Women Only

 

Note: Apologies for the lack of live links. Google Blogger was not allowing live links when I wrote this so I have included a full list of references at the end.

This post is likely going to lose me a considerable number of readers, particularly amongst women. I have a confession to make. I have never been a supporter of all-women shortlists. This, I assure you is not due to any misogyny on my part. I have considered myself a feminist for a number of years. But, rather is related to two connected principles. 

Principle one is that positions, particularly well paid political ones, should go to the best candidates. Principle two is that if a party has a culture that is hostile to the idea of women candidates that it is the culture that needs changing not the rules dictating who can be candidates. 

Historic gender imbalance

I understand the arguments in favour of all-women shortlists. There has been a historic imbalance in the number of women in senior positions, including politics. In 1979, despite there being a woman Prime Minister, there were only 19 women MPs, 3% of the total. By 1997, the year New Labour were elected, that figure had increased to 120, but this still represented only 18% of all MPs. 

Given those figures the case for all-women shortlists was easy to make. In order to correct a historic injustice, it was necessary to take steps to privilege women candidates. Only the Labour Party implemented women only shortlists which it did in 1997. As of December 2019 51% of Labour MPs were women. In fact, whilst 51% is the highest number ever for women Labour MPs, there were 15 less women than in 2017, a total of 220 women MPs from a total of 650.

According to the Labour Womens Network “Without AWS we could easily go backwards, as we did in 2001 when AWS was not used.” Of course, this only refers to the Labour Party because the proportion of women MPs overall was 18% in both 1997 and 2001. In 2001 there was a slight retrenchment within Labour with 6 less women MPs. Though to be fair Labour lost 5 seats in that election. The LWN make the point, “Labour is best served by having a strong and diverse body of representatives. We are most likely to win when we field a team which reflects voters and can connect with them.” So, the aim is not simply a fair representation but, as importantly, winning elections. Hold that point for as we will see this is key to any debate around all-women shortlists.

Sexist attitudes

The more important point is that in Labour, at least as far as I can tell, there is no anti-woman culture. There certainly was a significant number of men in the party when I joined in 1983 who were, to be charitable, not accommodating of feminism. Many of these men were from industrial trade union backgrounds, but the feminists who spent a good deal of their time confronting them did a fine job of making those attitudes untenable within the party. 

That is not to say that women do not experience sexist attitudes from time to time but on the whole women have positions throughout the party and both men and women vote more on factional grounds than gender ones. In the Labour leadership election given a choice of four women and one man, 34 women MPs (15%) chose to nominate the only man. Indeed over 40% of his nominations were from women, a fair few of whom were selected from all-women shortlists including my own MP Anna McMorrin who, ironically, told us that it was time for Labour to have a female leader. By comparison only 14 women nominated Lisa Nandy, which accounted for 45% of her nominations. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the left candidate also received 14 nominations from women, amounting to 42% of her total. Emily Thornberry received 11 women’s nominations and Jess Phillips also received 11 nominations. In total, therefore given the opportunity to make a big statement 40% of those who nominated voted for the only man on offer. Perhaps more astounding though is that with 4 women candidates to campaign for, representing all factions within the party, over 60% chose not to nominate anybody.

I was never entirely convinced that the deep seated misogyny in wider society was reflected in the Labour Party, but some women tell me otherwise and I have no reason to disbelieve them. There is an argument that we have now had those battles and won. But even if that is not true my misgivings about all-women shortlists are not quite calmed. In 2019 84% of Labour MPs were university educated and 20% went to Oxbridge. I have nothing against university education, after all I spent 25 years working in universities, but it tells us something about the type of person who becomes an MP. It is worth stating here that there are no formal educational requirements to be an MP. In other words, a university education is not a requirement.

Occupational bias

It is though when we look at the occupations from which MPs come that we can see why all-women shortlists may not only be the wrong answer, but that we are not even asking the right question. In 2017 almost three-quarters of Labour MPs come from what might be termed the professions. As Helen Lewis commented in the New Statesman “Say your industry is dominated by men, which often means white, privately educated Oxbridge men. Institute a gender quota without tackling the underlying issues and you’ll largely fill the slots with white, privately educated Oxbridge childless women..”

