The 90 all-male panels at Conservative Conference fringe are just not acceptable

There are 90 panels at Conservative Conference fringe which don’t contain a single woman, meaning that 23% of Conservative fringe events don’t include a single female voice.

Last week I highlighted how many all male panels there were at Labour party conference. I found 34 listed in the fringe guide. Many of these panels had found women by the time the event actually happened, but that’s just not good enough. When you send in an all-male panel listing, you’re sending out the message that the organisers think it’s fine to have an all-male panel.

We need lots of voices in politics – male and female. With less than a quarter of MPs in Parliament being female, it is high time Party Conferences got their acts together to let female voices into the conversation – so we don’t end up with dodgy events like  this  all-male Labour panel talking about how to get more women into engineering.

Plenty of Labour men are prepared to stand up to this sexism and challenge the status quo – last week at Labour Conference these men pledged not to take part in all male panels. Conservative party conference begins on Sunday. Will Conservative women challenge their Tory male counterparts to do the same?

There are 90 all male speaker events listed in the Conservatives’ online fringe guide. This is 23% of all fringe events. [I have only included events with at least 3 named speakers]. In a world where we’re all equal and an all-male panel could be  a coincidence, assuming there’s a 50% chance that panellists are a man or a woman, the probability of a four-person panel being all male is 6.25%. In this magical world, just 25 events of the 397 listed should be all-male at Tory Conference.

But the reality is much much worse: at Tory Conference, there are 90 all male panels. That’s 66 more all-male panels than we found at Labour party conference, and it’s over three times more all-male panels than coincidence dictates there should be. Before you say, but what about the all-female panels – there are fewer than 10 of those at Tory Conference.

So here you have it: the Conservative Conference fringe events where the 3+ person panel (including chair) are all men.

I am bored of women being side-lined in public life. It’s time to step up and listen to women’s voices. Join the boycott of all male panel events, and if you’re a man invited to take part in panel discussions, ensure that the panel is not all male.

*These statistics are correct as of 10pm Thursday 26^th September according to the Online Fringe Guide to Conservative Conference 2013