Women Councillors — An Explanation of the Under-representation of Women in Local Government

Local Government Studies

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 1980, Pages 73-90

  Bristow, Stephen L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WOLVERHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84925927867     PISSN: 03003930     EISSN: 17439388     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03003938008432878     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. R. K. Kelsall, “Recruitment to the higher civil service: how has the pattern changed?”, P. Stanworth and A. Giddens (eds.), Elites and Power in British Society. Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 170.
2. Ibid., pp. 170–171.
3. Maeve Denby, “Women in Parliament and Government”, Lucy Middleton (ed.), Women in the Labour Movement, Croom Helm, 1978, p. 186.
4. Report of the Committee on the Management of Local Government (The Maud Committee Report), HMSO, 1967, Five Volumes
5. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the System of Remuneration of Members of Local Authorities (The Robinson Committee) (Cmnd. 7010), HMSO, 1977, Two Volumes. Strictly speaking, the Maud Committee produced survey evidence of women’s under-representation in England and Wales, whereas the Robinson Committee’s evidence related to Great Britain as a whole.
6. Maud Committee, Vol. 2, p. 16.
7. Robinson Committee, Vol. 1, para. 46.
8. And this is reinforced by their gross under-representation at senior levels of management in local authorities. In 1975, NALGO reported that 99 per cent of Chief Officers and 95 per cent of Principal Officers were men. The reasons for, and consequences of, this are discussed in Debbie Ounsted, “Do women in local government get a fair deal at work?”, Local Government Chronicle, January 19, 1979, pp. 63–65.
9. To borrow a useful expression from Peter Paterson, The Selectorate, MacGibbon & Kee, 1967.
10. M. J. Le Lohé, “Sex discrimination and under-representation of women in politics”, New Community, Vol. V, Nos. 1–2, Summer 1976, pp. 118–119.
11. See, for example, the conclusions of Josephine F. Milbum, “Women as Citizens — a Comparative Review”, Sage Professional Papers in Contemporary Political Sociology, Vol. 2, 1976, esp. pp. 36–38.
12. or Murray Goot and Elizabeth Reid’s strictures on the academic students of women’s political involvement: “Like most ‘value-neutral’ research, much of the work we have reviewed simply assumes the dominant values of the dominant groups of society … Insofar as anyone constructs a world of politics or work the builders are men.” “Women and Voting Studies”, Sage Professional Papers in Contemporary Political Sociology. Vol. 1, 1975, p. 35.
13. I am grateful to Alan Bruce of Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council for arawing my attention to these statistics, drawn from various sources, including Milburn, op. cit.
14. J. Halligan and P. Harris, “Women’s Participation in New Zealand Local Body Elections”, Political Science (NZ), Vol. 29, No. 2, December 1977, pp. 95–114.
15. For an extensive discussion of this under-representation at Parliamentary level, see also M. Currell, Political Woman, Croom Helm, 1975
16. and, more recently, E. M. Vallance, Women in the House, Athlone Press, 1979.
17. This is the figure cited by the Robinson Committee, op. cit., Vol. II, Table 2, on the basis of a survey of 4,400 Councillors in England and Wales. A count of the women members of local authorities listed in the Municipal Year Book for 1978 shows that 4,190 of the 24,197 Councillors on all English and Welsh authorities in 1977–1978 were women. This represents 17.3 per cent of the total. A similar count of the County Councillors elected in 1973 and their District counterparts holding office in 1976 (the Councillor population which the Robinson Committee surveyed) gives 4,120 women members out of 24,214, or exactly 17 per cent.
18. The analyses which follow have been undertaken by means of the SPSS procedures BREAKDOWN, CROSSTABS, PEARSON CORR and PARTIAL CORR. See N. H. Nie et al., Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, McGraw Hill, Second Edition, 1975.
19. Sue McCowan, Widening Horizons — Women in the Conservative Party, Conservative Political Centre, 1975, p. 18.
20. Alan Bruce, The Impact of Corporate Planning in the Greater Manchester District Authorities: with special reference to Councillors’ role orientations. CNAA M.Phil. thesis, 1979. See also Table 4.3. in Volume 2 of the Maud Report, op. cit., which suggests that roughly 15 per cent more female councillors preferred dealing with problems of particular individuals than did male councillors, who preferred broad policy matters.
