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RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS BABIES AND BISCUITS TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Alison Wolf Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Innes Bowen BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 08.03.10 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 14.03.10 2130-2200 CD Number: PLN/009/10VT1010 Duration: 27’ 35” Taking part in order of appearance: Dr Roger Mortimore Head of Political Research, Ipsos-Mori Dr Ruth Fox Director of the Parliament and Government Programme at the Hansard Society Professor Paul Whiteley Professor of Government, University of Essex and Co-Director British Election Study Dr Rosie Campbell Senior Lecturer in Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London Annika Strom Melin Columnist, Dagens Nyheter and former Director of the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies Dr Scott Blinder Research Fellow, Department of Politics, Nuffield College, University of Oxford Philippa Roberts Founder of Pretty Little Head Ltd Justine Roberts Co-Founder and Managing Director, Mumsnet WOLF: Odd things, elections. Opinion poll after opinion poll, printed commentary, blogs multiplying. All with views on what’s going on - and lots of handed down titbits, even among the pros. I ran into a senior executive from a polling company the other day. We started talking about women’s votes. “Ah”, he said. “Women. Tory, mostly, I think. Always have been.” But they aren’t. Like much of what we think we know, this is an election myth. MORTIMORE: Up to the Tony Blair period, overall women were more conservative than men. That was gradually falling even before New Labour; and during Tony Blair’s time in office, it fell further. And at the last General Election, 2005, for the first time women voted more Labour than men did. But in the few years since 2005, that seems to have moved back again; that women are again a little bit more conservative than men are. WOLF: Dr Roger Mortimore, Head of Political Research at pollsters Ipsos-Mori. So something has happened to women’s votes. Something has changed. Dr Ruth Fox, Director of the Parliament and Government Programme at the Hansard Society. FOX: It’s certainly right that whereas the Conservative Party for example used to be able to rely on women’s votes, in the 90s and a major part of this decade women have tended to vote for the Labour Party and a sense again that that is now shifting. The explanations for it - I think very strongly around public service issues, family and children related issues. Parties that are talking about politics and policy that are most relevant to women’s lives will tend to garner attention; and certainly for younger voters in the 90s and 2000, young women voters coming through, they found the Labour Party more attractive on those terms. WOLF: Getting more of the woman’s vote was vital for New Labour. And since women’s votes are generally cast differently from men’s, they can be critical to many elections. It’s not, of course, that some huge phalanx of organised females all vote the same, and all vote differently from men. But in a close-fought election, shifting just 1 or 2% of voters can make all the difference. What’s extraordinary is that a gender gap in the voting booth isn’t a particularly British phenomenon; it’s a completely universal one. There’s a gender gap in the US and in France, in Sweden and Germany. Pick your country, and you’ll find one. And talking of election myths: another one is that women used to vote the same way as their husbands. But in the 1950s, women weren’t voting like their husbands. They were often voting completely differently. Professor Paul Whiteley of Essex University is Co-Director of the British Election Study, our largest intensive study of voters’ behaviour. WHITELEY: When female participation in the workforce was very low, in the early 50s and so on, women were distinctly Conservative. People explained it in terms of, first of all, class politics was very powerful then, and middle class women tended to be very conservative. And there was a distinct group of working class women who were also conservative, but not so much on economic issues but on social issues. They had conservative values. Now over time class politics has declined, got much less important, and people are much more pick and mix about which party they’ll choose; and if they feel that this party’s doing well for them, they’ll stay with it; but if they feel it’s not, they’ll jump. Whereas in the 1950s people would stay with their party even when they felt it was not performing well. WOLF: How far do you think that’s because of things that are specific to being a woman, and how far is it that women have different labour market experiences, different views about key issues of the time? WHITELEY: Women have a different life experience from men. And funnily enough in the 50s, this was much more different - you know women were the housekeepers, men went out to work and all that - and now it’s much more complicated, but they still nonetheless have a different life experience. And we know that women in the labour force lose out in terms of pay, promotion and all the rest of it. There is a glass ceiling, and that makes a difference. WOLF: So one reason that women vote differently from their grandmothers is that their lives are very different. Women’s career choices have widened enormously. In Britain, almost half our working women now earn as much as or more than their partner. Meaning everything’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds? Definitely not. Women still carry the main family