With the upcoming General Elections on the 8th of June the current Prime Minister Theresa May, might lose her position to one of her male oppositions.
So, what really are the differences in political participation within men and women?
Surprisingly, the differences are fairly small. There is a pattern but there is no huge gap as one would assume taking the information available in academic literature and articles.
Political attitudes and views may differ amongst men and women, this could be an explanation for the remaining pattern of preference within parties. Scholars suggest that women tend to approve left-wing, whilst men tend to approve right-wing. For instance, men may prioritise tax-cuts, whereas women may prioritise spending on education. Despite there not being an obvious difference in the position men and women take on issues, they still might view them as more or less important.
In the 2015 general election, 33% of females and 29% males voted for labour and 38% females and 37% males voted for Conservatives (Kellner, 2015). Although the differences visible are not very high, looking more into the data I found that the real difference lies within different age groups.
The data provided by the House of Commons shows that the older the women were, the more likely they were to vote for Conservatives and the younger the women were, the more likely they were to vote for Labour (Hawkins, Keen and Nakatudde, 2015). For example, Conservatives support appeared particularly strong in older women (45% of women 55+).
The YouGov conducted a survey to find out people’s intentions to vote in the General Election 2017. Whilst the results indicate that 48% of survey participants would vote for Conservatives and only 24% would vote for the Labour Party, my personal interest to this study was to learn the gender differences in the preferences. I was quite surprised to find that the gap was not as significant as available literature suggests. The graph below represents voting intentions of participants, excluding those who wouldn’t vote or don’t know who they would vote for, it was drawn from the data that YouGov found.
50% of women participating in the study would vote for Conservatives, that is only 3% more than men. 28% of women would vote for Labour, comparing to 22% of men. 13% of men would vote for Liberal Democrats, in contrast to only 11% of women. UKIP was one of the least favoured parties by participants of this study, only 7% of men and 4% of women said they would vote for UKIP. 12% of men and 8% of women said they would vote for other parties such as The Scottish National Party, or Green Party (Smith, 2017).
This means that women have changed their attitudes towards politics since the last general election. The study by YouGov suggests that Labour has lost female supporters. Women now seem to favour the Conservative party more. Could this drift towards the right be because of Theresa May? The conservatives may be in favour thanks to having a female leader. Perhaps, the difference lays in the rising number of women planning to take part in this year’s election.
Political Representation
Despite there being little difference in men and women participating in voting, the representation of women in politics is significantly lower to men. Before the General Election 2015, women took 23% of seats in the Parliament (Lowther and Thronton, 2015). After the election, the figure has risen to 29%. Out of the 650 MPs, there were 44 more female MPs in the parliament. Although the proportion is still small in comparison to men, this was a great change to the history of female politicians.
Sufficient female representation could help to achieve equality between both sexes in political engagement, or could it?
If there were more women in the parliament, there would be a more sufficient representation of women’s needs in the society. Makes sense, right? Not exactly, this claim assumes that there are fundamental differences in the values and attitudes of male and female MPs. In reality, their attitudes are not likely to differ as much. According to Lovenduski and Norris (2003), even if the Westminster was predominately female, the course of British politics would continue to be very similar;
‘The public face of politics will become feminised, but the political culture and the substantive policy agenda will remain unchanged.’
Significant change would happen only if the new female politicians differ considerably from men, ‘for example if they give greater priority to public spending on education rather than defence, or if they raise more parliamentary questions about childcare than about Europe, or if they pay more attention to constituency service rather than parliamentary debate.’ (Lovenduski and Norris, 2003).
Although the current Prime Minister is a woman, the political sphere remains male predominated. Can this ever change? Or will the United Kingdom, land of the Queen, continue to be governed by men?
References
Campbell, R. (2004). Gender, Ideology and Issue Preference: Is There such a Thing as a Political Women’s Interest in Britain?. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 6(1), pp.20-44.
Gilardi, F. (2015). The Temporary Importance of Role Models for Women’s Political Representation. American Journal of Political Science, [online] 59(4), pp.957-970. Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12155/full [Accessed 20 Apr. 2017].
Hawkins, O., Keen, R. and Nakatudde, N. (2015). General Election 2015 Briefing Paper. House of Commons Library.
Kellner, P. (2015). General election 2015: how Britain really vote. YouGov. [online] Available at: https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/06/08/general-election-2015-how-britain-really-voted/ [Accessed 21 Apr. 2017].
Lovenduski, J. and Norris, P. (2003). Westminster Women: The Politics of Presence. Political Studies, 51(1), pp.84-102.
Lowther, E. and Thronton, C. (2017). Election 2015: Number of women in Parliament rises by a third – BBC News. [online] BBC News. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32601280 [Accessed 21 Apr. 2017].
Smith, M. (2017). YouGov | Voting Intention: Conservatives 48%, Labour 25% (20-21 Apr). [online] YouGov: What the world thinks. Available at: https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/04/23/voting-intention-conservatives-48-labour-25-20-21-/ [Accessed 24 Apr. 2017].