All the Women are Middle-Class and all the Working Class are Men

Women’s under-representation in UK politics continues to be questioned. Sometimes this is antipathy towards quotas; other times because characteristics - local non-politico - are privileged. At the male elite level an additional claim is increasingly common: that the DRW has come at the price of men’s. Logically it has - increases in women must mean fewer men. The charge is, however, more specific. First, quotas are discriminatory against men as a group, and individual (local) men. Second, class is added into the mix: m/c women have pushed w/c men out of the representational frame. It is not only that ‘all’ the women entering politics in recent years are ‘m/c’, but that it is they and not m/c men who are foreclosing opportunities for w/c men. In this, the w/c woman is lost from the story. This paper undertakes a re-reading of classic gender texts, recent work on intersectionality and representation, alongside research on class. This may in turn also illuminate race, as a marker of class. The reading is applied to public/parliamentary debates: 2010 Speaker’s Conference; 2010 Equality Act; and 2014 APPG Women In Parliament Inquiry. The paper identifies the new terms of debate, analyzing how actors constitute ‘men’s interests’, regarding descriptive, symbolic and substantive representation. It explores how the explicit introduction of class changes the debate – taking seriously ‘politics of presence’ claims for w/c men. At the same time it is sensitive to the apparently absent w/c woman, and examines the charge that the ‘w/c male under-representation’ claim is deployed less to highlight w/c men’s lack of presence, and more to undermine the presence of women – irrespective of whether they be w/c or m/c - and to undermine the main means by which the limited re-balancing of DRW in the UK has been achieved, namely quotas.