The U.K.'s Ruling Party Has a Woman Problem
For a party that talks a big talk on women and equality, it's embarrassing that Labour has never elected a woman as leader.
Great Britain has a new Prime Minister (again), and it’s a guy (again). Because although the UK’s ruling center-left Labour party talks a lot about gender equality, and even installed the most women-heavy leadership team of any British government when it came to power in 2024, it has never, in its 126-year history, been led by a woman.
That tradition continued on Monday of this week, when the U.K. got its seventh Prime Minister in a decade: Andy Burnham. Until recently, Burnham was the mayor of Manchester, the country's second city. He is defined by his "centrist dad" politics — and his frankly enviable lashes.
As Burnham prepared to move into 10 Downing Street, the man he ousted, Sir Keir Starmer, gave a speech. "I am confident that Britain is now stronger and fairer than it was two years ago," he said, citing various economic measures.
What didn’t merit a fairness mention is the fact that the leadership contest that put Burnham into power had precisely one participant — Burnham himself.
That’s because the only person who got enough support to run was Burnham, despite the fact that the challenge to become the new leader of the party (and the country) was kicked off by a woman, Catherine West. But West quickly bowed out when it became clear that Burnham was the top guy.
Why so difficult?
Some women have tried to break the pattern: Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman have led the party on a temporary basis, while Labour’s Scottish and Welsh divisions have also had women leaders. But ironically, it is the right-leaning Conservative Party that has done the best when it comes to gender representation at the top. So far, it has had four women leaders, three of whom have been Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss (although some would rather not mention Truss' disastrous, 50-day, salad-battling tenure). Its current leader, Kemi Badenoch, is the first Black woman to lead a major political party.
Why does Labour find it so difficult to elect a woman? "Like all institutions it's a bit sexist, innit," suggested Jess Phillips, a Labour MP (who herself would have made a great leader), at the Hay literary festival earlier this year. "Every institution that every single person in this room works for is led by the patriarchy," she added.
That feels suspiciously like an excuse. "There are clearly enough women in the party who've got the chops, so what is the issue?" asks Lyanne Nicholl, the chief executive of 50:50 Parliament, a charity that campaigns for better gender representation in Parliament.
"I don't think it's a secret that politics is still a boys' club," adds Nicholl. "For a party that consistently fields much higher numbers of women candidates than most other parties, it's a real shame that Labour [has] never got behind a woman to lead… It's starting to look a little like it does have a women problem."
Last year, the former transport secretary Louise Haigh highlighted a pattern in Labour of "misogynistic" briefings against women cabinet ministers. "I'm just really fed up of opening the papers and reading briefings against my female former colleagues," she said.
This stuff matters. Because when women don't feel climbing the ladder isn't possible, they stop trying — a phenomenon known as "promotion burnout." In 2025, McKinsey reported that for the first time, an "ambition gap" had opened up between men and women, showing that women were less interested in getting promotions at work than men. But when they received the same career support as their male counterparts, "this gap in ambition to advance falls away," the researchers said.
The same is arguably true in politics.
Labour shouldn't be wholly criticized. It was the first party in 800 years to name a woman, Rachel Reeves, as its chancellor, the finance minister role that serves as the Prime Minister's de facto second-in-command (although she was replaced by a man, John Healey, this week). And until September last year, Labour’s deputy leader was a woman, Angela Rayner.
Burnham himself appears to be committed to improving the situation for women in the party. As Nicholl points out, "the make-up of the new cabinet is a step in the right direction" — because over half his leadership team are women. He has also said he wants to end the culture of criticizing female ministers, saying that "if anyone in my team was found to have done that [negative briefing] they would be out of the door."
He has also, rather patronizingly, been described by one insider as "Labour's first woman prime minister" because he is, according to them, "genuinely passionate" about "traditionally female-oriented issues" such as "health, education, family finances and issues like safer streets, social care, [and] online safety for kids, that are disproportionately important to women" (rather than, the insider added, manly stuff like "bombs and budgets").
Enough said.
The real proof will come when it's time to elect a new leader. Will a woman feel that she can put herself forward and stay forward, rather than stepping back, as Catherine West did? Or will the machinations of the party do what it did this time around, and show the women of Labour that when it comes to entering a leadership race, there isn't really any point?
Vicki Shabo
