Status of Women committee  Was that a question for me? Yes. I really do agree. I think what Sarah was saying is that it's very easy to be rhetorically committed to increasing diversity, and parties often say they care about having different people represented, but then don't do anything about it. I think

Status of Women committee  It's really important to note that populist arguments often hinge on the idea that there is an elite that's disconnected from the people, and it's easier to make that argument if there is an elite that looks very different from the average voter. For example, in the U.K., at leas

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. I don't think it's a zero-sum game. Clearly there are a lot of working-class women, so we should be doing these things at the same time. At least in Britain, it's also about a lot of people accessing politics by doing things like free internships. Some of the routes i

Status of Women committee  We all know the research about groupthink. Unfortunately, if people's voices are not represented in a parliament, policy isn't of the same quality. Take the example of domestic violence. In most countries it used to be considered a private matter. If you called the police out t

Status of Women committee  There's very little research that voters are influenced by the gender of the candidate, not in my research in the U.K. We did find one example in the 2010 election showing that women who were more feminist were more likely to vote for women. There were similar findings in the Uni

Status of Women committee  The media treatment of female candidates is not my expert area, but if you look at the media treatment of women leaders in particular, I can think of some current examples. Our current Prime Minister and Julia Gillard are constantly described by the media as being wooden and not

Status of Women committee  Is your question about whether, if you have quotas, it's creating a restriction, or is it about—

Status of Women committee  Yes. Absolutely. Obviously, voters have to vote for candidates, but we want to create an environment where there is much more equal opportunity and where a more diverse slate of candidates is possible.

Status of Women committee  We have the same problem you have at the national level. There's a lot of variation by party. The Labour Party has a much higher proportion of women MPs than the other parties do, and they use quotas. The devolved institutions in Scotland and Wales have much higher proportions of

Status of Women committee  I'll just add a few points to Sarah's, particularly around the approach to the recruitment of women candidates, which suggests a passive role for women or that women are not interested in politics and that's why they're not putting themselves forward. There's increasing and ver