Joni Lovenduski: How men deter women from Parliament

From the inaugural lecture of the Anniversary Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London

Feminising politics is about more than increasing the numbers of women in political institutions, it is about how institutions, processes and procedures are affected by changing the numbers of women, about what else happens when the numbers of women change.

This is not a trivial issue. It raises fundamental questions about democracy and representation. Many feminists have claimed that only when women are present in decision-making in proportion to their membership of the population are they adequately represented. This claim has at its heart the notion that women should be represented by women. It raises the question of whether what is said is ever separable from who is speaking.

When women become members of a legislature or other representative assembly they are normally entering a male domain. For a long time Westminster was one of those places where men gathered with other men. Its ways were the ways of the gentlemen's clubs and public schools that were so important in establishing the norms of appropriate male behaviour.

When I say that Parliament is masculine I mean this in the sense that it institutionalises the norms of the men who founded it and for so many years inhabited it as a wholly male institution. This is why Westminster for so long boasted a rifle range but not a crèche. No conspiracy was necessary to exclude women; indeed often the exclusion of women was not even a consideration. Like many institutions of the state the Westminster culture embodies practices that reward codes of masculinity and disallow codes of femininity.

The disruptive effects of the entry of women into this environment are well illustrated by the career of Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons. Her most recent biographer writes of the almost overwhelming effort of courage and will needed to stand up to the hostility – petty, persistent and often vicious – from her colleagues in the House of Commons. The hostility came mostly from her own party. There was an unwritten consensus among the Conservatives, her party, that a female MP was by nature wrong.

The idea was to freeze her out, cause the maximum embarrassment and humiliation, and so discourage constituencies from adopting other women candidates.They refused to give her a seat at the corner of the bench, forcing her to climb over men's legs. At first they pretended they could not find a lavatory for her and made her walk to the far end of the building. Before a debate on venereal disease they put the most graphic photographs they could find in the lobby, hoping to embarrass her.

Shortly before she died she told her son, David, that if "I had known how much men would hate it, I would never have dared do it".

More recently, there was one woman Labour MP who found it off-putting that when she got up to speak, some of the Tories shouted "Melons, Melons". So she went to see the Speaker, who was then Betty Boothroyd, who told her: "Look love, we've all had to go through it. Next time, wait for them to speak and shout out 'Chipolatas, chipolatas'."

For years the kind of institutionalised traditional masculinity that such comments and practices reflect was a characteristic of Westminster, embedded, ubiquitous and unremarked. Only recently have these biases become objects of scrutiny. This is one of the things that increased women's representation may change.

For women to make a difference there must be differences in the values, attitudes and behaviour of women and men. If such differences do not exist, then even if women gradually become the majority at Westminster, British parliamentary politics will continue in familiar ways. The public face of politics will become feminised, but the political culture and the substantive policy agenda will be unchanged.