United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

David Cameron has defended his pledge to give a third of ministerial jobs in a Conservative government to women.

Despite all the measures to enfranchise women and ensure equal representation, women still aren't securing many bums on seats. In the London assembly elections, of 151 candidates across all parties, just 52 of the candidates are women.
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The Government today launched a taskforce aimed at getting women from ethnic minorities involved in grassroots politics. Women and Equalities Minister Harriet Harman said the project would aim to encourage women to stand as councillors.
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To mark last week's 80th anniversary of women getting the vote, Ms. Featherstone, MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, posed outside the Houses of Parliament with the Electoral Reform Society dressed in 1920s outfits.
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Susanna Rustin hits the campaign trail in Queen's Park. Just a few months after joining a political party for the first time, I was standing in the Queen's Park Westminster by-election. The election day was an unreal prospect. I phoned my ad-hoc campaign manager, and asked what to do. Go to work, he said. Act normal. But I didn't feel very normal. I had an odd but quite enjoyable feeling of nervous expectation and exhilaration, familiar from other election days. Only, of course, no one else in the office was feeling this at all.

Obligatory quotas for the number of women put forward for selection as a parliamentary candidate by each political party have been proposed. The conference on diversity issues was commissioned by the prime minister. It wants the parties either to improve the representation of women at the 2010 general election, or face mandatory quotas for the next one.
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The Liberal Democrats face the prospect of having no female MPs after the next election if their current poll ratings continue, the Fabian Society says. The society, affiliated to the Labour party, suggests radical moves for the Lib Dems such as making former leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell offer their safe seats to female candidates to reverse the trend. Only seven of the 57 Lib Dem MPs are female and in the last couple of months the party has created a "leadership programme" to ensure more women and members of ethnic minorities become MPs.

Campaigners demand reform of party selection procedures after last week's elections mostly failed to boost female representation. Equalities campaigners have called for dramatic reform of party selection procedures after the proportion of women elected to the UK's devolved legislatures was one of the lowest on record. Reform groups said the parties had to take positive action to increase the number of women in the Scottish parliament and the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies, as last week's elections justified their fears there would be no improvement on equal rights. 

Gaffes are prompting female MPs to wonder if some equal opportunities training is in order. Coalition ministers keep on putting their foot in it. Among those facing accusations of sexism we've had David Cameron ("calm down dear"), David Willetts (blaming feminism for the lack of jobs for working men) and then Ken Clarke ("serious" rape). In each instance the government's defence was that they were misunderstood – by accident or design.