For the first time, the number of women elected to Parliament has topped 40%. As Lyanne Nicholl, the Chief of 50:50 Parliament wrote on the Huffington Post,

This truly is a historic day – a 50:50 Parliament is now no longer a dot on the horizon, it is beaming into view and – with a fair wind – we can even dare to hope to reach equal representation in the next election.

We are not there yet, 40% is not 50%, but to potentially have a government with more women MPs than ever before and the potential of a gender balanced cabinet; that is exciting and cause for celebration. This is a great day for women’s representation.

Gender balance has not always been a positive story for the Liberal Democrats. It’s only in the last Parliament that we have ever had a majority of women MPs. At the start of the Parliament, we had 4 men and 7 women. By the end, this had risen to 5 men and 10 women. How are we doing now that we have an extra 57 people in our Parliamentary party? After all, the last time we had 57 MPs, our number of women was in single figures.

The answer is not too bad. We have 32 women in the 2024 Parliament, which makes up 44% of the total. This is not too far off Labour, who have 46% women and it’s great Keir Starmer has appointed a record number of women to his Cabinet. I have to admit a small tear in my eye as Angela Rayner walked up Downing Street. Whatever political differences I have with her, I am so happy to see someone with experience of social housing and of being a care worker in charge of housing and employment rights.

The Tories have had an absolute shocker in so many ways. They only have 29 women out of 121 MPs. Not even a quarter.

The SNP, having been quite good on gender balance in recent years, now only have a solitary woman and 8 men.

Why is it important that we have more women in Parliament? Well, as Engender writes, women are too often the “shock absorbers of poverty.” If truth be told, we are also the shock absorbers of all sorts of other situations – taking most of the responsibility for caring for children and older relatives.  We are more likely to be victims of domestic abuse. We are discriminated against in the workplace and the issues we face often go ignored or actively dismissed. There is a lot that could be done to make the streets safer for us.

The 40% figure across the Parliament, with us and Labour doing most of the heavy lifting, makes me hopeful for lots of cross-party working. There does tend to be fair amount of solidarity amongst women across politics, because we tend to come across, shall we say, the same barriers in our own parties.  We’ll not always agree on solutions, but there tends to be a common solution. In the last couple of Parliaments, there have been many examples of collaboration on issues like domestic abuse and abortion rights for Northern Ireland.

I’ve put the breakdown for all parties below.  Let’s hope that we make some real advances for women in the next few years.

Alliance 1 woman

Greens 1 man, 3 women

Plaid 1 man 3 women

SDLP 1 man 1 woman

Sinn Fein (don’t take their seats)  4 men, 3 women (57-43%)

Labour 221 men, 190 women (54-46%)

Liberal Democrats 40 men, 32 women (56-44%) Newbies 35 men and 22 women (62:38)

Conservative 92 men, 29 women  (76%-24%)

DUP 4 men 1 woman

SNP 8 men, 1 woman

Reform 5 men

Traditional Unionist Voice 1 man

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social