Surprisingly, fewer women (18%) than men (21%) support the LibDems, while for both Labour and the Tories the opposite is true.
Why?
Perhaps an explanation lies in Ming’s remark in Brighton last week that “we can’t represent a country if we’re not representative of it”.
School-gate mums and working parents are an important demographic, but not one of our parliamentarians is a mother of young children. It’s hard to show we empathise with family issues when women juggling politics and family life are all but invisible in the Lib Dems.
Barring broodiness from our talented young women MPs, the prognosis isn’t good. Campaign for Gender Balance research shows that, faced with an invidious choice between family and politics, many LibDem women are deferring political ambitions rather than risk compromising the quality of their parenting.
Of course this problem isn’t unique to Lib Dems. The Commission for Equality recently reported that women with young children are the most discriminated-against group in the workplace – more so than ethnic minorities or the disabled. But both Labour and the Tories have female parliamentarians successfully balancing family and politics… why don’t we?
One issue is that we have to work much harder than the other two parties, and that mothers caring for young children cannot match the instant availability of those without family responsibilities. Arranging and paying for childcare is part of the problem, but, more fundamentally, families need to spend time together. Renewed focus on breastfeeding and early years bonding has actually increased the pressure on mothers. So wraparound childcare can only be a short-term solution.
However, with a bit of flexibility the family vs. politics dilemma needn’t be as intractable as it seems.
As Liberal Democrat activists we need to move away from knee-jerk presenteeism and instead focus on the quality, as well as the quantity, of time a PPC can contribute. A busy but well-organised PPC may actually be far more effective than one who is permanently available but a poor strategist or media performer. (This is true not only of young mums but also of others who lead busy lives but want to help us advance our LibDem goals).
We must not be judgemental about contributions that don’t fit the typical pattern. For example, a mother with pre-school children may not help much with surveys (which require her to arrange childcare). But she can do many useful things from home while her children nap or play: telephone canvassing, speaking to journalists, writing letters to local papers, planning campaign strategy, drafting campaign literature and so on. If she is a stay-at-home mum she may even be able to get things done in office hours that someone who works full-time cannot. While her activities may be invisible to many LibDem activists, they won’t be to voters.
We need to think carefully about what we expect of PPCs and focus on the bottom line (winning votes) rather than micro-managing how PPCs deliver that bottom line. Inflexibility about how the job can be done disenfranchises young mums from political participation. It also prevents them being represented by one of their own – something which is unacceptable for ethnic minorities and the disabled and should be for women too.
As Ming said, we have much to gain from ensuring LibDem representation reflects all parts of the community we serve. Young mums are well networked into their communities and at the coal face of using public services such as the NHS and education, giving them a hands-on understanding of issues that matter to many voters.
In Brighton last week we voted to extend flexible working rights. Let’s make sure we practise the excellent family-friendly policies we preach.
Dinti Batstone is a Lib Dem member in Hammersmith & Fulham
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16 Comments
I would suggest another reason for our poor polling amongst women, which may not make me very popular.
It is often taught in political and social academia that women are generally more small c conservative than men. Traditionally, in the two party prism, more women voted Tory and more men voted Labour. Perhaps our radical traditions and our (hopefully) ongoing radical nature can account for our lower support amongst women.
I agree with much that Dinti says above, but actually, this is not a problem that we can solve.
Being a PPC takes a phenomenal level of dedication and sacrifice.
A PPC or MP has to give up a lot of time that they would otherwise spend with their families. Unfortunately, this is the nature of the beast, and actually there is nothing we can do. To be a successfull PPC, you absolutely have to spend your nights and weekends out on the doorsteps. I’m sorry Dinti, the alternatives that you mention are all essential campaign tools, but don’t win elections without the face to face contact.
PPCs schedules are micro-managed because winning elections are hard, and, in my experience, PPCs are often not the people who know best how to run their campaigns. This is very sad, and I have a great deal of sympathy with young mums who simply do not have the time to take on the role of PPC. I just do not believe there is an obvious solution, and unfortunately do not think Dinti has found the solution here.
Just to clarify, I wasn’t saying that young mum PPCs can’t do any face-to-face campaigning…!!
