That women were ‘invisible’ during the general election campaign is now widely acknowledged as a point of shame. This applies to Labour as well as the other parties: despite the hugely positive steps taken by Labour to redress the gender imbalance in political representation since 1997, there’s still a long way to go. Yet while much has been made of isolated initiatives, such as the proposed 50:50 quota for the shadow cabinet, far less attention has been given to the fundamental reasons why women were sidelined, and why they are not pushing through to the highest ranks of public office. Without a comprehensive and coherent analysis of these questions, any reform at the very top of the party will prove unsustainable.
To be clear, I wholeheartedly support the goal of a 50:50 shadow cabinet. But I do so with this important qualification: that the 50:50 shadow cabinet composition must exist because it reflects a 50:50 composition of the PLP, select committee chairs, parliamentary candidates, council leaders and cabinet members, councillors, and Labour office holders right down to the local branch level. It cannot be hailed as a panacea, or as anything other than a means of reflecting the actual party structures as a whole.
Out of the leadership candidates, so far only David Miliband has made this link expressly. His vision for women within the party refers directly to the 50:50 policy at shadow cabinet level as a “target”, to be combined with a change in culture across the party, rather than as a measure to be implemented without delay. The other candidates, while supporting a quota at the shadow cabinet level and in some cases supporting further reforms in the party, do not seem to link the two. It is also not clear whether Ed Miliband, for example, would seek to introduce 50:50 this autumn or have a more gradual introduction over time.
The difference in these approaches matters. From 1997 onwards, Labour showed a tendency to promote individual women to positions of prominence without sufficient complementary reforms to the party’s internal structures. The danger here is that the culture of the party lags behind the appearance of reform that individual female rolemodels embody. There is an argument to be made that the promotion of individual women without root-and-branch reform of our internal systems actually masks the fact that reform to date has not been sustainable. A key example of this is the lack of comprehensive internal monitoring. Despite several promising women choosing to leave the PLP since 1997, and many female PPCs not contesting elections again if unsuccessful the first time, to my knowledge there is no formal mechanism by which these trends are monitored and evaluated within the party. Rather than making (albeit educated) guesses as to the reasons for the attrition rate among women candidates, Labour should introduce a process of formal monitoring of all past candidates’ experiences as a matter of course. After all, only once a problem is put in its factual context can we begin to take steps to address it effectively.
Formal monitoring, through both qualitative and quantitative research of past candidates’ experiences, would have a twofold effect. First, it would give Labour the information it needs to pinpoint effective ways of encouraging good candidates to stand. Second, it would provide ideas for addressing the trickier question of how to maintain the engagement of good candidates over a longer period of time. It is this second problem which has proved resistant to an easy answer.
A quota at cabinet level does have a role to play. Numerous research studies show the strong link between seeing ‘someone like me’ in a job and viewing that job as attainable*. Yet reform at the top can only be effective in the long run if it is mirrored by a rational process of reform across the party’s structures, involving the grassroots as much as the future leaders. Instead of rushing to impose 50:50 only at the highest level this autumn, let’s reform the system as a whole. Perhaps then, in the words of Harriet Harman, we can “encourage women to step out of the shadows”.
*Evidenced extensively in academic research studies, for example by Fawcett, Prof Joni Lovenduski at Birkbeck College and Prof Pippa Norris at Harvard University
This is a really good article but I don’t think it gives a fair representation of Ed Miliband’s position. According to his reply to the Lead for Women letter http://lead4women.wordpress.com/reply-from-ed-miliband/, he sees a clear link between 50:50 gender representation in the shadow cabinet and broader change within the party. He argues for a number of measures to achieve more accessible structures across the whole party including at CLP level, and for supporting the work of groups such as the Labour Women’s Network and the Fabian Women’s Network, as well as learning from successful women’s representation in Scotland and Wales since devolution, and the culture change that this has brought. To me, the bigger question is about why David Miliband and Andy Burnham don’t support 50:50 gender balance in the shadow cabinet from day one. None of the other three candidates who do support immediate 50:50 argue that it is a panacea – but it is an important measure of change