21. These are simple product moment correlation coefficients, based on 369 cases.
22. The original classification scheme was summarized in R. Webber and J. Craig, “Which local authorities are alike?”, poulation Trends, No. 5, 1976
23. appeared in full as R. Webber and J. Craig, Socio-economic classification of local authority areas, OPCS Studies on Medical and Population Subjects No. 35, 1977.
24. My modifications of the scheme, as applied to party systems data, were discussed in S. L. Bristow, “The Reorganisation of English Local Politics: an empirical framework for analysis”, Paper given to PSA Local Politics Group, July 1977.
25. It is unfortunate that Debbie Ounsted cites Islington — the most exceptional case in all England and Wales — as her evidence for saying that “Interestingly, women seem to be less reluctant to work their way up on the political (as opposed to the Officer) side.” See Ounsted, op. cit., p. 63.
26. As these are used as relative measures of affluence and socio-economic character, it is of little importance which year’s Figures are used. In this analysis I have used those for rateable values at April 1974, detailed in DoE/Welsh Office, Rates and Rateable Values in England and Wales 1974–75, HMSO, 1976.
27. Derived from party composition figures cited in the Municipal Year Book for 1974 and for 1977, supplemented where necessary by reports in The Times, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. The 1979 figures are taken from the Daily Telegraph of May 7 and 9, 1979. For an analysis of trends in party support between 1973 and 1977 see S. L. Bristow, “Local Politics after Reorganisation — the homogenisation of local government in England and Wales”, Public Administration Bulletin, No. 28, December 1978.
28. The evidence for this is given in S. L. Bristow, “Women Councillors”, a series of three articles in the County Councils’ Gazette, Vol. 71, Nos. 2, 8, 9, May, November, December 1978, pp. 38–40, 229–230 and 272–274.
29. An earlier report appeared as S. L. Bristow, “Women in County Government — gross under-representation”, County Councils’ Gazette, Vol. 68, No. 1, April 1975, pp. 10–11.
30. J. G. Bulpitt, Party Politics in English Local Government, Longmans, 1965, p. 21.
31. For a commentary on the 1979 elections see my two articles in Municipal Journal, April 20, (pp. 403–404) and May 25, 1979, pp. 545–546.
32. This trend has been referred to variously as the ‘nationalisation’ or the ‘delocalisation’ of local politics. For examples, see M. I. Schofield, “The Nationalisation of Local Politics”, New Society, April 28, 1977
33. M. J. Goldsmith, “The Changing System of English Local Government”, in J. Lagroye and V. Wright (eds.), Local Government in Britain and France, George Allen and Unwin, 1979, p. 19.
34. On balance, I prefer the former label, as the conflict between national parties at local level may well owe as much to the peculiarities of the locality and its distinctive political culture and historical experience as to the essentially non-local appeal of the parties. This point is well made in W. Harvey Cox and Michael Laver, “Local and National Voting in British Elections: Lessons from the Synchro-Polls of 1979”. Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, Autumn 1979.
35. “Conservatives … cast their net wider than their active membership in seeking candidates, drawing in those of sympathetic persuasion who have made themselves known in the social or charitable life of the community.” John Gyford, Local Politics in Britain, Croom Helm, 1976, p. 68.
36. Gyford, Ibid., usefully summarises existing evidence to this effect.
37. That the motives for such participation can be varied is suggested by Herbert Goldhammer, “Some factors affecting participation in voluntary associations”, in E. W. Burgess and D. J. Bogue (eds.), Contributions to Urban Sociology, University of Chicago Press, 1964, especially p. 225. “The satisfactions provided by participation in group activities often arise more from the emotional sustenance provided by satisfactory human relationships and the sense of social solidarity and personal security that such relationships inspire than from the specific nature of the activities thus jointly engaged in.”
