French borough mayor tracks gender disparity at city council with knitting project

City council meetings should be a fair space in which male and female voices are heard and represented equally, but one French mayor has shown that this is not always the case.

Sue Montgomery, mayor of Côte-des-Neiges - Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, began a knitting project earlier this month in which she knits in red when men speak and in green when women speak at meetings.

The results, as posted on Twitter, reveal vast discrepancies, showing that men spoke for far longer than women, with the scarf featuring slight snippets of green sandwiched in between large sections of red.

The tweet swiftly went viral, garnering more than 23,000 likes and 8,400 retweets in addition to thousands of comments from people demanding to know why women’s voices were not being heard nearly as much as men’s.

“Clearly... way more green is in order,” wrote one person. “We need more women in positions of power and political influence!”

Another described Montgomery’s scarf as the “best data visualisation [they’d] seen this year”.

“I would say it’s probably 75 per cent, 80 per cent red and the rest, there’s little bits of green here and there,” Montgomery told CBC Montreal’s Daybreak.

But the mayor explained that the difference is not due to men making up more members than women on the city council, as there are 31 female councillors and 34 male councillors.

“The women are much more efficient, stand up, make their point, sit down,” she added. “Men like to hear themselves talk. What can I say?”

Montgomery said she intends to keep the knitting project going until Christmas. Then she hopes to auction off the pieces she has knitted and donate the funds to charities supporting women.