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Earlier this week at WDM we had a very interesting meeting about gender, considering how best to ensure that our practice and campaigns contributed to a post-patriarchal politics. It was intelligent, sensitive and radical.

Then we came to set a date for the next meeting; 2pm on Wednesday the 23rd of June was suggested; and all hell broke loose. Various attendees at the meeting were deeply concerned that this would cause them to miss the start of England’ s third group game, against Slovenia. Would it surprise you to learn that these attendees all belonged to the same gender?

You will be pleased, I am sure, to hear that a compromise was reached and duties to both In-ger-land and the campaigns function meeting will be met in full. But it served to illustrate that even in the most consciously progressive environments, the gender divide is alive and well.

I mention this because this match features two countries with an interesting story to tell about women in government.

Uruguay is one of only two nations in the tournament with no women in its government. Not one. Zero. This despite the fact that Uruguay achieved universal women’s suffrage 12 years before their supposedly revolutionary opponents (1932 vs 1944), not to mention before Portugal, Greece, Italy, Japan, Australia and Canada, and long before infamously backward Switzerland (1971).

France has if anything an even more troubled relationship between women and politics.

The role of women in the Revolution was critical. The Women’s March on Versailles, for example, was arguably responsible for turning the Revolution from a Cromwellian middle-class hissy fit into a working-class movement. Despite this, the first Republic never did grant women the same citizen’s rights as men, and as mentioned it took until the last years of the Second World War for Frenchwomen to get the vote.

Among the British stereotypes of France is that its culture is particularly highly gendered – many even see it as an idealised gender landscape, populated by cool, arrogant alpha-males and coquettish, impossibly stylish women. Certainly this is a stereotype that the First Family does little to dispel.

Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, France’s recent record of women in politics is, though objectively poor, no worse than its near neighbours. With women making up 17% of minsters, it matches the Brown government and outperforms the ConDem coalition by 2%. And Sarkozy himself won the Élysée by only 6% from Socialist leader Ségolène Royal.

Our own country’s politics, particularly within the Labour Party, is now raising fascinating questions about how to deal with this imbalance.

Progressives conscious of the dearth of both black people and women in senior roles are faced with the dilemma of the candidacy for London Mayor of a black woman – Oona King – whose politics arguably represent those aspects of the Labour Party that the self-same lefties find so disappointing.

Another black woman – the first in Parliament, Diane Abbott – makes history again by becoming the first black person to run for Labour leader, but it’s hard to shake the impression that her candidacy is being treated as tokenistic window-dressing by swathes of her party. Should she really be the “black woman candidate” when the fact that she is the “only left-wing candidate” seems to this author so much more important?

And the second woman ever to lead the Labour Party – though like her predecessor Margaret Beckett she is allowed a temporary appointment only – has proposed a rule change to require 50% women in the Shadow Cabinet. Spain enacted legislation stipulating the same for its ministerial posts, and as a result boasts the only 50-50 government at the World Cup.

Far from uncontroversial in feminist circles, the proposal has at least served to highlight a bigger problem than Labour’s internal elections – women’s representation in parliament is so poor that in order to make 50% sound feasible, Harman has also had to propose that the Shadow Cabinet is reduced in size. And this in the parliamentary group with more women than any other, aside from the Greens’ all-female delegation of one.

However the problem is addressed, France’s 17% record on women in government cannot be allowed to remain a perfectly respectable mid-table performance. By the time we do all this again in Brazil in 2014, I hope to see more WIGs than WAGs in the VIP boxes, and neighbouring Uruguay must at least drag itself out of the relegation zone.

Oh, and for the record, I didn’t care when the campaigns meeting was. But then I’m not English, and nationalism is a subject for another post.

Posted in: France, Uruguay, Uruguay-France

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.