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Women’s Local Government Society
Local Government
Chronicle - 5 February 2007
“Women march on town halls again.” My eye was drawn to this headline in The Times. I groaned: not another batch of ageing council tax martyrs from the shires desperate for a spell of bread-and-water behind bars.
This turned out to be much more interesting. The Women’s Local Government Society has been re-launched in order to campaign to get more women into council seats. On February 1, 1907, it wrote to Liberal Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman demanding that the law should permit women to stand in local elections. It won. Six women were elected to councils in the local elections of November that year. It took until 1918 for women to win the parliamentary franchise.
Today some 27 per cent of councillors are women – and the Society thinks this is no-where near enough. The Fawcett Society which campaigns for women’s rights, points out that Strabane in Northern Ireland and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales each have only one female councillor, ensuring a firm Celtic grip on the wooden spoon. North-West Leicestershire comes bottom of the district council poll with five. There is clearly something in the air or the cocoa in Leicestershire since it props up the county council league table with eight. Redcar and Cleveland, where women edge men by 30 to 29 and Islington, where the sexes level-peg, fly the Fawcett flag for female mobility.
Jessica Crowe, the chairman of the WLGS Steering Group, says that women are put off by “macho yah-boo politics.” Quite frankly, I would give my right arm for a spot of yah-boo politics in local government, macho or not. In the current climate consensus reigns to the point of narcolepsy. To those who opine the conventional wisdom that we should not allow politics in local government my response is that before abolishing it we might at least give it a try!
Anyone who believes that women MPs (128 out of 646) are squeamish conciliators hasn’t switched the hearing aid on during Prime Minister’s Questions. And all, the tricotteuses who sat around the guillotine, were not there to exchange information on the latest fashion in revolutionary shawls!
But if women are lacking as councillors, what about their presence behind the town hall desks? I am grateful to the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives for digging up some information based on 440 of the 468 councils in the UK. This shows that there are 68 (15 per cent) of chief executives and 34 per cent of senior managers are women.
Of the 68 on the SOLACE books 34 are in districts (9 per cent; England only, of course); 7 in counties, 7 in London boroughs, 5 in Mets; 9 in new Unitaries; and – another bad Celt day – 3 in Scotland 3 in Wales. The 15-year trend has been consistently upwards.
A report by Bristol Business School entitled Room at the Top (not quite as exciting as John Braine’s “new wave” novel of 1957 whose hero (?) was….a local government officer!) blamed the relatively poor numbers of women in senior council management on institutional sexism. The study produces a 14-point action plan to develop more “gender-sensitive” local authorities and “new models” of leadership.
Of course, there are some pretty powerful women in Quangoland. My top two are Baroness Barbara Young of Old Scone, Chief Executive of that sprawling empire the Environment Agency and Dame Deidre Hutton, chairman of the Food Standards Agency whose focus is increasingly nutrition and lifestyle. I bet the Government would kill to be able to put a woman into the chair of the BBC Governors.
As for the future, I can hear the thunder of the advance of women on both public and private sector. One little statistic explains why. In 1974 there were 75,000 women university students and 145,000 men. Thirty years later 950,000 women studied at British universities. Women are storming through the legal and medical professions. The power-dressed, power-wielding, bonus-generating businesswoman who also raises a family of demography-defying size is fast becoming a legendary figure, half icon, half goddess.
The problem for local government is simple: these super-women might simply by-pass it on their way to much higher things. We had better hang on to the men – we might just need them for the lower-sort of job!
© Local Government Chronicle
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