Article - 'Women MPs should be representing women’s interests'

[UtopiaPlanitia]

Having read this article it’s really made me think that the increase in female MPs hasn’t brought about as much positive political change in women’s lives as I would have anticipated.

I’m wondering if it’s to do with the general calibre of party politician elected nowadays; if it’s the political philosophy of female MPs being more in tune with Liberal Feminism; or is it that very few working-class women get elected these days and so middle-class issues predominate; are they the type of people who are more in favour of tinkering at the edges of issues rather than making wholesale changes? Is it all these things and more?

Isn’t it interesting that male MPs have taken an interest in recent women’s rights campaigns where some female MPs haven’t? Should we expect female MPs to only advocate for female-relevant policies?

At any rate I thought FWR might enjoy reading and discussing the article. It certainly gave me things to think about.

https://thecritic.co.uk/women-mps-should-be-representing-womens-interests/

'It’s a depressing circumstance and one that has challenged my assumption of what progress looks like. What is the use of pushing for further representation of women in parliament if they are so ineffective on issues that concern us?…
^^
Perhaps my cynicism is unfair. They are women working as political professionals — it must be challenging to respect the confines of the Equality Act (2010) and also express concerns on specifically women’s issues during interviews. Indeed, the committee itself has a broad aim, as it is designed to “hold the government to account on equality law and policy” and has 14 current inquiries investigating issues ranging from the rights of older people, to the escalation of violence against women and girls. It seems that they are having to constantly balance and consider everyone’s rights, even though the label of “women” is pride of place in this committee’s name.'

The role of MPs is to represent/advocate for every constituent as required, regardless of sex, colour, religion, etc.

I can see a few different issues and considerations here:

• How much should a member of any marginalised or underprivileged group be expected to further the interests of a demographic they happen to belong to? After all, no demographic is a monolith and we want politicians to stand on their own convictions, and not try to people-please just to get elected. Is it reasonable to expect anyone who is not a straight white middle-class man to carry the moral burden associated with the demographics they do not choose to belong to? Or should it be seen as a moral obligation rather than a burden, created by having a societal position of visibility?
• Is the article focusing unfair blame on the female politicians rather than the intra-party machinations that may be more likely to have a chilling effect on women than men? Or do the female politicians realistically have a lot more power than they're using and just saying whatever benefits them personally, like so many male politicians do?
• Is this call for equal representation, and puzzlement at why it isn't working, forgetting the enormous class divide and how working class interests may not be the same as those of the upper-middle class?

I think the author has some interesting points but, as with the other article she's written, it would have been good to see a little more analysis (assuming she wasn't constrained by a word limit).

While I agree with MrsSkylarWhite, I think women have been representing women’s interests. It hasn’t always worked and there are big blind areas, but that is true for lots of men’s interests too. I do agree the lack of working class people finding their way into parliament in the last 40 years is, as you suggest, one of the ways in which interests that closely intersect with women’s interests have lost their voice. I also think the quality of MPs generally has declined since parties, especially the Labour Party “professionalised” and centralized selection.

Nevertheless, there has been a sea change in the areas of private life that parliament has been prepared to legislate on since female MPs started to become more prevalent. In particular, children are far better considered nowadays than they were and domestic violence takes a much larger proportion of MPs’ and government time. The “free” childcare hours is not in anyway a good bit of legislation, but it wasn’t on the cards when female MPs were as rare as hen’s teeth.

This article looks at one incident that wasn’t handled by one committee the way the author wanted it to be. And while I share some significant dissatisfaction with the Women and equalities committee and find Caroline Noakes generally to be very lackluster, that isn’t a sound basis to criticise female MPs performance generally.

As MPs, women have a job to represent all their constituents and a need to get reelected. They also won’t be an hive mind and may, when taking into account all the things they want to do, find that there are many things of a higher priority than some of the issues that come under the women’s interests umbrella. So the ones who are good politicians may not be able to move on some things they may want to but they are clearly talking about lots of issues that are important to them and it has had an huge impact on legislation.

Could it be better - yes! By a long, long way. But that is true for MPs performance in all areas. They are currently a shoddy bunch. I don’t think the performance of female MPs in representing women’s interests has been significantly shoddier than the general standard.

It’s easy to forget that ingrained sexism still holds so much sway that it will take a lot of generations of women in power to overcome it. We grew up with so much sexism that it seems normal and is largely invisible. I think that’s probably another factor that needs to be taken into account.

There is unpalatable evidence of this in that more women support men having access to women’s spaces than men. Lots of women are so conditioned to compromise that anyone who doesn’t is branded too extreme.

Many of us here would like to be more Germaine Greer, but there are undoubtedly a lot of women who would argue her that they felt she was too abrasive or whatever. Think about how many women have distanced themselves from all feminism because they think some feminists went too far.

I liked the way the Critic author expressed her dissatisfaction with Nokes, but there have already been some very good points made on this thread.

I think being the career pre-requisites for being an MP necessarily mean that your breadth of experience is too narrow to optimally perform the role, and I don't see a way around that.

Thanks everyone for your insightful comments - it’s very interesting to read your analysis 👍

I read Invisible Women recently and it discussed the changes to countries’ priorities that arise when a significant number of women get into government or parliament. Criado Perez noted that women tend to promote policies that benefit the community at large and that make it easier for women to take part in public life generally and the economy specifically. She also noted that all-male governments tend to undermine or reverse these policies that benefit women and children. From the descriptions in her book it seemed that women, as a group, very often come at politics from a different perspective to men and tend to prioritise different things as being important.

From my perspective, it feels like the UK (and Europe generally) went through that period of women getting relevant and sometimes fundamental political changes made in the 70s-90s and since then, apart from some countries like Ireland securing transformative abortion rights for women, there have only been occasional helpful policies concerning big issues like domestic violence, sexual assault etc. Fundamental and transformative changes like properly ensuring equal pay, increasing maternity pay and childcare options have still been left to linger unsatisfactorily in many countries as half-sorted. These issues aren’t at the forefront of any party’s offerings to the electorate.

Fundamental and transformative changes like properly ensuring equal pay, increasing maternity pay and childcare options have still been left to linger unsatisfactorily in many countries as half-sorted. These issues aren’t at the forefront of any party’s offerings to the electorate.

I imagine the problem is akin to making our roads and public services more efficient -- society has built on top of what was previously there without giving any thought to the fact it's sitting on a rotten system.

It's almost impossible to knock down buildings and put straighter roads through commercial centres, or to widen the motorway to accommodate both a fourth lane and a hard shoulder, or fix the hangover of NHS systems that were first designed in the forties. It can be done -- but it's enormously time-consuming, it uproots everything and people tend to get pissed off when their stability gets ripped up. Politicians don't want to touch issues that will take a generation or more to fix. They want quick solutions that will make their party look good and might at best put a sticking plaster on the problem. Hey look! We'll put a new set of traffic lights here and make more congestion, we'll turn this into a smart motorway and hope nobody breaks down, and we'll move our NHS appointments system online so the elderly can't access it.

Short of a social calamity the equivalent of rebuilding Dresden, politicians are unlikely to act in any meaningful way.

Edited for messed up formatting.

That’s a point I hadn’t considered Song.

Politicians these days are more iterative and seem either intimidated by or scared of making large changes in either infrastructure or social policy. They feel very managerial rather than class or ideology-driven, and prefer to tinker with areas of policy rather than decide on and make changes based on data collection.