Sunak’s government is too male – and it will cost him
As a woman, it is good to know your place. I, for example, know that I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head with the economy. After all, the nation’s finances famously only impact men, so why should I bother? Similarly, my female body has never required and will never require any form of medical intervention, so any public
health planning doesn’t have to account for me. Of course, I never went to school or university so the field of education isn’t relevant to my interests either. Finally – and as everyone knows – women do not have access to cars or public transport. If, for whatever reason, we may wish to leave our homes, we can very well use our own two legs.
Lest you think I’ve gone completely mad, this is apparently the world this government lives in. According to the most recent and publicly available data, the Treasury and the departments for Health, Education and Transport currently have 15 special advisers between them. Not one of those 15 special advisers is a woman. Furthermore, two out of three of those secretaries of state are men.
Over in No 10, the picture is rosier – but not quite Barbie pink. Of the 40 people advising the prime minister, two-thirds are men and one-third are women. Strikingly, Rishi Sunak’s chief of staff, two deputy chiefs of staff, head of strategic communications, government spokesperson and political secretary are all men. The only senior roles filled by women are head of operations, director of communications and press secretary.
This matters for a number of reasons. The first and most obvious one is that Britain is a diverse country, and deserves to be governed by people who are just as diverse. There are issues that women will always be more likely to spot, but in order to do so they must be in the room. This goes for class background and ethnicity as well.
The second is internal, and thus probably of more immediate interest to the Conservatives. The party’s support among women has cratered over the past few years, and shows no sign of recovering. You shouldn’t need to be obsessed with identity politics to assume that a government of men may find it hard to regain the attention of female voters.
The third may seem more trivial, but it is anything but. In 2016, I wrote a piece on a very similar issue and found that, in Theresa May’s No 10, only 28 per cent of special advisers were women.
In 2019, I looked into it again and was shocked to find that the numbers had got even worse under Boris Johnson’s premiership.
Tory support among women has cratered over the past few years, and shows no sign of recovering
Both sets of figures felt especially dispiriting, since the problem had (nearly) been solved by David Cameron. By the time he left government, just under half of his Downing Street advisers had been women. It wasn’t just that progress had been slow, things had actively become worse again, for no obvious reason.
But you could argue that the circumstances played a part. Westminster remains an environment where the default will usually be male, and hiring more diverse advisers still seems to be an effort. Why? I have some idea: the years between 2016 and 2021 were ones where both the country and the government, frankly, had bigger fish to fry. Gender ratios among special advisers do not quite come before generation-defining referendums or global pandemics. It shouldn’t quite work as an excuse, but everyone’s got their priorities.
The problem for Sunak today – and the reason why this matters – is that he cannot hide behind a single great political or national issue in the way his predecessors could. The danger and chaos have passed and so he must deal with everything else. Or, to put it more vividly: May and Johnson had to deal with one horsesized duck, and he’s got to contend with a hundred duck-sized horses.
You may not care about the gender of special advisers and that is fine, but the current maleness of government should be seen as symptomatic of a bigger issue with Sunak’s premiership. He isn’t in an enviable position, but it is one he picked for himself. He is about to reach his hundredth day in power, and he needs
to get to work. Else, he risks death by a thousand cuts – gender equality is just one of them.
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