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

[Bosky]

Anyone got any questions for Stella and Caroline?

Go to:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_live_events/4468388-Webchat-about-women-mums-in-politics-with-Stella-Creasy-and-Caroline-Nokes-1st-February

Try not to completely alienate the female electorate generally.

From their language I got the impression that they wouldn't mind that much if there were no "women born women" in politics and only "those women who become women"

But then who will give a shit about your maternity leave, Stella.

@Thelnebriati

we need to raise the level of debate. Anyone have a clue what this means or how we reach politicians when talking directly to them just results in us being fobbed off?

I think it means we lesser women should shut up, be kind, and let our betters tell us what to think, as they necessarily know more than us, because reasons.

@rogdmum

Yes, FOJN I once had a comment on a webchat just completely vanish. I posted a question less than a minute after HQ’s latest post (I hadn’t seen it as was typing). Full expecting it to vanish.

My post disappeared for the same reason - was typing for a wee while in between doing other stuff and hadn’t yet seen that future ones on the topic would be deleted when I posted mine.

Having posted and seen the post about deletions I copied it so I’m reposting it here, because why not:

I think it is really important to focus on this being a chat about how we get more women involved in public life. I want that to be all women, natal women, transwomen, and those who self-identify and do not yet (or perhaps ever) have a GRC.



I’m surprised at this seeing as there doesn’t seem to be any issue with under-representation in politics of biologically male people who identify as trans/NB, especially in local politics. 

Given the tiny percentage of trans people in the population, of which the biologically male ones are not the whole group but a sub group, there are already quite a few well known names of those who are or have been in some form of public office - Gregor Murray, Sarah Brown, Heather Peto, Owen Hurcum, Edward Lord are just a few I can name off the top of my head. Not forgetting LP former “women’s officer” L Madigan.



In the US, there are many more, including a member of Biden’s administration, and the one who had a prominent bulge in the clinging dress chosen to wear on stage.



OTOH I can’t name a single biologically female trans person who has held or currently holds any equivalent public office. Just a couple who are in the news for having given birth.



Surely it would make more sense to campaign for greater representation for female people, however they identify, and leave male people to manage their own interests, as they seem to be really quite proficient at doing that already? 



After all, no biologically male people face the twin challenges of female biology/reproductive role, and female socialisation, as women do, even if they “identify as” women. In fact I’m at a loss to see exactly what they share with us beyond our common humanity, shared with all other male people too, and therefore why you would put us in a common grouping.



The radical changes pushed through the world over at the behest of the trans rights movement, in stark contrast to the decades-long slog to get any semblance of parity for women, with issues like childcare and child maintenance non-payment which women are making virtually no headway on, seem to suggest that this is not a group lacking in political power at all.

One friend has told me she was live banned today on the web chat.

'I would rather face 4chan than mumsnet'

Crikey. Who knew a few quavery-voiced old wims and their many hand knitted socks could strike fear into the heart of grown men?

As for 'raise the level of debate' - I think this means they want us to stop talking about penises popping up in changing rooms. We're supposed to avert our eyes like naice girls and pretend nothing's happening.

Trying to look at it from their POV, I can sort of see where they’re coming from, in their version of things.

Something like - We want to talk about all this amazing stuff we’re doing/want to do to improve things for women in politics and all you want to do is go on and on and on about this one topic, which just stops us talking about all the other really interesting and exciting things! It’s such an unreasonable thing to do and it just makes you look obsessive. And unkind. (Of course.)

What they don’t seem to get is that for us, we’re trying to shout that THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE - and they are just talking about repositioning the furniture. Yes, it’s a great idea to change the furniture round so it serves women better, but THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!

And if you/we don’t attend to the fire, all the bloody furniture is going to be burnt to a crisp anyway, on a lovely bonfire of all our sex-based rights.

That webchat, like so many others, was just Nero fiddling while Rome burnt, all over again.

I feel like the OP on the current sex denialism thread - it’s just so insane that these intelligent, powerful, educated women are so in thrall to this nonsense. And so insulting when they trot out their meaningless platitudes about including “all women” and less heat, more light etc.

Of course there’s bloody heat. The house is on bloody fire. And YOU’RE actively engaged in stoking it.

FFS.

@ArabellaScott

'I would rather face 4chan than mumsnet'

Crikey. Who knew a few quavery-voiced old wims and their many hand knitted socks could strike fear into the heart of grown men?

As for 'raise the level of debate' - I think this means they want us to stop talking about penises popping up in changing rooms. We're supposed to avert our eyes like naice girls and pretend nothing's happening.

Helen Stanisland used 'cock' in a variation of her question a couple of days ago. It provoked quite the reaction from men of many genders. That woman has ovaries of steel and I 💚🤍💜 her.

Just re read that web chat as I got so angry

So many great questions from women

Hope them 2 policticans go back and read it

And I am still disappointed by nokes. That wasn’t deleted 💪

@TinselAngel

One friend has told me she was live banned today on the web chat.

A woman I'm in touch with also told me she was banned. Perhaps it's the same woman or maybe there's more than one?

@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.

@ArabellaScott

'I would rather face 4chan than mumsnet'

Crikey. Who knew a few quavery-voiced old wims and their many hand knitted socks could strike fear into the heart of grown men?

As for 'raise the level of debate' - I think this means they want us to stop talking about penises popping up in changing rooms. We're supposed to avert our eyes like naice girls and pretend nothing's happening.

Quite literally more balls than Millwall, as discovered when one of the women's rights meetings birthed here ended up being too scary for Millwall to host!

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.

@Rodedooda

Message deleted by MNHQ. Here's a link to our Talk guidelines.

This was my conclusion too. If we did ‘down tools’, riot whatever - men would be fucked. But in the same vein, we are currently propping up a system that is not working for us, it’s actively discriminating against us, working against us and we’re not even afforded the luxury of talking about it.

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

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

@ArabellaScott

'I would rather face 4chan than mumsnet'

Crikey. Who knew a few quavery-voiced old wims and their many hand knitted socks could strike fear into the heart of grown men?

As for 'raise the level of debate' - I think this means they want us to stop talking about penises popping up in changing rooms. We're supposed to avert our eyes like naice girls and pretend nothing's happening.

But there’s only 6 of us isbt there?

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

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'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

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

These women get great wages and pensions and allowances

Lest they can do is stand up for us

Still furious here

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).

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.

Great work red

Wish them pair spent as long researching this

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.