RUN AS YOU ARE

A century after women won the vote, we still aren’t fairly represented in politics. ELLE looks at the boundary breakers working for real change

A century since women won the vote in the UK, we aren’t even close to being fairly represented in politics. So we’re damned well doing something about it – in our own way and on our own terms. ELLE’s Lena De Casparis reports

If you’d told me a few years ago that a female world leader, with her baby on her lap, would address the United Nations, I would probably have called your bluff. But in September, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did just that when she took her daughter Neve to the UN General Assembly in New York. As a working mum who recently shared parental leave with my daughter’s dad, this felt like a giant win for me (and all women and men). You see, when Ardern was elected Prime Minister in 2017, she promised to make New Zealand the best place in the world to have a baby.

Ardern isn’t the only woman doing politics in a new way. In Iceland, when Katrín Jakobsdóttir took the reigns as Prime Minister in 2O17, she made it illegal for men to be paid more than women for doing the same job. And when Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson gave birth in October, she became the first UK party leader to have a baby while in office (and is currently the first leader ever to take maternity leave). In the US, Socialist Latina Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at 28, proving women of colour will have a seat at the table in American politics in 2O19.

Call it an uprising, call it a rose-tinted revolution: this will go down as the moment women we could actually relate to seized politics, for themselves, as themselves. And they are transforming the political landscape.

“I CANT BELIEVE WE’RE STILL PROTESTING

THIS SHIT in 2O18”

Ten years ago, fresh from a Politics undergraduate degree, I took a starter job in the House of Commons as a researcher for an MP (incidentally, he was old, white and very much a ‘he’). I found myself in a building where very few people looked similar to me, dressed like me or showed much enthusiasm for the politics I believed in. Wearied by being the only woman in meetings and thus always seemingly being the one handed the photocopying and asked to take notes – despite my role not being administrative and me being useless at using a photocopier – I quit.

Needless to say, the current influx of women into the houses of power has been neither fast nor easy. For women, under-representation is a glaring reality. Men are still heads of state in all but 12 of the 196 countries in the world today*. And in the UK, more than 1OO years after Emmeline Pankhurst and her troop stormed Westminster and some women were permitted suffrage, just 489 women have ever been elected to parliament** (considering 65O MPs sit in the House of Commons, that’s pretty dismal).

Sexism is a reality for many. It was reported in August 2O18 that a number of Remain female Tory MPs were receiving sexist online abuse from Leave-voting Tory members, plus let’s not forget the harassment faced by Labour’s Jess Phillips MP, who last June received 6OO-plus rape threats via Twitter in one night alone.

‘Politics continues to be a male-dominated environment,’ Labour’s Tulip Siddiq, elected Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Kilburn in 2O15, tells me. ‘We may have a female PM, but we are a long way off equal representation. Only around 2OO of the 65O MPs are women.’

“THIS IS MY RESISTING BITCH FACE”

“THE GROUND is SHIFTING. WOMEN won’t STAND BY AS MEN TRY to TAKE AWAY their POLITICAL VOICE”

Things are changing, however, with a new generation of women engaging in politics in new ways. In January 2O17, the Women’s March saw more than 5 million people worldwide marching in solidarity of women’s rights. Nine months later, news of the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke. In the 24 hours that followed, 4.7 million people engaged in the #MeToo conversation on Facebook alone, with 12 million comments, posts and reactions as women shared their stories of workplace sexual harrassment. Even a night at the cinema got political, with Meryl, Reese, Nicole and the full force of Hollywood’s best actors fighting for sexual equality in the Time’s Up movement. ‘The ground is shifting,’ says Siddiq. ‘Women won’t stand by as the men in charge try to take away agency over their bodies, or their political voice.’

Theresa May, meanwhile, has spent her career pushing for an increase in representation within her party (she co-founded Women2Win, a Conservative Party group that supported David Cameron’s commitment to elect more Tory women to Parliament). In an interview in 2O16, she said, ‘Women shouldn’t feel they’ve got to “walk like a man”.’ Across the House, half the Green Party’s leadership is female, including its co-leader Siân Berry. Some 46 per cent of Labour MPs are also women, including powerhouses Angela Rayner, Stella Creasy and, of course, Jess Phillips.

