Shirley Williams: Above all because they have to lead two lives. The difficulty about politics is that the years in which you are most likely to have to make your mark and to advance as a parliamentary candidate then on to being an MP, are the same - if you're married or have a partner - as the years when you're likely to be having and bringing up your children. That's roughly between 25 and 40 - especially now that people are marrying later or find their partner later. It's wonderful in one way but it's a hell of a handicap in another. It's just unrealistic to suppose you can run two lives as well as one. I'd add to that the fact that from my own research that if you look at the period up to the second world war almost all the women who were elected to parliament were childless widows, or single. I think Edith Summerskill was one of the very few with children. Then, in the immediate post-war years, you began to get more women MPs who were married, and now of course, the great majority of women MPs have partners and children. It just is a huge difficulty.
LK: What about the progress made by women with families in the business world?
SW: Not at the top you know - it's staggering how few women directors there are. In fact in the whole of the finance and banking sector, absolutely none. We've raised a series of questions in parliament about this and the answer is still N-O-N-E. It's just ludicrous. The overall proportion of directors of all kinds of companies - including retail where they obviously have a huge contribution to make - is still only 6%. So it's well below parliament [18%]. People always jump on politics but quite honestly, the private sector businesses are the worst in terms of discrimination.
LK: The number of women in the cabinet is striking - will that encourage more women into politics?
SW: I think Tony Blair fully intended to be woman-friendly and therefore went out on a bit of a limb on the women-only constituencies - which I actually think is a bit of a bad idea. There are other ways to do it such as introducing proportional representation (PR), which don't create the resentment that ringfencing constituencies does. We're not anywhere near PR but every PR parliament in Europe has a better proportion of women than first-past-the-post ones. Specifically because under PR you can include women in a list. And even if it's an open list, by and large the public don't do much reordering so you can give a greater priority to women. With the European elections we had the so-called "zipping" principle which meant that any list headed by a woman would have a man next, then a woman, then a man, and vice versa. So if you voted, as many people do, for a party list, which I must say I don't wholly approve of, but then a most people vote with a party under first-past-the-post. You can actually get in a much higher proportion of women in an entirely democratic way because the public can always reorder the candidates if they want to but they never do.
On the whole, the public has lost almost all its prejudice against women - the prejudice resides in parties, deeply so in some cases. You still get a great unwillingness to select a woman, and in the Conservative party to select a married woman is even harder. The assumption is that she should be at home bringing up the children and making teacakes. Even in countries like France which is particularly advanced, like Scandinavia is, you still get a substantially higher proportion of women because of the PR system. The other country which has a lousy record is the United States. Against all the other obvious criteria - if you look at business and directors, America comes out considerably higher than Britain - when you get the the Senate and Congress, the figure is just appalling. I think in the Senate it's 6% and in Congress it's 8%. Among the lowest in any democracy in the world - and that's primarily explained by first-past-the-post, it's a devastating system for women and for ethnic minorities too.
LK: Is that why there are so few Lib Dem women MPs?
SW: There are so few women Lib Dem MPs quite frankly because some of our men are prejudiced, we don't have PR, and in each constituency where you can only choose one person, what you get is ambitious young men who think they can win and are therefore quite likely to block women candidates because they are getting in their way. And if you try to introduce, as we have done, measures to help women with additional training and all the rest of it it doesn't get you very far. The thing that got us a long way was adopting the PR system for Europe. Out of our 11 MEPs, five are women. The only reason we have six and not five men is because Jim Newton-Dunn was a Conservative and joined us voluntarily. The funny thing is that people hang on to our current voting system despite the fact that the evidence is overwhelming that it's prejudicial against women. It's a bit like the way all the political parties fought women's suffrage at the time - it was the first world war that actually brought women's suffrage not the politicians.
The other key thing is that there is still considerable prejudice against women. If I take my own case, there were three clubs for rising Labour members of parliament when I was a Labour MP, and for rising Social Democrats when I was a Social Democrat, and I wasn't invited to join any of them, because the thought of having a woman member of such clubs - which were dining clubs essentially- was considered too much of an innovation. Men are very clubby and they don't much like women to be part of the club - they find them scatty and tedious.
LK: Have things improved since you got involved in politics?
SW: A bit. I'm now a member of what's called the other club, because they decided to break their life-long male rule and they invited Winston Churchill's daughter Lady Soames and I to grace this club, which otherwise consists of everybody you've ever heard of: Ken Clarke and Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins and so on. She and I were invited to show everyone how openminded they were.
