‘Labour’s women’s conference compromise raises questions about our commitment to single-sex spaces’

The outgoing Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Chair Baroness Falkner was on the airwaves and in the papers over the weekend — and The Times’ leader, reflecting on its interview with her, could not have put it more plainly: “Moral cowardice makes for bad politics.”

Last week, Labour’s NEC quietly approved a compromise for the 2026 Women’s Conference. Formal business in the hall will be restricted to biological women, while the fringe, the receptions and the exhibition areas will be open to both sexes. 

The change elicited a response from gender critical women that it is “welcome that the Party of Government obeys the law”. This strikes me as a very low bar.

READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Labour women’s conference plan and locals campaign priorities revealed

In practice, Labour’s response to the Supreme Court judgment — which confirmed, that “women means women” — has been to protect only the procedural part of the conference, while making the rest mixed-sex. The Party told the BBC this was the best way to balance accessibility with legal compliance.

At the same time,  Baroness Falkner criticised the Government for delaying publication of the EHRC guidance for service providers following the Supreme Court ruling. The guidance is needed, but her core message was correct, institutions do not need to wait for guidance to follow the law. The law is the law.

Labour’s decision on Women’s Conference does comply with the letter of the law. But the choice to open everything outside the main hall to both sexes is nevertheless an act of moral cowardice — and, politically, a mistake.

Ordinary people and even journalists can’t be expected to realise what Labour activists know – that the business in the hall is basically ignored by Labour’s leadership and any real member involvement in decision making is long gone. No males will be allowed in for the voting through of uncontroversial motions that will have no impact, and sitting through a few predictable speeches from female Labour cabinet members.  

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What is happening here is not a principled debate about rights but a familiar piece of political choreography: the quiet use of technicalities to override the spirit of the rules. Formally, Labour can say that the Women’s Conference reception is not part of the “business” of Conference, and therefore not covered by the sections of the Rule Book that define Women’s Conference as a women’s space. Informally, everyone knows that the reception is where much of the real work happens (particularly as the truly democratic elements of Women’s Conference have been eroded). It is where women meet across regions and factions, compare experiences, offer advice, and form the alliances that keep them afloat once they return to their CLPs and council Labour groups.

By reclassifying the reception as something outside Conference, the Party can claim procedural innocence while stripping the event of the very thing that makes it valuable. The manoeuvre keeps Labour technically within the rules while travelling far outside their intent. It is a decision that seems to respond not to the highest court in the land, but to internal anxieties.

This is how political institutions lose trust: not by openly rewriting their rules, but by quietly working around them. When the Party treats its own structures as obstacles to be sidestepped rather than safeguards to be honoured, members learn to read between the lines. Women notice when a space created for their benefit is reclassified just enough to permit a symbolic gesture to someone else. The message is not subtle, and it is not lost on us. It marks the difference between a Party that genuinely promotes women’s political participation and one that protects it only until it becomes politically inconvenient.

The rule book is clear that the Women’s Organisation exists “to promote and ensure women’s full and equal participation in every level of the Party, to provide opportunities for women members to meet, organise and learn together, and to empower women to play an active role in all sections of the Party.” And that women-only forums and meetings are a legitimate part of this work. The reception attached to Women’s Conference has always been part of this ecosystem — a space in which women can talk openly, develop networks, and support one another without the pressures and dynamics that inevitably shape mixed-sex environments. Changing this undermines the very purpose these structures were created for.

The explanation that this is the best way to promote “inclusion,” does not reflect how women experience the change. The burden of adjustment once again falls on women, whose boundaries are treated as the thing that can be revised without consequence.

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This is happening at a moment when the Supreme Court has provided total clarity that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex, thereby strengthening — not weakening — the legal foundation for single-sex political spaces where they serve a legitimate aim. The Party should be showing confidence in upholding their own Rule Book’s not retreating from it.

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