Women in Politics

Women in PoliticsBy Thangam Debbonaire

Numbers

The UK is currently ranked 58^th in the world for proportions of women in the elected national state legislature. We have 143 MPs – that’s a mere 22%, barely a fifth. And it’s slightly down on 2005.

In the top ten, along with the Nordic countries, are Rwanda, South Africa and Angola. Think for a minute what might have happened in these countries to bring this about – in Rwanda, just over 50% of the legislators are women. Why? It’s not an accident...

The number of women MPs in the UK barely increased from the 1945 election until the 1990s. In local councils the proportions are slightly better – it’s about a third of all councillors. So  how come Rwanda, South Africa and Angola are doing so very much better? And why does this matter?

If you have ever criticised or even worse, sneered at, positive action, you may not want to hear this: without affirmative action women just don’t get elected much.  Without many women in parliaments, women outside parliament continue to face discrimination, harassment and worse without any recourse to law. When women do get elected at critical mass levels, women get laws passed and action taken to improve women’s lives significantly.  These changes just don’t get made without women’s action, both inside and outside parliament. The increase in numbers in the UK didn’t happen until individual political parties took various different forms of action, from all-women shortlists in some seats to training and mentoring for women interested in standing for local or national elections. Without this, we would probably still be where we were in 1945, with a handful of brave women struggling to get equal rights on the political agenda.

What happens when women get elected

The UN report (published 2011) on women’s participation in public life {REF] shows the extraordinary amount of changes to help equal rights for women that Rwandan parliamentarians have achieved in less than a decade of quotas and positive action to get them elected. They haven’t been twiddling their thumbs and waiting for their cues from the men. Nepal, Spain, Macedonia, Costa Rica – all of these countries have gone from tiny percentages of women to more than 30% in a very short time, all with various sorts of efforts made by an individual political party or national policy to increase the numbers of women in parliament. In all of them, women have swiftly passed laws to protect women from violence, to provide them with equal rights to land or income and other rights to health care or education. All of which makes significant differences to millions of women.

What happens when women aren’t in the room

At joint 178^th in the league of shame are Belize, Micronesia, Nauru, Oman, Palau, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Tuvalu. Who have a grand total of 0 women in their parliaments (or what passes for parliaments). This is an interesting collection of countries. They are certainly not the poorest in the world, but then the top ten aren’t the richest. Getting more women in positions of political power doesn’t make you richer. But it rapidly makes the country a better, safer place for women to live, work and contribute to.  The top ten aren’t all in the top ten of the UN index for gender equality –  but those that aren’t are rapidly improving.

If there are no women or very few, it is a lot harder to get an Equal Pay Act, Sex Discrimination Act or domestic violence legislation. And before anyone shouts that we still don’t have equal pay and there is still discrimination at work and violence in the home and on the streets, yes, but it was a damn sight harder to do anything about any of these when they weren’t against the law. And they weren’t against the law when I was born.

Without representation at significant levels, such laws just don’t get passed. Without these, so-called democracy is fairly useless for most women’s lives.  It’s just not democracy when women aren’t there, because 50% of the population doesn’t get to participate in civic or public life on an equal basis with the other 50%.

Barriers to women’s participation in politics

It takes a lot of time. Just getting selected for election at national level and to a certain extent at local level takes up a great deal of time and energy.  Trying to get elected then sucks of up every single spare second, every bit of energy. Your capacity as a mother, partner, friend, carer – these are all affected. Whoever you work for, whether paid or unpaid, needs to be supportive. 

I recently ran a campaign as a council candidate for the Labour party in Bristol. Lots of people got involved, lots of women who had never taken part in a campaign before got interested in what could be achieved if there were more women on the council. They are wonderful – coming out, knocking on doors, listening to people in our neighbourhood, working out our strategy. From tackling the frightening and rapidly increasing rates of youth unemployment to challenging the licensing of lap dancing clubs and how we deal with prostitution, there’s a lot to do. We are getting on with it and we are working with the elected councillors to achieve some of this. However, I would have been able to achieve more if I had got elected. We are already working on getting more of us into the next council election in 2013.

The processes are very tough and there is plenty of sexism. What can I say – this is also true for getting women into senior positions at work. We are making improvements but there is a long way to go. Supporting each other helps. Criticising each other for making the effort doesn’t.  

Childcare, pregnancy, children – just the same as for getting into employment and senior levels of employment, these can be very difficult for many women to juggle happily with the demands of a political career. Community meetings usually clash with children’s bedtimes. I’ve yet to hear of a council crèche for councillors – though there is one in Westminster.

