Bad news for International Women’s Day, I’m afraid. Here’s the summary of my last few posts, looking into the numbers of women standing in the Scottish elections in May. In total, less than a third of the candidates across both regional lists and constituency seats are women. The Greens are the only party to have more female than male candidates, while the Lib Dems achieve gender parity in their list candidates, but fall down badly in constituency seats.
So which party fares the best? Here’s a breakdown of gender for each party: I’ve based this on the regional lists only, to remove the duplication caused by candidates standing in both a constituency seat and on the list.
And for completeness, here’s the data for constituency seats. Note the Greens don’t have any constituency candidates.
Having done this, I now have a massive spreadsheet of all this data: let me know if there are other analyses I should be doing.
March 9th, 2011 at 9:27 am
Appreciate the points you’re making, but it would be interesting to see how the parties compare when measured against their membership.
I have no idea how other parties look, but analysis has shown SNP membership to be split 70/30 in favour of males. I think we need significantly more female members to start seeing a difference.
March 9th, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Do you have other demographic data? Would be interesting to see age, simd etc breakdown.
March 9th, 2011 at 10:09 pm
Alison, I totally agree: I did a bit of looking around a while ago to try to find out if any party had done any work on their gender breakdown, but I couldn’t find anything, which prompted a slightly irate post about the unlikeliness of women’s representation improving if no-one is even bothering to measure participation in party politics. Which is here, should anyone be interested: http://theshooglypeg.com/2010/09/25/no-answer-to-questions-that-nobodys-asking/
Andrew, afraid not, I just looked on party websites to get the names of candidates: for most I could extrapolate gender from names, and the ones I wasn’t sure about I googled.
March 18th, 2011 at 9:03 pm
There’s some information in this book – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-SNP-Protest-Power/dp/0748639918/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246871491&sr=1-1