The day-to-day style of the House of Commons is roughly as adversarial as a football game. And very similar in many ways, because you have this intense tribalism, you've got people shrieking their heads off when their chap scores a goal and boo when the other chap scores. It's ludicrous really, it's like a football match in a not-very-well-ordered public school, and I think women are appalled by that mostly. A few take to it - people like Barbara Castle really enjoyed it - but not many do. Here in the House of Lords, you find that people are very polite and never make personal attacks - if they do they're hissed at - and you get women like Liz Symons or Baroness Scotland, or Baroness Amos who blossom and it's amazing. It's funny in a way because it's a more old-fashioned style but it's one which women take to more. I think the extremely adversarial style in the UK puts a hell of a lot of women off and incidentally puts a lot of women voters off. All the evidence suggests that the voters slightly prefer women as they think they are more honest and more approachable. I think when you put that against the background of the tribalism of men, it's clear what the electorate prefers, and increasingly so. I think also that television and radio have a huge amount invested in making politics as adversarial as possible.
LK: Someone like Estelle Morris didn't fit into that adversarial style ... and was prepared to say so.
SW: Yes, in fact I think she was a good education secretary and I think she would have grown into a much better one.
LK: What should we learn from her departure?
SW: I think we learn that women are much less likely to brazen it out if they think they've got something wrong. She's not the only one - if you go back in time you find that quite often it's not so much admitting not being up to the job as she did (and I think she was up to it) it's people - and it's all too typical that it's Clare Short who's the first person to come to the edge of resignation. If you look back at all the major issues it's almost always been women who've resigned on points of principle. They tend to be boat-rockers. I resigned, Barbara Castle threatened to resign, Eirene White and I threatened to resign over the immigration 1968 bill , the one which brought in the east African Asians. There are men who do - Lord Carrington over the Falklands - but it's more unusual.
The history which I followed fairly closely, is fairly consistently one of women being more likely to resign than men on issues of principle
LK: Why do you think women are more likely to resign?
SW: Because I think they're less anchored into the career. In the end, as Roy [Jenkins] said about himself, if you have a hinterland your ambition isn't all you're about. I think for most women - especially those with families - there's a hinterland and therefore they don't have absolutely everything invested in the advancement of their career. I suspect that the kind of man who's extremely happy in his home life, has lots of kids, is probably less likely to be shaken to bits by having to resign, may even enjoy it.
LK: What about Clare Short's case?
SW: She's a strong example of that. What's so wonderful about her is that she's so blunt and outspoken and she doesn't pussyfoot around. The only question, I suppose, is whether she should have waited until it was so [and war had begun]. Or whether she was right to say it in advance.
LK: Do you think attitudes to her would be different if she was a man?
SW: Yes, I think it would be different. She has built herself a tradition of speaking out and that happens quite often with women MPs. I think Barbara Castle did the same - she was the one who was able to say things that were not normally said - and that probably protects them a bit because they become a person the public knows and recognises - the public gets fed up to the back teeth with the absolutely predictable answer given to the absolutely predictable question. If you play it cleverly, you can make yourself sufficiently loved by the public to make yourself a difficult person to sack, and I think that's exactly where Clare's at. Although one mustn't forget and get dewy eyed about it - look at Mo Mowlam, she was hugely popular and Blair got away with sacking her relatively easily, sending her off to the airlock known as the Cabinet Office - it's where you go before getting chucked off the plane. It's surprising there wasn't more outrage as she was pushed across and then dropped - it was fairly ruthless I think.
LK: Lastly, who have you been most impressed by in terms of female politicians
SW: Much as I disagree with most of her policies, Margaret Thatcher's achievements by any standards are remarkable, simply as a woman,
LK: She did have young children early in her political career ...
SW: She did have a rich husband, which helped a lot - she could afford nannies and so on. But I don't want to detract from her achievement because she came from a school where almost no one went to Oxbridge, she took two degrees in no time flat in chemistry and law and she had her twins within weeks of the law exams. I didn't like her policies and in some aspects she could be very inhumane, but she was somebody with the most colossal political will. She was almost tripped up because she was landed with the milk scandal - she was actually carrying the baggage for the chancellor, Anthony Barber, who neatly avoided all controversy and let it all land on her - not unknown by the by, it happens to women quite a bit - but she survived that, which is also rather remarkable.
The other one is Barbara Castle I have to say. Barbara was a bonny fighter by any example. Although she was well to the left and her politics were often emotional, she was a staggering fighter and fought against increasing physical incapacity ... watching her come into the House of Lords, bent almost double and then as she rose to speak on something like the inadequacy of pensions, you could almost see her catch fire and she would suddenly turn back into Queen Elizabeth I. The sheer commitment and passion about particular things - the fire just caught her it was astonishing when she was 90, you could see her bolting into battle like a female El Cid.
LK: What about in parliament now?
SW: Invidious. I shan't say. I think they're all a bit too new and one has to wait a bit and see how they work out. There are several who are going places, but I won't name them just yet.
LK: Before PR, under the current system that we have, what can the Lib Dems do to boost female representation?
SW: The key thing is to persuade men, and they're increasingly learning this lesson, that family responsibilities must be equally shared as far as possible.
