I’m not sure if you’ve heard, because the news people are only bashing on about it 26 hours a day, but on May 6th we have a general election in the UK.
You could however be forgiven for thinking there are no female MPs to vote for – the role of women in this election is almost limited to that of the doting, silent, wide-eyed wife. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s wife Miriam obviously doesn’t like this either.
She’s largely stayed away from the campaign trail to carry on working, and has spoken out about the patronising coverage of herself, Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron. There have been endless reams of crap printed about their clothes, appearance and Cameron’s pregnancy as though that’s all we silly little women can be bothered to read about.
What about the actual female candidates? Oh yes – they’re dressing up for Grazia and talking about how it’s “not a problem” if they get elected because they’re attractive. Last time I checked, ladies, it wasn’t 1958.
Here’s one particularly brilliant excerpt of a Daily Mail article on the Grazia piece:
“Solicitor Maryam Khan, 27, a doe-eyed brunette who would not look out of place fronting an ad campaign for mascara, standing for Bury North admitted she received a text message from a man saying: You should be a model, not a politician.”
I can’t decide whether to smash something or vomit.
I haven’t seen the Grazia article, so maybe it’s not as embarrassing as the Daily Mail makes out, and maybe these women didn’t have a huge amount of control over how it was presented. But as far as I’m concerned they’re doing themselves, and us, no favours. How are women in politics ever going to be seen as equals if privileged women like these allow the focus to consistently swerve to their appearance without making any apparent effort to fight it?
I can imagine they were put under pressure from spin doctors to appear in a pretty dress for a magazine, and I suspect this is part of the reason why so many women are not attracted to a political career. Are there any young male candidates in a similar spread for a men’s magazine, with the focus on their “fashion forward” sartorial choices rather than their achievements or abilities? Why does it matter what female politicians wear when it has no bearing on how they do the job?
Not only are the female candidates relegated to women’s magazines, there’s not a single senior, high-profile woman fighting on the election front line for any of the parties. This says more about their attitude to women than any smug-faced, bland platitude about equal opportunities ever could.
Even the female political correspondents – usually relatively quiet on the lack of gender balance in Westminster – all have their election stories. A tweet from Channel 4’s political correspondent Cathy Newman said last week: “Mandy [Business Secretary Peter Mandelson] left it til last question to ask a woman (me) at Labour's press conference - and then she apologised to the men!”
Perhaps as MPs drop their guard in the panicked race to hold on to power, their true colours are shining through a bit more. They don’t care that Parliament has tiny numbers of women or ethnic minorities – they don’t want the extra competition.
America might have elected a black man who chose a woman as his secretary of state, but we have the same fat-cheeked old Etonians we’ve always had. For such a supposedly liberal, progressive country, this is all a bit shameful.