Chairs at the table: women in Select Committee elections

In the midst of coverage of the UK’s MEPs departing from the European parliament, as the scene is set for leaving the EU tomorrow, it would have been easy to overlook some important developments back in Westminster yesterday. MPs voted to elect Chairs of Select Committees in the House of Commons.  Select Committees are a key part of holding governments to account, as they scrutinise departmental business, and the procedures of parliament themselves.  Governments are obliged to respond to Select Committee recommendations, which they make based on reports including evidence from expert witnesses to Committee hearings.

 

After every General Election (so pretty often lately) Select Committees are reformed, with Chairs divided between the political parties, according to parties’ share of the vote.  As the 2019 election changed the political landscape dramatically, its impact has been felt in the distribution of Chairs between Conservative and Labour.  In the 2017 parliament, the Conservatives held 13 Chairs, and Labour 12, but following Conservative gains under Boris Johnson, this has shifted to 16 committees being overseen by Conservatives, and 10 by Labour MPs.  The SNP have retained their two Chairmanships – Scotland and International Trade, while the Lib Dems lost Science and Technology to the Tories. The Institute for Government has a full summary of who stood for election to the Chair positions here.

 

However, it is not just the party arithmetic in Select Committees that has changed as a result of the 2019 General Election.  The gender balance has too – and not necessarily in a progressive direction.  Although the election resulted in the highest proportion of women ever elected to parliament (220 out 650 MPs, or 34% of the total) the proportion of women elected in each political party varies radically.  While 48% of Labour MPs are women, three-quarters of Conservatives are men.  In the SNP and Liberal Democrats, male MPs outnumber females by roughly 2:1.  This means that the pool from which Select Committee Chairs are chosen in this parliament, skews male.  Moreover, these posts have become high-status, and a way for experienced backbenchers to carve out a prominent and authoritative position for themselves, outside of becoming a government minister.  I wrote in autumn about the issue of women leaving parliament in relatively high numbers, especially on the Conservative side.  This means that there are more novices among Tory women in parliament than may otherwise have been the case, reducing the numbers of Conservative women likely to stand for Chairmanships considerably.

 

I have also written before about the tendency for Select Committee Chairs and members to sort themselves on gender lines according to status and perceptions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ political topics.  Foreign Affairs and Defence are historically male-dominated, while Education and Health are more likely to be evenly mixed.  In yesterday’s elections of Chairs, only 15 Committees out of 28 ended up in contention, as incumbents remained unopposed in 11 cases, and 2 Chairs were elected unopposed (Steve Crabb for Wales and Caroline Nokes for Women and Equalities, both Conservative MPs).  Elsewhere, there were two Committees, International Development and Petitions, where only female (Labour) candidates stood, and a further 6 where both male and female MPs were candidates.  In the remaining seven contested Chairs, only male candidates were on offer.  In all, only one Conservative, and one Labour, woman, was elected Chair where they stood against men. Of the 28 Select Committees where Chairs can be elected, only 8 have a woman in the Chairman post (28%).

 

These results may be an early warning concerning female representation in this parliament.  Boris Johnson was rumoured to have plans to reduce the number of government departments, and therefore the number of corresponding Select Committees.  The (male-dominated) Department for Exiting the EU will go, and the freestanding department of International Development has apparently escaped the axe.  It’s now said that the Prime Minister wants to focus on departmental performance, rather than changing the composition of government departments.  For the moment it is impossible to know exactly what changes the Prime Minister has in mind in advance of his re-shuffle next month; but the chances for women to attain positions of power in parliament can go down as well as up.

 

 

 

Think of a Leader …

It’s Davos time again – for the 50^th time, world leaders, CEOs and assorted luminaries will meet in the Swiss Alps to thrash out the world’s problems.  Peak elite, you might say – or as FT journalist Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson neatly put it, there’s a reputation for ‘high altitude pontificating’ …

This year the conference theme is ‘stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world’ – a step away from the unbridled global capitalism, more favoured in previous agendas.  Climate change is top of global concerns, and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the organisation which runs the Davos conference, has been keen to publicise environmentally-conscious aspects of the meeting.  Delegates have been encouraged to travel by train, and if they have to use private jets (the notorious mode of transport for Davos man) they can buy a special fuel onsite which reduces omissions.  There is a day devoted to vegetarian menus and alternative proteins, and attendees can glide across floors featuring carpets made from recycled fishnets.

So just who are these people who gather annually to chew over the world’s problems?  I’ve written before about Davos’s women problem, which means that despite WEF’s work to calculate the Global Gender Gap and to promote women in business, delegates remain overwhelmingly male. WEF has pledged to double the number of women at Davos by 2030, and are working in a range of countries to accelerate measures to reduce the gender gap. This year women make up 24% of attendees – depressingly the highest proportion to date – and a number which WEF defends by pointing out that it is higher than the proportion of women in ministerial positions worldwide (21%), and a lot higher than the  percentage of women in CEO posts in major companies – which currently stands at an abysmal 6% of the Fortune 500 list.  This is an uneasy argument, given that the Davos crowd is skewed towards Europe, where the political balance is often better, and that one third of delegates are drawn from civil society. The appearance of Greta Thunberg and 10 further teenage ‘Changemakers’ will probably not reduce the average age (around 50) of conference-goers much – nor will it address the dearth of older women present, in spite of high-profile speakers such as Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde.

Indeed in a venue for ‘thought leaders’ it’s fitting that an organisation – Women Political Leaders – is launching a report on the ‘Reykjavik Index for Leadership’ which illustrates how open people are to women occupying leadership positions.  They find that in G7 countries (Canada, France, USA, UK, Germany, Italy, Japan) only a minority of people (46%) feel very comfortable with the idea of a woman as head of government, and only 48% feel similarly about women as CEOs of major companies.  The index, which records views on women’s leadership across a range of sectors, is in its second year, and the UK is in a lower overall position this year than last, with men’s perceptions of women in leadership having declined notably. Not an encouraging sign for future gender parity.  The best-performing countries are France and Canada, with Germany and Italy lowest in the G7.  A second group of nations, containing Brazil, Russia, India and China, shows Russia and China lagging far behind the others. The index also looks at whether people are comfortable with male leaders in the childcare sector, and finds that, in the G7, it’s the sector least likely to be seen as equally suited to both men and women.  Scores are particularly low in Japan (where a government minister recently caused a stir by taking paternity leave) and also in China, where perceptions of childcare as a woman’s activity remain particularly strong.

 

Meanwhile, among the civil society organisations attending Davos, Oxfam has launched its annual report on inequality, timed to be part of the conference debates.  This year they have looked at global inequality in terms of gender and the share of unpaid labour.  They find that the 22 richest men in the world have greater wealth then all the women in Africa taken together.  This statistic is underpinned by the fact that women do three-quarters of all unpaid care work across the world.  These inequalities between the sexes will only be exacerbated by climate change (making chores like fetching water more arduous) and ageing populations (resulting in women spending more time on elder care).  To make a more gender-equal society, therefore, the perceptions revealed in the Reykjavik Index, will need to shift towards acceptance of men in caring roles, alongside women in leadership. Perhaps the most pertinent question at Davos should be ‘Where’s the creche?’ ….