responsibilities. And it’s still a world of single mothers out there, not single fathers. Dr Rosie Campbell, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, London, thinks these changes are very important in explaining which parties women vote for. CAMPBELL: Historically women were associated with parties of the right, but that was when they were less likely to be in higher education and employment. And in countries where women still do take on more of a domestic role, they do still seem to be more allied with parties of the right; whereas as women have moved into the workplace and moved into education, they’ve shifted to the left. And I would suspect that is all about something about family life. It’s saying well actually if I’m going to be out in the workplace, then I need the state to intervene more to provide things like childcare and so on. That perhaps in the past women saw themselves as trying to protect their family from the state; whereas women in Western secular societies, perhaps they’re starting to look to the state to actually help them perform their roles better. WOLF: So you could say it’s a slightly more complicated version of voting your pocket book really? CAMPBELL: Yes, I do think that’s potentially the case. One of the reasons women have slowly shifted to the left is also because they’re employed in the public sector. So I think the parties are quite directly targeting that. They’re aware. They’re going after women voters. Because women voters are less likely to be affiliated to a party, they’re less likely to have made their mind up. They know women are disproportionate in the public sector and they know they have particular issues around motherhood and so on, and so this dual strategy makes sense. WOLF: Women in the public sector. That’s another change since our grandmothers’ day. For middle class women, the public sector was always important - all those nurses and teachers. Now it’s all the admin jobs as well - in hospitals, town halls, benefit offices - plus the thousands of care workers and teaching assistants. Two thirds of Britain’s public sector workers are now women. Public and private sector employees have historically voted differently, and recent UK polls show a gap between them. And in the last election, public sector employees were more likely to turn out and vote. These trends are not specific to Britain. Sweden is the world’s pin-up when it comes to female equality. It’s also a country which has enormous gender gaps in its voting. Swedish women swung the vote in the 2003 referendum that kept Sweden out of the Euro. Annika Strom Melin is a journalist and, until recently, Director of the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies. STROM MELIN: It was quite a big gender gap in this referendum: 38% of women voted yes and 50% of the men voted yes. So if it was only the men who would have decided, it would have been a yes. So actually the women’s vote was decisive for the result of the referendum. WOLF: Why do you think the women were so much less convinced than the men? STROM MELIN: Well that’s an interesting question. I think if you look at this pattern, it’s very clear that it is men living in big cities, working in offices who think that they can gain from this co-operation, this European co-operation. And why is that? Well I think perhaps an explanation to this fact in our country is that we have had a strong public sector. The welfare state is strong and stable, has a long history. It is mostly women who have gained from this you know strong welfare state, so maybe that is an explanation. But it’s certainly true that this gender gap is very clear and it’s significant for voting patterns in all of the referenda we have had. WOLF: Britain’s labour market isn’t as divided as Sweden’s where women are really heavily concentrated in the public sector. But we do seem to be going the Swedish way. In the last ten years most of the new jobs created generally, and 90% of the new jobs taken by women, have been in the public sector. But do all the world’s elections, and their attendant gender gaps, fit this single story? Hardly. Dr Scott Blinder is an American political scientist at Nuffield College Oxford. He is an expert on identity politics. That’s what’s going on when people say to you, “I just can’t imagine actually voting for …” Labour, the Tories, whoever. Why not? Because one isn’t that sort of person. It isn’t one’s identity. Scott Blinder: BLINDER: The gender gap in the most recent presidential election was about 12 percentage points, according to exit polls, So Obama won among men by a single point - 49% to 48% - and swept easily among women by about, what, 12 points. WOLF: That’s a big difference. I mean that’s almost as big as it was for Bill Clinton in 96? BLINDER: Clinton’s was even bigger, more in the order of 18 points or so total. That’s the biggest that we’ve seen though. Obama’s was more typical. WOLF: How do you explain that? BLINDER: Basically in 1964, the political system, the political parties realigned themselves around the issue of civil rights for African Americans. President Johnson had recently signed the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act was coming the next year, and the parties at the national level for the first time sort of decisively divided themselves on opposite sides of the issue. WOLF: So are you saying to me that women changed because of civil rights; that they were such nice people that they stuck with the Democrats, and the men went away just because of that? BLINDER: More or less. It was more actually the men who changed. The women more or less stayed about the same in their levels of support for the two