THE GENDER GAP IN WESTMINSTER
ALL THE WOMEN MPs EVER ELECTED WOULDN’T FILL THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
ALL of the women who have ever been elected as MPs would fill only three-quarters of the House of Commons chamber.
While women currently make up 208 of the UK’s 650 MPs - or not quite a third - it is only in the last 100 years that they have been allowed to stand for election at all.
The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave women over 30 who met certain property requirements the right to vote. It also gave them the right to stand as MPs. Yet only 489 women have been elected to the House of Commons since then. To put that in perspective, the current parliament alone includes 442 male MPs. The first woman ever elected was Constance Markievicz of Sinn Fein in 1918, though she did not take her seat. The first woman who did was Nancy Astor for the Conservative party in 1919.
Unsurprisingly, the two biggest parties in UK politics - Labour and the Conservatives - account for 86.5 per cent of all women ever elected to parliament.
Labour alone have accounted for 283, or 57 per cent.
A further 140 have been Conservatives.
There have been 25 female SNP MPs, and 21 for the Liberal Democrats.
The highest number of new women ever elected to the House of Commons was in 2010, when 93 new female MPs were elected.
They included the Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Priti Patel, who recently resigned as International Development Secretary.
In 1974, some 10 new women were elected to Parliament. One of those was Labour’s Dame Margaret Beckett, currently the longestserving female MP.
Another longstander is Labour’s Harriet Harman, first elected for the constituency of Peckham in a 1982 by-election.
In 1987, some 17 new women were elected as MPs, including the current Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott - Britain’s first black woman MP.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s snap election last year saw 54 new female MPs elected to the Commons. A study last year found that just two countries in the world have a female majority in parliament Bolivia and Rwanda. Some 36 countries had a higher proportion of women in parliament than in the U.K.
These include Norway, Iceland, and Finland.