Women in parliament – a new emphasis

By Mark Rowney / @markrowney

We don’t have enough women in politics and particularly in parliament. We should therefore take steps to encourage more women to run for office and to take leadership roles in the shadow cabinet. The strategy of the Labour Party in doing so needs a new emphasis.

In the past we have had All Women Shortlists. In the last shadow cabinet elections, MPs had to have an element of gender equality in their voting. Now Harriet Harman campaigns for Leader and Deputy Leader to be one man, one woman. Yet despite all this, only 31% of Labour MPs are women.

Affirmative action is an important tool in correcting a discriminatory imbalance that cannot be corrected purely by Labour’s meritocratic ambitions. However like radiation treatment for cancer it must be used cautiously because of its side effects. Unlike radiation treatment, it cannot cure the problem; it just eases the symptoms.

There are recent examples of affirmative action’s success in the UK. The Police Service of Northern Ireland has just ended a 50:50 Protestant/Catholic recruitment policy. In 2001, 92% of RUC officers were Protestant. Now, the percentage of Catholic police officers in the PSNI is 29.7%. However, the credit for this lies with radical reforms to that organisation. The discriminatory policy was merely a catalyst towards this increase, not the cause. It was not without negative consequences either. I know several Protestants who wanted to join the PSNI but couldn’t. The PSNI never benefited from their valuable skills. On balance though, the policy was right.

The problems of affirmative action are well known. Firstly, it is a form of arbitrary discrimination based on normally irrelevant criteria e.g. gender, race etc. It therefore has the same negative consequences of any prejudice, including fostering a sense of resentment: “why should she get the post just because she’s a woman instead of me?”.

Secondly, affirmative action can, over time, do harm to the group it is meant to promote. I imagine the reader has heard both genders question an MP’s fitness to serve if she was the product of an all women shortlist on suspicion that better men were excluded (I do not share this assumption). Furthermore, there is the risk that affirmative action over time contributes to a feeling that women are not good enough because they require special help. Thankfully, I haven’t heard a Labour member say this, but the risk must be borne in mind.

Also, the toxicity of affirmative action increases the smaller the pool of available positions. I believe that the numbers of PPCs are a large enough pool to potentially justify affirmative action. As for the shadow cabinet, I’m not an MP so I won’t comment, but if female MPs face meritocracy issues, then there’s an argument for affirmative action there too. However, I’m sorry Harriet, the positions of Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are too important and the pool too small (two people) for any candidate to be denied one of those positions purely because the other is filled by a person of the opposite sex. If the best candidates are both women or both men, they should both get the job. And you’ve excluded transgender people too. So if affirmative action only tackles the symptom of too few female MPs, what is the problem? Answer: why women don’t want to become MPs in the first place. There are many reasons for this, but I want to highlight one important one in particular.

I work for a law firm. At junior levels, the gender balance is slightly in favour of women. Yet at partner level that figure drops dramatically – none of the partners in my department are women despite the high calibre of female lawyers in the firm. I’ve done some unscientific research and it simply seems that the more senior the female lawyer is, the less likely she is to have young children. For men, that doesn’t seem to be the same. I doubt parliament is any different to business.

I won’t enter into a commentary about what gender roles in family life should or shouldn’t be. For current purposes, I assume that even if the law was equal (which it is not e.g. paternity and maternity leave), we have a culture where women are more likely than men to make career sacrifices for family life. It is therefore important that the role of an MP is seen to be family friendly to encourage women to be MPs.

Being an MP is not a family-friendly job nor is politics in general (I’ve yet to see parents bring a child to my CLP’s AMM). It is also arguable that MPs don’t perceive the voters’ expectations as being family friendly. If Ed Milliband was to have another kid, what would your reaction be if he disappeared for 6 months, especially closer to 2015? If you think that would be madness, you’d be in agreement with me. Problem is, we are both then contributing to a barrier to more women in elected roles. We need to address that attitude as far as possible.

None of the above is news and I know that Yvette Cooper with Fiona McTaggart and the Women’s PLP have been campaigning for years for better working conditions for both genders in parliament. This is right and I support them wholeheartedly. However, Labour has been banging on and on about all women shortlists etc for some time and with limited success. It is most successful at keeping the issue in the limelight by being a radical policy. I believe that radical steps are needed to keep this issue alive, but we need to consider suspending affirmative action as it’s not working well enough, detracts focus from the real problem and it’s toxic.

For more women MPs, Labour, like the PSNI, must focus on the problem not the symptoms, with radical policies. Perhaps we’re not ready to bury Ed up to his neck in nappies for six months, but Labour could put front and centre policies that facilitate MPs having a family life. One approach could be a change to the rules on how constituencies are represented. If Rachel Reeves went on maternity leave, could Hilary Benn as a local MP be supported in listening to West Leeds constituents’ issues? Should all MPs have an elected or allocated Vice-MP (which might be another MP of the same party) for any absence? We need to look at the problem from a different angle. I applaud the angle from which Grace-Fletcher Hackwood approached the issue.

Once we have really started to address the problem, that’s the time to use affirmative action and we can consider doing so on a much larger scale. Get the negative consequences over as quickly and painlessly as possible. We could start the debate from as radical a position as ensuring that at a future election every seat that does not have a sitting Labour MP is contested by women. When the protests are made that that will lose male votes, we can consider moving back from there.

Let’s do it right first and then do it loud.