After a cross-party review, Great Britain may begin requiring political parties to include a specific number of women on the parliamentary ballot or face all women shortlists.
"The Labour Party is the only party to have used all-women shortlists to date, and faced a series of legal challenges over the move.
But the Speaker's Conference suggested that compulsion might be necessary for all political parties to increase diversity in the House of Commons.
It also called for the introduction of candidate lists which exclude white people, although they would not be mandatory and it is unclear whether any parties would adopt them.
Chaired by John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, the Conference was commissioned by Gordon Brown to investigate the under-representation in the House of women, ethnic minorities and the disabled.
There are currently 126 women in the House of Commons compared to 519 men, and 15 MPs from ethnic minorities.
The report said: "If the political parties fail to make significant progress on women's representation at the 2010 general election, Parliament should give serious consideration to the introduction of prescriptive quotas, ensuring that all political parties adopt some form of equality guarantee in time for the following general election."
The report admitted the controversial angle of short lists and quotas:
"We recognise that equality guarantees do not sit easily within some political party cultures. "Yet, to date, the all-women shortlist has been the only mechanism to have produced a significant step-change in representation in the House of Commons in a relatively short period of time."
The committee also called for the equivalent of all-women shortlists to be introduced for black and ethnic minority candidates.
It acknowledged that the idea of all-BME (black and minority ethnic) shortlists was "controversial".
There were concerns that people might think certain communities could only by represented effectively by one of its own members, or that BME candidates should not stand in majority-white areas.
"Such beliefs would undermine the fundamental principle that an MP represents all his or her constituents regardless of their identity, background or political allegiance," the committee said.
However, after researching the effect of shortlist, the report concluded that the reward outweighed the risk, and found short lists efficacious:
"Nonetheless we note that all-women shortlists were, and to an extent remain, controversial yet have had positive effects overall. "We believe that similar enabling legislation could be created to allow all-BME shortlists to be used, if and when political parties judge that their use would be reasonable, in order to achieve greater parity of representation for BME communities in the House of Commons."
This position found support:
Anne Begg, Labour vice chair of the Speaker's Conference, said: "The case for equality of representation has not yet been won.
"We welcome the progress which each of the main parties has made over recent years towards ensuring that its selection procedures are more professional and objective then they have been in the past.
"Yet the fact is that, in most cases, it remains more difficult for a candidate who does not fit the 'white, male, middle class' norm to be selected, particularly if the seat is considered winnable.
"Our recommendations are aimed at putting that right, and I urge the Government, political parties and Parliament itself to implement them without delay."
In the United States, women face similar challenges to getting on the ballot, and representation of diversity -- representatives other than white men -- are out of proportion.
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