United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Be yourself" is the advice former British prime minister Theresa May gave to the Global Women's Forum in Dubai on Monday (Feb 17), explaining how she had risen to the top job despite refusing to conform to masculine traditions in politics.

"I did my politics a different way from the men," she told the mostly female audience of her entrance to parliament in 1997.

“I liked it when my Twitter was just mine and it was only my friends”, says Amy Callaghan. “I could tweet about far more mundane things, more about what I was watching on Netflix than the political matters of the day.”

Callaghan is 27 years old, and these days her social media presence cannot be the one of a normal woman in her twenties: on December 12th, she defeated Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson and became the SNP MP for East Dunbartonshire.

Men still dominate the most senior roles in public life and the UK is “generations away” from achieving gender equality, according to a report published on Monday. The 2020 Sex and Power Index compiled by the Fawcett Society, a charity campaigning for gender equality, showed that women are missing from the top ranks of business, politics and law. The index also highlighted an “alarming lack of women of colour” in senior positions and what it lamented as a “dismally slow” pace of change.

In the general election, 220 women MPs were elected, pushing women’s representation in parliament up  from 32 per cent to 34 per cent - placing the UK 36th in the word between Belarus and Monaco.

A record number of women presented themselves for office ahead of the UK’s 2019 election. A total of 37% of candidates were female – an improvement of eight percentage points over the number of women standing in 2017 (29%) and 11 percentage points compared to 2015 (26%). This despite how challenging it can be to organise a campaign for a snap election.

More women MPs have been elected to the House of Commons than ever before, according to the Press Association news agency, breaking the previous record of 208 set in 2017.