Women in Politics

Britain has proportionately fewer women MPs than most other European democracies. At last year's general election 118 of the 659 MPs elected were women, roughly 18% of the total. This was a decrease of 2 from the previous general election (when a record 120 women were elected), and the first general election for more than twenty years when the number of women in the Commons fell. Nevertheless, it has been a rapid advance since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister for the first time while one of just 19 female MPs.

Of the 118 current female MPs, 95 are Labour, and the Labour Party has historically selected more women as candidates than the Conservatives and ? more to the point ? in the last few elections have selected more in winnable seats. The Labour landslide of 1997 brought in a host of new MPs, many of them women, who were immediately (and patronisingly) dubbed the "Blair Babes". With most of these new MPs being young enough to serve several terms if re-elected, and 2001 being politically a standstill election, there has been little turnover since, though one of the 1997 Labour intake stood down after just four years, saying that she was disillusioned and frustrated with the Commons.

Why are there so few women in the Commons? Part of the reason, of course, is a consequence of the first-past-the-post constituency system and the tradition that the constituency parties should be allowed autonomy to select their own candidates, which has left Millbank and Central Office comparatively helpless to insist on increasing the number of women selected even now both are committed to its desirability. (As, it must be said, are most of the smaller parties ? who, however, simply because they win far fewer seats, can make only a minor impact whatever candidates they nominate.)

At any rate, the shortage of women MPs does not reflect any hostility to the idea among the wider public. MORI recently published the results of research for the British Council on British attitudes to women politicians *. For the British Council, the main point of the survey was for comparison with similar research in a number of countries in Africa, but the British data is of considerable interest in its own right.

The bottom line is that most people in Britain think that there are too few women MPs. Concern is a little greater among women (three-quarters of whom say there are too few) than among men (of whom just under two-thirds agree), but it is a strong across-the-board consensus nevertheless.

Q And do you think that the number of women MPs in the House of Commons is too many, too few or about right?

Source: MORI/British Council Base: 1.002 British adults 16+, 5-7 April 2002

Perhaps understandably, it was the oldest age groups and especially the older men who were marginally more likely to accept that the present position is about right, having been accustomed for most of their lives to there being far fewer women in the Commons. Yet even among the men aged 55 and over, of whom 27% said that the number is about right, 54% thought there are too few women MPs, a two-to-one margin.

Not that the public are particularly well-informed about how many women MPs there are, in any case. Asked to estimate what percentage of MPs are women, only 1% guessed the exact figure of 18%, and 17% were in the 16-to-20-percent band. But this may owe something to the public's not being very good at thinking in percentages, as well as ignorance of the exact figure. More tellingly, the public were divided fairly equally between over-estimaters (42%) and under-estimaters (49%), and the mean guess of 17.95% was almost spot-on. (The correct figure to two decimal places is 17.91.) Interestingly, men were slightly more likely to under-estimate the figure than were women, although more women than men felt unable to make a guess at all and answered "don't know". As might be expected, those who substantially over-estimated the number of women in the Commons were also considerably more likely to feel that the number was "about right" rather than "too few": of those whose estimate was lower than the correct 18%, four in five (80%) said there were too few.

But perhaps more enlightening is the differing view of the sexes as to what politicians are achieving for them, and this reveals a classic case of "the grass is greener" syndrome. We asked how effective a job our respondents thought that British politicians were doing to improve the lives of men, and how effective a job they were doing to improve the lives of women. The men thought, by a small margin, the politicians were doing an effective job for women, but not for men; the women thought the opposite!

Q How effective a job do you think that British politicians are doing to improve the lives of men in this country?

Source: MORI/British Council Base: 1.002 British adults 16+, 5-7 April 2002

Q How effective a job do you think that British politicians are doing to improve the lives of women in this country?

Source: MORI/British Council Base: 1.002 British adults 16+, 5-7 April 2002

At any rate, we can see that many women do not feel politicians are doing a good job for them, and we might expect they would feel that getting more women in power would be an improvement. Yet when we asked whether female politicians were more or less effective than male politicians in improving women's lives, it was men who were somewhat more likely to feel that female politicians would do the job better, than women.

Q Do you think that female politicians are more or less effective than male politicians in improving the lives of women in this country or are they about the same?

Source: MORI/British Council Base: 1.002 British adults 16+, 5-7 April 2002

Why? The reason most frequently cited by women for thinking female politicians to be less effective was that "women are not taken seriously" ? and four times as many women as men suggested this (in answer to an unprompted question). On the other hand, among those who felt women are more effective, men were twice as likely as women to attribute this to their being more forceful or pro-active than men; and, given that men were also more likely to think female politicians would be effective in the first place, it doesn't sound as if it is the male half of the general public that is refusing to take women in politics seriously.

It is quite likely that the number of women in politics will increase much further over the next few years. The Labour Party conference in 1993 attempted to remedy the situation by authorising the NEC to impose all-women shortlists where necessary to ensure that half of all winnable marginal seats and half of existing Labour seats where the MP was retiring should select women as candidates; but in January 1996 this was ruled illegal. Legislation introduced in this parliament will legitimise the practice, and it may well be adopted by the Labour Party in future, though probably not by the Conservatives; but all parties have emphasised their commitment to selecting more female candidates. In the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, where the hybrid electoral system includes a party list element which makes it easier to impose a balanced ticket, the number of female members is already much higher ? around two in five in each case, among the highest proportions in Europe. It will be interesting to see whether, over the next few years, public attitudes to women in Parliament change; and whether the public in general, and women in particular, begin to feel that politicians are doing a better job at improving their lives.

* MORI interviewed a representative quota sample of 1,002 people aged 16+ across Great Britain on 5-7 April 2002. Interviews were conducted by telephone as part of the MORI Telephone Surveys (MTS) Omnibus survey. Data were weighted to match the profile of the population.