We need to push for equality to prevent a gender landslide for men in politics
4 min read
Whilst everyone celebrated the new milestone of 40% womens’ representation (now 41% after Sarah Pochin won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election) after the July 2024 election, I could not ignore a little niggle that this was potentially something of a false dawn in the fight for equality.
The afterglow of the election, with women taking 263 seats and 50% of Cabinet roles, felt like something that 50:50 Parliament, a small non-partisan charity championing equal representation, wanted to bask in, but we just couldn’t. It didn’t feel like the firm foundation on which to continue to build the pathway to parity. We knew from monitoring the candidate selections in the run up to the election that women candidates had fallen to 30% and as we looked at polling over the last year, we became more and more concerned that the next election could see us go backwards, significantly, on women’s representation in Westminster.
We decided to test our concerns by using the Electoral Calculus data, and a seat-level model, to predict the next election. If the polls play out, we calculate that the drop in women MPs could be by as much as 36% - taking us from 41% to 26%. Even if Labour won again, or the Conservatives won a majority, women’s representation could still take a hit by about seven percentage points, with women again only making up around a third of the House. This is because no party is fielding an equal number of women and men candidates - Labour were closest at 47%, with the Greens just behind them at 44% and then we have the Conservative party at 34%, Lib Dems at 28% and Reform trailing with 16% women.
Why does this matter? The electorate doesn’t seem to vote by gender; they vote by Party. However, they can only vote for candidates who have been pre-selected by the Parties, and men are over-represented in all candidate selections for every Party. We stand no hope of reaching equal representation if almost two-thirds of all candidates are male. It is a similar picture in local politics.
50:50 Parliament exists because we believe that representation shapes policy, and policy shapes lives. Women make up 51% of the UK population and yet are under-represented at every level in government, with the exception of three of the four great offices of State. The under-representation of women risks poor policy-making as it neglects the perspectives of half of the population. We need more women, from all backgrounds, to be in all rooms where decisions are made (to misquote Ruth Bader Ginsburg) to ensure their different ways of working and lived experiences come to bear in policy-making and legislature.
In the last 50 years, as women’s representation has begun to move beyond tokenism, we have finally seen policy that reflects the realities of women's lives: from the Equal Pay Act to the Equalities Act and smaller, but no less significant, movements in areas such as violence against women and girls, women’s healthcare, kinship care and domestic abuse. Women’s perspectives are vital to ensure we adequately address some of the most pressing challenges we face today, including the climate crisis, AI, poverty and inequality, and war.
In three years' time it will be the centenary of the Equal Franchise Act. It has not passed me by that, as we celebrate this milestone: an act which enabled all women to vote (and stand for election), it could be the eve of the biggest regression in women's representation in the Commons in over 100 years.
We need all political parties to take another look at their candidate selection processes and figure out why men are over-represented (to the tune of 70% across all parties) and what to do about it. A good start would be posting on #AskHerToStand Day - Friday 21st November - to encourage bright and brilliant women across the UK to take that first step. We have around four years until the next election; there is time to turn this around.
