#001 FiLiA meets: 50:50 Parliament
5050 Parliament is a cross-party campaign group asking for gender equality in the Houses of Parliament.
The 50:50 Parliament #askhertostand programme encourages, advises and mentors women on their journey to becoming an MP. The group was founded by Frances Scott in 2013.
Charlie Brades-Price is a television producer and has been a member of 5050 Parliament since 2014. She makes campaign films for the group and is often seen out and about in London wearing her 5050 parliament t-shirt.
#5050Parliament #AskHerToStand
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to the FiLiA podcasts. We are the daughters of those women who came before us. It is our absolute honour to have met so many incredible women fighting for the liberation of us all. Our role at FiLiA is to amplify the voices of those women, via the FiLiA conference and these podcasts. Please take from them what you can. In sisterhood and in solidarity, the FiLiA team.
So this is Shivana and I'm sat with Charlie and this is FiLiA's very first podcast and I'm very excited to be speaking to Charlie from 50:50, hello!
C: Hello!
S: How are you doing?
C: I'm very well thank you.
S: Super excited about finding out all about 50:50 so why don't we start from there. Who are you and what do you do?
C: So, my name is Charlie Brades-Price. I’ve been working with 50:50 Parliament since 2014. By day, I’m a television producer and then on the side I campaign with Frances Scott the founder of 50:50 Parliament. I’ve made some campaign videos with them and I’ve been out campaigning with them as well so I’m an active member of the team.
S: So, what is 50:50?
C: So, 50:50 is basically a campaign group to try and get more women into Parliament. It started off with a petition asking the Government to sort it out, basically, and we got lots of signatures and lots of support. But since then, it has evolved into doing mentoring programmes and a new campaign we’ve been working on since last year called Ask her to stand, to try to support women getting into politics. So, we’re campaigning to get more representation and we’re helping women to get there and we’re just trying to spread the message about having more females represented in politics in the UK.
S: So, what does the current picture look like for women in politics?
C: In 2018, as it stands, men still outnumber women by 2:1, in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords it’s 3:1. Over the last 100 years, since women had the right to stand and vote, 4,992 people have been elected as MPs but only 489 of them have been women which is just 9.8%. When this campaign first started, we had men outnumbering women 3:1 so things are getting better since 2013, but we are still gunning for having roughly equal numbers of men and women in the House of Commons. We only need 117 more women to be elected (laughs) for us to be as an equal standing to men, so it doesn’t feel impossible.
S: What do you think are some of the main barriers to women being able to access positions of power within Parliament?
C: I think a big barrier is that to run as an MP it is estimated to cost on average about £34,000, through loss of earnings, things like childcare, travel and just general expenses while you are on the campaign trail. So, when you are trying to become an MP, you need to be campaigning, you need to be out there doing work, but you haven’t got the job yet so you are not getting paid. One of the things 50:50 does is to try and support women and give them information and access of where they might be able to get funding, how to talk to political parties about running for them and kind of nurturing them through. I think it is really basic, but I think that the patriarchy has a lot to do with it! (laughs)
S: It’s always a good start on that
C: The patriarchy is a big barrier.
S: What does that mean? De-construct that a little bit. What does that mean to people who want to.. who are politically inclined and they want to .. they have a voice and they want to share it, but for some reason they don’t see politics as being that
C: For them
S: They don’t see politics as being that for them.
C: Growing up and being socialised as a woman, you’re not necessarily taught, this is talking very averagely, but you’re not talk to come forwards, to speak up, to take leadership roles, a lot of women, often try and take up as little space as possible, often do the majority of childcare, emotional labour within a relationship and the gender pay gap, women generally get paid less than men, there’s not as many women in positions of power, the age old thing of, you can’t be what you can’t see and just kind of life as a woman, we could be here forever talking about how the patriarchy holds women back in different avenues. I think Parliament in particular is seen as an old boys club, like a huge proportion of ex Prime Ministers have come from Oxford university, privately educated, white men, is the average politician, when you think about a politician, that’s who you think of. Diversity is getting better and different voices are coming through and we do have a female Prime Minister right now so hopefully things are moving closer but it’s just about breaking down those more kind of invisible barriers as well as the visible barriers that women face. I know myself I spend half my time apologising for just entering a room. Every time I speak I feel like I have to qualify everything I say, ten times, I have to have every stat exactly, I have to have every piece of information exactly there and that does hold yourself back from putting yourself forwards because you are never as confident as you are. I read an interesting study this week about how men back themselves and you know that feminist hashtag that says back yourself as much as an average white man (laughs). And it was a thing of saying that basically men will back themselves, they will think that they are more intelligent than they are, they are cleverer than they are, much more than women do and there is the statistics are kind of crazy. And we are just so used to seeing men in power, throughout my whole life, you know, Theresa May is the first female Prime Minister I have seen in my life. There’s those old fashioned gender roles that are still hanging on.