parties. But men - and it’s important to add the qualifier white men - began to quickly shift first in their voting at the presidential level, and then sort of their overall view of politics began to shift from Democrat to Republican. So people are more likely to vote their values and their sense of identity than they are to vote their pocket book, and that extends to explaining the gender gap as well. WOLF: Millions of altruistic American women voting just on values and identity? Really? I’m not altogether convinced. But these US voters do show that gender gaps aren’t just about childcare worries and public sector employment. And it is clear that identity matters in elections. Voting decisions are about how we see ourselves, and consequently we want leaders who seem to identify with us. That is why pre-election polls ask whether Brown, or Cameron, or Clegg ‘understands the problems faced by people like you’. Hence, too, the panic at party headquarters when the answer is No. Campaigns are projecting identity and image, and one thing we know from product marketing generally is that men and women respond differently to different marketing strategies. Philippa Roberts founded Pretty Little Head, a consultancy which advises organisations on how to reach female audiences, and which has done work for the Conservative Party. P. ROBERTS: The essential difference is that men tend to respond well to product claims that are fact and features based - sort of better, stronger, faster kind of promises - whereas we find that women are driven by slightly different things. They are looking for brands and companies that are much more on side with them as customers; really want to listen to them and understand how they feel and the things that they need, and to have a much more sort of equal relationship with them - a classically sort of empathetic approach to marketing. WOLF: At present, leading politicians feel it’s very important to come across as empathetic human beings. You seem to be saying that makes sense from the point of view of attracting women voters? P. ROBERTS: Yes, I think it’s very difficult for both men and women, but particularly for women to disconnect the sort of political from the personal. And women do want to understand the person behind the policy and do want to understand the composition of that person. WOLF: So actually politicians are quite right to emote all over the place? P. ROBERTS: They’re certainly right to provide a sort of authentic - horrible marketing word - but to put forward a authentic sense of who they are. WOLF: Which of course is what they’re trying to do when they shed tears on television. Or when they queue up for a slot on a mothers’ social networking site, and tell the world about their favourite biscuits. J. ROBERTS: We’ve had ten major politicians, very high profile politicians - ministers or shadow ministers - on Mumsnet in the last twelve months. And we only invited two of them. Eight of them invited themselves. David Cameron’s been on twice before this time round. But they were keen to get to us rather than we being keen to get to them. WOLF: Justine Roberts, Co-Founder of the online network, Mumsnet. Politicians, clearly, are pitching hard for a female vote. Why Mumsnet? J. ROBERTS: Obviously we’re large. We’re a large group of women. There are a million mums and obviously that’s a big group to speak to you. You can get your message across directly to a lot of people. There has been suggestion that women are a key vote in this election, in fact in every election. So the politicians understand Mumsnet. To them it’s a cohesive community, which it is in fact. You know these are essentially 25 to 45 year old women who have children. It’s totemic of you know an audience that politicians are desperate to try and win over , a social media audience and an audience that’s maybe a little bit undecided at the moment. WOLF: You’d think that one obvious way to come over as empathetic where women are concerned is to have women politicians do the talking. It sounds so intuitively plausible - women will respond differently to female politicians. Does Roger Mortimore from Ipsos- Mori agree? MORTIMORE: I think they do, but the evidence isn’t very strong. It’s clear that because politics is so traditionally male-dominated, a female candidate, particularly a female leader, is unusual, and that will make women think about how they should respond to it. And I’m sure to some extent they find that because that candidate is female, they will feel that their needs are a little bit better understood than they are by a male politician and, therefore, that will at least be a prompt towards stronger sympathy for that candidate. But the evidence is pretty weak. CAMPBELL: There’s not a lot of research to show that it affects it directly - simply women saying, “I want women MPs.” There’s not a lot of research that says that. WOLF: Rosie Campbell of Birkbeck College, London. CAMPBELL: Instead what we’ve seen is that since 97 when the Labour Party did bring more women MPs in, that people - men and women who were overtly feminist - voted for the Labour Party in larger numbers, and that effect was stronger amongst younger women. So we can make the link indirectly that way. WOLF: So the Labour Party was right to have all female shortlists? CAMPBELL: That’s my belief. Obviously that’s a normative question. But if you look at the research, to get the kind of levels of women in parliament that we need, to bypass the kind of long-term historic legacies which I’m afraid have been biased against women, it seems that these kind of mechanisms, quotas are the only way of actually getting more women in quickly. In terms of