Why should we care that Diane Abbott is a woman?

By Bryony King / @BryonyVK

Lately I seem to be hearing an awful lot about how disgracefully underrepresented women are in politics, which is of course true and thanks to our leadership contest the issue seems to have become a hot topic again. To begin with there was an outcry because no women threw their hats in the ring. If we’re honest I believe that’s because there aren’t really that many prominent, high-up women in the Labour Party who were in a position to become leader. Do I think that’s fair? No. If we think about this sensibly though the first female MP didn’t sit in the House of Commons until Nancy Astor blazed in, in 1919, some 624 years after England first began having an elected parliament, quite a wait by all accounts. We had our first female cabinet member in 1924 and not until 54 years later did we get our first, and only, female Prime Minister (although I’d rather gloss over that one). Suffice to say as a gender we have a significant amount of catching up to do. We only have 143 female MPs, compared to 507 male. With that difference it’s hardly statistically surprising there are so few female MPs in the cabinet.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and you can’t install a couple of hundred female MPs into parliament overnight, nor can you magically sneak them straight to the top jobs to appear more representative and progressive. It can’t work like that. I don’t know about anybody else but I want to see strong, hardworking female MPs who reach the top by merit – not pushed into place as a token gesture or because people are complaining that there are “not enough women”. How would that help the cause? It’s going to take time to level the playing field and for those females to work to the top. It might be frustrating and it might not seem fair but I am just pleased we are heading in the right direction and, in the words of Barack Obama, “we will get there”.

A slightly annoying feature of the leadership contest is that ever since Diane Abbott announced her intention to stand I, and some of my female friends, have heard endless times, in fairly aggressive tones, “Well, as a woman, shouldn’t you be supporting the only woman standing?” Well, no. Why should I? Frankly, I think it would be ridiculous to make a decision to back any candidate based solely on an issue like gender. I’d rather make my decision based on who I think would be the best leader of the party and the best person to lead Labour back into government. Reproductive organs don’t come into it.

It’s this ardent type of campaigning I find slightly annoying; “we need a woman to stand”, “we need a woman on the ballot”, “you’re a woman so you should vote for a woman”. I’m happy Diane Abbott did choose to stand but I’d like to think her gender wasn’t the overriding factor in her decision, the same way I wouldn’t like to believe her gender wasn’t the overriding factor which compelled 33 MPs to vote her onto the ballot. Again, I just don’t think it looks great for women: “Sorry, we had to help you, love, because a woman couldn’t make it on merit alone”. If this were the case, anyone who wants to be critical can say “well she only got on because she’s female, it was nothing to do with her credentials” and I also think the disappointing thing is Abbott’s experience, politics, values and vision have been overlooked in this process because people are too busy focussing on the fact she is a woman, above anything else. That in itself shows inadvertent inequality. We should be judging Diane Abbott the same way we are judging David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham – gender shouldn’t make a difference.

We need to be doing more to make parliament a more representative place in general, championing all minorities – people shouldn’t forget in all this that it is not only women who are underrepresented – but this attempt to seemingly force and coerce women to stand for things such as the leadership contest on the ‘gender card’ is not the way to go. I think we need to look at why these groups aren’t standing to begin with and if they are why aren’t their Constituency Labour Parties nominating them to be their candidate? This is a problem we can be trying to solve at grass-roots level, not complaining that ‘the Government’ or ‘the Party’ aren’t doing enough. After all, it is us who put the MPs there. It’s not the top we need to be fixating on in the name of representation – it’s the bottom.