S: I remember hearing somewhere that women express opinions, men express facts.
C: Yeah
S: And I think that is kind of true so even now, the kind of language I use, I start with, I think .. or I feel .. In my opinion .. whereas my male counterparts are like, no this is it, this is the thing, and you are like, no, that’s just your version of events, so how we own language and how we communicate is really interesting as well.
C: A lot of being a politician is being able to communicate your views and your policies and speech making, being very publically visible. In my TV career, I used to work with Russell Brown and he taught me a lot about owning your language, how saying this is how something is. Take out all the qualifiers and just tell them straight, believe in yourself and it actually taught me a lot spending time with somebody like that who was very confident in their opinions and somebody who a lot of people trust and just take their word for things. It really helped me to stop over-qualifying, apologising, saying, oh I think… or it could be this, I think I’ve heard this, I’m not quite sure. I’ll often start something with, I’m not quite sure of the statistics but… And then will rattle off a statistic and I remember working in television, I used to do political TV shows and if we were out of the office having a drink and we would start talking about policy or kind of statistics or anything like that, I would say something, and people wouldn’t believe me and then I would go home at midnight, half-drunk, looking up a statistic and then emailing it around to them and everyone is like, why have you sent me this? It’s because you didn’t believe me, that this percentage of women do this, and, yeah, it’s that kind of thing of backing yourself and pushing yourself forward.
S: What would you say to people who just turn around and say, well, women should be more confident, women should be more assertive, it takes a certain amount of skills to be a politician and women just need to push themselves, that kind of emphasis upon the individual as opposed to the wider, structural oppression, what’s your response to that?
C: I think, convincing people who aren’t already in tune with structural oppression is such a hard thing to do, and it is really difficult because often you don’t have the time to sit them down and say this is how the patriarchy works this is how engrained sexism, engrained racism, how all these power structures are set up. I think putting it on an individual is kind of not the point of 50:50 Parliament, we want to champion individuals to take part but not every woman has to be really, really confident and ready to be a politician for us to realistically say we should have equal representation of women in Parliament. We have 32 million women in this country to get the right number of women in the House of Commons, for it to be equal, we only need 117, so that is one person every hundred thousand, it doesn’t have to be everybody and the women who do want it, there are things that you can do, people you can talk to, there are places you can do to practice making speeches and learning about things and just having more visible women doing it does encourage younger people to get involved and feel like they can do it.
S: Sometimes people turn around with initiatives that push for this kind of social change, with a remark around, you are just putting people in to tick boxes, you are not putting the right person in for the role, it should be done on merit and on talent of the individual rather than on what their race is, or what their gender is, what’s your response to that?
C: Well I just think that, if you think that we are living in a meritocracy right now, then you think that white males are fundamentally better than any other demographic of human being, and that just isn’t the case. Again, it’s that convincing somebody about underlying issues of the patriarchy, of sexism of misogyny and the numbers of women that we have in this country and the diversity within those women of education of backgrounds, of ages, we have enough women and talented women to take on these roles, they are just not being given the opportunity, firstly by the political parties, they are not being pushed nearly enough, in my opinion and by their peers and people around them, teachers, and being given that opportunity to go for it and that’s not to say there are not women out there who don’t want to be politicians because there definitely are, they just need to connect with the parties and the parties need to have a real incentive to push them through.
S: And is there a particular party that you are representing?
C: No. (Laughs) So 50:50 Parliament is a cross party campaign. We have no alliance to a particular party and I think it is really important, we … whilst campaigning with 50:50 Parliament I’ve managed to spend time with people of different political persuasions. We are often all called out living in our echo chambers. I’m left-wing and I don’t think I spend much time with Conservatives, people from the right-wing, but doing 50:50 Parliament, I’ve got to know a lot of other women, you realise that the feminist cause filters throughout everything. Every woman of every demographic feels it, feels it in different ways but still feels it and has their way to get through. Getting more women in Parliament isn’t about getting a certain type of woman in Parliament, it’s about getting a diverse range of women in Parliament that represent a cross-section of womanhood and what that means and it’s quite frustrating that we’re forced into our gender binaries when we are talking about men and women because it’s never as simple as, this is a man, this is a woman, this is what they look like and I think we are already restricted by that so let’s not restrict ourselves to a particular party because we want the opportunity for women to be in Parliament, to be the goodies, to be the baddies, to be the loud ones, to be the quiet ones, to have a full-range of emotions and just show people that they are complete individuals, as men are allowed to be.
