Stand up and be counted: a message to young female voters

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/20/stand-up-and-be-counted-young-women-voters-xxvote

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Hannah Vincent is super-excited about this election. Words tumble out giddily as she explains how important it is for young women like her to vote. Those arguments are punctuated by enthusiastic exclamations like “dude!” She talks the way politicians wish they could speak when talking to young voters – passionately, informally, clearly – which makes her perfect to lead a campaign encouraging that group, particularly young women, to vote.

“There are so many reasons why young people should vote,” she says. “They are being shafted at the moment by cuts to the youth sector and rising student fees, but if young people are not voting, then they’re not going to be listened to.”

You’d think Vincent was a seasoned politico trying to persuade her girlfriends to pick up a habit she’s already well settled into. Her campaign, #XXVote, is aimed at women aged 18-24 who are currently disengaged by politics. But this general election is the first time she’ll ever vote, too. “I still don’t really know what it’ll be like,” she confesses.

Vincent isn’t an oddball. At the last election, she was part of the demographic group least likely to vote. While 50% of men aged 18-24 voted, only 39% of women in the same age group turned out. This is an odd gender gap in a group that hasn’t just caught up with the boys, but is steaming far ahead of them on almost every other measure. Girls do better at every stage of school than boys. They outnumber men in university applications. And now women in their 20s are earning more than their male counterparts. But they’re not outstripping men at the polls.

This means young women are an easy group for politicians to ignore. Vincent and her colleagues at the Youth Media Agency worked on the No More Page 3 campaign, and met Labour MP Stella Creasy at one of its events. She told them she was worried about this group, and given the Youth Media Agency (YMA) was looking for a new cause after the disappearance of nipples from the Sun, it set about trying to close the electoral gender gap.

The agency raised £5,000 through online crowd funding to make what it describes as a “hard-hitting” film aimed at young women to persuade them to register to vote. The film, which has been doing the rounds on social media, runs through a line of scenarios in which girls are horrified by headlines, such as women being forced to return to work just four weeks after having a baby, student fees being pushed up to £50,000 a year and politicians passing a law enabling the microchipping of young people. “Is this the future you want?” it asks viewers, as dramatic music plays in the background.

There is a risk with such scenarios that anyone watching might think that this isn’t really the future, but rather that their lives will continue to bumble along without getting better whichever party is in power. The #XXVote campaign wants to shock young women by arguing that it is perfectly possible politicians could, as Vincent puts it, “shaft” them unless they see by the volume of votes from this age group that they’re worth listening to. “Old people – and I’ve got nothing against old people, they’re great – vote, and look at everything they’ve got. They’ve had everything protected,” she says.

I have never felt included by politics. I just do not believe any of what politicians are saying

Why has Vincent, officially classed as a nonvoter until 7 May, only just decided that trundling along to a polling station is worth it at all? Perhaps it’s that she’s now 26, and in an age group that votes in almost equal proportions to men of the same age: in 2010 54% of females aged 25-35 voted, and 56% of males. “Dude, I’ll be really honest with you,” she says when asked what stopped her before. “I just thought that it was really boring and I did not know where to start. I was really overwhelmed by politics, I remember being overwhelmed to the point of apathy when I looked into it.”

That’s a familiar complaint. Steph Wilson, 27, has already avoided two general elections on the basis that she saw nothing in politics for her. “It’s basically the same reason as Russell Brand, which is I have never felt included by it. I just do not believe any of what politicians are saying.” It was only the rise of Ukip and a series of passionate arguments with her older sister, who does vote, that changed Wilson’s mind.

This disaffection is present across all young people, however, so there must be other reasons why women are less likely to vote than their male peers. Here’s a clue. Watch an evening news bulletin on a day when parliament is sitting – perhaps a Wednesday after Prime Minister’s Questions – and take note of who you see. Chances are that it will be a male political correspondent (just 22% of political journalists are women) who will be reporting on a House of Commons full of men (only 23% of MPs in the last parliament were women). The three main party leaders in Westminster are men.

Wilson complains: “I never see women! It is all old men and you look at the House of Commons and the House of Lords and it’s just men making that ‘uuuuh’ sound that they do. There’s nothing there for women like me.”

Even before they become eligible to vote, young women will catch these broadcasts of men talking to other men in the impenetrable language that the political class uses, and conclude that politics isn’t for them. Of course, politicalese isn’t gender-specific: female politicians can sound just as robotic and coached as the men in interviews, but there are fewer women to speak that language and so it seems an almost exclusively male world speaking a special male political language. It’s better than the US, where Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle said last year that young women “don’t get it” because they are “healthy and hot” and should therefore neither vote nor serve on juries. But even far less strident messages can still have a big impact.

Parents worry that the candy-floss-coloured world of girls’ toys suggests to their daughters that they should either be dolled up to the nines looking for a handsome prince or playing in the kitchen, while the boys can be firemen, scientists and superheroes. Toys send subliminal messages, but so does Westminster when the images beamed out of it are so masculine.

When politicians try to engage women voters, their efforts are often clumsy and patronising. Too often MPs of all creeds assume that if they address the cost of childcare, then they’ll solve the “women’s vote”, as though all women have the same concern. But the average age of motherhood in the UK is just under 30 – years away from the group of disengaged young women who don’t vote.

Look at the House of Commons and it’s just old men making that ‘uuuuh’ sound. There’s nothing for women

Similarly, there is little evidence women are more interested in “soft issues” while men base their votes on “tough” subjects such as crime and defence. Yet women’s campaigns tend to focus on domestic topics, as though women have been physically liberated from the kitchen, but are still expected to talk and think about it most of the time.

When Labour launched its much-mocked pink bus to take its women’s election campaign around the country, the party’s election chief Lucy Powell said female voters wanted “a conversation about the kitchen table, and around the kitchen table” instead of an “economy that just reaches the boardroom table”. The suggestion, however unintentional, was that women wanted to talk about housekeeping while the big boys busied themselves with the money. No matter that a lot of young female voters may not be able to afford a kitchen table of their own and are either living at home with their parents until they can get a deposit to rent their own place, or are managing to rent cramped accommodation where everyone eats their food on their laps on the sofa, not at something as fancy as a kitchen table.

The way women in Westminster communicate with young women means even enthusiastic female politicians struggle to persuade those would-be voters that it really is worth turning up. By contrast, Hannah Vincent’s #XXVote campaign has reached more than 5 million people on Twitter, and more than 1 million through a “thunderclap” – a way of organising people to tweet or post on Facebook about the same thing at the same time, thus amplifying the message.

She’s one of a number of nonvoters who’ve realised that if they don’t vote, they won’t matter. Her convert’s zeal makes her a far better candidate for persuading others like her to register to vote than politicians, who will never ever manage to say “dude!” with quite so much sincerity.

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• The headline on this article was amended on 20 April 2015. The original had “women voters”. The Guardian style guide suggests: “Women are nouns, not adjectives”, so it has been changed to “female voters”.