You’re always surprised the first time you meet me; I don’t look like your usual local councillor. At 30, I’m half the average age, and as a woman, I’m in the minority. Only 33% of councillors in England are female, a figure that’s stayed stubbornly low over the past 20 years.
There are a few reasons for that, both structural and behavioural, which the Fawcett Society has just published its research into and which, if we’re serious about living in a democracy, we have to fix.
Let’s starts with the good old-fashioned sexism. We’ve all had it. When I was first appointed to my council’s cabinet, the only woman there at the time, it was muttered by enough people for the rumour to get back to me that I must be sleeping with the leader.
I was at an event recently with one of my officers, 37 years my senior, and he introduced me to someone as “his boss”, only to get the reply: “Ahh, so you’re his wife!” It took me three attempts to get them to accept that I might actually be his boss.
You get resigned to the fact that often new officers will take one look at you and treat you condescendingly for the first few weeks before you’ve proven yourself.
Explaining how my “job” works is a nightmare to a voter, let alone a mortgage lender. Councillors in England get an allowance to cover the time we spend on duties, which averages 25 hours a week, or more than double that if you have a portfolio like me. Those duties cover everything under the sun, from local litter picks and fixing streetlamps, to reforming services and handling multi-billion-pound budgets.
But the catch is that we’re not employees: and this means the pay and responsibility come without any working rights. Councillors don’t get a workplace pension, we don’t (in 96% of councils) get maternity and parental leave, and we don’t get any notice if we lose our posts (and therefore income); and that’s before you get into the long and antisocial hours we keep.
Being a councillor doesn’t lend itself to people with dependents, people without a decent pension pot, people who might be starting or growing a family, or people with caring responsibilities. Those are all people whose voices need to be heard in local government; and they are all groups of people who are very disproportionately female. In a democracy, that’s a problem.
Lots of this is deeply ingrained. When I found out my council had no arrangements for cabinet members to stay in post while having a child, it wasn’t being told this that really floored me; it was actually the fact that they’d never needed to address the issue before. More than 100 years after women first joined Birmingham city council - my council - there simply hadn’t been, that anyone could recall, a need for one.
Birmingham is now sorting this policy out. And sorry Mum, and all the friends and relatives who got excited after I first mentioned this point in public, I don’t have a bun in the oven. Just a bee in my bonnet.
Lots of you think I shouldn’t be paid at all, and a big part of that was the MP expenses scandal. Thanks to the moats and duck houses, it became toxic in the eyes of the public for politicians to get any income, let alone claim extras, like a carer’s allowance.
It puts hundreds of people off claiming what they need to be able to be representatives, or simply from going into the council in the first place. I’m often told, usually by older white men, how much better and more honourable the council was back when councillors didn’t get paid, and didn’t “do it for the money”. I’m pretty sure councils were whiter, older and more male then, too. Funny that.
I know plenty of other women who have had unwanted physical contact in their roles. But because we’re not employed, because we operate without any normal employee or management structures or rules, there’s often no redress for any of this.
The Fawcett Society sets out clear ideas about putting this right. I’ve been lucky in not having suffered the online abuse so many other women have, but I make a point of not revealing my address to anyone. Some call that anti democratic, but some of you get pretty mad at me by email. I hate to admit it, but I’m scared of having that on my doorstep and in my home. I may not be an MP, but the threat is a real one.
A lot of people assume things will naturally get better over time, but the indications are they are getting worse. In the new combined authorities, not one woman has been elected mayor. Part of the reason for that is probably that when women do break through into leadership in local government, it’s often into stereotypical positions. Women match men in England in roles relating to care and children, but are outnumbered six to one in economic development positions and eight to one in roads and infrastructure, some of the main concerns of devolution deals.
The extraordinary imbalance that exists between men and women in society is the reason the doors to councils need to be opened and our councils dragged into the 21st century.
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Brigid Jones is a Labour councillor for Selly Oak ward and a cabinet member for children, families and schools at Birmingham city council.
This series aims to give a voice to the staff behind the public services that are hit by mounting cuts and rising demand, and so often denigrated by the press, politicians and public. If you would like to write an article for the series, contact kirstie.brewer@theguardian.com
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