Where are the women in British politics?

Despite the promise of the 1997 general election, the UK still has fewer female MPs than Cambodia

On the eve of the big breakthrough for women in the 1997 general election, when female MPs broke the magical 100 barrier, I was in Ethiopia, running a workshop on behalf of the British Council on women in politics. On my way to Addis Ababa airport to catch a flight home to London, I made a pilgrimage to the grave of suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, in the garden of the Holy Trinity Church near the grave of her great friend, Emperor Haile Selassie.

I placed a red flower on her tomb in deference to her socialist beliefs, making a wish that in the upcoming election, for the first time in British history, at least 100 women would be elected to the House of Commons. A record 121 women were elected.

The leap forward was due to a big swing to Labour, combined with the fact that the party had bravely introduced controversial all-female shortlists for winnable seats with no Labour incumbents. This was about the only type of quota system available in our first-past-the-post electoral system.

If I were to make a wish that at the next general election at least 200 women would be elected, I would be disappointed.

In 1928, when the Equal Franchise Act was passed, it raised among British women huge hopes that quite soon they would become equal participants with men in the House of Commons. Eighty years on, the UK parliament rates a poor 69th in the world league of women in parliament, one ignoble place below Cambodia.

Women's representation in politics is not linked to whether a country is rich or poor. The United States has 16.8% women representatives. Japan has 9.4% women in the Diet. Rwanda, with 48.8%, and Sweden, with 47%, have the highest representation of women in any parliament in the world, versus the UK at just over 19% women MPs. Countries ranked above the UK in the world league include Afghanistan, Australia, Rwanda, Belarus, Pakistan, New Zealand and 27 other European states, including far, far ahead of us, the Scandinavian countries.

Spain comes a commendable fifth in the European Women in Politics League with 36.3% female MPs. More than half of Spanish cabinet ministers are women.

If this were a soccer league, we'd keep firing the manager until the UK clambered up to a top position. The facts on the ground show that if the Conservative party wins the next election, the percentage of women in the mother of parliaments is likely to tumble even more shamefully lower down the league. For more than a quarter of a century, the political parties have said, repetitively and routinely, that they want to increase the number of female MPs. Party leaders have simply not delivered the goods. There is still only one woman in every five MPs.

I have learned from campaigning and working on equal representation of women in politics in more than 40 countries that encouragement, lobbying and training are helpful, but progress is too slow. As Helena Kennedy would say: "It's like waiting for fish to grow feet."

One look around the world shows that in politics, no actions, let alone exhortation, will ever succeed without some form of quota as a perhaps temporary breakthrough measure. The 20 countries with more than 30% women in parliament share two things in common: their electoral system uses some form of proportional representation and they use quotas.

Elections after a major upheaval can be a swift catalyst for reform and throwing off the baggage of the past. Five countries currently with more than 30% women in their legislatures took such an opportunity to introduce radical reforms: Rwanda, Mozambique, Uganda and Burundi after wars and South Africa after Apartheid. In the United Kingdom, major constitutional and devolution reforms led to the first Scottish parliament in more than 300 years, and a Welsh assembly. Women activists in the Labour party seized the chance and lobbied hard for quotas to be introduced into the party candidate selection system. The Scottish parliament now has 33.3% women members and the Welsh assembly 46.7% women members. At one point there was even an exact gender balance of female and male assembly members and more than half the Welsh assembly ministers were female. Before the reforms, only one in 20 Welsh local councillors was a woman.

Our party leaders have taken a few hesitant steps in the right direction, but so far it has been all foreplay. They need greater courage to go all the way in both chambers of parliament. David Cameron's first promise when he became Conservative party leader was to increase the number of women MPs in the party from the current 17 out of 180 Conservatives. Shadow leader of the House, Theresa May, has been touring the country working hard to carry out her leader's pledge, but at the current rate of candidate selection, even a major swing to the Conservatives would most likely only result in a handful more Tory women MPs at most.

Lib Dems, long-term supporters of reforming the voting system from first-past-the-post to PR, threw away their chances of becoming a truly representative political party by slamming the door on equal representation of women and men MPs at a party conference a few years ago, when they voted against the introduction of gender balanced quotas in their candidate selection system. To try to compensate for this disastrous vote, party activists upped the amount of training and encouragement for women budding politicians and targeted extra cash and resources at constituencies with female candidates. The results are not encouraging. Out of the 54 Lib Dem MPs, nine are women. At the next general election, Liberal Democrats are likely to deliver little or no increase in women – given a fair wind, they might increase their number of female MPs by a couple.

There is only one way most of us will live to see gender equality in the British parliament: speedy reform of the electoral system to PR, combined with a gender balance quota.

The big questions is, do party leaders Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have the political commitment and courage to deliver equality for women in parliament and a more democratic political system?

This article was amended at 4:15pm on July 7 2008