The proposal that was going to the November party conference was to raise the percentage to 45 per cent after next year's election and 50 per cent in 2017.
Labour's record is much better than National's. With Dr Blue's recent departure, only 14 of its 59 MPs are women - just 24 per cent.
Yet somehow Labour has bought into the idea it's the guilty party. After refusing to discuss the issue when it first arose, leader David Shearer eventually declared his personal opposition to the proposal going to the November conference to allow some electorates to have women-only selection lists to help boost female MP numbers.
Yesterday he went even further, forcing the party hierarchy to remove the proposal from the conference agenda. He said: "The distraction is turning our attention away from the issues that most New Zealanders are concerned about."
If "equality" has become a distraction - what a strange concept - it was surely because he and his parliamentary colleagues first dithered when Mr Slater "exposed" the agenda item, then scattered in disarray. One-time leadership hopeful Shane Jones somehow managed to paint women as less than "entire" men, saying "the overwhelming response is the public doesn't want the country run by geldings".
Despite all this hysteria, the idea of all-women short lists is not new. The British Labour Party introduced them in 1997 to help achieve a parliamentary gender balance. Because of a subsequent employment tribunal finding that this breached the Sex Discrimination Act, the act was amended in 2002 to allow the practice in all British elections. The Equality Act 2010 extended the use of all-women shortlists until 2030. The British Labour Party has made considerable use of it - sometimes against the strong opposition of local party organisations.
The Conservatives have baulked at the idea, although leader David Cameron said in the run-up to the 2010 election that if more women weren't picked as Tory candidates, he would copy Labour and introduce all-woman short-lists. He was quoted as saying too many local party organisations saw choosing a potential MP as like seeking "the perfect son-in-law rather than the perfect candidate". He said leaving it to "meritocracy ... doesn't work". Since becoming Prime Minister, he's backed off the idea.
Speaking to me just before Mr Shearer canned the "man ban" debate, Labour Party general secretary Tim Barnett argued it would have been just another tool in the fight to achieve gender equality. "Our problem is we're stuck with women percentage in the caucus between the high 30s and low 40s for nearly 20 years, which implies there's something more than casual chance involved ..."
He said an all-woman list wouldn't be a major tool, but put up the example of an area like Wellington where "all our electorate MPs are men but one". If Annette King were to retire - he insists this is a hypothetical example - the electorate organisation might say "we'd like a bunch of good women to apply".
For Labour, the main tool in achieving equality has been the party list. But the risk of relying solely on this mechanism is that the list will become seen as the women's and minorities door into the Labour caucus. It's an interesting debate. The sort of discussion you'd expect to take place at a political party conference. Instead, Mr Shearer has been spooked by noises and banned it.
At Labour's annual conference last November, former Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Judy McGregor noted the party's "slippage" in female political representation, and challenged it to make "a formal commitment to 50 per cent women's representation in party selection processes - both list and constituency".
Mr Shearer has rejected the party organisation's plan to meet this challenge. We're waiting for his alternative.
