Rebecca McQuillan: How do we neuter the misogynist backlash against women at the top?

May, Sturgeon, Foster, Davidson, Dugdale, Swinson, Wood and Lucas – never before have women held so many leadership roles in British politics.

The televised election debates of last month provided telling tableaux. North and south of the border, the number of women typically equalled or exceeded the number of men (in spite of Theresa May’s no-show).

The Prime Minister, First Minister and SNP leader (Nicola Sturgeon), Scottish Tory leader (Ruth Davidson), Scottish Labour leader (Kezia Dugdale), DUP leader, now Commons power broker (Arlene Foster), deputy leader of the Lib Dems and heir presumptive to the leadership (Jo Swinson), Plaid Cymru chief (Leanne Wood) and Green Party co-leader and sole MP (Caroline Lucas), not to mention the leader of Sinn Fein Northern Ireland (Michelle O’Neill), have comprehensively demolished the glass ceiling.

Significant? You could say that. It’s a state of affairs that the weary footsoldiers of feminism could once only dream of: role models left, right and centre to show young women and girls that politics is for them. As the former Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont puts it: “As a young girl, if you’d said to me that this could happen, I would have been highly, highly sceptical.”

Margaret Thatcher habituated the British public to government run by Margaret Thatcher, not by women in general, failing, infamously, to promote female colleagues. The phalanx of women now occupying top jobs in politics represent a much more profound shift.

So is this equality? Hell no. The advance of women to the top of politics has been accompanied by a misogynist renaissance in Britain, the US and other supposedly progressive democracies that is part of a wider anti-liberal backlash. Women wielding executive power are its prime targets.

That is not to say the tide of progress is going out – for the wider voting public, having women political leaders has become normal, more likely to illicit a shrug than a frown, and casual sexism is becoming less socially acceptable. But women’s detractors are vocal on social media and emboldened by their tubthumper-in-chief, Donald Trump, who has mainstreamed misogyny to an extent that would not have been thought possible 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, women in politics are still outnumbered by men. Progress towards gender parity in our elected bodies, be they councils or parliaments, has stalled.

If the unprecedented feminisation of political leadership is not to go down in history as a passing curiosity before male-dominated business as usual resumes, then campaigners agree that more women must be brought into politics, by affirmative action if necessary, to become the leaders of tomorrow. Real and lasting diversity in parliament is likely to be the best way to overcome the reactionary bile women in politics must currently endure.

Of course, it’s not all slog. The mainstream media is more careful than ever not to use gendered insults or imagery about political leaders, though naturally that doesn’t stop the Daily Mail. Its “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!” headline, following a tense meeting between the country’s two pre-eminent leaders, Sturgeon and May, prompted weary sighs among women all over the country.

More worryingly, there are still jaw-dropping lapses even in the liberal, left-leaning press. Jo Swinson, the recently re-elected MP for East Dumbartonshire, points to an “undercurrent of misogyny” which female politicians face. Sometimes these draw on old-fashioned tropes such as the mother, whore or wicked stepmother, or attack women over their looks.

One example is the New Statesman cover which featured four prominent women – Sturgeon, May, Merkel and the then-Labour leadership candidate Liz Kendall – standing round a cot containing a ballot box and asking why so many women leaders had no children. Ms Sturgeon called the image (though not the article) “crass” and tweeted: “Jeezo ... we appear to have woken up in 1965 this morning!” Ruth Davidson’s response to the cover was more direct: “Oh do sod off.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Theresa May’s spectacular failure on June 8, followed by her shortcomings responding to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, did not prompt the usual sexist invective (though there was that very public Twitter put-down by JK Rowling of writer John Niven for calling Mrs May a “whore”).

Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, takes scant comfort from this: “Misogyny is aimed at women when they are doing well, like Stella Creasy [the Labour MP who forced the government to fund Northern Irish women seeking abortions] and Jess Phillips [the outspoken Labour star]. They are the ones who are targeted because it is about silencing them. If May had made herself into more of a feminist figure to start with, she might have had more of it.”

Swinson says that she has become more aware of sexism in her own political life as she has become more senior, probably, she believes, because women with power are more threatening.

She has had her share of abuse (the spikes tend to occur around her Question Time appearances, she reveals) but notes that it is worse for gay, black or Muslim women, who face discrimination on multiple levels. Diane Abbott was subjected to gleeful derision even from left-leaning sources following her disastrous and much-replayed election interview on police pay. Swinson believes the abuse was so intense because of elements of sexism and racism behind it. “Diane Abbott gave a really bad interview but then Jeremy Corbyn did too, Boris Johnson did, without getting the same abuse.”

