There were pictures in the newspapers on Thursday of Liz O'Donnell going into Leinster House to address a committee. She looked knock-out in a lovely white jacket with satin revers and a pinched-in waist. The headline under one of the pictures said: "Female politicians want gender quota". Feminist though I call myself, I succumbed to conditioning and went straight back to studying the picture of the former junior minister for foreign affairs in the vain hope that the secret of eternal luminosity would be revealed to me.

At least the odds were better than getting elected. Waiting politely to be asked is a strategy that has ill-served aspiring women politicians. The need for a quota system is as obvious as the Green Party's itchy feet. Ireland lies a pathetic 87th internationally for female representation in national parliament. Of the Dáil's 166 deputies, only 23 are women. Even more depressingly, the future looks no brighter, despite the headline-grabbing triumphs of Nessa Childers, Mairéad McGuinness and Marian Harkin in the Euro poll. Of Fianna Fáil's 218 county councillors, just 30 are females. Try uttering that sentence to a French or Dutch democrat without wishing the ground would open up and swallow you.

"We're talking about getting our hands on power, not a garden party," former education minister Gemma Hussey told the Dáil's sub-committee on Women's Participation in Politics. "Voluntary doesn't work." Niamh Bhreathnach, another former education minister, advocat­ed the French model of a quota system with penalty points for parties that fail to comply. She said the Labour Party had identified the obstacles to political involv­ement as the Six Cs: "cash, connections, confidence, children, culture and career".

Gemma Hussey, Liz O'Donnell and Niamh Bhreathnach are three impressive women who became political heavyweights at national level and within their respective parties. Their arguments for an electoral quota system make perfect sense. But it will never happen because, as Bhreathnach said, asking a jealously conservative, male-dominated parliament to legislate for it is like expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.

This, though, is not the only problem. More women candidates than ever contested this month's local elections and yet fewer were elected. This is doubly puzzling at a time when the world and his wife agree Ireland's economic dive was compounded by a testosterone-crazed, boy-racer machismo powered by an unregulated greed-is-good capitalism. You might have thought if ever there was an appetite for the female perspective, it is now. But no. When one unsuccessful candidate in the local elections was asked to explain women's dismal performance, she suggested: "Women just don't support other women. I don't know why."

It's the same refrain we have recently heard to justify Miriam O'Callaghan's ineligibility for the job of hosting The Late Late Show. According to rigorous, scientific research, women don't want their husbands ogling a beautiful presenter on a Friday night. I don't doubt that three out of every four housewives polled offered their secret dread that Miriam was going to pounce on their better halves as soon as their backs were turned putting on the kettle during the ads. The intriguing question is why would they think that?

Sexist stereotyping is why. A great weak­ness of the media is its inability to depict people in all their dimensions. Women are portrayed as either decorative and non-threatening, or sexlessly brainy. When the twain inevitably meet, the headlines shriek 'Cor, Get an Eyeful of the Man-Eating Prof'. Which brings me to Mary Coughlan.

"The Lovely Girl" is what they call the Tánaiste in insider circles. It is no longer meant as a compliment. Last year, when she got catapulted to stardom by Brian Cowen, her "lovely-girl-ness" was her unique selling point. But what happens to Lovely Girls when they grow up? If they choose to eat books of gobbledegook for breakfast and regurgitate them on the lunchtime news and repeatedly lose count of the number of commissioners in the EU, they become the Dumb Blonde.

Coughlan is no bimbo. History does not indicate that the enterprise and employment portfolio would be safer in a man's hands. She is a mediocre politician; as good or as bad as the fellow beside her. That is her crime. Other women were punished on 5 June because the Lovely Girl got pushed up the ladder without proving herself better than everyone else. Remember, lovely as Liz O'Donnell looked going into the Dáil last week, the voters of Dublin South rejected her in 2007. The commentators said it was because she eschewed constituency clinics. Let women into politics, by all means, but they must play by the boys' rules.