It is simply a fact that someone with family responsibilities (male or female, but in most families the brunt of childcare falls on women) is not going to be as instantly available as someone without family responsibilities and I am suggesting that rather than being put off by this, we can quite easily work around it (after all, someone who works full-time is not generally available during office hours and this doesn’t pose a problem for most PPCs!).
My plea is that we should focus on the quality, as well as on the quantity, of time a PPC can give.
Arguments like yours have long been deployed in professions such as law and management, but actually research has shown that mums who work fewer hours than their colleagues are often far more effective because they work much more efficiently. There is no reason why the same logic cannot apply to politics. I know plenty of successful women who have combined high-flying business careers with motherhood.
Also, there are elections (for example the Mayoral and GLA List elections in London next year) where face-to-face contact is less of an issue (no candidate can hope to make face-to-face contact with 7.4 million people). Those elections are generally fought in the media and so the quality of the candidate must be the paramount consideration. Availability is a very important factor, but it shouldn’t be the only factor.
No-one says combining politics and family is easy (either for men or for women) but rather than being defeatist about it there are actually many things we as activists can do to attenuate the difficulties.
Motivating women with young children to be involved in politics (as PPCs or in other ways) will involve flexibility, but with the right support and efficient time management the positives can far outweigh the negatives.
Dinti is spot on. I have worked (no SLAVED!) for the Lib Dems for 22 years mostly as a volunteer. The party has been my life and I am not complaining about that – it’s been a pleasure most of the time. But I am seriously thinking of bowing out for good because of my negative experience combining parenthood and PPCship. When I was recovering from having my second child I asked about maternity leave from my role as PPC and was told by an official that: ‘The rules for selection of Lib Dem Parliamentary candidates make no mention of maternity leave and any ‘statutory rights’ I’m afraid do not apply’. What a disgrace in a modern party which claims to champion human rights.
I was unable to stand again because of this ruling. Five men applied for ‘my’ seat and surprise, surprise a man won!
How do these figures play out across the age demographics.
I remember seeing some figures from the 2001 General when the best group we polled in (in fact the only group we “won” were 18-24 yr old A B or C1 women.
The worst group was 18-24 year old C2 D & E women!
We also polled comparatively poorly among older voters – which will contain a higher proportion of women.
Not dissenting from your basic point but the picture contains a number of shades of grey 🙂
The bottom line is being a PPC does involve a significant commitment of time. Some of the things you suggest are useful for a PPC to do. But some are all slightly tangential to the bottom line of getting elected in that they can be done my someone else.
The important (though not only) job of meeting people, connecting with them, building a relationship with people isn’t a PPC job that can be delegated.
To that extent I agree totally that it is quality of time not quantity that matters – but what constitutes quality time.
Unlike being a councillor in a significant position there isn’t any recompense. People may choose not to make that commitment.
You do see a similar pattern with (ex) LDYS people sometimes. People can be very active going through University but then disapear from the scene after they leave as building a family/career becomes more important. Often they reappear a few years later
Whilst I totally agree that we need to strive to get more women Lib Dems elected, I’d like to make a small correction.
Dinti, you said, “but not one of our parliamentarians is a mother of young children”. If you’d said MP, I would have agreed with you, however I can think of at least one female Lib Dem parliamentarian with young children.
Kirsty Williams AM, represents Brecon and Radnorshire in the Welsh Assembly and she has 3 very young children – all under the age of about 6.
One of the disadvantages that we have is the (near) absence of “safe” seats (say, consistently winning twice the vote of the runner up). I wonder how many Tory and Lab marginals have young mums as MPs? Or are Con/Lab young mum’s all in the sort of very safe seats that we don’t have?
The only reason why women hsitorically have been more “conservative” is becuase they live longer, and the age demographics of the over 60s indicates that they are disproportionately from middle class and wealthy backgrounds, and are more conservative.
In younger age groups, women are more left wing and are put off by Tory sexism (less prevalent these days as a result).
It is also the case that in all parties, the members and activists are disproportionately over 60.
No doubt childcare is an important variable, but more fundamentally I would have thought it is simply the case that women are less likely to join the party than men are regardless of age. Does anyone know why that is?
Overall, I agree with Dinti, but Tim makes the corollary I was going to make at #6. Lack of safe seats does make it much more necessary for us to select perpetual activist types, and while Dinti is right that we might have a preconceived notion about the best activities a PPC should be doing, it does take a lot of work to take a seat for us.
