During the coronavirus pandemic it is more important than ever to have women in our government.
Politics, a topic of most conversations at the moment. Whether you know your Tory party from your Labour party or not, you will at least be more involved with politics now more than ever. The coronavirus has been a massive turning point for political awareness with more people sitting down to watch Prime Ministers Questions, weekly press conferences and evening announcements. We have been addressed by the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock, and other advisors, however, what do a majority of these people have in common? They are all male.
As Labour MP Rosie Duffield pointed out in last week’s PMQs, “only one woman in the cabinet has lead the Downing Street briefing in the last 8 weeks” and even this has been very few times. It’s safe to say women are underrepresented in government. Even to this day it is still stereotypical that politics is a man’s world. Although in the words of singer, Tom Jones, “…it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman”.
Directly quoting from the government’s 2011 census results, 51% of the UK population is women so why are we not being represented enough. Could this be the fact that we, the UK, have only had two female Prime Ministers or could it be the judgements and constant criticism against women. It was only a couple of months ago that Labour MP Tracy Brabin was in the news for wearing an off-the-shoulder dress in the Commons.
Another point brought up by Duffield, is the fact that “we need a change of tone and more female voices”. Taking this outlook forward it poses the question of how the UK would have handled these unprecedented times with a female leader or at least more women involved. Especially as places such as, New Zealand and Germany have seemed to handle the virus outbreak much better than the UK government. Most importantly, if more women were involved with the decisions, would children be going back to school so soon?
As MP’s have shown, it takes a woman to speak out about domestic abuse. It takes a woman to speak up about the lack of women in government. It takes a woman to speak up for issues surrounding period poverty; a word in which so many men recoil at in disgust. But, it takes a woman to address women’s issues for them to be taken seriously and for a change to be made.
So even if politics is still portrayed as a man’s world, the importance of women is greater now than ever.
Neve Gordon-Farleigh
Tweet to @Neve_GF
Featured image courtesy of Ugur Akdemir on Unsplash. This image has in no way been altered. Image license is available here.