Now, of course, this could be accused of whatifery in that pointing to the lack of access for one class of people does not justify discriminating against another. But the truth is that if the now prioritised group are disproportionately from one narrow sub-section of the population then the stated aims of the policy are not being realised. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the shift to Labour MPs being from a narrow sub-section has been caused by all-women shortlists, nor that it is unique to the Labour Party. 

My concern is whether all-women shortlists rectify their stated aim which is to make the parliamentary party representative of the electorate. In pointing to the class bias which has become a feature of parliamentary selection, for both women and men, it is worth stating the obvious. Privileging middle class professionals does not only favour women it favours men from those backgrounds too. What all-women shortlists do is provide a level playing field for women and men from those backgrounds, but in so doing continue the inherent biases against working class women, who alongside working class men now have virtually no representation in parliament and no realistic prospect of achieving parity.

Statistics

Let’s look at some statistics. We know that the population is roughly 50-50 male:female. In 2017, according to the Office For National Statistics 42% of adults had a higher education qualification. Of those with a degree, less than 1% had been to Oxbridge.  Yet, even amongst Labour MPs 84% have a degree and 20% are Oxbridge educated. As academic Tom O’Grady has pointed out “When (Labour) first achieved electoral success in the 1920s, more than 70% of its MPs were drawn from working-class occupations..” He shows how those from working class occupations have declined from over 30% in 1987 to just 5% in 2015. Labour MPs are more likely to have been barristers than baristas.

You might wonder whether this really matters and particularly if it is relevant to all-women shortlists? O’Grady points out that what he terms “careerist” politicians not only have a different background to working class MPs but view their role very differently. “Careerists are more concerned than working-class legislators with advancing their own political career. They are more willing to take policy positions for strategic political reasons (such as gaining the favour of certain sections of the electorate) or to help advance their political career, and they are more instinctively loyal to the party leadership. Hence, careerists have lower relative ideological support for left-wing policies, and their ideologies are less important in determining their stances in the first place.”

This is not just an opinion based on his own prejudice, his study looked at the careers and politics of a number of Labour MPs during the Blair years and used their attitude to welfare reform legislation as an indicator of his assumptions. He is clear, and I think this is significant, that these categories are not absolute. Individuals may differ, but overall the tendencies toward conforming to their group profile is very strong. Part of the reason concerns socialisation. Bear in mind that 49% of Labour MPs come from what the House of Commons Library call ‘instrumental’ professions, that is researchers, party officials, journalists, trade union officials or lobbyists.

Occupational socialisation

“Having begun their working careers around campaigners, pollsters, party staff, and others who are invested in electoral success, they will come to view winning elections as an important goal in its own right, and an intrinsic part of their job. Having worked closely with the party leadership, loyalty will become more ingrained for them. And having been surrounded by people who are invested in politics as a career, they too will start to see it as a career with a structured trajectory like any other white-collar profession, and will strive to reach high office.”

There it is. They “.. come to view winning elections as an important goal in its own right”. This instrumental approach to politics is justified on the grounds that it is necessary to win elections. The result is that the same women MPs who get their positions because women are under-represented, then pursue policies that disproportionately negatively affect other women. The careerist MPs, and this includes plenty of men, view the World through the prism of their own background and experiences. And, despite their stated affinity to the working class whose votes they need to maintain their position, their background is best described as middle class with very little lived experience of the daily struggles experienced by many working class women.

Tom O’Grady is clear that working class MPs can also be affected by careerism. The socialisation process of parliament is designed to promote fealty to the party, not to your constituents. I once worked in local government with John Smith who had been Labour MP for Vale of Glamorgan and he would tell us stories of his time as an MP. One such tale was his telling of the power of the whips office. As a new MP, he said, it would be made very clear to you that if you did as the whips told you, then you would be rewarded with, perhaps, a nice “fact finding” trip to a warm, hospitable country. Refuse and you might get a trip to Outer Hebrides. If you were lucky!

Blowing with the wind

In his analysis of speeches O’Grady found what many of us on the left have always suspected: “most working-class MPs were consistent over time, taking almost the same position regardless of the political context. Careerist MPs were the opposite: much more likely to blow with the political winds.” Indeed, blowing with the wind usually meant moving away from policies that might benefit their constituents and toward policies that would mainly benefit their careers. Of course, these two positions are not always mutually exclusive, but where they clash the careerist impulse is to favour the latter over the former.