There are no job shares in politics – yet! Caroline Lucas, the UK’s first Green MP, has raised this. IF we are serious about getting more women into politics, particularly Westminster politics which is a full time job, we need to consider this and other flexible working practices.

It’s hard to be away from your family for long periods of time and moving them causes upheaval. For many parents, the sheer thought of having to uproot children to live in the capital, or a constituency where they don’t already live, will put them off even considering national elections.

Politics and women’s liberation

The Birmingham 1978 conference of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) defined the seven demands of the WLM as follows:

1.       Equal pay

2.       Equal education and job opportunities

3.       Free contraception

4.       Free 24 hour community controlled child care

5.       Legal and financial independence for women

6.       An end to discrimination against lesbians

7.       Freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of violence. An end to teh laws, assumptions and institutions which perpetuate male dominance and men’s aggression towards women. 

I recently read a lot of twitter chat arising from a workshop at the UK Feminista national conference concluding that we have only achieved one of the. This puzzled me because I wasn’t aware we have really fully achieved any of them.  However, we would be doing a great dis-service to our own campaigning skills, to our sisters in elected office and to our achievements if we didn’t note that:

a)      We’ve achieved a great deal on all of these, to varying degrees; and

b)      There are things missing from this list.

We can and must applaud, for instance, the legislation and significant measurable improvements in practice to deal with 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7. Women organised, both within and outside the political process and between activists and politicians to achieve these. Male politicians did NOT wake up one morning and suddenly pass the Equal Pay Act or ban rape in marriage.

As for what’s missing, the most obvious omission in the context of this article would be:

8.       Equal representation in political office and policy making.

I also think that it was lamentable to leave out:

1.       An end to all forms of discrimination against women; and

2.       And end to all forms of discrimination.

Without the missing number 8 above and a very strong focus on achieving it, thereby making democracy actually democratic and useful for women, we are severely hampered in trying to get the others fulfilled or the potential of what we have achieved realised.

There’s a lot of cynicism about politics and politicians in the West and shockingly low rates of turnout at elections. At the same time millions of people across the Middle East and North Africa are rising up for representation and democracy. Women died for our right to vote. South Africans queued in the heat for hours in the first post-apartheid elections. We are in danger of being against politics and for – well, what, exactly? Do we really think that democracy, with all its flaws, is best ditched for no democracy? That’s an awful thought. How, exactly, do the women of Qatar get to lobby for any of the seven demands of the WLM, or their own self determined equivalent?  

The uprisings for democracy also have potential problems for women. The armed revolution in Libya may have rid the world of another dictator (although at the time of writing he is still out there and he still has armed support) but has left the country with a generation of men with guns by their beds. Women aren’t yet visible on the National Transitional Council of Libya. Women have been demanding better participation in the liberation struggles in North Africa and Middle East but I have yet to see it happen. Without this, the struggle for democracy will continue to be the development of 21^st century forms of patriarchy. Without women’s participation, there can be no true democracy.

Get involved!

If you don’t like the current state of politics, get involved. Every one of us can join the Fawcett Society or support its campaigns. You can join a political party whose values you believe in. Even if you just pay your subscriptions, which can be as little as a few pounds each year, you are helping, but you can also help in elections to get more women elected.

Consider standing for election, at local, regional, national or European levels. Some of the political parties have specific programmes or committees for women, to encourage more women to get involved and to lobby for better rates of selection for seats. I went on a weekend residential course for women in the Labour party which uplifted and inspired me as well as giving me tough but necessary training on the gruelling processes involved in getting into politics.

Get involved in campaigns outside party politics to change things. Don’t like the effect of lap dancing clubs in city centres? Find out when their license is next up for renewal, gather your evidence (it’s there), write your objection to the licensing committee, get others to do the same. Your local Fawcett Society or Object is probably doing a campaign on it and the Object website has resources to help you do this if there isn’t a local group or you don’t want to join. Ask questions at your local council meeting – you are entitled to get an answer and you will probably get press coverage.

I’ve heard more whining lately from men who don’t like us organising separately, moaning that it isn’t fair to exclude men from things. We’ve had two millennia of men excluding women from things, like running banks and countries. That’s not gone well. Sometimes we may need to group together to work out our strategies, support each other and help to get our sisters elected and hold them to account when they are. Deal with it, boys. 

People can change the world, in fact, it’s the only way it ever happens.

Thangam can be contacted via her blog and Twitter @tdebbonaire