Equality in government – always an afterthought?
Nicola Barker
Liz Truss is the minister du jour. The Foreign Secretary, trips aside, is consistently the most popular Cabinet minister in surveys of Conservative members[1] and touted as a successor to the Prime Minister were he to resign. She has also been given the role of Brexit negotiator with the EU following Lord Frost’s resignation. Both these roles, one a great office of State, the other a once in a generation role to establish the future of the UK after Brexit, would be responsibility enough for one person, and yet the Prime Minister has bestowed two roles upon one person.
But Liz Truss already had a second job - Minister for Women and Equalities. So that’s three jobs. How does she do it?
The role of Minister for Women and Equalities was established by the Blair government in 1997 following electoral pledges to improve the representation of women. Although not a Secretary of State role, the Minister has always attended cabinet. But the Minister has also always had a second job. Harriet Harman was the first minister in 1997 and noted in her biography that officials in her other job as Secretary of State for Social Security saw that role as “unimportant and…a distraction”.[2]
For my MSc dissertation I examined the role from its inception in 1997 to the 2019 election. I was fortunate enough to interview 3 former ministers, Patricia Hewitt, Baroness Morgan and Amber Rudd, who all performed the role while having another department to oversee. I also spoke to some who had examined the role via the Women and Equalities Committee, and those who had interacted with the Minister through organisations they oversee such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission. I specifically looked at it from a feminist perspective in how the Minister represents women.
Broadly I found 4 key problems with the role – incumbency, governance, policy making and what I have called the issue of being an afterthought.
The problem of incumbency
The graph above shows that a total of 15 individuals have held the job since its inception. Average incumbency in the job is 18.1 months, although if you look post 2010 that drops to 12.8. The importance of ministerial stability is oft noted to ensure that ministers can get a grip on their policy area, be able to see policy through and take responsibility for it. The Institute for Government have noted that since 1997 the average Secretary of State incumbency is 2 years, so this role suffers from a significantly higher turnover.[3]
The problem of governance
The supporting department that the Minister relies on has suffered from not really being a department in its own right since 2010. The Government Equalities Office has been shunted round myriad departments from the Home Office, Department for Education, DCMS, to its current home at the Cabinet Office. So the Minister has suffered from either having an unsettled department in a new home trying to find their feet, or having a sponsor department settled in an entirely different department from where they are based and therefore being apart from the support their civil servants can provide.
The problem with policy-making
Whilst there have been some policy successes, those that have been made have generally been pushed through by the department of the Minister’s Secretary of State role. For example, Patricia Hewitt was successful in upgrading maternity and paternity policy whilst Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, and Amber Rudd managed to signpost officials to look for signs of domestic abuse when people were applying for benefits at the DWP. But equality policy is broad and stretches across all departments. How can a minister with two big jobs be across it all with such little and fragmented support? Perhaps if the Windrush scandal had been approached from an equality instead of an immigration perspective, the government may not have made such a mess of things?
Always an afterthought?
A theme that came up repeatedly was how it was seen as an afterthought. Depressing tales from ministers abound of last-minute appointments, being pushed to take the job even though they already had a huge role such as Home Secretary, or not even being told they had the job until they were asked to do an interview on the Today programme. Others who had not held the role felt that it was starting to look tokenistic – it seems to be given to any random woman who is appointed to the cabinet.
How to fix it?
It’s hard to come up with nuance in a blog post, but my contention is the status quo is damaging equality. Norms of women’s unpaid extra work, and that equality is a side issue are only being increased as it stands. You could solve it in a couple of ways, none of which are perfect. Have a standalone Secretary of State with their own department. Appoint a straight white man to the job to show that it’s not a tokenistic issue. Or abolish it altogether. But how on earth can we expect Liz Truss to perform this role and give it the scrutiny it deserves when she’s got loads on her plate already? I mean I know we’re good at multi-tasking, but come on…
[1] https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2021/12/our-cabinet-league-table-johnson-falls-to-his-lowest-ever-negative-rating.html
[2] https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-womans-work/harriet-harman//9780141983868?awaid=3787&utm_source=redbrain&utm_medium=shopping&utm_campaign=css&gclid=CjwKCAiAlfqOBhAeEiwAYi43F7Y23c446w9F4CY3c-zdBMsWVBG15-R7ccc_PC_8qqdc4WZO1MeORhoCcH0QAvD_BwE
[3] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/government-reshuffles.pdf
Nicola Barker was a Postgraduate student in the Birkbeck Politics Department. You can read her dissertation here. She tweets at @nipsla