Evans, Elizabeth | DOOR - DOuglas Open Repository

Evans, Elizabeth

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Elizabeth Evans

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The year 2010 constituted a favourable opportunity for the greater descriptive representation of women in the UK Parliament. The parties were publicly competing over the issue; Parliament had its own Committee looking at it; and there were plenty of vacancies for candidates in each of the parties’ held seats, as many more MPs than usual stood down. The outcome was disappointing. There was an overall increase in the number of women MPs – up from 128 to 142 – but this was only a 2.5 per cent increase on 2005. Inter-party differences remain. The Liberal Democrats witnessed a decline in the number and percentage of their women MPs and candidates; the Tories saw a doubling of their number, with women now constituting 16 per cent of their parliamentary party; and Labour has both the largest number and percentage of women MPs. These patterns are best explained by the parties’ different attitudes towards equality guarantees – measures that, all other things being equal, return women MPs to Parliament. In other words, Labour's All Women Shortlists once again delivered. The other parties’ efforts were simply less efficient at translating women candidates into MPs. Looking to the future, the picture is far from rosy. The Coalition's plans for political reform will likely increase competition for selection at the next general election to women's detriment, and the impact of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority raises the possibility that their supply might decrease too.

'Gender, ethnicity and political representation in the UK and Canada'

Digital Document

Presentation embargoed pending a permission. Conference presentation delivered at the <a href="https://www.ecpg.eu/">European Conference for Politics and Gender / ECPG</a>, (June, 2017), in Lausanne, Switzerland. The extant literature on political representation demonstrates white men dominate political legislatures (Murray, 2014), whilst women and ethnic minorities are under-represented relative to their proportion of the population (Hughes, 2009). This pattern holds true for both the UK and Canada, although the UK House of Commons has moved closer to gender balance than Canada’s, while Canada’s House of Commons has moved closer to mirroring the country’s ethnic composition than has the UK. This paper longitudinally explores these representational differences. The research is underpinned by an intersectional analysis exploring the multiple ways in which gender and ethnicity interact at both the party level and in the national media. We argue the specific construction of ‘problematic’ political identities, influenced by the interaction between racialized and gendered stereotypes, makes it especially hard for ethnic minority politicians to become elected. Although the under-representation of ethnic minority women in the UK and Canada has attracted scholarly analysis, less attention has been paid to the ways in which gender and ethnicity interact to affect the representations of male and female ethnic minority politicians. Accordingly, this paper provides a multi-year comparative overview of ethnic minority descriptive representation in the UK and Canada and analysis of party responses to address ethnic minority under-representation.

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