looking like a modern party, you need to have women there. WOLF: So according to this argument - and a lot of people would strongly agree - a successful British party needs to look representative. It needs to project its inclusion of women. In Sweden, this is so generally accepted that no-one - even the far right - would dream of having a candidate list that wasn’t gender-balanced. I asked Annika Strom Melin how this happened. STROM MELIN: This was a decision taken by the big political parties, that they would put one man after a woman on every list. And I think today it would be impossible for a political party to have you know a list with only men in the top. That would be really impossible in the framework of the political discussion in our country today. WOLF: And there would be a feeling that if you had a party where almost all the candidates were men, it would be both generally unacceptable and would lose you a large number of female votes? STROM MELIN: Absolutely. WOLF: Which is fine and may be true. A lot of people would very much like it to be true. But really, where is the evidence? If female candidates are so appealing to women, where were all those women voters when Hillary Clinton needed them, back in the 2008 primaries? Scott Blinder: BLINDER: Gender was still a huge factor in the primaries, and notably men did not turn out to support Mrs Clinton as much as she had hoped. WOLF: But nor did college women. I mean when I’ve looked at the figures, it seems very clear that among the younger college educated, college student population, there was no particular support for Hillary Clinton. BLINDER: That may be true, and I think of that as more a part of the generational or youth vote for Obama than a vote against Clinton. But there may be something to that. It may be that Hillary’s candidacy appealed more to women of her generation, who had fought sort of the same feminist battles for power and recognition that she had. It could be part of why the youth vote was so strong for Obama even among women; that they sort of took that struggle a bit for granted. WOLF: Was the Republican Party trying to win female votes when they chose Sarah Palin as their vice presidential candidate? BLINDER: I think they were. Their public statements, including her own, certainly suggested that they were. WOLF: Yet today, if you look at the polls, it seems that women dislike her more than men dislike her. BLINDER: Yeah, I know it ended up not helping them at all in the end. The offering of Palin as sort of a substitute for Hillary embodied a sort of very crass tokenism. WOLF: And yes, you heard that right. The people who really dislike Sarah Palin are the women. They have been and remain consistently more negative than men. Britain’s most prominent female politician certainly didn’t get there by tokenism - though Margaret Thatcher did, and does, arouse Sarah Palin-like levels of emotion. But there’s nothing to suggest that her handbag made a difference either way, in attracting female or male support. Paul Whiteley of the British Election Study. WHITELEY: Most people didn’t like her. I mean certainly Conservatives loved her, strong Conservatives loved her, but most people didn’t like her. But a lot of people thought she was very competent, and that was a big advantage. Funnily enough, much of the time she was against Neil Kinnock, lots of people (including some Conservatives) liked him, but they didn’t think he was very competent. And what happened was competence trumped likeability, and that’s important. WOLF: But for most women in 97, it was Blair, not Blair’s babes that did it. WHITELEY: Yes, that’s certainly true. Yes. Blair’s babes may have played a little bit of a role, certainly in those constituencies where they ran, but it was Blair that mattered. WOLF: Blair’s babes don’t, after all, offer an easy win. What can a party do to score a hit with more of those crucial, undecided women? Philippa Roberts from the Pretty Little Head agency. P. ROBERTS: It’s certainly around the ambiance and feel of a party and how well or not they appear to understand and listen and connect. That having been said, that doesn’t mean at all that the whole decision- making is entirely sort of right-brained and emotional and intuitive. That’s not the case at all. But, nevertheless, it is true if something appears to have a feminine character, it’s more likely that women will respond to it. One of the things that we find is that - and this is true in the political discourse and in the commercial discourse - is that women are very interested in the practicalities, and one of the reasons why they feel so alienated from the political discourse is that they see a lot of kind of talk and proclamations but very little practical change to things. And the practical and the specific and the detail, often the very granular detail, is really important. WOLF: So what do women scrutinise? What are the practicalities which really engage them? The Hansard Society’s Ruth Fox believes that a lot of policies are of specific importance to women. FOX: The Labour Party has benefited I think from having that broader range of women in the party who’ve been able to articulate and focus on concerns that are of most interest and relevance to women. For example, domestic violence has been a particular issue of concern in the Scottish Parliament to a number of women MSPs who’ve taken that issue forward and championed it. Policies on breastfeeding, violence against women. There have been improvements in matrimonial law to benefit women, tackling prostitution, the social economy and women’s role in that, greater focus on women prisoners. Now that’s not to say that they perhaps