My blog

Tag: Women2Win

  • Baroness Anne Jenkin: ‘In 2024, Women Must Have a More Powerful Role in Every Meeting’

    Baroness Anne Jenkin

    I founded Women2Win with Theresa May in November 2015. At that stage the Conservative party had nine per cent women MPs – I spin it around the other way and say ‘91 per cent male’. The first thing was to rattle the cage and explain to the Party why it mattered.

    It was just before David Cameron became leader and he embraced it. In his first speech he said: “I want the Party to better reflect the country I seek to serve.” Now we’ve plodded onto 25 per cent. The Labour Party is at 51 per cent but they use all-women short lists.

    Besides, Labour has an easier pond to fish in. They have the trade unions and the public sector, and these structures mean that young female candidates are better supported on their journey. Labour also has a far less rigorous system of quality control in order to get on the candidates list.

    Women2Win matters because women’s life experiences are different to men’s. You have to have that different experience better reflected around the Cabinet table, as well as in Whitehall and in Westminster more broadly. I’m absolutely sure that we wouldn’t have made such a hash of education during Covid if we’d have had more women around the Cabinet table. That’s why I urge senior colleagues never to have a meeting without a woman round the table, and preferably two.

    After a recent reshuffle, a senior minister said to me: “I hope you’re pleased that there’s been an increase.” I said: “Yes, an increase of one, and the Cabinet Office has no women in it. It has nine male ministers.” They also don’t often consider the impact of appointments. I think the Foreign Office has more female ministers than men, meaning they travel a lot. But then there are no women in the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy departments (BEIS), or in Scotland, Wales or Ireland. They need to be aware that our voices need to be heard.

    My campaign was to get more women to come forward. The sort of women who would make good Conservative MPs may be on a trajectory to become partner at a firm like PwC. They know if they work hard and do a good job that although it may be challenging, they’ve a very good chance of making partner, and being well rewarded. We’re asking them to move to a risky profession where they may not get selected or then elected – and if they get elected they may well lose their seat.

    Furthermore, no matter how hard they work, promotion isn’t dependent on ability. Not surprisingly they see sharp-elbowed men who know how to play the game differently being promoted and it gets very frustrating – and they leave. That’s not always the case, of course: the government is currently busy promoting women ahead of men, which can create frustration in the other direction. Even so, it’s not an easy path.

    My concern has always been around attracting the right people. In the main from my experience it’s about character which you can’t define easily. I regret that the party doesn’t use our best asset – our people – to show the fascinating narratives of those who do get into Parliament.

    I’m focussed on getting more to step forward, and on helping them navigate the maze that gets them into Parliament. That means assisting them with selection, and explaining how to appeal to those are going to pick you as a candidate. Then I aim to help them once they’re in the job.

    Finding MPs, however, should really be the Party’s job. Famously, Gillian Keegan, who’s now minister of state in the Department of Health with responsibility for social care, I met at the theatre. The Party needs to step up and do a focused outreach job. 

    We really work with women once they have passed the Parliamentary Assessment Centre and are on the official candidates list. We do speech practice, Q&A practice, and we have weekends away where candidates work on their CVs and other relevant skills. We have even included improv comedy sessions, as women can find humour difficult. That aspect is hard for women, who tend to take ourselves more seriously, especially if we’re entering public life. We aim to give our female candidates confidence to do the self-deprecating humour.

    Theresa May remains our patron, and she comes to things regularly. We had our 15th anniversary last year and she was our guest of honour. She’s unlikely to be mentoring people individually as she used to do. She helped that generation of Amber Rudd and Andrea Leadsom a lot. We now have quite an effective group of female Conservative MPs and Peers called the 2022 Committee – she comes to all those meetings, and has made a real difference for young women in the Party.  

  • Baroness Anne Jenkin on Women2Win, JK Rowling and the ‘Animal Farm of our times’

    Baroness Anne Jenkin

     

    My prime role in life is as an advocate for getting more women in parliament. But lately I’ve found myself speaking out more and more about the trans question. Ever since the JK Rowling furore, I think the question of gender dysphoria and feminism have become impossible to separate – perhaps they always were.

    I have become interested, for instance, in the case of Sinead Watson, a Scottish ‘detransitioner’, who is a campaigner on this issue. She changed gender but now her argument is that she should never have been allowed to have a double mastectomy and hormone therapy, and she’s taking the Sandyford clinic in Glasgow to court.

    We’ll see the result of that case, but the 5,000% increase in the number of girls presenting with gender dysphoria is highly disturbing. The research seems to point to the fact that it relates in some ways to the amount of time young people spend on their phones. They are driven to consider the matter by influencer sites, and unfortunately it’s not possible to say that the influencer sites have no commercial interests in the fate of these young people. That’s why we have a 25 per cent year on year interest in puberty blockers and cross sex hormones.

    In addition to that we have the widespread availability of violent porn, which until 15 years ago you’d have to reach for from the top shelf of a convenience store – and pornography was in those days tame by comparison to what we see today. Today everybody has access to everything and that is not only screwing up relationships, it’s also making young girls very fearful about sex when they see what’s expected of them.

    It’s traditionally always been a traumatic period, when your body is changing from childhood into womanhood – or childhood into manhood. Traditionally, girls who struggled psychologically and emotionally with that might have become anorexic at that point. But today they have this other option which is to bind their breasts, and be injected with testosterone.

    In a way what we’ve done is to conduct – pretty much by accident – this huge social experiment on children without really having any understanding of what the long term implications are.

    At the centre of all this is the so-called JK Rowling cancellation. If you look at what Rowling said in her original blog, I challenge anybody to find anything remotely controversial in it. People who repeat it and say she’s transphobic, or a hater or anything like that – I don’t think any of them have actually read what she wrote. In fact, most of us are very proud of being women, and though it has its challenges, it’s also a tremendous privilege.

    We’re at the point now where women feel they have been understanding and sympathetic about the question of female single sex spaces for too long. This is especially the case as while they’re being nice, their sex-based rights are being eroded. So you’ve got this concern about safeguarding children on the one hand, and concern around single sex spaces on the other – and single sex spaces are single sex for a reason.

    Some people try and make the comparison that the plight of the LGBTQ community resembles the fight over Section 28 in relation to gay rights. What they don’t understand is that this is a clash of rights. Both women’s right and trans people’s rights are protected characteristics under the Equality Act. It’s not something we can turn away from – we need to sort it out.

    Fortunately, there’s a novelist out there able to satirise this – and insodoing make sense of it a little. This is the brilliant parody The End of the World is Flat written by Simon Edge. It’s the story of small charity which achieves everything it needs to achieve and then has to pivot into campaigning for the – exactly as Stonewall has had to do once it achieved its goals in the field of gay rights. It is the Animal Farm of our times.

    But Edge’s novel ends happily, and I don’t know where this particular story will end – I only know we need to sort it out.