The UK used to have a gender-specific code of conduct for local government, overseen by an independent body which had the power to suspend councillors. But this was discarded under the 2010 coalition government’s ‘Red Tape Challenge’. It is now up to each local authority to decide which standards to set and how to enforce them. The government’s recommendations for how this should be done included only one vague reference to promoting ‘high standards of conduct’ and did not mention non-discrimination at all.83 There is no longer any clear mechanism by which councillors can be suspended for non-criminal misconduct.84
It is unsurprising then that by 2017, when the Fawcett Society produced a report on local government, the women’s charity found ‘a harmful culture of sexism in parts of local government politics which would not be out of place in the 1970s’, where ‘sexism is tolerated, and viewed as part of political life’, and where almost four in ten women councillors have had sexist remarks directed at them by other councillors.85 One female councillor described ‘a culture of demeaning younger women and dismissing the contribution that women make’. A women’s group was described as ‘the wives club’; a dinner with a senior national political speaker ‘was promoted as an opportunity for ‘the wives’ to dress up’. When she and a fellow female colleague challenged the behaviour they were described as ‘aggressive’, and ‘referred to by demeaning, sexist nicknames’. Her emailed questions have gone ignored; she has been excluded from meeting notifications; and she described her contributions to discussions as ‘tolerated rather than welcomed’. On social media her own party colleagues told her to ‘run away little girl and let the grown-ups do their job’.
There are two central points to take away from this section. The first is that when you exclude half the population from a role in governing itself, you create a gender data gap at the very top. We have to understand that when it comes to government the ‘best’ doesn’t have to mean ‘those who have the money, the time and the unearned confidence from going to the right school and university’. The best when it comes to government means the best as a whole, as a working group. And in that context, the best means diversity. Everything we’ve seen so far in this book shows us without a doubt that perspective does matter. The data accrued from a lifetime of being a woman matters. And this data belongs at the very heart of government.
Which leads to the second point: the data we already have makes it abundantly clear that female politicians are not operating on a level playing field. The system is skewed towards electing men, which means that the system is skewed towards perpetuating the gender data gap in global leadership, with all the attendant negative repercussions for half the world’s population. We have to stop wilfully closing our eyes to the positive discrimination that currently works in favour of men. We have to stop acting as if theoretical, legal equality of opportunity is the same as true equality of opportunity. And we have to implement an evidence-based electoral system that is designed to ensure that a diverse group of people is in the room when it comes to deciding on the laws that govern us all.
PART VI
When it Goes Wrong
CHAPTER 15
Who Will Rebuild?
When Hillary Clinton wanted to speak about women’s rights at the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, even her own side was dubious.1 ‘People were saying: “This is a not an important issue for the US government, it’s a nice thing and I’m glad you care about it, but if the First Lady of the United States goes and actually speaks about women’s rights, that elevates an issue that in the midst of everything else going on – the collapse of the USSR and the transition of the former Soviet states and Warsaw Pact nations and Rwanda and Bosnia, there was so much else going on in the world – maybe you should speak about it from afar.”’ As we will see (and as the US administration already knew at the time) what was ‘going on’ in Rwanda and Bosnia was the mass and systematic rape of women.
When things go wrong – war, natural disaster, pandemic – all the usual data gaps we have seen everywhere from urban planning to medical care are magnified and multiplied. But it’s more insidious than the usual problem of simply forgetting to include women. Because if we are reticent to include women’s perspectives and address women’s needs when things are going well, there’s something about the context of disaster, of chaos, of social breakdown, that makes old prejudices seem more justified. And we’re always ready with an excuse. We need to focus on rebuilding the economy (as we’ve seen, this is based on a false premise). We need to focus on saving lives (as we will see this is also based on false premise). But the truth is, these excuses won’t wash. The real reason we exclude women is because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest.
The failure to include women in post-disaster efforts can end in farce. ‘They built houses without any kitchens,’ Maureen Fordham, a professor of disaster resilience, tells me. It was 2001, and an earthquake had just hit Gujarat, a state in western India. Thousands of people died and nearly 400,000 homes were destroyed. So new homes were needed, but Gujarat’s rebuilding project had a major data gap: women weren’t included or even consulted in the planning process. Hence the kitchenless homes. In some confusion I ask Fordham how people were expected to cook. ‘Well, quite,’ she replies, adding that the homes were also often missing ‘a separate area that’s usually attached to a house where the animals are kept’, because animal care isn’t on the whole a male responsibility. ‘That’s women’s work.’
If this sounds like an extreme one-off, it isn’t. The same thing happened in Sri Lanka four years later.2 It was after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which swept across the coasts of fourteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean, killing a quarter of a million people in its wake. And just like in Gujarat, Sri Lanka’s rebuilding programme didn’t include women, and, as a result, they built homes without kitchens. A related issue arises in refugee camps when humanitarian agencies distribute food that must be cooked – but forget to provide cooking fuel.3
The US has a similar history of forgetting about women in post-disaster relief efforts. Fordham tells me about the redevelopment scheme set up in Miami following 1992’s Hurricane Andrew. ‘They called it “We Will Rebuild”.’ The problem was, the ‘we’ who were planning the rebuilding were nearly all men: of the fifty-six people on the decision-making board (reportedly an ‘invitation-only group of Miami insiders’4) only eleven were women.