The Women's Equality Party wants to rules for listed companies' boards in Britain
LONDON, Oct 20 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Britain's first feminist party joined a growing global movement on Tuesday to put pro-women policies at the top of the agenda, calling for action to tackle sexual violence, the pay gap, and under-representation in politics and business.
Launching its policies at an event in central London, the Women's Equality Party (WE) said it wanted gender quotas in politics and business, the expansion of subsidised childcare, and the criminalisation of the purchasing of sex.
"We very much think that we're part of a global political movement," party leader Sophie Walker told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
WE was founded in March by broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and author and journalist Catherine Mayer, and Walker, 44, also a journalist and author, recently became the party's leader.
At Tuesday's event the hundreds-strong audience, many sporting WE-branded t-shirts and pin badges, gave their biggest cheer to 17-year-old party member Honor Barber who said she had skipped an English lesson to be present.
"We're 51 percent of the population, and we're not happy," she said, before outlining WE's support for gender quotas.
"Quotas are scary, but not achieving equality when I'm 80 and all of you are dead is much, much scarier," said Barber.
Germany passed a law earlier this year requiring major companies to allot 30 percent of seats on non-executive boards to women, following Norway which introduced a 40 percent quota in 2003.
WE wants to see similar rules for listed companies' boards in Britain.
An international milepost was the election to the European Parliament last year of Soraya Post, a Swedish Roma and mother of four who campaigned for the party Feminist Initiative under the slogan "Out With Racists And In With Feminists!"
Her party recently set up in neighbouring Norway too.
Britain's WE wants quotas in politics as well as business. Just 29 percent of Britain's 650 members of parliament are women, placing it 39th in the world, according to the Switzerland-based Inter-Parliamentary Union.
"We have 30 million women in the country, I am sure we can find 325 brilliant ones to become MPs," said Walker.
Her party wants to make all parties field women candidates in two-thirds of seats in the next two general elections, due in 2020 and 2025,
"This will not, as the scaremongers suggest, permit mediocrity," she said. "Rather it will stamp it out by eradicating the centuries-old system of unwritten quotas, which have created institutions in which wealthy, white, male elites wield far more power than the rest of us."
It is possible for men to support women's rights, said Frances Scott, founder of 50:50 Parliament, a campaign group, but getting more women into politics will make it more likely that progressive laws are introduced.
"When you're a minority, it's very hard to speak clearly and authoritatively about these things," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
WE said it had many male members, and some men were in the audience on Tuesday, though the only one on stage was Duncan Fisher, head of the Fatherhood Institute, a thinktank.
He helped WE produce its policy on parental leave, which is that both parents should get six weeks of paid time off after childbirth, and share an additional 10 months of leave.
The party wants to change social attitudes, copying countries like Sweden where it is the norm for new fathers to take a significant amount of time off.
"There is an added stigma for men taking time off work," said Fisher. "Equality for women depends on men becoming closer to their children."
The party plans to field its first candidates in elections in Scotland, Wales and London in early 2016 - but in the longer term it hopes to bring about the sweeping changes that will make its existence unnecessary.
"I would far rather that all the other political parties took this on and got this done," said Walker. (Reporting By Joseph D'Urso, editing by Tim Pearce. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
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