All-women shortlist
All-women shortlists (AWS) is an affirmative action practice intended to increase the proportion of female Members of Parliament (MPs) in the United Kingdom, allowing only women to stand in particular constituencies for a particular political party.
[5] Following polling that suggested women were less likely to vote Labour than men, the party introduced All-women shortlists at their 1993 annual conference.
[3][6] Labour used all-women shortlists to select candidates in half of all winnable seats for the 1997 general election, with the aim of reaching 100 female MPs post-election; a goal that was achieved.
In 1996, Labour Party branches in Croydon Central, Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney, Bishop Auckland and Slough all submitted hostile motions criticising the policy.
[11] In January 1996, an industrial tribunal found the Labour Party had broken the law, unanimously ruling that all-women shortlists were illegal under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 in preventing men from entering a profession.
[23] At the 2005 general election, the shortlists helped to increase the number of female MPs in Parliament to 128, with the Labour Party's 98 women constituting 77% of the total.
[1][15][24] However, a Labour-controlled "safe seat" was lost when explicitly anti-AWS independent candidate Peter Law won the Blaenau Gwent constituency in Wales beating Maggie Jones who had been selected using Labour's All-women shortlist policy.
[30] In October 2009, David Cameron stated that the under-representation of women and ethnic minorities was "a real problem for Parliament and for my party", and reversed his opposition to AWS.
[31] In 2009, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg stated that he would consider introducing all-women shortlists if the number of female MPs did not increase following the next election, but he did not see this as a long-term solution for the unrepresentative nature of parliament.
Although 51% of Labour MPs are now women, the lack of any stop mechanism in party rules[35] means preferential AWS shortlists may continue this rise until the legal exception sunsets in 2030.
The Liberal Democrats held the highest percentage of any party's female MPs represented despite a small increase in the number of first-time members elected, which was the case for the SNP.
After Labour was warned that continuing with all-women shortlists for parliamentary elections would become an "unlawful" practice again under the Equality Act (because the majority of their MPs are female), HuffPost reported that the party abandoned them in March 2022.
[44] The Liberal Party and the NDP at both federal and provincial levels started to set targets to increase the number and percentage of female candidates in the 1990s and used informal and internal mechanisms toward that goal.
Del Duca further mandated party officials to prioritize designating "target ridings", namely districts with retiring incumbent and where it previously held while in government, as women-only.
[45][46] Similarly, some critics argue that quotas in corporations in addition to those in governing bodies, should be instituted among other measures to improve public and private sector career opportunities for women.
[45] However, other critics believe that gender quota policies, like those of which all-women shortlists represent a subset, do not, no matter their requirements, provide a way for women to achieve equality in government.
[46] More specifically, these critics assert that even when women do run for office under quota systems, they face a lack of monetary support and as a result often do not win elections.