S: When .. it’s 2018, it’s in the centenary of when some women got the vote, what I find really interesting is the way in which power is shared in instalments, the fact that some women got the vote, married women of a certain age who owned property, so you are thinking about class and you are thinking about a whole range of other privileges. It’s a hundred years later, what’s your response and what do you do, to really ensure that when we talk about getting women represented, we are actually talking about women of colour, we are talking about women who are perhaps from the LGBT community, women who are disabled, everything is intersectional and Parliament needs to be as well and it’s like when you start putting people into the demographics, you see the disparity widen in certain areas, whether that’s to do with your sexuality, your race, disability and other things like that and Parliament will be a much better place if it is more diverse in every single way. The kind of great thing about womanhood is that it captures so many different parts of life. We, as human beings are so diverse and 50:50 Parliament want to make sure that it’s not white middle class women coming through because that’s kind of defeated the purpose of it. 50:50 Parliament is about equality across every section and even, you talk about 50:50 men and women, what does that really mean? It’s one of those things that we are using the binary terms, man, woman and the 50:50 to represent the ideals of the society that we live in, rather than our own personal views. Society champions men over women so we are trying to equal the playing field for women but that’s not to say that we believe that all men are as privileged as each other and all women are as privileged as each other, it’s really important to kind of understand it in those terms rather than just man, woman, like we are just toilet signs and nothing more.
S: So, say I’m interested in going into politics and I approach 50:50, what kind of support can I expect?
C: So, on the 50:50 Parliament website, which is 5050parliament.co.uk if you yourself are interested in becoming an MP, you want to run, you can follow the links and you can send your information away so you can get some mentorship and support by the wealth of experience of women that are working with 50:50 Parliament and can guide you through the process, ‘cos a lot of it is just admin stuff that people don’t get. Also, if you have any friends, family members, colleagues who you think, they would be a great MP, they should definitely get into this, in the Ask her to stand campaign there’s a click through link as well that you can put in the person you want to nominate’s details, why you want them to stand and send it through to them so they get the encouragement from 50:50 Parliament to say if you want to go through with this, we are here to help and support you and to help you along the way. Statistics have shown that women need to be asked three times, for them to run for Parliament, which is kind of crazy but apparently that is so. So, if you could get nominated by three friends then it hopefully will give people a real confidence boost and think maybe I can do this and look into it. Initially, if you want to find out about it, you don’t have to go and stand, it’s just registering your interest to say, yeah this might be something I would like to look into, what do I need to do and you can get a bigger picture. I think it’s so hard to find all the details of what I need to do to become an MP and the women working with 50:50 Parliament have experience running as MPs, experience in business, in campaigning, so many different areas, it’s such a great collection of people from all walks of life that will be able to help you and yeah I think it is a really great resource, if I was started a different career, I might have done it myself, I might even now, I do think in some years to come and it’s through working with 50:50 and meeting other women that you do get that confidence boost and it feels that it is within touching distance rather than something that would never be for you.
S: Which kind of leads me onto the final question so some women got the right to vote a hundred years ago and it’s easy to be quite cynical and to think there is so much we still need to do but it’s always nice to take a moment to acknowledge the progress that we’ve made in such a short period of time. What do you and 50:50 want from the next hundred years?
C: Do you know what, I think in terms of looking at a hundred years, it’s too far, I think 50:50 Parliament are not worried given that, there were some statistics to show that if we carry on growing the number of women in Parliament at the same rate we will be looking at potentially another hundred years before we have equal numbers of men and women in Parliament but I think it is achievable much sooner than that. You know 50:50 Parliament wont stop until there’s more women in Parliament, putting pressure on political parties and people in public life to really take notice of this and get more women’s voices heard and it is quite a straightforward campaign, you know, and our goal is Parliament and, of course, everyone in our campaign cares about other issues, there are huge issues around women in the UK and all around the world that we support and we love working with other feminist groups, but for 50:50 it’s quite simple, it’s Parliament, it’s getting more women in there, whoever you are, if you identify as a woman, we want to help you get there and those in power, we’re going to keep talking to you until it happens.
S: Charlie, it’s been so great speaking to you and I know 50:50 have been regularly attending the annual FiLiA conference, so looking forward to seeing you at this years and thank you so much for sharing your wonderful, wonderful experience and insights who knows I might look into politics myself, thank you so much.
C: Thank you!