The issue explained empirically by Tom O’Grady is that the British political system has evolved to provide access to the political system disproportionately to a narrow sub-section of the population. The same is undoubtedly true of other liberal democracies. What this means is that politics is presented through a lens that is shaped by the experiences and backgrounds of a narrow part of the electorate. More importantly it almost totally excludes people from around half of the population. Ordinary, non-university educated, working class people do not get into parliament, and with only rare exceptions get into the media which reports on, favourably or otherwise, our political institutions.

But what has all this to do with all-women shortlists? Surely if women are 50% of the population they should be 50% of MPs, of judges, of journalists, and, yes of the unemployed and homeless too? Fairness dictates that if they are less than their proportion in the population in every part of society that they should be given the leg up to achieve that proportion. Interestingly enough nobody is arguing that 50% of all poor people should be women, nor 50% of all homeless people.

Middle Class Labour

Finding candidates who are not middle class is increasingly difficult. According to Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary’s, University of London, who runs the Economic and Social Research Council-funded Party Members Project,  77 per cent of Labour members fall into the ABC1 (middle class) category, compared to a national average of 62 per cent. In other words, the problem of a lack of working class MPs is not just a question of different women, or men, coming forward, but of changing the dynamics of the party entirely. Unfortunately, current moves in the party to drive out anti-Zionists of the left, is likely to increase the over-representation of the professional, middle-classes. Whilst this is good news for women who view gender as the key characteristic of discrimination, it is bad news if the goal is to show that Labour represents either its voters or the general public.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is tasked with monitoring ‘fairness’ which it does on a range of key indicators. Their report ‘Is Britain Fairer?’ Is published on a regular basis. The last one was presented to Parliament in June 2019. The question here is did it find widespread discrimination against women that would justify special measures such as all-women shortlists?

Although the report mentions the under-representation of women in Westminster (and Holyrood and Cardiff Bay), it fails to look at the way in which different political parties take a different view. So whilst Labour now has 51% female representation the overall percentage is brought down by the other parties. But, overall, it is not discrimination against women that is highlighted but under-representation amongst ethnic minorities and the worsening conditions for those from the lower socio-economic background - men, women and children. The report concludes:

“Socio-economic disadvantage and deprivation are strongly linked to poorer outcomes in education and health. People from the most deprived households have significantly lower educational attainment, putting them at a lifelong disadvantage in the employment market.”

Women are disadvantaged

Women are disadvantaged. But, more so if they are from the lower classes. Of course women from all classes can be subject to domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape, misogyny, and patronising, disrespectful attitudes. I am neither denying these nor underestimating their impact. But, systems thinkers suggest that in complex systems a failure to take a holistic approach can have unintended consequences. So that all-women shortlists whilst solving a problem of under-representation of women exacerbate a related problem by making political representation the domain of a particular social class. Far from making political representation more representative of the population they have made it less so.

The emphasis placed by middle class women on under-representation of women in the professions should make socialists wary of the motives of many women. That tendency to blow with the wind is seen in the shift from Corbynista to witch finder general by Angela Rayner, a beneficiary of an all-woman shortlist but also one of the few Labour MPs without a university degree. 

If there was ever a case for all-women shortlists we have to ask whether they are now a tool for bringing the Labour Party closer to the electorate, or one that drives a wedge between the elite and the rest. Do we really need more women like Lisa Nandy or Jess Phillips? Those on the left advocating all-women shortlists forget, or ignore, that it was not gender that determined whether MPs supported Corbyn, nor gender which determined whether they support policies which would benefit their less well off constituents. These things were determined by politics and although there are plenty of middle class socialists it is partly a function of class orientation. All-women shortlists have strengthened a currency in which being a parliamentary representative of the Labour Party is neither a vocation nor an honour but simply another career choice for people who can already choose from a variety of middle class professions.

References

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7483/

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05057/

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-is-labour-the-party-of-the-working-class

https://preventioncentre.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Systems-thinking-paper1.pdf

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/is-britain-fairer-accessible.pdf

https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/elitist-britain-2019/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jul/decline-working-class-politicians-shifted-labour-towards-right-wing-policy

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0010414018784065

https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/11-01-2018/sfr247-higher-education-student-statistics/qualifications

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominations_in_the_2020_Labour_Party_leadership_election#Members_of_Parliament_4

https://www.lwn.org.uk/all_women_shortlists

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/03/success-all-women-shortlists-risks-masking-issues-they-were-meant-solve

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