Too little progress on female MPs, says senior Tory

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/05/tories-female-mps-bernard-jenkin

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The Conservatives are not succeeding in getting more women into parliament and new laws may be needed to improve the gender balance in the House of Commons, according to a senior Tory MP who was in charge of candidates before the last election.

Bernard Jenkin, a member of the Conservative backbench 1922 committee and formerly vice-chair of candidates, made the comments to Essex University students on Wednesday night, pointing out that no country in the world had managed to get an equal parliament without some form of positive discrimination towards women.

He said: “I was deputy chairman of the Conservative party for candidates and we introduced something called the A-list and we tried very hard to do it by persuasion. We achieved a certain amount by persuasion but I think we are not succeeding and the Labour party are succeeding with quotas. The Liberal party is miles behind. The Conservatives have made some progress but not enough.”

So far a third of the Tory candidates picked to defend the seats of retiring MPs at the next election are women, compared with half of the Liberal Democrat candidates and three-quarters of the Labour candidates in those seats where they have the best chance of winning.

Jenkin told the Guardian he had “recently mentally crossed a rubicon” when it came to backing positive discrimination in the Conservative party, whether that took the form of quotas or another system. In relation to the candidates selected to run in 2015, Jenkin said: “In terms of pure numbers we are not looking as good as we should.”

He added: “We’ve made Herculean efforts but the point I made was that nowhere in the world has achieved equality of representation for men and women without some form of positive action. My preference would be to do this by legislation for all parties so they are all in the same boat.

“I just think it is going to take too long the way we are doing it at the moment. Whether you simply put an obligation on parties to make sure there is equal representation, something needs to be done. It is no criticism of anyone in particular, it is just an observation. The points that people tend to make are that women don’t want to go into politics and that then becomes self-fulfilling. Why should we allow that? It’s a combination of biology and culture that makes it more difficult for women. That’s what the A-list was an attempt to do.”

Many within the grassroots of the Conservative party are fiercely opposed to positive discrimination, including all-women shortlists or other forms of quotas. Having boosted their female representation from 7% to 23% after the last election, David Cameron’s A-list of women candidates was scrapped.

However, some top Tories, including Nicky Morgan, the education secretary and women’s minister, have indicated they could be open to reviving the idea if the party fails to bring in more women at the next election.

Jenkin’s wife, Anne, runs the Women 2 Win campaign to encourage female candidates. He has previously spoken out about outdated attitudes towards women in his party, telling the House magazine in 2013 that male Conservative MPs were guilty of “unconscious slights” towards their female colleagues.

He said the Tory party tended to assume that women would deal with “women’s issues”, leaving the men to run the country.