British Parliament Passes Bill to Elect More Women

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Here's today's update:


INTERNATIONAL
British Parliament Passes Bill to Elect More Women

By Paul Rodgers - WENews correspondent

LONDON (WOMENSENEWS)--Confronted by the first drop in the number of women
elected to the House of Commons in 20 years, British lawmakers have passed a
bill to reinstate a previously banned election procedure that favors female
candidates for office.

The bill, which needs the approval of Queen Elizabeth II to become law,
would allow Britain's political parties to mandate women-only so-called
shortlists--the lists of candidates for the House of Commons put forth to
party members in the British equivalent of primary elections. A brief
experiment with all-women shortlists in the mid-1990s helped elect a record
120 women to the Commons in 1997, up from 60 five years earlier.

But then law professor and disappointed office-seeker Peter Jepson
successfully challenged the women-only policy in an employment tribunal in
Leeds, northeast England; following last June's elections, the number of
women in the Commons slipped to 118 out of 659 members.

The bill, which received the support of all political parties and moved
rapidly through Parliament, revises British sex-discrimination laws to allow
the parties to impose forms of "positive discrimination" that are illegal if
practiced by private companies. It passed its final vote in Parliament on
Jan. 28 and now awaits only the assent of the queen. Under a sunset clause
in the bill, its provisions would lapse in 2015, probably after three
elections for Commons seats.

"When asked, 'Why not do more to reduce inequality in representation of
women and men in Parliament?' we have been able to hide behind the Jepson
case, which has cast a legal shadow over positive measures," said Rt. Hon.
Stephen Byers, Member of Parliament, Secretary of State for Transport, Local
Government and the Regions. "But with this measure on the statute book,
there would be no hiding place for political parties."

Bill May Face Court Challenge from Male Office-Seeker

Candy Atherton, Member of Parliament for Falmouth and Camborne
constituencies, is the first person ever selected off an all-woman shortlist
and one of the most vocal advocates of reinstating the practice. "I wouldn't
even have been called in for an interview if men had been in the race," she
said. "A couple of local men just assumed they were going to get the
nomination."

But Jepson indicated that he may challenge the policy again, this time under
European Union law. "I'm not at odds with the Labor Party over the
inadequate representation of women in Parliament," he said. "But there is
nothing positive about discrimination."

He said his preferred solution is "twinning," in which two districts combine
to select a pair of candidates, one male, one female. In 1999, twinning led
to women winning 37 percent of the seats in the Scottish Parliament and 41
percent of those in the Welsh Assembly.

While offering no real opposition to the bill permitting women-only
shortlists, leaders of the opposition Conservative Party indicated they
would not implement the policy. Instead, they plan to create training
programs for women considering public office and to use polling data to try
to persuade local officials to back promising women candidates.

"I can't imagine the Conservative Party going to women-only shortlists,"
said Caroline Spelman Member of Parliament for Meriden constituency and the
Shadow Secretary of State for International Development and Shadow Cabinet
Spokesman for Women's Issues.

Rt. Hon. Anne Widdecombe Member of Parliament, a defeated candidate for the
leadership of the Conservative Party who remains influential, said that a
policy of women-only shortlists would deny men's human rights and would be
patronizing and demeaning to women.

"It would create two groups of women MPs," she said, "one who could look
everyone from the prime minister down in the eye, and the other that got
there because of special favors. I wouldn't find that helpful. I'd find it
humiliating."

Britain and the United States Lag Behind in Electing Female Lawmakers

Widdecombe said she is confident that the gender balance in Parliament will
shift when the generation of women who grew up in the 1980s--when 10 Downing
Street seemed the exclusive property of Margaret Thatcher--enter their 40s
and 50s and start to move into politics.

But Byers said the Labor party supported a more interventionist approach to
correct the longstanding imbalance of power. "Relying on improvements to be
made without direct intervention has been tried before and has failed," he
said. "It was that view that meant that in 1945 there were 24 women members
of the House of Commons, and almost 40 years later in 1983, four years after
the first female prime minister was elected, there were 23--hardly an
encouraging statistic that supports the argument for 'biding one's time.'"

Britain ranks 36th among world parliaments for the percentage of women
sitting in its lower house. Eighteen percent of its members are women,
according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union rankings, while the U.S. House of
Representatives ranks 49th with 14 percent, the global average. At the top
of the list of 179 countries are the Nordic and Germanic states, with
Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland and Germany
taking the first seven spots.

In several Latin American countries, notably Argentina, parties are required
by law to meet a quota of women candidates. The 74th amendment to India's
Constitution in 1993 reserved a third of the seats in village councils for
women. In France, a law requiring that women's names fill three out of every
six slots on slates for municipal office resulted in women winning nearly 48
percent of the seats in city governments last summer.

Full equality may be on hold in Britain. Labor's national executive
committee announced on Jan. 30 that it would drop its goal of having 50-50
representation after the next election, aiming for 35 percent instead.

"We still have an aspiration of 50 percent of women MPs, but you have to be
realistic about these things," a party spokesman said. "We would have to
have something like 140 MPs retire or die to get 50 percent at the next
election."

Paul Rodgers is a freelance Canadian journalist based in London. He has
written for The Economist, New Scientist, and The Independent, among other
publications.

For more information:

The Inter-Parliamentary Union: - http://www.ipu.org

Caroline Spelman MP: - http://www.carolinespelman.com

Peter Jepson: - http://www.peterjepson.com

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