Then there’s the Women’s Equality Party, which has already been noted as the UK’s fastest-growing political group. ‘So much of 2O18 has been about women,’ party leader Sophie Walker says. ‘From revelations about the gender pay gap and testimony from the #MeToo movement to the Irish referendum on abortion and the Women’s March against Trump. The Women’s Equality Party is our biggest opportunity to turn that into lasting progress. Every race we stand in, we force the other parties to field women candidates; every manifesto we write encourages the other parties to increase their offer on childcare or social care, and every campaign we run pushes equality up the political agenda.’

And around the world? Mexico recently elected an equal number of men and women MPs in its parliament for the first time, while

last June, the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez chose 11 women to be part of his 17-member cabinet. And Ana Brnabic became Serbia’s first female and firsty openly gay Prime Minister. And to bring it back to New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern, she recently wrote: ‘Lifting wages, closing the gender pay gap, living free from violence, having the choice to be a carer, to have a career, be a mother – those are uppermost on my to-do list. Our extraordinary women deserve no less.’ Thereby proving she is the best thing to come out of New Zealand since Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc, only better – much better.

In the US, almost two years after Hillary Clinton was defeated by a self-professed pussy grabber, a record 257 women ran for the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections. ‘This year, the Left has seen a remarkable wave of women winning races they’d never have entered before, especially first-time candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,’ says Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.

“GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE

FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS”

What makes this moment so exciting, so positively radical, is that many of these women are making it clear they see politics, and the world, in an entirely different way from their male counterparts. It’s not just that they have different backgrounds and résumés: for years, a career in politics as a woman meant appearing to be macho but never too bold, confident but not cocky, ambitious but never ruthless, family-loving without actually spending any time with said family. I even remember buying a work wardrobe of oversized grey tailoring in an attempt to fit in. Well, no more. Finally, we are seeing women win by being themselves. Commentators are calling it the ‘Rihanna approach’ to politics, as in ‘be more her and give less of a flying toss’.

In the US, Somali refugee Ilhan Omar and Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib became the first Muslim women ever in Congress after November’s midterm elections. Likewise Deb Haaland, Sharice Davids and Yvette Herrell are now the first Native American representatives. Then there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former cocktail waitress from a working-class background, who during her campaign admitted, over and over, that women like her are ‘not supposed to run for office – or win’. When asked how she thought she would get on in Washington, the Democratic Representative for New York’s 14th District channelled JLo (pop references never grow old), saying: ‘Trump isn’t ready for a girl from the Bronx.’ Well, we so are.

As Traister puts it, ‘This year has marked a real tipping point in how female candidates present themselves – not imitating a white male approach to politics, but instead running as themselves: young, old, racially, ethnically and religiously diverse, women who’ve had a variety of jobs and who aren’t afraid to say they became candidates because they’re angry.’ The result, she says, is a change in ‘the mass understanding of what politicians are supposed to look like, what they can sound like, how they can present themselves. It helps us adjust our eyes and ears to a more broadly representational group of candidates’.

“WHO RUNS THE

WORLD?”

Call me a spoilsport, but it’s far too early to hail this as the end of the old white man in power. But with worldwide revulsion at Trump and Weinstein and their kind, and a new confidence among women from recent successes, there surely is a new opening for women – and a new generation of woke men – to challenge the traditional power structures. As Traister puts it: ‘We’re in a period where we’re acknowledging how fucked up and unjust it is, and thinking about how to start chipping away at it.’

So go forth and chip. Politics needs us; it’s time to get involved. There are plenty of opportunities to volunteer with a campaign group or political party. Try going to a city council meeting or volunteering for a neighbourhood cause that matters to you. Work with your own MP or for a charity – everyone needs help. Journalist and political activist Ash Sarkar has some advice: ‘Don’t be afraid of learning. Political circles can be intimidating… but mistakes are the only tool nature has for improvement, and if that’s good enough for evolution, it’s good enough for you.’

Women are taking charge and forcing our way into power, and we’re doing it on our terms. It’s a given that we are all feminists and can wear millennial pink, block Céline heels and eat cinnamon swirls – but now, we can be world leaders and talk period tax, maternity-leave legislation and our sexual abuse histories, too. The question should never have never been, ‘Who runs the world?’ Rather, we should have been asking: ‘When are we taking it?’ So, how about now?