In the 2017 UK general election, Labour used AWS for 50% of its winnable seats, and 41% of the candidates the party fielded were female. The Tories and the Lib Dems, neither of whom used AWS, fielded 29% each. The UK’s House of Commons is currently (2018) 32% female, which places it at thirty-ninth in the world rankings – a drop in standing which is partly a result of other countries catching up, and partly a result of the dominance of the Conservative Party which still doesn’t use AWS (43% of Labour’s MPs are female compared to 21% of the Conservatives).
It is clear that Labour’s use of AWS has driven a significant proportion of the increase in female MPs. The government’s refusal to extend their legality beyond 2030 is therefore tantamount to legislating for a resumption of male bias in British democracy. Perhaps they haven’t read the data on the impact female politicians bring to legislation. Or, perhaps they have.
The British government’s refusal to extend AWS to local elections is if anything more perplexing, because female representation is even worse in local government. Britain’s trend towards devolution was meant to be about giving power back to local communities (local government, on which Britain spends ￡94 billion each year, plays a vital role in providing services that women in particular depend on). But the evidence uncovered by a 2017 report commissioned by women’s charity the Fawcett Society suggests that it is mainly giving power back to men.26
The Fawcett Society report found that nine councils across England and Wales still have all-male cabinets, while only 33% of council chief executives are female. Just one in three councillors in England is a woman, up only five percentage points in two decades. All six of the newly elected metro mayors are men (in the latest Liverpool election none of the main parties even fielded a female candidate), and just 12% of cabinet members in devolved areas are women.
The Fawcett report is all the evidence we have, because the data is not being collected by government, so unless this particular charity continues to collect the data, it will be impossible to monitor progress. And yet the government’s reasoning for refusing to extend AWS to local or mayoral elections is that the ‘evidence base is as yet underdeveloped’.27 Given they also refused the committee’s most basic recommendation to force parties to collect and publish candidate-diversity data (on the basis of the ‘regulatory burden which this would impose’), this stance leaves those who would like to see a less male-biased form of democracy take hold in Britain at something of a disadvantage.
Three of the recommendations in the Women and Equalities report concerned the implementation of quotas, and it was not surprising that these were rejected: British governments have traditionally been opposed to such measures, seeing them as anti-democratic. But evidence from around the world shows that political gender quotas don’t lead to the monstrous regiment of incompetent women.28 In fact, in line with the LSE study on workplace quotas, studies on political quotas have found that if anything, they ‘increase the competence of the political class in general’. This being the case, gender quotas are nothing more than a corrective to a hidden male bias, and it is the current system that is anti-democratic.
The form of quota that is available to a country depends on the electoral system it operates. In the UK, each of the country’s 650 constituencies has a single MP. This MP is voted in using ‘first past the post’ (FPTP), which means that the candidate with the most votes gets returned to Parliament. Since there is only one candidate per constituency, in a FPTP system all-women shortlists are really the only practicable corrective to male bias.
In Sweden, a party list is used. In this system, each constituency is represented by a group of MPs allocated under proportional representation (PR). Every party draws up a list of candidates per constituency, with candidates set down in order of preference. The more votes a party receives, the more candidates from its list are elected to represent that constituency. The lower a candidate is listed, the less likely she is to win a seat.
In 1971, only 14% of Swedish parliamentarians were female.29 The Social Democratic Party (SDP) decided to try to address this discrepancy, first with a recommendation in 1972 that party districts should place ‘more women’ on electoral lists.30 By 1978, this had evolved into a recommendation that lists reflect the proportion of female party members, and in 1987 a 40% minimum target was introduced. None of these measures had a significant effect on the number of female MPs elected: you could have a 50% female list, but if all the women were down at the bottom, they weren’t likely to win a seat.
So in 1993 the SDP introduced what is known as a ‘zipper’ quota. Two lists must be produced: one of male candidates and one of female candidates. These two lists are then ‘zipped’ together, so you end up with a list that alternates male and female candidates. In the 1994 election that followed, female representation leapt eight points,31 and has never dipped below 40% since32 (although the proportion of women in parliament has been slipping as Sweden has increasingly been voting for more right-wing parties that don’t operate gender quotas).
Compare this to South Korea, which provides an instructive example of how something as seemingly unrelated to gender as an electoral system can in fact make all the difference to female representation. South Korea operates a mixed electoral system with around 18% of its seats allocated under PR,33 and the rest working in the same way as the UK Parliament: single-member districts (SMD) elected under a FPTP. Both systems operate under a quota for female representation.
When the PR system quotas were increased from 30% to 50% for the 2004 elections, female representation more than doubled in the South Korean parliament. This sounds impressive, but they were starting from a low base, because while the parties more or less stick to the quota in the PR system, it’s a different story in the SMD. Here, 30% of candidates are supposed to be women, but in a recent election women comprised only 7% of the Saenuri Party’s and 10% of the Democratic United Party’s SMD candidates. If both SMD and PR quotas were adhered to, the South Korean parliament would be around 33.6% female. As it is, female representation currently stands at 15.7%.
It’s not hard to see why there’s such a stark difference in quota compliance between the two systems: FPTP and SMD electoral systems are a zero-sum game.34 Winner takes all. And so while on a macro level all-women shortlists in such systems are a fair corrective to an unfair system, on a micro level they certainly feel less fair – particularly to the specific man who wasn’t even allowed to compete.
This was the argument of two rejected Labour candidates, Peter Jepson and Roger Dyas-Elliott. In 1996, the two men brought a legal challenge against the Labour Party in the UK, arguing that AWS fell foul of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. Given what we know about the invisible positive discrimination that operates in favour of men this was perhaps not in the spirit of the Act. It was, however, in the letter of it, and Jepson and Dyas-Elliott won their case. AWS were briefly outlawed before being brought back in via the Labour government’s 2002 Act. Originally intended to run until 2015, in 2008 Harriet Harman, then Labour’s deputy leader, announced that its run would be extended to 2030.35 Meanwhile, Dyas-Elliot was most recently to be found in court receiving a restraining order for sending a rival MP’s wife a dead bird.36