Gender equality in UK politics has moved higher and higher up the agenda in recent years, however, scant attention has been paid to the gender balance of politically active individuals in non-elected positions. Elected representatives lean heavily upon the expertise and input of a wide range of stakeholders in the formulation and consideration of legislation and there should be a reasonable expectation that those individuals providing oral evidence to parliamentary committees developing and scrutinising legislation should be broadly representative.
My recent Politics article examined the gender breakdown of individuals providing oral evidence to committees in the National Assembly for Wales. The findings are based on analysis of the minutes of 1,036 committee meetings and asked whether descriptive or substantive representation of women was occurring.
Analysis of the overall data for female and male external non-elected participants from civil society, the public sector and the private sector demonstrate that women made up only 27% of representatives across a twelve-year period, composed of 904 appearances by women out of a total of 3,274 instances of external individuals participating in committee meetings.
The proportion of women participating fluctuated depending on the sector from which they originated, however men outnumbered female participants in each sector. The proportion of women participating in giving evidence varied significantly between committees concerned with differing policy areas, with committees covering areas that historically could be considered to be more ‘male’ concerns, such as agriculture and economic development, demonstrating the largest gap in gender representation, with female participants comprising only 19% of those giving evidence.
Most concerningly, in analysing the data, it became apparent that there was a high frequency of occurrences where no female representatives at all were called upon to provide evidence to committees. Out of 1,036 meetings analysed for this study, 338 drew evidence from men only, with no women present to give evidence in those meetings. This represents 33% of the meetings analysed in which women were not present to provide evidence. In contrast, there were only 43 occurrences in which men were not present to give evidence, which is only 4% of the total. As my article argues, this points to a level of normalisation of gender imbalance in the provision of oral evidence, and potentially reduces the quality and breadth of scrutiny.
