Earlier this week the Fawcett Society published a report on the gender balance on Councils across the UK. The headline story is that only 36% of elected councillors are women. In only 5% of Councils were at least half of the councillors female.

It gets worse. You might imagine that Lib Dems would be ahead of the other parties on this, but tucked away in the report is the embarrassing fact that only 35% of our councillors are women – a figure below that achieved by five other parties and only higher than the Conservatives and some Northern Ireland parties.

This is a subject dear to my heart, and I have provided training and mentoring across the party on candidate diversity with a particular interest in encouraging more women to stand. In my own local party I have co-ordinated the recruitment, approval and selection of Council candidates for over 10 years, only recently handing on to two other members. Kingston upon Thames is a London Borough so we have all-out elections every 4 years, and this is what we achieved on my watch:

• In 2014, we lost control to the Conservatives and took 18 seats out of 48, of which 10 (55%) were held by women.
• In 2018, we regained control with 39 seats, and 22 (56%) were held by women.
• In 2022, we increased our majority by winning 44 seats, including 20 (45%) women.

Not surprisingly, I was called to account by our local party Executive for the drop in female representation last year. I explained that finding 48 electable candidates during a pandemic was challenging; in fact, the outcome demonstrated the effectiveness of the strategies that we had used in previous cycles but were unable to use during Covid lockdowns and restrictions.

So what needs to be done?

There are four stages in the election of a councillor – recruitment, approval, selection, election. It is easy to assume that discrimination must be at play at each of those stages; but whilst it is important to examine both conscious and unconscious biases we must be careful to avoid pointing the finger at the electorate or our members and instead should examine our own practices.

In fact, using the language of blame, discrimination and victimisation is not helpful. Rather we should be asking what we need to do to encourage women to participate. And we should be concentrating on our target seats, where the real battles lie.

So let’s see what we can learn about each stage, taking them in reverse order.

In the election, voters can only vote for the names on the ballot paper, so if we present an unbalanced team in our target seats we should not be surprised at the outcome.

But there is one caveat. In an all-out ward election, when parties are close the result usually depends on the split votes. It is fascinating to watch the grass skirts (the method used to record split votes) and to speculate on how voters have made their choices of two or three candidates across different parties. Some prejudices are exposed, including those along gender lines, although in my experience that is far less common than other forms of bias.  But those prejudices should NEVER drive our selection of candidates in a ward. So how should we select them?

Local parties use a variety of ways of selecting candidates for target seats. Some allocate approved candidates from the centre, taking into account each person’s preferences and location. This can be a thankless task, and there is a danger that a candidate could be unhappy with the decision and challenge it, but it is sometimes the best way of handling small teams. The problem, of course, is the accountability, and possible unconscious bias, of those charged with doing the allocation.  At the very least the decision-makers should be truly representative of the local electorate in terms of ethnicity and gender.

Other local parties, such as mine, use a more labour intensive process by inviting approved candidates to nominate themselves for wards and then calling on ward members to vote for their choices. I am not a fan of quotas and all-women shortlists. Given a free choice our members selected at least one woman in each ward (and in several cases, two or three); this is a product of the culture of the local party – but more on that later.

Of course, the gender balance in the selection of candidates does depend on the make-up of the pool of approved candidates, which takes us back to the previous stage of approval. Now my approach to approval is that it is essentially a two-way exploration of  the suitability of someone for the role of councillor and the impact it could have on the candidate. So if someone drops out at this stage it is not necessarily a failure, but rather an indication that they have realised that it is not for them.

It is worth looking at how women fare during this stage.  Do more women than men drop out during the approval stage? If so, why? We should also look at the team who carry out the approvals process – is there at least one woman conducting each interview?

But again, if the number of women presenting themselves for approval is less than 50%, we need to look back at the crucial first stage – recruitment. This was the bit that suffered during Covid. We need to recognise that, for understandable historic reasons, as well as personal lived experience, women respond differently when searching for potential candidates. It is said that if a man is given a list of skills required to do a job he will think “I can do that, and that, and that. I can’t do that but I can learn, so I will apply”. A woman will think “I can do that, and that, and that. I can’t do that so I am not suitable and won’t apply”. OK, it is a stereotype, but a very useful one, as it happens, because it explains some of the reticence of women to volunteer as candidates.

To back that up if you send out an email to members calling for candidates I can pretty well guarantee that you will only get responses from confident middle-aged white men. Now don’t get me wrong, I like confident middle-aged white men and they are really important in our organisation and should be encouraged. But targeted encouragement of women is what we should be looking for.

I am sometimes asked whether we have a list of requirements for candidates. My answer is that we want a wide range of people to stand for Council – people with demanding jobs, people with young children, people in every decade of life from their 20s to their 80s, people with a variety of skills and interests, people of all ethnicities and genders. Our only requirements are that they hold Lib Dem values and they are committed to working with and improving the community. Anything else narrows down the field and probably marginalises women.

The slogan for 50:50 Parliament, which campaigns for more women in Parliament, is “Ask her to stand”. It’s that easy. Look out for women and ask them. More than once. Just ask them. Invite them – no, take them – to social and political events. Then ask them. Introduce them to other women in local politics, who should ask them. And then find a woman to mentor them. That works.

Finally, we should take a long hard look at the culture of our local party. Is it openly supportive of women? How many women are in leadership positions – and does anyone care if they are not?

Good luck to everyone standing for Council next month.  Understandably your local party is focussing on this election campaign, but at the same time it should already be recruiting candidates for the next election, whether it is next year or in 4 years’ time.

* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.