Thirty-eight years on, things have changed for the better – but not enough, argues Barbara Follett

The idea that British women might be interested in politics is relatively recent. Their participation in this cruelly challenging occupation is even more so. This is scarcely surprising when you consider that it is only 99 years since a limited number of us over 30 were allowed to vote.

When I joined the Labour party in 1979 the effects of this late entry were plain. Only 11 of our members of parliament were women. The Conservatives had eight and the Liberals had none. So, 51 per cent of the British population held three per cent of the seats in the House of Commons. Not a very representative figure.

Thankfully, 38 years on, things have changed. Despite Labour’s defeat in the 2015 general election, the party managed to get 99 women into parliament. That is an 800 per cent rise since 1979. Better still, women now account for 44 per cent of Labour’s representation on the green benches.

This change did not come about by itself. Between 1929 and 1983 women’s representation in the Commons never rose above five per cent. In 1987 it increased to six per cent and the number of Labour women in parliament went from 10 to 21. We celebrated until Barbara Castle reminded us that exactly the same number of Labour women had been elected in 1945. Then we started organising.

The biggest barrier to women’s participation in British politics is its culture. This still is – despite all the changes – overwhelmingly male. Architecturally, organisationally and socially. Like the Houses of Parliament, it was designed for and by men. In 1997, when I and 119 other women – 101 of them Labour – took our seats, the building, the staff and its older members seemed to reel in shock. So did we. The setting was beautiful but the atmosphere was so unnecessarily combative, rule-driven and inflexible. A public school over-provided with public bars.

The only way to change a culture is to infiltrate it. But to do this successfully you need help. That is why, in 1988, we founded Labour Women’s Network to give women the skills and the confidence to deal with the yah-boo side of British politics. Two other barriers to women’s political participation – caring and cash – quickly became apparent. So we set up local support networks for women candidates and formed Emily’s List UK to help them meet the cost of getting selected.

But it was a culture change within the Labour party itself – the introduction of all-women shortlists in 1993 – that made the real difference. Without this we could not have raised the percentage of Labour women in parliament by 173 per cent in a single election as we did in 1997. Nor could we have managed to get 99 Labour women elected in 2015.

Many of those 99 women were graduates of Labour Women’s Network which, 30 years after it was founded, continues to play a vital role in the election of Labour women to parliament. One of the 99, Jo Cox, chaired the Labour Women’s Network for four years. We will never forget her.

Women’s participation in British politics has come a long way in the past 40 years but we still have much to do. There has never been a Labour woman prime minister or deputy prime minister. There has never been a female chancellor of the exchequer of any political persuasion. Women are still under-represented in the cabinet, the shadow cabinet and the higher echelons of the civil service. We are still the exception, not the rule. We have to change this. Not to make things look better but to make things work better. For ourselves and for our world.

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Barbara Follett is patron of the Labour Women’s Network and was MP for Stevenage from 1997 to 2010. She tweets at @Barbara_Follett

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