This, of course, reflects the experience of women in other public spaces. The Reclaim the Internet campaign was launched last year by Labour’s Yvette Cooper, Swinson, Phillips and Tory Maria Miller to tackle online abuse and particularly misogyny. Its research showed that in a three-week period last spring, 6,500 people were targeted with aggressive tweets featuring the words “whore” or “slut”. Women and non-white writers are much more likely to be trolled and abused online than white men. The feminist Caroline Criado-Perez received rape and death threats after her victory in having Jane Austen’s image put onto a British banknote. The list goes on.

So in spite of the progress that has been made, women in the public eye, particularly those discussing equality issues, are contending with misogyny, some of it blatant and unrepentant, some of it insidious.

This in turn has prompted a clamorous feminist counter-attack, characterised by women’s marches, slut marches and online mobilisation. Campaigners are challenging the stereotypes and language around women.

The latest manifestation of this is a bid to reclaim the term “witch”. In a new book, Witches, Sluts and Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, feminist author Kristin J Sollee draws parallels between these three groups and their impulse for “self-sovereignty… sexual and intellectual freedom”.

Women persecuted as witches in the early modern period were typically those who existed outside male control, such as unmarried older women living alone who had healing powers and standing in their community. Fast forward 350 years and their equivalent is Hillary Clinton, maligned, as Sollee notes, by arch Republicans and Bernie Sanders’ fans who used the slogan “Bern the witch”. (Clinton was also accused of having a “vagenda of manocide” by one Maine gunsmith whose meme went viral, but the camp absurdity of it caused so much mirth in Hillary-supporting circles, they forgot to be offended.)

Sollee wants to see women turn the insults into empowering slogans, reclaiming the archetype of the witch because it “connects us to a lineage of resistance”.

Her message is: don’t be cowed.

But of course, some women are.

Jess Smith, an expert on British political leadership and gender doing doctoral research at Birkbeck College, notes that studies show women are more likely than men to say that the way the media represents them, and the impact this could have on their family, is a worry in elected office.

She suspects that some women are being put off politics as a potential career because of it.

Yet unless women do consider elected office, then the progress of gender equality will grind to a halt.

The visibility of women in high political office belies serious underrepresentation further down. Women make up 52% of the population, but only 35% of MSPs, 32% of MPs, 34% of Scottish MPs and 29% of councillors. In some respects, progress has gone into reverse – while the Scottish Cabinet has gender parity, six out of 23 UK Cabinet ministers are women, down from the eight out of 23 in May’s first Cabinet (though no one could criticise any prime minister for demoting Andrea Leadsom).

Smethers believes that the parties are lagging badly behind public opinion, which – cybersexists aside – are demanding parliaments, councils and assemblies that better reflect the diversity of their own communities.

“I think things are better for women than they were 25 years ago. On the plus side, we have more than 200 women in parliament and some of them are fantastic, so it’s not just quantity, but quality. It is important symbolically that we have these women in positions of power. There is an acceptance that diversity makes for better decision-making.

“But the processes and structures are not improving. The slow, slow progress we are seeing in improving gender balance is because we are not changing the processes that deliver change.” All parties have tried in different ways to address the shortage of women, she notes, but the softly softly approach has not worked. Only 21% of Tory MPs are women. By contrast, 45% of Labour MPs are, because the party has been prepared to use all-women shortlists. At Holyrood, some 43.5% of Labour MSPs are women, a shade more than the SNP, compared to 22.5% for the Tories.

Swinson was once firmly opposed to all-women shortlists, but has reached the conclusion that they are necessary, praising Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie’s efforts to introduce them in winnable seats. They were used in Scotland in the 2017 election and the Lib Dems have now improved their previously woeful performance on gender balance in the Commons, going from zero women MPs to four, or 33% overall, (though all five of its MSPs are men).

Jess Smith believes that without decisive action, the advances of recent years will be put at stake: “Women’s progress is not linear and I think it’s really dangerous to assume that it is. You see statistics saying that there will be 50:50 gender balance in parliament by 2070 but that assumes that we carry on at the rate we are when in fact progress is slowing. This latest House of Commons is hailed as the most diverse ever, but every time you put just one woman or person of colour in parliament, then it becomes more diverse. We only got 12 more women in this election and that’s minimal in terms of what we need.”

All women shortlists can make a material difference quickly, but Johann Lamont points to another problem that needs addressing, namely the tendency of women politicians to shape themselves to politics rather than changing politics better to reflect them: “I think Scottish politics is a bit mean just now, so the challenge to those women in leadership roles is to think about what you are saying to young women. I think my 22-year-old daughter is very proud of seeing all these women in politics, but I fear the message coming across is that you have to be as hard as nails.”

So there are challenges aplenty: misogyny, subtle discrimination, the off-putting nature of combative politics and that’s without even considering the mighty practical barriers women face to becoming MPs, especially if they have caring roles. But in spite of it all, women are in the ascendancy – let’s savour that thought for a moment – and if that’s possible, then, surely, anything is.