If women hold up half the sky, you wouldn't know it from the rotten-borough functional constituency lawmakers returned in Sunday's Legislative Council election. It's an all-male cast.
It's never good when a representative political body is all men. That alone should be another nail in the coffin for these trade-based seats, quite a few of which are elected by just dozens of corporate bodies. All right, Miriam Lau Kin-yee could have retained her seat for the transport industry. But she ran and lost in the direct election for Hong Kong Island. She deserves credit for taking the electoral plunge, though she might have overestimated her popularity.
By contrast, the direct geographic polls returned many more women - 11 out of 35. It's not half, but it's almost a third.
Officials refer to the so-called super seats for the district councils as functional seats; and these returned two women - Starry Lee Wai-king and Chan Yuen-han. Again, women are still in the minority, but two out of five ain't bad.
Elected by 3.2 million voters, the supers are the most direct and representative of elected seats. One reason the government likes to call them functional is surely in the hope the reflected glory of their super mandates might rub off on the other trade-based seats. Actually there is fat chance of that; rather they just make them look more rotten.