A government minister has rejected calls for an all-women shortlist to find a replacemet for disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish.
Universities minister Michelle Donelan said that female-only shortlists for parliamentary candidates are “demeaning” to women.
Boris Johnson is facing calls from within his own party to ensure that a woman is chosen to fight the by-election in the east Devon seat of Tiverton and Honiton triggered by Parish’s resignation after being caught watching pornography in the Commons chamber.
Tory MP Caroline Nokes, who chairs the Commons women and equalities committee, has said the party must pick a female candidate in order to show “real evidence of change”.
But Ms Donelan said she did not support all-women shortlists, arguing that it was better to encourage female candidates to get into parliament “on merit”.
“We don’t do it by putting in quotas which I find quite demeaning to women. Women can get there on merit,” she told Sky News.
“We have seen that in the past in my own party – the first two female prime ministers when Labour haven’t even come close.
“We have got the home secretary who is a female, we have got the foreign secretary who is a female: those individuals got there on merit.”
Conservative Party chair Oliver Dowden has voiced the ambition of half of the party’s MPs being women, but the Tories have so far drawn the line at introducing all-female shortlists for the selection of candidates in winnable seats.
Mr Dowden told the Sunday Telegraph: “I think the single best thing I can do as chairman of the Conservative Party is make sure that we select more good female members of parliament so that the membership of the [parliamentary] Conservative Party reflects the wider country.”
Ms Donelan said she had not personally experienced any harassment in Parliament and insisted that reports of misconduct were confined to a small minority of “misogynistic dinosaurs”.
“This is not the majority of members of parliament, this is a minority,” she said. “These are misogynistic dinosaurs. They do not represent the majority of members of parliament.”
Labour frontbencher Fleur Anderson agreed that sexist misconduct in the Commons was restricted to a “minority” of male MPs, and said she had not experienced it very often.
But she told Sky News: “A minority is too much. A minority can make the whole workplace feel unsafe. Even one place in the workplace that you can’t feel that you can you can trust or is inappropriate is too many in the workplace.
“To hear that there have been 56 allegations of sexism, bullying, harassment being investigated at the moment is a kind of workplace that I don’t really want to be part of. It’s extremely worrying for me.
“We should be setting the highest standards for the country. And even more important, we’re the ones making the decisions about rules for the whole country. I have joined politics, for politics to be a force for good – to tackle sexism, to tackle discrimination. To find that it’s in Parliament and it’s still not being tackled fast enough is very, very concerning.
“I hope this will be a wake-up call and that we will now tackle sexism with much more vigour and root it out.”
Ms Anderson voiced support for Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s proposal that MPs should no longer be the direct employers of their office staff, saying that this created a “power imbalance” which could act as “a door for abuse”.
She said that one of the best ways of tackling the culture of misogyny would be to bring male and female representation in parliament closer to parity.
“We can definitely increase the number of women in parliament,” she said. “We are still nowhere near that 50/50 level that we should be toequal to society. We are in the Labour Party, we’ve got 54 per cent of MPs who are women. The Conservative Party is still only 24 per cent, and there are ways that that can be changed, but they’re just not putting those rules in.”
Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon said that the answer to misogyny lies in changing men’s behaviour.
She told BBC1’s Breakfast: “Not all men are misogynist, but all women do experience misogyny and it is a problem of male behaviour.
“It shold be younger men that we are talking to, rather than trying to tell young women what they have to do to cope with misogyny. We should be trying to educate and talk to young men about behaving in a way that doesn’t subject young poeple to that kind of conduct and behaviour.”
Ms Sturgeon said that after years in politics she felt she was personally “inured” to the sexism she encounters, but that in her younger days she had consciously adapted the way she dressed and the way she behaved in the hope of protecting herself against sexist commentary.
She warned that politicians “run the risk of making politics and public life somewhere that women just don’t want to be”, which she said would be damaging to democracy.
