Mumsnet Webchat about women/mums in politics with Stella Creasy and Caroline Nokes - 1st February

We was asking reasonable questions.

About womens rights

Some people just don't think women should speak at all if they're not saying nice, kind things.

My post was deleted too @DazzlePaintedBattlePants, not really sure why but if it makes us cool I won't argue .

Feeling frustrated by that session but it has certainly got Twitter fired up. We must keep asking the questions, keep raising the issues. Women do not need to be kind and then be kinder. Women should voice their opinions and hold their boundaries. For ourselves, for our mothers and for our daughters.

You think women asking to have our rights makes us akin to climate change deniers?

Why not, it makes a change from being compared to anti-semites and I'm sure lesbians are grateful for the change from "sexual racists".

I don't think all participants wanted one issue to dominate.

The webchat wasn't a secret. Questions could have been posted in advance. Those who felt one topic dominated they could have posted lots of questions beforehand to redress the balance. Why didn't they? Is it possible that this is a really big issue for women and we would like politicians to allay our concerns about women's rights being eroded? They fail to do so every time they have the opportunity.

Do a 'diversity' survey of MPs and see who in their households work, how many have children and who does the bulk of childcare and I bet you will get some interesting results. Which are highly unrepresentative of the population.

What we get statistics on so we can 'see' and what we don't record as statistics is always interesting. This often can reveal hidden biases that are built into the system.

There is no interest in Parliament being 'more representative'. Not really.

We was asking reasonable questions.

About womens rights

Ironic as we're the ones who actually follow the science...

You think women asking to have our rights makes us akin to climate change deniers?

Red for PM.

Participants wanted one issue to dominate and not permitting that is like the BBC giving equal weight to climate change deniers when the vast majority of scientists agreed climate change was serious. It's biased and it was wrong.

I don't think all participants wanted one issue to dominate. Honestly, from the outside, it looked more like a bunch of climate deniers who go to a climate change talk and won't stop shouting and heckling and interrupting until everyone else leaves out of annoyance and then they sit around and count who's left and claim that they're a majority.

Great work red

Wish them pair spent as long researching this

Being lumped together with transwomen means we don't have to talk about the MASSIVE underrepresentation of women without Higher Education in politics. We don't have to talk about the MASSIVE underrepresentation of young women with children in politics. Cos 'diversity'.

Lets talk a little about diversity and representive democracy on a population level.

Look at the list of LBGT ministers and members there have been in the commons:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_politicians_in_the_United_Kingdom

There has been ONE lesbians in the Cabinet Justine Greening CON (whose career got trashed because she decided to not follow the whip and eventually left her party).

There have been THREE lesbians who have been ministers: Angela Eagle LAB, Justine Greening CON and Margot James CON.

The first lesbian was Maureen Colquhoun LAB in 1974.

Lesbians had to wait until 1992 for the next (Angela Eagle).

The change only started in the 2000s.

2005 brought Nia Griffith LAB and Justine Greening. Margot James was elected in 2010. 2015 saw Hannah Bardell, Mhairi Black, Joanna Cherry and Angela Crawley elected (all SNP) as well as Labour's Cat Smith. Layla Moran LD was elected in 2017 and in 2019 Olivia Blake LAB, Dehenna Davison CON, Charlotte Nichols LAB, Kate Osborne LAB Nadia Whittome LAB and in 2021 Kim Leadbeater took her seat.

But compare that to the list of men. There are 14 serving LBGT women. I think there are 45 men if I can count corrently.

In 2019, the proportion of men identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual was 2.9% and women identifying as LGB was 2.5% (source ONS 2019).

There are 650 MPs. Therefore there statisically should be 9.5 male LGB MPs and there should be 8 female LGB MPs.

I doubt we will hear much talk about why gay men are so over represented in parliament, nor much about at whose expensive in representative terms.

I can't find a statistic which relates to the number of men / women living with children under 16 broken down by sex. (Always interesting to note statistics that don't seem to be recorded). Just 'households'. I did find this though:
Almost 3 in 10 mothers (28.5%) with a child aged 14 years and under said they had reduced their working hours because of childcare reasons. This compared with 1 in 20 fathers (4.8%).
ONS 2019

In April to June 2019, three in four mothers with dependent children (75.1%) were in work in the UK. This compared with 92.6% of fathers with dependent children.
ONS 2019

In 2019, the employment rate of mothers (75.1%) was greater than men without dependent children (73.5%).
ONS 2019

The way couple families structured their employment differed depending on the age of the youngest dependent child. Families whose youngest dependent child was aged between three and four years were most likely to have a father working full-time while their partner worked part-time (56.5%).
ONS 2019

There were 1.8 million lone-parent families with dependent children in the UK in 2019. The majority (69.9%) of lone parents were in employment.
ONS 2019.

That works out about 3.3% of the adult population. So there should be slightly more lone parent MPs as there are LGB MPs in theory. And the majority of them should be women.

Over half of mothers (56.2%) said they had made a change to their employment for childcare reasons, compared with 22.4% of fathers.
ONS 2019

Mothers were most likely to say they “reduced working hours” because of childcare, with around 3 in 10 mothers (28.5%) selecting this. In comparison, 1 in 20 fathers (4.8%) said they reduced working hours for childcare reasons. In addition, around 1 in 12 (8.0%) mothers said they had changed jobs or employer to help with childcare arrangements, compared with 1 in 50 fathers (2.0%).
ONS 2019

Long working hours was one of the main obstacles to parents being able to fulfil childcare responsibilities while working. Other obstacles faced by parents included unpredictable or difficult work schedules, having a demanding or exhausting job and long commuting times
ONS 2019

www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/familiesandthelabourmarketengland/2019

Raise the debate...

Ok well it seems pretty obvious what the problems and obstacles here are. I don't think its the attitude of women. I think its parliament having utterly backward thinking and no desire to be representative of the population. There's too many, with too much power, who have too much to lose.

All these figures are out there, yet there isn't anyone shouting to the rooftops about diversity and underrepresentation on this, because its not trendy and social media friendly and it doesn't suit men.

Nope, we get half arsed webchats in which we are told sex isn't relevant to the debate.

newsthump.com/2022/02/01/woman-who-visited-mumsnet-looking-for-advice-on-baby-food-now-a-trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist/

Wims, we've made it to newsthump. (With a sneery lads-know-best fart of an article, but still).

These women get great wages and pensions and allowances

Lest they can do is stand up for us

Still furious here

Stella and Caroline should just seeing what happening to girls and women by British cycling

Alls good though according to them 2

Be kind and be kinder then be even more kind. Long as we are kind then

Fuck womens sport.

BE FUCKING KIND WOMEN AND GIRLS

'I'm surprised we aren't rioting to be honest.' We don't need to riot, we can just sit down. All the discounted work that women do EVERY DAY to keep the economy going. What if we just sit down? No childcare, no elder care, no nursing care - all those underpaid, dismissed jobs, not happening. They did it in Iceland and it made a difference. We need to say NO to this and mean it.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34602822

I'm sometimes a lurker here - mainly to find out where to go gardening - but wanted to say, if Justine is still reading this thread, that I was very disappointed in questions being cut off. If you want to get women into politics then the most important issue you need to address is whether they will be able to make a difference. And clearly where women most want to make a difference is to their rights being removed and the attempts to prevent them even thinking about it.

Participants wanted one issue to dominate and not permitting that is like the BBC giving equal weight to climate change deniers when the vast majority of scientists agreed climate change was serious. It's biased and it was wrong.

I mean surely they have the intellectual fire power to deal with 6 women and our eleventy hundred sock puppets

Ooo what did I say? Or will this get deleted too?

Mumsnet Twitter storm - I'm seeing a number of women there saying they're going to sign up.

We're not just mummies, woolly functionaries of others, wake up to the sexism of believing that rubbish. We're barristers, police officers, teachers, business women, journalists, civil servants, doctors and a range of health care professionals, academics.... women here know their bloody stuff. If they tell you that you're talking rubbish, then the chances are that you are, and they are actually trying to help. Because women do that too.

@RoaringtoLangClegintheDark the house is certainly on fire.

Every-time I hear of a police force, PCC or MP talking about tackling VAWG or misogyny, I just think exactly what you’ve written about and roll my eyes, nothing will change and money will be wasted. Because if we can’t define women as a sex class, if we can’t talk about issues that effect only women, if we can’t protect our rights and our same-Sex spaces, and if we can’t talk about women in law (without having to include men) then every campaign, every ‘women’s’ movement is pretty pointless because it becomes about anyone who feels like it, focus is lost, the issues are diluted and our female experiences become meaningless.