In this article, we focus only on the House of Commons.

Each grey bar represents one parliamentary term.

For example, this bar represents the first New Labour government under Tony Blair.

Let's draw a line for each woman MP's stay in parliament. For example, these are the lines for the longest-serving woman MP. Dame Margaret Beckett left parliament for a few years so she gets two separate lines.

Here are all the other women MPs. Many different women from across the political spectrum have served over the past century. Let's dive in and look at a few prominent ones.

Constance Markievicz: first woman to become an MP Sinn Féin 1918 → 1922 Dublin, St Patrick's In December 1918, Countess Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected to the House of Commons. However, she was a member of Sinn Féin and due to a party policy of abstentionism, she did not actually take her seat. A socialite-turned-revolutionary, she spent her life campaigning on behalf of working people, fought in the Easter Rising against the British, and got herself elected to the first Irish Dáil (parliament) while serving a jail sentence.

Nancy Astor: first woman to take her seat Conservative Party 1919 → 1945 Plymouth, Sutton The first woman to take her seat was MP Viscountess Nancy Astor, in 1919. Despite her 26-year tenure in parliament being met with sexism and derision from other MPs, she campaigned for lowering the voting age of women to 21, better pensions for widows, employment rights, the expansion of nursery schools, and for better representation of women in the civil sector. She arrived in the House of Commons as the only woman MP and left in 1945 as a record 24 women were elected.

Margaret Thatcher: first woman prime minister Conservative Party 1959 → 1992 Finchley In 1961, Baroness Margaret Thatcher was elected as the MP of Finchley in North London, and she led the Conservative Party to landslide victory in 1979 in one of the most important political upheavals in British history.



By breaking through the ultimate glass ceiling in British politics, Thatcher was an important role model and inspired many women to enter politics. Her overall contribution to women’s participation in politics is less certain. In her 11 years as Prime Minister, she promoted only one woman to her cabinet and did not champion any feminist causes. It took another 26 years (and four male PMs) until another woman—Theresa May—led the UK government.

Since 1918, 490 women have been elected to parliament and there are currently 209 women in the House of Commons.

The 1997 Labour Landslide The 1997 election saw a doubling in the number of women MPs, with 80 newly elected. Of these, 70 were Labour MPs (highlighted in the chart).

All Women Shortlists Half of these new Labour women MPs had been selected through All Women Shortlists (AWS, for short). The controversial decision to use AWS (a process in which only women are allowed to stand for candidate selection in certain seats) faced opposition on the grounds that it was discriminatory. Legal challenges were later nullified by legislation passed in parliament. While the merits and pitfalls of AWS are still being debated, there is no doubt that they have helped improve the representation of women in parliament.

Let's now look at how close we are to gender parity in parliament.

In 2018, there are 209 women MPs, which, while significant, is still a long way from gender parity. For every woman currently in the House of Commons, there are twice as many men.

The breakdown also varies by party. In 2018, 45% of Labour's MPs are women. In part due to all women shortlists, there are currently more women Labour MPs than all the other parties combined (and at a time when the Labour Party is in opposition).

But only 21% of current Conservative MPs are women. A Conservative landslide election could cause a significant step backwards in progress towards equal gender representation unless the party puts more women forward as parliamentary candidates in marginal seats.

For smaller parties such as the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party, women make up about a third of their ranks.

While approximately a 32% of MPs in the UK are women, it’s important to place the imbalance in context of other countries. Is the UK progressive, or does it pale in comparison to other governments in gender representation?

Visualized is the percent of women elected to other national government bodies (among OECD member countries). For Norway, this is the Stortinget. For Mexico, it's the Cámara de Diputados. For the United States, it's the House of Representatives. The Nordic countries lead in equal gender representation, although Mexico has also made great strides and is progressing much quickly than the UK despite the fact that both countries started with the same gender representation in 2002. In fact, the UK is a rather middle of the road performer. None of these countries has made it to gender parity. In fact, the only two countries in the world to meet or exceed 50% women in governing bodies are Bolivia and Rwanda, both of which also have gender quotas.

With gender parity, constituents might hope that elected officials focus on more inclusive issues. To better understand how a gender shift in the House of Commons might affect the topics debated, consider the speeches made by MPs in the main chamber. We compiled a collection of of 1.2 million speeches delivered by men and women who have served in the House of Commons since 1970, including monologues, debates, single-sentence replies, and acknowledgments. We then used a probabilistic machine learning model to help us infer the topics within a speech, looking for words that often appear together and clustering them into the same group (eg. NHS & social care, energy policy, armed forces, education, etc.) The result: a rough calculation for the fraction of time each representative has spent on an issue.

Here is the topic “economy.” Each circle represents one MP, with men on the left and women on the right. The higher the circle, the greater the proportion of their time was spent on the economy.

We can represent the difference between the median amount spent by men versus women with a line. Men and women appear to devote roughly the same amount of their speeches to the economy. Next let’s take a look at another topic, one to which women tend to devote more parliamentary time.

While welfare reform is an important topic for all MPs, women spend more than twice the amount of their speeches discussing reform than men. Now let's examine a topic favored by men: parliamentary terminology. Even when accounting for party, the result is almost exactly the same: Conservative women are as far apart from Conservative men as Labour women are from Labour men .

This time, we see that men spend twice as much time talking about parliamentary terminology. Let's take the median difference between men and women for parliamentary terminology (depicted as a line) and plot it against all other topics.

A difference of +100% (eg. “education”) means that women are twice as likely as men to refer to the topic in a speech. A difference of -100% means the opposite: men are twice as likely as women to refer to the topic in a speech. Women MPs focus more of their speeches on welfare reforms, child care, the NHS and social care. Men spend more of their speeches on legislation, energy, the European Union and the armed forces, and the disparitities exist even after accounting for party affiliation. Select a topic to examine its data more closely.