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Sex, Gender and the Conservative Party provides a comprehensive gendered analysis of the contemporary UK Conservative Party. The modernization of the Conservative Party under David Cameron's leadership has garnered much comment. However, scholars have rarely considered the role of feminization in this. As leader of the party, Cameron inherited a multi-faceted gender problem: only 17 women MPs; an unhappy women's organization; electorally uncompetitive policies 'for women'; and a party which was seemingly unattractive to women voters. Written by leading gender politics and party scholars this book draws on extensive new empirical research to fill this gap. It examines how the party sought to increase the number of Conservative women MPs and looks at the nature and role of the women's organizations. It also analyzes how the party 'acted for women' in the 2005 Parliament, the nature of its electoral offer to women in 2010 and how party members and voters were likely to respond to the party's feminization efforts.

Feminist democratic representation is a new design for women's group representation in electoral politics. We build on the design principles and practices of the 1990s' presence theorists, who conceived of political inclusion as the presence of descriptive representatives and advocated for gender quota. Our second-generation design foregrounds women's ideological and intersectional heterogeneity, and details a representative process that enacts three feminist principles: inclusiveness, responsiveness and egalitarianism. A new set of actors – the affected representatives of women – play formal, institutionalised roles in two new democratic practices: group advocacy and account giving. Together, these augmentations incentivise new attitudes and behaviours among elected representatives, and bring about multiple representational effects that redress the poverty of women's political representation: elected representatives now know more, care more and are more connected to diverse women, including the most marginalised; and the represented are now more closely connected with, more interested in and better represented through democratic politics.

Parliaments are everywhere highly masculinized institutions, created by and for men. Yet they are not unchanging institutions. The UK has just undergone an Inter-Parliamentary Union's Gender Sensitive Parliament's audit. This was one of the recommendations of the 2016 The Good Parliament Report. With its 43 recommendations, The Good Parliament Report was a blueprint for a diversity sensitive House of Commons. Since then, and through the newly established Commons Reference Group on Representation and Inclusion, Westminster has addressed some of its diversity insensitivities. This article reflects back on the author's secondment to Parliament and how her relationship with a feminist official was critical to the success of Report and indeed the day-to-day practice of seeking to be an impactful academic change actor.

This article addresses a foundational question of political representation: how do representatives act for those they represent? In a shift away from analyses of individual representatives' attitudes and behaviour, we identify Women's Parliamentary Organizations as potential critical sites and critical actors for women's substantive representation. Offering one of the most in-depth studies to date, our illustrative case is the long-standing UK Parliamentary Labour Party's Women's Committee. With a unique data set, and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we systematically examine the Parliamentary Labour Party's Women's Committee efforts to substantively represent women over more than a decade. We find that the Committee sustains its focus on a small number of women's issues and interacts with party leadership to advance women's interests in a feminist direction. Our findings capture processes of political change, a frequently under-explored stage in studies of substantive representation. We close by identifying the potential for comparative research in this area.

This article addresses a foundational question of political representation: how do representatives act for those they represent? In a shift away from analyses of individual representatives' attitudes and behaviour, we identify Women's Parliamentary Organizations as potential critical sites and critical actors for women's substantive representation. Offering one of the most in-depth studies to date, our illustrative case is the long-standing UK Parliamentary Labour Party's Women's Committee. With a unique data set, and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we systematically examine the Parliamentary Labour Party's Women's Committee efforts to substantively represent women over more than a decade. We find that the Committee sustains its focus on a small number of women's issues and interacts with party leadership to advance women's interests in a feminist direction. Our findings capture processes of political change, a frequently under-explored stage in studies of substantive representation. We close by identifying the potential for comparative research in this area.

Since the 1980s, gender and politics scholarship has prospered alongside increases in women's descriptive representation. If a 'feminist imperative' drives us to seek to transform as well as study politics, the potential impact of research and our role as change actors has been little studied. We ask: (1) what effects feminist scholars sought to have; (2) upon whom; (3) when; and (4) through what channels. With two cases – Nordic countries and the UK – we explore the opportunities and dilemmas faced in seeking to enhance descriptive representation and aim to contribute to the development of feminist theories of political change.

Progress toward gender equality in politics is striking. With the help of electoral gender quotas in more than 130 countries, women's national legislative representation more than doubled in the last 20 years. Other historically marginalized groups—racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, immigrants, and indigenous peoples—are also increasingly making their way into our parliaments. Political institutions are, then, more inclusive today than they have ever been. Yet equal representation has not been fully realized: some marginalized groups have seen a decline, and men from dominant social and economic groups—hereafter "elite men"—remain numerically dominant. Globally, there are no known cases in which elite men do not hold a disproportionately high share of positions in national elective office (Hughes 2015).

AbstractThere has been extensive consideration of women's under‐representation in the UK parliament. Here we are interested not only in the question of sex and political representation, but in parenthood too: in short, whether national politics is closed to women, and possibly men, with young children. We start with a review of the academic literature on legislative recruitment to see what it has to say about mothers—almost nothing has been written about fathers. Based on a 2013 survey of UK MPs—men and women—we then identify key features of parents' presence at Westminster. For the first time, we can be sure that mothers are in fact significantly under‐represented in the House of Commons. We then consider whether arguments made to support the descriptive representation of women have purchase for mothers. Finally we consider how political institutions might be reconfigured not to be merely woman or even mother‐friendly, but to be care‐friendly.