wouldn’t have been picked up by men from time to time, but I think you’ve seen a greater focus on it and you’ve seen an ongoing commitment to those policy issues delivered by women Members of the Scottish Parliament. WOLF: Obviously these are issues that matter a lot - to some people. But issues that will make a party ‘feel’ right for lots of undecided women? Would campaigning on core feminist or super-female issues really keep - or reclaim - large numbers of female votes? Personally, I don’t really buy it - and nor does Justine Roberts from Mumsnet. J. ROBERTS: No, I think actually that is a bit of a patronising kind of way of going about politics - that oh all mums are interested in childcare vouchers or you know education. The breadth of discussion on Mumsnet about all issues is very wide and some people are very interested in green issues, some people are very interested in the economy. Some people, you know the policy they’ll vote on is what the parties plan to do on Trident. You know these are intelligent women and they aren’t necessarily just going to vote on things that are meant to appeal to housewives. So I think one of the key things about whether you’re going to have a successful web chat with Mumsnet is you don’t patronise the users by implying that really all they’re interested in is sort of nappies and washing machines. WOLF: Roger Mortimore of Ipsos-Mori agrees: this isn’t a world with two lists of key issues - one pink, one blue. MORTIMORE: If you look at the issues today that are of interest to men, to women - yes, you can see a distinction. There are slight and consistent differences. For example, when we ask people what are the most important issues, we do find that women are consistently a little bit more likely than men to name the National Health Service; are a little bit less likely than men to name the economy. But then when you look at all those issues in the total, the rank order is exactly the same. At the moment, the economy is top for men, it’s top for women. Race and immigration is second. Crime is third. The NHS is fourth. And that’s true for both sexes. It’s only in the details that there are differences. So the idea that there are women’s issues, that the parties will gain among women by campaigning on these issues and the men won’t notice - that’s a fantasy these days. It just doesn’t work that way. WOLF: So if that’s a fantasy, what should the poor politician - male or female - try? In the UK, as we’ve heard, women’s votes moved to Labour and now seem to be moving away. And women are more than half the electorate, so there’s everything to play for. It’s worth thinking about how people make that final voting decision. For some of us, it’s tribal. For some, it’s self-interest, or some very specific issues. But for lots of people, it’s more intuitive: the ‘feel’ of the party, whether it is competent. And critically, for undecided voters, it’s the leaders. Paul Whiteley: WHITELEY: They want reassurance that this leader is competent and likeable and looks as if you can trust them and so on, and that’s why you get these interviews where people talk amazingly about their private lives and personal lives in a way that politicians thirty years ago would just not have dreamt of doing. And it’s because they’re sending signals out, above all to people who are at the margins but who might make a difference in terms of who wins and who loses the election - that’s why we’re seeing the personalisation of politics. What happens is the less educated, the less interested will use leadership as a device for making a judgement about voting much more than the educated. The educated will use issues and their judgements about what governments will do for them. So what’s happening is it’s a process of if you like cognitive engagement. If you don’t know much about politics and you don’t care too much about it, but you think you should vote, you can solve your problem of what to do by looking at the leaders and saying, “Well I like him” or “I don’t like him.” WOLF: At election time, many voters are looking for a short-cut: Does this leader, and the whole package he’s presenting, feel right to me? How do you reach the women in that group? For a leader who wants to be liked and trusted, blogs and online forums might be a good idea. But a web chat on Mumsnet, with people firing off questions about policy details, will hardly captivate all those women who couldn’t care less. Grazia magazine and daytime TV could be a lot better. And what is it that really strikes a chord - with women, rather than men? Rosie Campbell. CAMPBELL: We did focus groups of men and women voters, and what we found is that we asked them exactly the same sets of questions and the women mentioned references to their family 77 times and men 11. So that indicated to me although we asked them exactly the same set of questions, the way they were relating with discussing politics, thinking about the issues, they were thinking it through a lens of family life in a way that men weren’t. And I suspect that that does go on, but it’s hard to get at that in a more quantitative way, I think. WOLF: Here in the UK, gender differences have recently been far smaller than in America or in Sweden’s referenda. Nonetheless, our mobile female voters will be key in deciding our next Prime Minister. What he - and it will be a he - should remember is that, while women today are rich and poor, hunters and saboteurs, CEOs and bus-drivers, they are, still, more family-focused than men. They want a party that, in their view, understands and supports them in caring for their family, juggling home and work, raising the kids. Babies, it seems, do still matter.