Gender balance in politics
This explainer takes a closer look at how women are represented in parliament, cabinet, the civil service and among ministers and special advisers.
Gender balance in parliament
What is the current gender balance in parliament?
At the 2024 general election, 263 women were elected to the House of Commons (out of a total of 650 MPs) – the highest ever proportion of women MPs. Of the 335 MPs elected for the first time in 2024, 129 (39%) were women.
The House of Lords has 242 female peers, but they represent a smaller proportion – 30% – of the house (804 sitting peers).
How does the gender balance in parliament vary by party?
Some parties have higher proportions of female MPs than others. The Labour Party has a higher proportion of female MPs (46%) than any of the major parties in the Commons, beaten only by the Green Party and Plaid Cymru (which each have three female MPs and one male MP) and the SDLP (which has one male MP and one female MP).
Other parties have a much lower proportion of female MPs. Just under a quarter of Conservative MPs are women, while there are no female Reform UK MPs and just one woman among the nine SNP MPs. Despite a higher than usual number of independent MPs, all six independents are male.
How has the gender balance in parliament changed over time?
There has been steady increase over time in the House of Commons. Constance Markievicz was the first woman elected to parliament in 1918, but as a member of Sinn Féin, did not take her seat.
The first woman to sit in parliament was Nancy Astor, elected in 1919. It was not until 1987 that women exceeded 5% of MPs. Since then, the number of female MPs has grown rapidly, reaching 34% after the 2019 general election and 40% by 2024. The largest jumps were at the 1997 election when the proportion of women MPs doubled from 9% to 18%, and at the 2015 election when it rose from 22% to 30%.
Across devolved governments there has been a more varied pattern of growth. The Northern Ireland assembly has followed a similar trajectory to the UK House of Commons, with the proportion of female members rising from a low of 13% in 1998 to 35% in 2022. By contrast, while the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd have always had a higher proportion of female members, they have not seen the same steady pattern of growth. Senedd Cymru is the only legislative body in the UK that has ever had gender parity, with half of the members elected in 2003 women, but this proportion has since fallen to 46% (still higher than that of the House of Commons). 8 Senedd Research, ‘Election 2021 How diverse is the Sixth Senedd?’, 11 May 2021, retrieved 19 December 2023, research.senedd.wales/research-articles/election-2021-how-diverse-is-the-sixth-senedd/
What is being done to achieve gender balance in parliament?
The election of more women to parliament is contingent on more women choosing to, and being selected to, run for parliament. While there are many factors that affect who decides to run and the barriers to becoming a candidate for MP, specific measures have been introduced to try and make parliament both more accessible and attractive to prospective women MPs.
One important development has been changes to the support given to MPs with caregiving responsibilities. For example, a pilot scheme was introduced in January 2019 to allow for proxy voting for MPs on parental leave, meaning that MPs who have new-born or newly adopted children can still participate in parliamentary votes. This reform has now been made permanent. In November 2019, Stella Creasy became the first MP to appoint a locum for her maternity cover. She has continued to campaign for MPs on parental leave to have all their duties in parliament covered during their absence, as is now the case for government ministers, according to the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act 2021. Creasy has also supported more mothers entering politics via a campaign called This Mum Votes and has argued for mothers to be allowed to bring their babies into the House of Commons.
There have also been changes, in 2005 and 2012, to the House of Commons sitting hours. In the 1980s and 1990s, over 25% of sitting days would extend beyond midnight, but in the year following the 2017 election, this only happened three times. This makes working in parliament easier for those with caregiving responsibilities.
Some other countries employ electoral quotas to promote more female candidates in elections. These are easier to implement in nations with proportional representation systems. While this is not the case in the UK, political parties have been permitted to use shortlists comprised only of women in the selection of candidates for elections since the 2002 Sex Discrimination Act. So far only the Liberal Democrats and Labour have implemented this. However, other parties do have initiatives to encourage women to run for office, including the Conservatives’ Women to Win support network, which was launched in 2005.
How does the UK compare to other nations?
While the UK has some way to go to achieve gender parity in parliament, it does rank fairly well in comparison to other nations. The UK ranks 25th in the world for the proportion of women in the lower house of parliament – 11th in Europe – and has the highest proportion among G7 nations, up from third before the 2024 general election.
