The next question is; “Is this discrimination happening?” Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell, look at the proportions in the population – and if the proportions in our candidates is significantly different, then, incontrovertably, the answer to that is, “Yes!”

Only after that do we get to the hard ones like “How is it happening?” and “What can we do to stop it?”

Clearly there is something systemic happening or we would have more female candidates and MPs. The reason may not be entirely prejudice, but I’ll bet that is one element.

Jumping straight to a poll about what is the best way to put things right, without considering how they are going wrong, seems to me at least somewhat misguided.

I gather that the proportion of female applicants is also low – which implies we aren’t appealing to women. That may be one thing to tackle. The root factor may be intractable – but every time I try to formulate that into concrete terms, I find myself spouting redundancies, tautologies, or using circular arguments, so I need help here. Measures like trying to ensure that members at least have a chance to select a woman are already in place: regulations for short-listing already have that as a criterion!

Until we can get the applicants, single gender short-lists seem to me likely to leave us scouring the barrel for anyone whose name can be used, rather than going for the highest quality.

I am sure that something is discriminating against women – and that something needs to be done – but if it is the job of being an MP that is putting women off, this isn’t a problem that we can solve inside the Party.

But maybe we can help.

http://www.oneworldaction.org/what_we_do/announcements_events/current_events.htm

It is a role that people inevitably grow into through hard work and experience.

If they are willing to do the work, listen and learn they will do fine.

It is the ones that lack the willingness to learn that tend to fail, and I have known a lot more men on that category than women!

Good job Andrew wasn’t around and in power at the time women were campaigning for the right to vote, otherwise half the population might only just be getting ready to cast their votes for the first time at next years’ election!

*eyeroll* Yes, because that’s exactly what ‘gradually moving from zero to evenly split’ means. Oh wait, no. In reality, these things don’t happen overnight, they take time. Roughly one lifetime.

Andrew, I am very impressed at your local party having individual conversations with every member, male and female, about standing as candidates! I suspect if all our local parties did this we would not have a problem. Well done on Council candidates success, and do send your women the way of CGB training to see if we can persuade them to stand for Parliament; after all, it is if nothing else an interesting experience.

Martin, I’m sorry to read your comments. Presumably you would also take a dim view of any male candidate who applies for Cambridge who had not applied for any of the other seats in the county? Experience as a Councillor can be helpful, but I would caution against it being regarded as essential. Lorely Burt, Julia Goldsworthy, Susan Kramer and myself would not be MPs on that basis.

Is there a typo in that as it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense (so not sure if my comments would then apply)

Short answer – exactly the same as our male candidates.

Long answer – wrote to all members and advertised in Lib Dem News to request expressions of interest, spoke to all our members directly to talk about the prospects of them standing, our seats’ structure, planned campaigning, support available, training, agents and mentoring; progressed all applications received to open hustings; and then voted on those who put themselves forward.

We’ve no issue attracting female candidates for council seats, but when it comes to Westminster constituencies, in a historically Labour area, we can’t give them away!

With David Howarth retiring, I can already see the far too visible hand of the GBTF pushing a number of female candidates forward, but strangely none of these candidates applied for any of the 5 other seats in the County when they came up.

Indeed two seats had no applicants at all, where female candidates could have stood and gained valuable experience.

When you start talking about developing female candidates that have to jump through the same hoops as jobbing male councillors, then they will probably get more and better opportunities. Opportunities that they will deserve.

This is not the Tory Party. We do not have safe seats where we can parachute in candidates. Lib Dem seats are invariably won by years of patient hard work and campaigning often by those silly male activists, councillors and campaigners. I have two excellent female councillors at the moment who will make excellent PPCs and MPs – after they have done at least four years on their council and learnt their trade. I’d expect that from all but the most exceptional male candidate, so why shouldn’t I expect from a woman?

Actually, there is one exceptional female candidate from Cambridge who might well win….

In most selections, shockingly, our members don’t get the chance to vote for a woman.

We have far too many women coming forward as candidates, so need to do more to talent spot and encourage women to become approved as PPCs.

So Andrew Tennant, it’s not enough for you to be happy to consider women. The question to ask is what is your local party doing proactively to encourage women members to become candidates?

The evidence neither supports the idea that women are not as good as men, nor does it suggest that Lib Dem members are biased against women candidates in selection contests.

The evidence is rather nuanced in that it’s not a simple case of voters preferring male or female candidates. See http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117980976/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 as an example. What’s significant for the Lib Dems is that (a) overall the evidence seems to be that women prefer female candidates, and (b) our swing voters are disproportionately female – so even though the overall net effect across all voters and all candidates may be complex and nuanced, given who our swing voters are it suggests that, other things being equal, we would do better with more female candidates. But that wouldn’t necessarily apply to other parties.

Andrew Suffield If the issue really will go away on its own in 100 years, then I for one would be very happy with doing nothing. To me, that is an acceptable timeframe for completion

Good job Andrew wasn’t around and in power at the time women were campaigning for the right to vote, otherwise half the population might only just be getting ready to cast their votes for the first time at next years’ election! Its’ as out of touch a comment as someone on another thread suggesting that the word “equality” was illiberal.

Given how good the current women Lib Dem MPs are, I’m surprised that more members don’t want more of them. If people like Andrew are willing to wait a century to see equal gender representation, goodness knows how long they are prepared to wait before the electorate accepts the party as being ready to govern.

I thought Nick Clegg’s conference speech, talking about a Lib Dem cabinet, was essentially about impatience for change, for the good of the country. We need that same impatience throughout the party for a democracy that does not exclude people, because of the colour of their skin or their gender.

Because, make no mistake, the do-nothing line of thinking is in reality about tolerating the exclusion of many talented people.

One of the ironies about the Kelly proposals to ban MPs from employing family members is that parliament will be losing some of its most bright individuals, women who – if in power – would go a lot further than their MP husbands.

We, more than any party, cannot afford to be complacent about equality.

The fact that the UK ranks 58th in the world in terms of the percentage of female MP’s is not a representation problem, its a leadership problem. The interesting thing is that our notion of what counts as leadership characteristics are masculine: strength, hard skin, ability to divorce logic from emotion, focus on the bottom line at the exclusion of anything else, etc. This is what we think we want in our leaders, what we recognise from the past and its what fits in with the yah-boo nature of political culture. Women are not seen to fit this mould unless they are ‘trained’.

The fact is, women don’t need more training. (Ironic that I have come to this conclusion after this time.) Women (in as much as you can say anything meaningful about ALL women) are intelligent and resourceful. They constitute 60% of UK graduates. Rather, what we value, in terms of leadership needs to be opened up. There are other types of leadership. Compare the connected, systemic nature nature of women’s leadership and what it can bring to business. There are plenty of studies out there about the benefits on the bottom line of companies with women on the boards. London Business School found that teams with 50% women/50% men were far more innovative than those with high percentages of men. Teams with women perform better. Countries that empower their women perform better.

The fact that we do not have a large number of female MP’s leading our country IS A WASTE. Its not that its not fair (though its not). It’s that we are not equipping ourselves as well as we can to face the challenges the future is delivering us. Let’s encourage women to run for office by making the job more accessible to all human beings in our country. Let’s soften the barrier between the public and the private so that women (and therefore men) can exist and contribute in both. We will be stronger for it as a nation and the Lib Dems will be as a party. That would be a much more interesting debate than the one on quotas, as no systemic change will come that way.