Dinti is right and so is Ruth. Having recently carried out research on the gender-balance topic for my MSc dissertation, I can confirm that the child-care issue is massive (at least among the approved women candidates I surveyed). Furthermore Ruth will not be the only bright, talented PPC we will lose if we fail to address this. The other obstacle, of course, is our grim determination not to embrace affirmative action/positive discrimination of any sort on the grounds that it’s “illiberal”. Sigh…
Affirmative action and positive discrimination are not the same thing. The latter is deeply illiberal. The first is what the Liberal Democrats have agreed to do.
As for maternity leave for a PPC. This does not seem to be the real world. What happens if there is an election? Surely what is needed is appropriate support for a candidate to continue to be effective during that time, not jsut disappear for 6 months.
What about MPs – do we expect an MP to disappear for six months if they have a baby? Did Ruth Kelly?
I’m interested in the practical suggestions that can be made here. As chair of my local party, of my active members there are fewer young female activists than young male activists; there are practically no activists of either sex that have young families; and of activists that have older families, they are predominantly men. In addition, there are more elderly female activists than male ones.
How can I change this? There is no money in my local party to offer to pay for child care – and from speaking to members who have young children, I get the distinct impression they don’t want to get involved anyway! How do I get younger female members (without children) more involved?
We already seek to emphasize that it’s not all about delivering leaflets or knocking on doors, and that there’s loads of stuff that people can do. Turning members into active members is only just slightly harder than getting members in the first place!
It pains me to disagree with Tony but the maternity leave issue is surely a test of our Liberalism. Of course compromises would have to be made in the event of a General Election – but in peacetime it surely cannot be Liberal for PPCs to be expected to be Stalinist obsessives without real lives beyond the party. PPCs are volunteers after all and for some seats we can’t find ANY PPC and no wonder.
In April 2003 it was very likely that the election was 2 years away but as a PPC in a middling seat I was allowed just 2 DAYS of pure maternity leave when my newborn daughter was perilously ill. As Dinti’s forthcoming report will show there are other Lib Dem women who’ve been treated just as badly.
As you weren’t “employed” as PPC, how dare they say that you couldn’t let campaigning take a back seat for a little while with a newborn baby! Everyone needs a holiday from campaigning sometimes, and I’d say that having a baby was a good reason(!). I don’t understand why you had to “ask” for maternity leave; as you say, you were a volunteer – I suppose my point is that it would just seem rational – liberal, I suppose – that these kind of things could be sorted informally, in the sense that people must limit the amount of time they spend on Lib Dem activity all the time for all-sorts of reasons – some good and some not so good, but what can you do to a volunteer! I suppose it’s very different for PPCs in target seats, perhaps you have to make a formal commitment to how much time you’ll spend campaigning? In which case it would make sense why you asked for “leave”, but it still seems awful that this wasn’t just an obvious and easily sorted issue, especially two years before an election with, presumably, a capable support team who would have ensured campaigning continued in your absense/partial absence?
Grammar Police – I find it interesting that you are looking for ‘younger females without children’. As a younger female without children, I recently went through the selection process of applying for a seat. I was amazed how often the question about marriage and children came up. No answer seemed to be satisfactory either. The truthful response I gave which is that I’m not particularly interested in either – made me appear a bit cold and disconnected from families. But I think if I were interested in having children in the near future my commitment would have been questioned.
This isn’t a criticism of anyone for asking the question, just an interesting observation.
In the good old days, before we had targeting and winnable sets, our PPC used to turn up two or three times a month, do or say something (usually the latter) and then go away again.
Meanwhile the rest of us carried on campaigning within our own wards.
Nowadays, PPCs seem to be much more central to the campaigning. So if he or she disappears for a few weeks, it leaves the whole organisation rather directionless.
Obviously, as Tony says, it ought not to be like that. But where I am it is. Is the excessively “hands-on” PPC a general phenomenon?
Ah, I worded that quite badly – and so you’re reading more into that statement than is really there.
I was trying to emphasise the point that it’s not just women with children that don’t get involved in active politics, it’s young women full stop!!!! (And so there seems to be something more than children that’s stopping them getting involved). How do I get more women involved, regardless of whether they have children?