Politics for me is about change - about standing up for what you believe in and standing proud. My generation growing up in Malta and Gozo,  spent countless hours listening to people like Eddie Fenech Adami talk about the importance of service and duty; about the need to protect the common good and how change must start from people making their voices heard.

So as much as it was a surprise to my family, politics for me has always been a means to affect positive change in my community and my country. I am one of those optimists who still believes that politics remains a force for good - and the moment I stop believing that is the moment I retire.

Just as women in so many careers face steeper climbs and higher hurdles, being a woman in frontline politics in Malta and Gozo has its challenges. In 2019, we still face a gender pay gap that is too wide. We still face having too few female role models, journalists, business leaders and politicians for young girls and boys to look up to.

In the European Parliament I deal with issues like terrorism, anti-money laundering, corruption, rule of law, defence, immigration, organised crime. No-one has yet suggested that I should earn less than my male counterpart.

We are still in a situation where women on average in Malta earn 11% less than a man for the same job and up to 24% in certain sectors. It is unfair, unacceptable and must be consigned to the pages of history books. 

There is also an economic argument to be made here. Women are still the most underutilised part of the workforce we have in Malta - we need to do more, much more to encourage them to go out into the workplace, to stem the worrying figures of girls dropping out of secondary school and addressing the gender pay gay are a necessary first step. Otherwise we will keep trying to square the circle.

In my view the answer to having more women in politics in Malta is that we need political Parties to ensure that there are more female candidates putting themselves forward -  they need to do more to actively encourage women to put themselves forward. I am not a big fan of hard and fast quotas for example, I think that there is a danger of tokenism that means that the intention, while noble, risks backfiring and working against the very thing that they were intended for. I know this is not necessarily a very popular view, but I am very weary of having a 'token woman' scenario.

Quotas simply paper over the cracks, give a false sense of security and do nothing to tackle the underlying problem with female representation in Malta and Gozo.  Too often they paradoxically hold women back and simply creates new barriers for the next generation of women to overcome. Our representatives must be chosen on the basis of votes and merit, not gender. We cannot and should not escape from that principle.

That said we do need more role models, but perhaps the greatest thing needed to be done is having a shift in culture away from the predominant view that politics is an all-boys club. As Maltese MEPs, we are trying our best to show what we can do and things are changing for the better.

But it is also true that we still see a sometimes unfair disparagement of female politicians about what we wear, where we take our children, how we do our hair and so much more. We need a shift in attitude to address and it is not good enough to say "oh well that is the way it is". It should not be and we must all work together to fix that.

We will keep putting cracks in that glass ceiling - and one day soon one young girl reading this article will smash right through it.

@RobertaMetsola