SA Liberal Party votes to change its constitution to include female pronouns

The South Australian Liberal Party’s constitution will recognise women for the first time, with amendments passed at a state council meeting to include female pronouns in the document.

The party’s state council met on Friday night, voting in favour of changing the document which until now had only ever referred to individuals as “he” or “him”.

Carol Kulik, from the University of South Australia’s Centre for Workplace Excellence, said including women in foundational documents such as constitutions could have an impact.

“Research in other areas suggest that the kind of language that’s used can make a really big difference in the way cases are decided,” she said.

“For example, in the sexual harassment literature we know we see very different decision outcomes if decision-makers use a ‘reasonable man’ standard, which was the historical standard that was used in the legal literature, versus a ‘reasonable person standard'”.

But Professor Kulik said on top of policy purposes, there was also a signalling purpose in making the change.

“We look to our government documents to see if we are valued members of the community,” she said.

“One of the positive things about using he/she is it sends a very strong signal to women as a specific demographic group that the constitution applies to them.”

Professor Kulik said many other organisations were moving away from using gendered language like he/she and were instead using they/them.

“We are increasingly recognising that gender isn’t binary and so there are groups of people that kind of gendered language might also exclude,” she said.

“One of the reasons I wouldn’t recommend going directly to ‘their’ as a language and not using gender-specific pronouns in the constitution is that there’s research showing that if you don’t specify gender, the default that most people will go to is to assume a male protagonist, so ‘their’ language is probably going to be interpreted as male language.”

Party selects man for upper house vacancy

The council also voted to install Mount Gambier councillor Ben Hood to fill the seat left vacant due to former health minister Stephen Wade’s retirement.

Mr Hood ran unsuccessfully for the seat of Mount Gambier at the last election, and is a co-creator of children’s character George the Farmer.

He is also the brother of Labor MP Lucy Hood.

Mr Hood won over female candidate Leah Grantham and his elevation is controversial in some parts of the party, given only seven of its 24 parliamentary members are women.

But the majority, or five of those women, are in the upper house where Mr Hood will be one of three Liberal men.

Issues with the lack of female MPs came to a head at the Bragg by-election last year, where senior Liberal Vickie Chapman was replaced by Jack Batty.

To counter the backlash, the party announced a task force to look at how to better include women in the party.

The ABC understands that task force has completed its work and is likely to announce its findings within weeks.