Why women need a stronger voice in politics

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/05/women-turned-off-by-male-westminster-politics

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What is Westminster’s problem with women? Or, more accurately, what is women’s problem with Westminster?

Almost 100 years after women won the vote, a vast and, it seems, growing number are undecided about which party to support – a third according to recent polls, against a quarter of men.

In 2010, 36% of women voted Conservative, 31% Labour and 26% Lib Dem, but 9.1 million women, a million more than men, declined to vote. Only half of the UK’s women with children exercised their democratic right.

While democracy is flourishing in much of the rest of the world – see Nigeria – in England and Wales, it is shrinking fast, with no sign of the revival that Scotland saw in the referendum. On Thursday, in the televised leaders’ debate, some declared the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon the winner. What stood out was that she, along with Natalie Bennett of the Greens and Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru, defended the public realm – the social infrastructure that includes health and care – far more effectively than the four male leaders.

Women are not a homogenous mass, of course, but what affects them all, as long as they remain, willingly or otherwise, the chief cooks and bottlewashers in the domestic domain, is what is publicly shared and protected rather than privately owned.

While the three main party leaders are regularly portrayed in hard hats and high-vis jackets, surrounded by men and machinery, female disengagement keeps on growing – not least because the sharply serrated edge of the cuts has hit more of them, harder than men – proof of Westminster’s myopic male view.

Before 1994, greater numbers of women supported the Conservative party, and class influenced voting habits. Then Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour party, and he was liked. “Worcester Woman”, the working class woman with children and allegedly little interest in politics, came to the fore and the vote hunters gave chase. Women mattered, and they gave New Labour their vote.

Subsequently, thanks to prodding by female activists, trade unionists and Labour politicians such as Harriet Harman, now deputy leader, aspects of women’s lives were, for a short time, reflected more prominently in national priorities and policies, including the national minimum wage, childcare support, Sure Start, carers’ rights and flexible working.

Since then, the wholesale monetising of society has downgraded what we ought to value, namely time, care and work patterns that do not conform to the alpha-male City norm. The ignorance of many women’s lives displayed at Westminster means females have experienced, since 2010, what feminist economists in the Women’s Budget group call “triple jeopardy”. They have been hit hardest by the bedroom tax and other benefit changes; by the axing of thousands of public sector jobs; and by the disintegration of public services, including care for the elderly.

Add to that the pandemic of underemployment in which overqualified women are forced to take part-time dead-end jobs because a “proper” position does not come with the flexibility or the income to pay £10,000 a year for a full-time nursery place.

This is not about “women’s issues” – it goes to the heart of the country’s productivity crisis. It is the padlock that means men who want a greater hand in bringing up their children cannot afford the lost income.

Children, care and a real career in a part-time occupation are not the only concerns of women – and may not bother some women at all. But whether they are Tory devotees who run successful businesses or election refuseniks struggling to find a home they can afford, women’s views on the economy, the NHS, foreign affairs, taxation, Trident, immigration, the European Union, crime et al is refracted through the prism of their female experience – and that has too small a place in Westminster.

Once upon a time, a hope for change lay in the election of more women MPs – and Labour’s all-female shortlists helped. In 1997, 101 Labour women MPs had the indignity of being labelled “Blair’s Babes”. Now, no matter what the permutations of this election, the numbers of female MPs will increase, predicts the Electoral Reform Society, from 148 to 192, an all-time high of 29.5% of all MPs, even as female electoral disengagement escalates.

Paradoxically, unless women vote, a critical mass will never be reached. A critical mass, in all the parties, means that the chances of the unthinkable becomes the eminently reasonable. Free universal childcare? Free social care? Decent benefits for the first six months of unemployment? A citizen’s income? Policies that are sustainable and paid for by more women on decent salaries, off benefits, paying taxes.

In May, female politicians, whether on the backbenches or in cabinet, will continue as visitors in an old boys’ club. One that is arid, bland, white and privately educated, blindly ruling Westminster as the institution’s very foundations crumble away.