This isn’t another blog post about why the lack of female MPs in parliament is either terribly awful or totally unimportant.
It’s more looking at why 507 out of 649* MPs are men. That’s seventy-eight per cent. Is it politics itself, or politics at Westminster which has fewer women either participating or being elected?
To satisfy part of my curiosity, I took a random sample (and when I say random I mean utterly random, not stratified) of six London councils and checked the percentages of their councillors who were male/female. You can see the full spreadsheet on google docs here, and summarised results below:
And here are those results compared with parliament:
Initial (slightly obvious) conclusion – a higher percentage of women are councillors than MPs. So it’s parliament rather than politics itself which is putting women off . But this is just using six out of 32 London councils, and they are all in North London.
As I’m currently doing a dissertation on a subject completely unrelated to women in politics, I’m almost certain I’ll widen this over the coming weeks and look through more councils, as well as the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, GLA etc.
* There are 649 MPs in the House of Commons currently, but there are 650 constituencies overall. One constituency, Thirsk and Malton, has a delayed election after a candidate died.
** Richard Osley, the deputy editor of the Camden New Journal, tells me there will be 54 seats (as opposed to the 51 I’ve counted) on Camden council as of next week after a delayed election in Haverstock for similar reasons.
Dina Rickman
