A women only blogging day? What a rotten idea…

By Gaby Hinsliff / @gabyhinsliff

There used to be a dogeared cartoon on my desk, showing a boardroom full of men and one lone woman. The catchline read: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Briggs. Perhaps one of the men would care to make it?”

It’s one of those jokes most working women find funny, and many men strangely don’t. I thought of it when I accepted Alex Smith’s offer to guest edit LabourList for International Women’s Day today.

I’m generally suspicious of anything wimmin-only: it smacks of condescension. My first instinct was to commission something about why a female-only blogging day is a rotten idea.

What stopped me was the realisation that there are still too many Miss Briggses around Westminster, advancing good ideas which go ignored until a man takes them up with greater volume and confidence. And there are too many women waiting to be invited to blog, where men just pile in. What appealed about this guest edition was the chance to give new writers and fresh perspectives an airing.

My only rule was that the writing should stand on its argument, not its author. Ideally you wouldn’t even notice they were all female: after all, did you notice that every single byline here last weekend was male?

Some contributions are wakeup calls, like Darinka Aleksic’s piece exploring the likelihood of a post-election challenge to abortion law, or Ceri Goddard’s blog explaining how spending cuts affect women differently from men.

Others challenge conventional thinking. Ella Rolfe writes a controversial piece from Iraq, following yesterday’s elections, on the consequences of well-meaning efforts to get women elected. Back home, Julia Hobsbawm argues that while the politics of parenting revolve around money, what many families lack is time.

Kitty Ussher, the former Treasury minister, writes candidly about the warning signs we missed before the banking crash – and why unpopular decisions are necessary to prevent the next one.

But if you read only one thing, make it Lisa Ansell’s blog on why she feels patronised by talk of the ‘women’s vote’. Since resigning as political editor of The Observer last year in an attempt to get a life, I’ve finally understood how divorced from reality Westminster can appear.

As a journalist, I’m staying strictly neutral in this election, so the site will feel less party political than usual today. Which allows the New Statesman’s Sophie Elmhirst to welcome Samantha Cameron to the sisterhood.

Whether or not she voted Labour in 1997, Ms Cameron is nobody’s chattel and we applaud her right to do what the hell she likes in 2010. Sam, nobody will know but you and the ballot box….