11th April 2010
Where are the Women?
When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, some saw it as a watershed in British politics, that the door had been opened to a new world for women. The irony of course was that the ’79 election returned the smallest number of women MPs ever and during her thirteen years in power, Thatcher did little to address the interests and needs of women and absolutely nothing to assist women in breaking into political life in particular. As a consequence the number of women in the British Parliament held stubbornly in the mid-twenties throughout and beyond her reign.
Nearly twenty years later, in the run-up to the 1997 election, the Labour party made an effort to address the small numbers of women MPs by using all-women shortlists in half of all winnable seats. As it happened the swing to Labour was so great that women were also elected in a large number of very marginal battles, bringing the number of Labour MPs to over a hundred. This achievement was undermined in the most stomach-churning terms by the attachment to it by the press of the moniker ‘Blair’s Babes‘ which was cheerily encouraged by the famous, harem-like photograph of Blair, surrounded by his grateful new colleagues. The 2001 and 2005 elections depleted these numbers only slightly, perhaps indicating the value placed locally on those women MPs even in the face of Labour’s then growing unpopularity. The Tories meanwhile have failed to increase significantly the numbers of women in their ranks. It’s only since the leadership of David Cameron took hold that any systematic effort has been made to rectify this. Even then, local parties have resisted all-women shortlists and grumbled about confident young women being centrally imposed from A-lists of preferred candidates. The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding as this wide open election comes to its conclusion.
The more urgent question as we wander into the second week of the 2010 campaign is where are the women now? The main voices heard and faces seen at the front of each of the major parties are male. ‘Women in Politics’ apparently refers not to those who represent constituents in elected office but to the wives of men who pursue it. The offensive comparison articles, the fnarr-fnarr references to ‘Leaders’ Wives’ are all part of a wider impression that politics is yet another field of public life in which men act and women adorn.
And it’s not just the political parties who are guilty. Where are the women political commentators? Where are women as the narrators of the campaign? Only last week Ceri Thomas, editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, claimed that presenting the programme was a tough role, demanding a thick skin and suggested that this was the reason why only one of the five main presenters is a woman. Despicable though that is, it doesn’t address the other criticism levelled at Today, that the majority of reporters and interviewees on the programme are also male, creating three hours of peak programming dominated by the voices of men.
This morning, I listened to Sports Week on BBC Radio Five Live and heard not one female voice or even a single story relating to a sportswoman for the whole sixty minutes. Does this represent the sporting life of the nation or the marginal and male-dominated interests of programme editors and producers? They might, I suppose, argue that they are responding to the interests of the listeners they seek but that is hardly progressive.
For all the progress that has come over the last two decades — and it has not come quick enough — we are going backwards. There seem to be fewer prominent women participating in public life, not more and fewer female voices narrating or commenting on our political and cultural life. This cannot help encourage more women to move into public life and, more damagingly, it reduces a sense of a range of women’s voices being present in our public discourse.
