1993 conference part II: All-women shortlists
All-women shortlists have been contentious but undoubtedly strengthened female representation among Labour MPs and the quality of parliamentarians.
In 1944, Barbara Castle got onto the candidate shortlist for the vacant Blackburn parliamentary seat because the women’s section of the local Labour Party refused to make the tea at the all-male constituency management meeting unless they agreed to add a woman to the shortlist. Without the intervention of a handful of allies forcing the constituency’s hand, a stalwart of the Labour party and one of Britain’s longest-serving MPs may never have broken into national politics.
A year later, in 1945, 5 percent of Labour’s parliamentary seats were won by women. Almost fifty years later, in 1993, it stood around 14 percent. Women were still woefully underrepresented in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), despite several measures to remedy the issue. It was time to withhold the metaphorical tea and force constituencies’ hands
.All-women shortlists (AWS), endorsed at the 1993 party conference, have significantly increased female representation in the PLP and the House of Commons and produced some of the most capable MPs in recent history, including Angela Raynor, Jess Phillips, and Stella Creasy. But Labour will drop all-women shortlists for the next general election. The party must protect recent progress and ensure backsliding does not occur.
No luck with the ladies
As much as modernity should be for modernity’s sake, there was a cynical reason for tackling the position of women in the party in 1993. The 1992 general election had raised serious questions over Labour’s ability to attract female voters. Women backed Tory candidates over Labour by 44 percent to 34—a larger margin than male voters’ 41 to 37 percent.
Yet, when women were polled on the issues that they most cared about, issues that Labour had traditionally prioritised—like health and education—were disproportionately raised. Individual Labour policies were also more popular amongst women than Conservative policies. Yet, they still leaned Tory.
Labour’s male-dominated image was rebarbative to women. Its trade union link was partly to blame. The organised labour movement had for decades been characterised by striking miners and heavy industry workers and had few women leaders.
In his leadership bid in 1992, John Smith made the case for increasing female representation at all levels of the party to remedy the issue and raise the profile of women in the party.
“For far too long the Parliamentary Labour Party has been dominated by men, and women have been grossly under-represented.”—John Smith, 1993 Labour Party Conference.
A woman’s place is in the House of Commons
Smith was not the first to confront the issue of female underrepresentation in the Parliamentary Labour Party. The party had adopted earlier measures, including requiring constituency parties to include at least one woman on candidate shortlists and targets for female representation at all levels of the party.
The measures had some success. In the 1987 election, Labour grew its number of women MPs from 10 to 21. But this was still only the same number they had had in 1945. The 1992 general election was slightly better. Labour sent 37 MPs to parliament, however, women remained grossly underrepresented within the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Other sections of the progressive movement, in the UK and abroad, were making progress on female representation and the PLP risked being left behind. Quotas were helping women secure seats in other parts of the party and in legislatures elsewhere in Europe. For the first time in Labour party history, women would outnumber men among the constituency delegates at the 1993 conference (297 to 288).
Even the trade union movement was becoming more representative of the general population. More than half of Unite’s union delegation was female and among GMB members—a traditionally blue-collar, male-dominated union—more than half were women.
In this climate of change, Smith attached all-women shortlists (AWS) to his package for trade union reform at the 1993 conference, in the hope that the sweetener would secure the necessary votes for one member one vote. His proposal would require all-women parliamentary candidate shortlists in 50 percent of all winnable parliamentary seats and 50 percent of the vacant seats from retiring MPs.
The package was narrowly approved in a vote that went down to the wire. But the backlash was immediate.
A necessary evil
Former leader Neil Kinnock and his former deputy Roy Hattersley publicly denounced the measures. Ann Carlton, co-convener of Labour Supporters for Real Equality—set up to oppose female quotas in constituency parties—wrote in Tribune, “Labour has already given far too much to the raucous demands of the monstrous combination of those women who dislike the opposite sex so much that they privately exalt in wanting to chop off men’s balls (slowly) and those women who see quotas as a shortcut to political preferment.”
Even those in favour of AWS, including Harriet Harman and Mo Mowlam accepted that they weren’t popular, or an ideal method of securing greater female representation—Mowlam called them a “necessary evil.”
Their legacy has proven that, while raising serious questions about which demographics should have quotas (it is worth noting that at the same 1993 conference, a motion from the Black Socialists Society for the introduction of all-Black shortlists was rejected), AWS has made striking gains for women in the PLP.
The introduction of AWS was somewhat bumpy. They were declared illegal by an industrial tribunal in 1996, after they were judged to be in breach of the Sex Discrimination Act. The practice was stopped in the run-up to the 1997 general election, however, women who had already secured their candidacies through AWS remained on the ballot.
The 1997 general election showed what they could achieve. 101 female Labour MPs were elected to parliament. Every other party combined could only muster 19 women MPs. When all-women shortlists weren’t returned for the 2001 general election (although 50-50 lists were used instead), the number of female MPs subsequently fell.
The Blair government passed a new Sex Discrimination Act 2002 to specifically include a carve-out that allowed all-women shortlists for selecting candidates for parliamentary, European, devolved government, and local government elections. Labour has used all-women shortlists at every election since.
Gender quotas haven’t diluted MP experience levels. They’ve heightened them.
For many critics, the arguments against all-women shortlists centred around the claim that they could lead to an influx of candidates and MPs that were underqualified or incompetent. This has been demonstrably false.
Mary Nugent and Mona Lena Krook examined data on the number of years women MPs elected through AWS had previously held in elected office before standing for Parliament and compared them with their non-quota counterparts. They found that between 1992 to 2010, women elected via AWS were no less experienced and, in fact, had spent more time on average in elected office than their non-quota counterparts before standing as an MP.
Women are more likely than men to underestimate their own experience. Nugent and Krook’s findings suggest that as a result, women believe they need to accumulate more time in office before standing for an MP. In this sense, gender quotas and all-women shortlists have served as a catalyst, encouraging women to stand earlier than they might otherwise have.
Avoiding a repeat of 2001
While the number of Labour women MPs fell in absolute terms in 2019, at 51 percent, the election returned the highest share of female MPs in Labour party history. With the majority of the PLP now female, the party received legal advice in 2021 that continuing to use AWS for parliamentary candidates would be in breach of the 2010 Equality Act. Accordingly, Labour announced it would drop them for the next general election, but it will continue to use them for other elections.
It is too early to predict how this will affect female representation in the next parliament. It’s true that the last time AWS was entirely dropped for an election in 2001, there was a dip in the number of women MPs in that Parliament. But there are other mechanisms to amplify female voices now, including the MotheRED project that issues grants to mothers standing for selection as Labour MPs.
The latest data from early candidate selection, however, suggests the party cannot afford to be complacent. Of the 34 candidates already selected through early selection, men outnumber women 18 to 16. If this trend plays out on a national scale, 47 percent of the next candidates would be women.
There is also reason to believe the share of women MPs will be slightly lower than the female share of candidates. In 2019, 53 percent of candidates were women.
The introduction of all-women shortlists in 1993 had a profound impact on the makeup of the Parliamentary Labour Party and has undoubtedly been a major factor behind Labour’s progress in female representation. Their cancellation need not be a cause for concern if other efforts are made to protect recent gains. All-women shortlists were always a means to an end. But gender parity in parliamentary representation requires work and attention, and cannot be taken for granted.
Before you go…
Friend of IFTC Anthony Barnett appeared on the Interzine podcast earlier this month to discuss the mess of US politics and whether socialism needs rebranding.