38. Bristow, Women Councillors, p. 230.
39. Maud Committee, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 118, Table 164. Interestingly, 8 per cent of women electors claimed to be party members whereas only 7 per cent of men did.
40. This is true of both major parties. As the chairman of the Women’s Advisory Council of Brighton Pavilion Conservative Association explained in justification of a separate women’s organisation: “If we had men as well they’d take over the running of it. This is for us alone, since we do all the work in the party and raise all the money … We meet once a month … hold discussions, sometimes with a speaker, but we spend most of our time fund raising.” (Quoted in the Guardian, October 9, 1978, p. 10).
41. The National Labour Women’s Advisory Committee on “Women in the Labour Party” reported in 1971 that “although no analysis exists it appears that in the majority of constituencies, on the General Committee and the Executive Committee, there are more men than women.” (quoted in O. McDonald, “Women in the Labour Party Today” in Middleton (ed.), op. cit., p. 158).
42. That this is no new phenomenon is demonstrated by the evidence cited in McDonald, ibid., p. 153, “In 1934, for example, 25 per cent of the sixty-nine newly elected Labour councillors in London were women.”
43. Nicholas Taylor’s “cautionary tale of … the rehabilitation of urban villages” is interesting on the role of such “energetic immigrants, with the usual eagerness to ‘put down roots’ ” in upsetting the traditional balance of community interests in Barnsbury. See Taylor, The Village in the City, Temple Smith, 1973, pp. 234–236.
44. This is not to argue that child-care is an unimportant activity. Nor is it to claim that it should be subordinated to the demands of a producer-orientated society. It is rather to join Penelope Leach in criticising a society in which “the needs of more and more (babies and small children are) being less and less well-met” and which makes “it increasingly difficult for (mothers) to recognise and meet those needs”, and which demands of fathers “a kind of caring and co-operation which it simultaneously prevents them from giving.” See P. Leach, Who Cares?, Penguin Books, 1979.
45. As Vallance, op. cit., pp. 7–8 seems to suggest, as does the author of an extended précis and commentary on my County Councils’ Gazette articles.
46. Cf. R. Ashworth: “Fair Do’s for Women in Local Government”, Local Government Review, January 27, 1979
47. and the correspondence in ibid., March 10, 1979, p. 150.
48. Although the Rapoports have suggested a rather more cautionary interpretation of this trend. Cf. Rhona and Robert Rapoport, Dual-Career Families, Penguin Books, 1971, especially p. 290: “Social insulation from others results automatically from the overload which leaves little extra energy available (outside career and family life) for casual sociability. In addition, the pressures of many career-demands are so great as to make it important to some people to have relative quiet and seclusion for their off-work periods.”
49. As there is of potential male candidates. The Maud Committee found that 8 per cent of the electors they interviewed would be prepared to serve as Councillors, and a quarter of these were women (twice the proportion of actual women Councillors interviewed). Cf. Maud Committee, op. cit., Vol. 3, Table 189, p. 144.
50. In a survey of local association activists in Maidenhead in 1970, no fewer than 13 women in a sample of 100 (men and women, compared with nine men in the same sample) expressed themselves willing to stand for election if invited. Clearly, therefore, there is an ‘associational hierarchy’ effect in operation here, whereby those who do participate at one level of public activity are more likely to do so at another level. Cf. S. L. Bristow, Participation in Local Affairs in Maidenhead, MA Dissertation, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1971. p. 52.
51. In her study of Hillingdon and Haringey London Borough Councils, Clarissa Parsonage has claimed that “a substantial number of interested women were barred from standing for council office because they were employed by their Borough.” (C. Parsonage, “Women on a London Borough Council”, mimeo., no date, p. 14. I should like to thank Dr. Vicky Randall for drawing this study to my attention). This would help to explain their relative absence from Borough and District Councils in London and the Metropolitan areas, but would not explain the similar under-representation on the GLC and Metropolitan County Councils, which do not employ teachers or social workers (the two largest categories of politically involved female local government employees identified by Dr. Parsonage).
52. Evidence for the Counties is given in S. L. Bristow, Women Councillors, Vol. 71, No. 9, op. cit.