The current electoral system is a huge barrier to seat access for female MPs
With less than a quarter of MPs currently women, a 50:50 parliament seems like a distant hope.
But there are grounds for optimism. Based on polling trends and an analysis of every party’s candidate for the upcoming election, the Electoral Reform Society has predicted that 192 MPs are likely to be elected this May – up 44 on the current 148. It would mean three in ten MPs would be women, the highest ever figure.
Parties are putting forward more female candidates than before, too, with every party except UKIP fielding a higher proportion of female candidates than parliament’s current make-up (see Table 1). And in target seats, Labour and the Conservatives are actually fielding a higher proportion of female candidates than their overall number, meaning they are clearly trying hard to get more women into the House.
This is good news. The predicted boost this May would see us rising up the world ranking for female representation in lower chambers from 56th to 36th. We’d finally be ahead of Afghanistan and other countries with less-than-positive track records on gender equality.
But we’d still not be world leaders, by any means. And while moving from 23 per cent women to nearly 30 per cent is a welcome rise, there’s one big barrier that’s blocking future progress: our electoral system.
Under First Past the Post, there are hundreds of effectively uncontested seats where parties have a big enough lead not to worry about opposition. That means many MPs can act as ‘seat-blockers’, occupying their seats for decade after decade.
Here’s the catch: the longer an MP has been in situ, the more likely he is to be a man.
As you can see in Table 2, there are 67 MPs first elected in 1992 or before who are standing again this May. 59 of them are men. Having held their seats for over two decades, we can guess that most of these men will keep their positions effectively unchallenged.
This is a major barrier in terms of increasing women’s representation in the future. We can’t allow the existence of safe seats to act as a block on reaching a 50:50 parliament. We need to reform our voting system.
Proportional representation isn’t a silver bullet, of course. It can only facilitate – rather than guarantee – more diversity in politics. But experience from other countries shows that nearly all of those with a high proportion of women in parliament use some form of PR. Moreover, larger multi-member constituencies would increase the likelihood that more women would be able to win seats, as voters would have a greater choice of winnable candidates. Under our current broken electoral system, less ‘traditional’ and ‘safe-looking’ candidates lose out.
Nonetheless, it’s good news that nearly 200 women will be elected in two months’ time. Let’s just make sure it doesn’t become a new ‘glass ceiling’.
Josiah Mortimer is Communications assistant at the Electoral Reform Society. Follow him on Twitter
Read the ‘Women in Westminster’ report here
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21 Responses to “This May will be a boost for female representation – but there’s a catch”
Leon Wolfeson
FPTP is /valid/. It’s a problem and should be changed, but it’s the law of the land.
Moreover, FPTP means we already have coalitions, they just call themselves parties.
And no, you’re talking about a Labour-driven coalition, hence neo-liberal and pushing austerity.
Labour’s strategy has been to move right, and count on the fact that they’ll still be “better than the Tories” when push comes to shove.
keithunder
The ers supports STV which pretty much eliminates tactical voting. It is not possible to eliminate it entirely, but it is the system which makes tactical voting almost pointless.
Godfrey Paul
We need the best people available to stand. Their sex is irrelevant.
Guest
STV lends itself heavily to tactical voting. It’s all about the voting order, for instance, and parties. STV fails to meet the criteria for “independence of irrelevant alternatives” and “monotonicity”, terms you may wish to look up.
(Moreover, I’d add, the version of STV used in the UK for other elections – in terms of the way
the votes are transferred – is about THE most hostile to smaller parties.)
It is, of course, perfectly possible to have systems where tactical voting is largely pointless, but those are systems which use i.e. top-up rather than preference voting.
Please don’t spread propaganda.
keithunder
I am aware of these criteria and that STV fails to comply, but this is irrelevant in practical terms, no system is perfect. STV is in practice less prone to tactical voting than any other system. Your later preferences are only used if your earlier ones are no longer relevant. So I can vote Pirate number 1 if I wish without having to bother about whether they reach the list threshold, because I know that if they don’t get enough votes that my vote will be transferred and not discarded as in list systems.
I don;t see how STV as used in the UK is hostile to small parties is hostile to small parties (unless you are referring to the system used in Scottish local elections, and that is because of the small number of members elected in each constituency). You just need to look at the results in Northern Ireland which uses a superior system and achieved a better vote to party ratio than the Scottish AMS system (despite STV not being party based).
I am not quite sure what you mean by top up systems, I assume you mean AMS systems.. If you don’t think tactical voting is a thing in those then look at the German results where the CDU tactically voted FDP on the list (and then stopped doing it causing the FDP to lose all it’s seats) and even worse the results in Italy where they used AMS twice and exploited a fatal flaw in all AMS systems causing it to be abandoned.