Gender balance among ministers
What is the current gender balance among ministers?
There are currently 22 full members of the cabinet and five other ministers who attend cabinet meetings. Half of the members of cabinet are women (48% when attendees are included) – the highest proportion ever. The women in cabinet are:
- Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister and secretary of state for housing, communities and local government
- Rachel Reeves, chancellor of the exchequer – the first woman to occupy that post
- Yvette Cooper, home secretary
- Shabana Mahmood, justice secretary
- Bridget Phillipson, education secretary and minister for women and equalities
- Liz Kendall, work and pensions secretary
- Heidi Alexader, transport secretary
- Lisa Nandy, culture secretary
- Jo Stevens, Wales secretary
- Lucy Powell, leader of the House of Commons
- Baroness Smith of Basildon, leader of the House of Lords
- Anneliese Dodds, minister for development and minister for women and equalities (attends cabinet)
- Ellie Reeves, minister without portfolio in the Cabinet Office (attends cabinet).
Across the government as a whole, there are 60 female ministers, meaning that a majority of ministers are women for the first time ever.
There are similar proportions of female ministers in the devolved administrations too. Before the resignations leading up to Vaughan Gething’s resignation as first minister, 64% of Welsh Government ministers were women and women made up 55% of the cabinet. Similarly, 52% of Scottish Government ministers are female, including 73% of John Swinney’s cabinet. Finally, six of the twelve Northern Ireland Executive ministers are women, including both the first minister and the deputy first minister.
How has the gender balance among ministers changed over time?
Progress towards gender equality within government has never been uniform and the number of women at every level of government has fluctuated significantly over the past two decades.
The first woman to become a cabinet minister was Margaret Bondfield, who served as minister of Labour between 1929 and 1931 during Ramsay Macdonald’s premiership. Tony Blair’s 1997 cabinet was the first to include more than two women simultaneously. 10 Watson C, Uberoi E, Mutebi N, Bolton P, Danechi S, Women in Politics and Public Life, 2 March 2021, commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01250
Before 2024, the closest the cabinet had come to gender parity was under Gordon Brown when, in 2008, 10 of the 28 ministers (36%) attending cabinet were women. The lowest proportion since 1997 was early in the coalition government when just four out of 28 (14%) cabinet attendees were women. More than one-third of Liz Truss’ cabinet were women (35%), but this proportion fell to 29% upon Rishi Sunak’s entry into office.
What has been done to achieve gender balance among ministers?
The prime minister decides on ministerial appointments and it has always been possible, at least in theory, for a PM to prioritise gender balance when appointing their government. However, recent Conservative prime ministers have been constrained by the relatively low proportion of female Conservative MPs (25% in the 2019–24 parliament), which had limited the pool of women from which to appoint ministers. This is less of a problem for the Labour Party as nearly half (46%) of the party’s MPs are women.
One important development in increasing the number of female ministers was the introduction of the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act 2021. This was designed to allow the attorney general Suella Braverman to take six months of paid maternity leave. During this period, another minister (Michael Ellis – previously the solicitor general) was appointed to cover her functions and responsibilities.
Former female ministers have spoken about the prejudices they have faced in the role. Jacqui Smith, the first woman to be home secretary, reflected that after the 7/7 terrorist attack in London, “The thing that people most often said to me about my public performance that weekend was ‘You appeared… you seemed very calm and reassuring.’ Now there is a certain subtext there, which is ‘You were the first female home secretary and […] we partly thought you would go in, there would be a terror attack and you’d come out shouting ‘I can’t manage it, bring a man in’.” Since Smith’s tenure, half of the subsequent eight home secretaries have been women.
Margaret Beckett, the first, and until September 2021 the only, woman foreign secretary, also felt that she experienced discrimination in her role: “I remember one of the women, a fairly senior woman, saying to me, ‘You do realise that there are people in the Foreign Office who don’t think a woman should be foreign secretary?’ Which at that stage in the day would never have occurred to me.”
Jo Swinson, who served as women and equalities minister during the coalition, spoke of the importance of representation and role models: “It’s not as if you can’t have a male role model, but it is just easier as a woman to look at other women. And, of course, there are not that many women minsters.”