Coming bang in the middle of the conference season, Angela Merkel’s remarkable reconfirmation last weekend of her personal popularity with German voters can’t have made entirely comfortable watching for any of our own male party leaders. For all, in differing ways, have their women trouble.
True, only UKIP’s Nigel Farage has, or had, the incubus of the ludicrous Godfrey Bloom – the only member, one hopes, of the European Parliament’s women’s rights and gender equality committee who imagined it amusing to refer to female party colleagues as ‘sluts’.
Bloom, though, was but a symptom, a mild headache compared with the migraine of the ‘old man’s party’ image that will continue to afflict UKIP long after the conference hijacker himself is gone and forgotten.
The Ipsos MORI report, The Women Problem, commissioned by the Mumsnet website to coincide with the party conferences, was titled to emphasise the problem that David Cameron and the Conservatives generally have with women voters.
In polls averaged over the first half of this year, Labour’s lead over the Conservatives among men was just four per cent (35 to 31), but among women 13 per cent (42 to 29). Put into historical context, as it is briefly below, a gender gap of nine per cent in this direction has to be concerning for the Conservatives.
However, the gender gap for UKIP was proportionately even greater: 15 per cent of men saying they’d vote UKIP in a General Election, compared to eight per cent of women.
It would be surprising if a party led largely by men and supported predominantly by men were represented by loads of women, and it isn’t.
All five UKIP members on West Midlands principal councils are men, and 120 of the 135 county councillors (89 per cent) elected last May. Its nine remaining MEPs are all men, as are 86 per cent of its shortlisted candidates for next year’s elections.
But if the gender gap for UKIP voters is wide, the age gap is wider still. Only five per cent of 18-34 year olds said they’d vote UKIP in a General Election, compared to 16 per cent of over-55s. Combine the two factors, and UKIP support among over-55 men is a challenging 20 per cent, but among 18-34 year old women a mere three per cent.
It’s a similar, but proportionately more extreme, picture of the pattern of Conservative support. Among over-55 men, Labour had a narrow lead of two per cent over the Conservatives; among 18-34 women it was 25 per cent.
That today’s Conservative Party has difficulties appealing to women seems strange indeed for someone of my generation, who, born in 1945, would probably not have seen a Conservative Government until 1979, if only men had had the vote.
Churchill (in 1951), Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Heath: the chances are that without women (like my mother) – home-based, with supposedly more traditional moral values and an almost unquestioning readiness to vote Conservative – none of them would have made it to No 10.
After 1979, as women’s paid employment increased and gender differences in the home gradually reduced, the gender voting gap narrowed too, assisted by Labour starting to target both its policies and recruitment at particularly younger women.
Then, starting at the 1997 General Election, Labour decided the only way of significantly raising the internationally embarrassing figure of fewer than 10 per cent of our MPs being women was through affirmative action, and specifically through requiring that candidates be selected from all-women shortlists (AWS) in half the party’s most winnable seats – including, as it happened, mine.
The number of women MPs immediately doubled – from 60 to 120. 101 of them were Labour, 35 elected from AWSs, and a further 51 were elected from AWSs in 2005 and 2010, including Birmingham Ladywood’s Shabana Mahmood. For 15 years now, in competing to represent the interests of women, both the Conservatives and Lib Dems have been playing catch-up, or rather non-catch-up.
In 2010, as in 2005, the voting gender gap was modest, but now in Labour’s favour. The Conservatives’ lead over Labour among men was 10 per cent (38 to 28), but among women only five per cent (36 to 31). Still, it was a lead; now they’re 13 points behind, and in three years the pro-Labour gender gap has increased from five to nine per cent.
It’s hard to see how the Conservatives could win in 2015 without recapturing some of this lost support, but the hurdles get higher by the month.
First, there’s Cameron’s image and patronising attitude to even his own women MPs. Insulted Conservative backbencher Nadine Dorries’ depiction of Cameron and George Osborne will continue to prove more damaging than anything Labour could have managed: “two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk, and who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others – that is their real crime”.
Understanding the lives of others – that’s the policy problem, particularly the Coalition’s austerity policy. The decision to cut the structural deficit through slashing public spending and welfare benefits has inevitably hit women hardest.
Public sector job and service cuts are jobs held and services used disproportionately by women. Tax credit and child benefit cuts, housing benefit caps, cuts in maternity and pregnancy grants all impact mainly on women – and all were launched without apparently any serious assessment of the nature and scale of this impact in advance.
And always, seemingly, announced by men – because there are no women cabinet ministers anywhere near any economic or finance department. Which reflects the Conservatives’ recruitment problem.
Cameron’s first pledge as Leader was “to change the scandalous under-representation of women in the Conservative Party”. He introduced several ‘positive action’, rather than punitively enforceable, reforms to the party’s candidate selection process – particularly the A-list of candidates, half of them women, from whom party members in target seats were ‘expected’ to make their selections.
The A-list approach was partially successful. Women Conservative MPs did increase from 2005’s ‘scandalous’ 17 out of 198 (8.6 per cent) to the merely shocking 49 out of 307 (16 per cent). Successful West Midlands A-listers included Harriet Baldwin (West Worcestershire), Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) and Margot James (Stourbridge).
It may also have further embarrassed the Lib Dems, with their meagre seven women MPs (12.5 per cent) and professedly ideological resistance to all-women shortlists or most others forms of equality guarantees.
But the Conservatives were still way behind Labour’s 81 (31 per cent), and, if they were a country, they’d be 88th in the world parliamentary rankings, just behind those beacons of representative democracy, Turkmenistan and Libya. As it is, our parliamentary total of 147 women MPs (22.6 per cent) puts us near the bottom of western European countries in 58th place.
Cameron’s other recruitment “aspiration” was that a third of ministers by 2015 would be women. That would compare with eight women in Tony Blair’s final Cabinet and 30 per cent of women ministers in Gordon Brown’s last Government. Present figures are four women in a cabinet of 22 (18 per cent) and 23 women ministers out of 121 (19 per cent), so quite a way to go there as well.
You might conclude at this point that Labour has got this gender business about right. Its selection systems produce respectable proportions of women in both the Commons and Shadow Cabinet (10 out of 25). It has the least disliked leader, and a growing gender gap in its favour. Where are the problems?
They relate, I’d suggest, to the very effectiveness of AWSs. First, they’re just too successful. The idea was that their short-term use would redress the extreme gender imbalance in Parliament, eliminate any internal party prejudice against women candidates, and thereby soon make their use unnecessary.
What’s happened in this round of 2015 selections is that the party identified 79 target constituencies, and designated half for open selection and half for selection by AWS – including Birmingham Yardley and nine other West Midlands seats. Certainly until recently, though, just one open selection had produced a woman candidate: Warwick and Leamington, where Lynnette Kelly was chosen from a shortlist of two women. Instead of redundant, AWSs are becoming indispensable.
At the same time, they are accused of narrowing parliamentary recruitment, favouring women not only over men, but over other disadvantaged groups, also deserving of at least guaranteed places on shortlists, and who would both enhance and diversify Labour’s increasingly homogenised, middle-class, professional parliamentary membership.
* Chris Game, Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham
