To think if you didn’t include a female in your promotional literature then the views or needs of females are unlikely to concern you?

[Dailywalk]

Local elections coming up and a promotional leaflet just arrived through the door. This leaflet for (male) candidate includes glowing reference by current councillor (male) and four members of the public (all male).
I’m put off voting for his candidate given that they couldn’t even find a token female to try to balance it out.
Fully accept I may be unreasonable but interested to know others views.
Yabu- what does it matter if no women on a leaflet?
Yanbu- it would be sensible to include at least one female given that they make up 50% of the adult population?

Yanbu
I judge companies for the same reason, lose even more respect for them if most of the pictures that do have women in have them in secretarial/administrative/catering roles

Thanks TaraR2020 I feel validated now!

The only female I have ever seen in the leaflets of male candidates locally is a random bedentured stereotypical white haired little old lady smiling/laughing because she has met the fantastic wonderful male candidate in person and thought he was just sooooo brilliant.

Most likely an actress/model or his fucking mum.

I’ve refused to model (for free) for shitty employers. I might not be able to walk out but I’m not going to be responsible for other women expecting to be treated reasonably by sexist jerks. I also don’t like being tokenised because I work in a predominantly male field.

For a political pamphlet - YANBU!
I’d just assume that they had no female support.

YANBU

Of course it matters. Or in their eyes, only men matter.

Nope, I’m with you on this OP. If they can’t acknowledge women’s existence, don’t expect us to vote for them!

Nothing to do with elections, but (private sector) as someone who REALLY struggles to find female candidates and struggles even more to recruit female employees in some roles, YABU.

I would find a token female photo completely patronising and cringey.

@motherloaded There’s a difference between pulling the only woman in the team into every recruiting event as the token. And being so tone deaf as to not being able to find a single woman out of members of the public ,50% of whom are women!

P.S I’m a woman in a role that struggles to recruit women. I do not care one whit about how ‘diverse’ a team is and I don’t attend diversity events.

I will however attend grassroots recruitment events -which have a good amount of women. And am heartened to see more and more each year enter the field of their own volition, and stay on just like I did.

Well just to update, I’ve voted (by post) and the lack of any female face or comment really did influence my decision. I voted for a different party with not only views I believe in (which was a bonus!) but a female candidate too.
If the leaflet had only one or two members of the public giving their support I don’t think it would have been so obvious that there were no females included but six males and zero females is at least three too many in my opinion.

I understand where you're coming from OP, but it's really tedious having to use a range of diverse people in everything - it just feels like tokenism most of the time. Oh I've ticked the woman, the ethnic minority, the disabled person, the white working class male etc...

Just use people who have something interesting to say or who do a good job.

I understand where you're coming from OP, but it's really tedious having to use a range of diverse people in everything - it just feels like tokenism most of the time.

If it's too tedious to care what women think of your performance as a politician, then I don't know why you think women would vote for you.

Whether there is interest in the views of ethnic minorities or disabled people would depend on the area and on your policies. But if it's an ethnically diverse area then of course it's important to know how those people view the candidate.

Not wanting to derail, but I'm reminded of the time when Godfrey Bloom was challenged over the UKIP campaigning brochure showing dozens of people but not one single non-white face.

IIRC, he accused the person asking of being racist (several times - whilst trying to whack them with said brochure) because 'they had deliberately and obsessively gone checking the races of the people depicted, when it clearly shouldn't matter what race anybody is'

I suppose we'll know the day we reach absolute equality when we will no longer be needed to figure as a "token" female somewhere.

Not quite the same (!), but I play a game with the seasalt catalogue when it lands on the mat.

Almost every time, the women are standing around doing nothing, or holding flowers, and any man in the catalogue is doing something. Woodwork, painting a boat, measuring stuff... that kind of thing. Women appear to be so PASSIVE in their catalogue.

They also do a feature on "local tradespeople", which is nearly always about someone male, who is always photographed doing cool shit.

This in spite of the fact that about 90% of the catalogue is targeted at women. You'd have thought women could be doing something for some of that time...

Anyway, I therefore don't buy seasalt clothes, as clearly they're only fit for standing around in, and I need something more hard-wearing. Shrug.

Bach3lorBoi once you see these things you can’t help noticing more often!

I'm always sceptical about the people in any promotional material anyway.

So many are very 'try hard' and you know they've included a variety of people to tick boxes, rather than them being representative of the people they're actually marketing to/employ.

I too have postal voted for the only female candidate as 1st choice (and Labour 2nd as I am a member....). Why is only 1/5 candidates female?