Labour’s all women short lists

I am too interested in too much. Here are my notes.

Point No 1., the PLP is now over 50% female, so AWS will not get exemptions for the next set of selections.

All women short lists are exempted from the Equalities Act i.e. permitted to discriminate against men in §104, which limits the exemption to selection of candidates for most public offices by a registered political party.

Otherwise, I found these links,

1. All women shortlist, wikipedia, which makes the point that the pre-1997 AWS selections were illegal, and that its previous plan of mandating at least one woman on the short list didn’t work.
2. They were legalised in 2002, see All-women shortlists, by the HoC Library, is a report on the law and a look forward to the Equalities Act. This includes a table of the beneficiaries up to the point of publication.
3. All-Women Shortlists Have Starved Labour of Female Talent, an interesting & contrarian take on huffpo, but titled as clickbait, mentions Jess Phillips, Pat Glass and Emily Thornberry as beneficiaries, but the words used about Yvette Cooper are unclear. They make the point that when Labour wins big, we get more women but not so much when it does badly, although of course 2019 is an exception.
4. Yvette_Cooper’s wikipedia page, still can’t work out if she was a beneficiary or not, the HOC report above suggests not.
5. All-women shortlists save Labour from near-total male domination, from the Guardian dated 2013, reports on the NEC’s efforts to get sufficient women PPCs. There’s no doubt it causes problems i.e. resistance.