Conservatism, representation and feminization -- Women members and the party's women's organizations -- Conservative legislative recruitment -- Reforming parliamentary selection : party change, parliamentarian and party member attitudes -- Party member attitudes and women's policy (by and for women?) -- Sex, gender and parliamentary behaviour in the 2005 parliament -- Feminization and party cohesion : conservative ideological tendencies and gender politics -- The feminization strategy and the electorate
Women and British Party Politics examines the characteristics of women's participation at the mass and elite level in contemporary British politics; as voters, party members and elected representatives respectively. It explores what this means for ideas about, and the practice of, descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation. The main focus is on the feminization of British party politics - the integration of women into formal political institutions and the integration of women's concerns and perspectives into political debate and policy - in the post-1997 period.>
Drawing on interviews with over half of new Labour women MPs, Sarah Childs reveals how the women experienced being MPs, and explores whether they acted for and like women - in constituencies, in Parliament and in government.
Informed by my secondment to the UK Parliament in 2015–2016, and the production and reception of The Good Parliament report—which offered a blueprint for a diversity-sensitive House of Commons—this article reflects on my experiences becoming a feminist academic critical actor. This new type of critical actor extends the conceptualization first developed by Childs and Krook (2006, 2008). A distinctiveness vis. Chappell and Mackay's (2021) concept of the "feminist critical friend" is also drawn: In addition to researching institutional change and supporting others in their reform work, the feminist academic critical actor is essential to instigate and institute institutional change. In this, the feminist academic critical actor is engaged in quotidian persuasion work and is both the agent as well as the analyst of research, critically reflecting on the dynamics and actors of institutional status, change, and resistance, including their own acts, in situ and after. In making the case for the feminist academic critical actor, the academic is recognized as doing something different, begging important questions of responsibility and accountability, and the opportunities and costs of engaging in such acts, particularly for minoritized and/or precarious academics. In the latter part of the article, I sketch out some of the dilemmas located in the questioning of my authority and legitimacy, and concerning the harm that I faced as a relatively privileged aspirant feminist academic critical actor, acting to rework the highly masculinized institution that is the UK House of Commons.
Abstract The UK Government's decision to establish the Women and Equalities Committee in 2015 redressed an institutional deficit at Westminster—the lack of a Departmental Select Committee holding the Women's Minister and Government Equalities Office to account. This 'effective' reform was by no means a foregone conclusion, however. A feminist institutionalist (FI) approach demonstrates the limitations of traditional accounts of institutional change in accounting for this reform. With greater analytical space given to women's agency and introducing the concept of gendered parliamentarianism, FI captures the gendered constraints and conducive conditions that marked this moment of parliamentary re-gendering: identifying the critical role of women MPs; the new relations between them and women parliamentary Clerks and officials and the wider—crucially gendered—(extra) parliamentary actors and dynamics in play.
Parliament's working practices continue to reflect the traditions and preferences of those who historically populated it. Sarah Childs, author of The Good Parliament report following a research secondment with the House of Commons, reflects on how this sustains and permits exploitative and inappropriate behaviours.
It is the day after the UK general election in May 2015. No one single party has 'won' outright.1 The alternative governing teams look very different. Labour sees the party leader Ed Miliband sit at the head of a parity cabinet and government. Yvette Cooper and Harriet Harman will be his foremost 'wing women'; at least 40 percent of his backbenchers will likely be female; as will more than two thirds of his newly elected MPs. A Conservative government would, for sure, see Cameron appoint Theresa May, the current Home Secretary, to one of the four big Offices of State – she's too experienced and too much of a leadership challenger otherwise.2 He will also pepper his team with a good few women too, belatedly meeting his 2015 30 percent target. His summer 2014 government reshuffle showed that he could find women to sit in his Cabinet, if only to see off commentariat 'backlash'.3 But when you look beyond the 'doughnut' of women Cameron places on his Frontbench,4 the Conservative backbenches will likely remain women 'lite'. At least the worst case scenario – of fewer Conservative women MPs in the UK Parliament in 2015 - looks, 100 days out from the election, to have been avoided.
