The feminisation of the conservative parliamentary party: Party members' attitudes

Political Quarterly

Volumn 80, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 204-213

  Childs, Sarah ^a   Webb, Paul ^b   Marthaler, Sally ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Conservatives; Focus groups; Party members; Women's representation

Indexed keywords

EID: 65249118931     PISSN: 00323179     EISSN: 1467923X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-923X.2009.01979.x     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Joni Lovenduski, Feminizing Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005.
2. Sarah Childs, Women and British Party Politics, London, Routledge, 2008;
3. Joni Lovenduski, State Feminism and the Political Representation of Women, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
4. Childs, Women and British Party Politics.
5. E.g., May spoke at the launch of the 2005 Hansard Society Report Women at the Top in November 2005.
6. http://conservativehome.blogs.com/.
7. The potential of primaries to elect greater numbers of women is likely to be more limited than envisaged as it is not clear how many winnable seats would have constituency parties with fewer than 300 members. Moreover, it is not certain that primaries would be more likely to generate women or BME candidates anyway, although the leadership was clearly hoping that a less socially narrow selectorate would have such an effect.
8. These figures are derived from source material in the UK Polling Report: http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/guide/.
9. Our thanks to Colin Railings for providing the data upon which these calculations were based.
10. Full technical details are available on request from the authors.
11. Rosie Campbell, Gender and the Vote in Britain, Colchester, ECPR Press, 2006, p. 103;
12. Rosie Campbell, Sarah Childs and Joni Lovenduski, 'Do women need women MPs? A comparison of mass and elite sttitudes', British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming.
13. Campbell, Gender and the Vote;
14. Pippa Norris, 'The gender gap: Old challenges, new approaches', in S. Carroll, ed., Women and American Politics: Agenda Setting for the 21st Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 146-170.
15. G.E. Maguire, Conservative Woman, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998.
16. Childs, Women and British Party Politics.
17. As with all qualitative research, this work is designed to provide insight, but does not allow definitive conclusions to be drawn about the extent to which views are held among Conservative party members overall. We will shortly be running a survey that permits such analysis.
18. Indeed, for one woman in the mixed Bristol group, any discrimination against candidates tends to go the other way: white men are currently finding it difficult to be selected.
19. Interestingly, the view that older women are prone to discriminate against aspiring female PPCs has also been widely expressed by Conservative parliamentarians of both sexes whom we have interviewed.
20. Lovenduski, Feminizing Politics;
21. Campbell Gender and the Vote.