80 years women's rights celebration

By Lucy Hutchings  on Wednesday 2 July 2008

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Today sees women celebrating everywhere after 80 years of having the right to vote.

The birthday celebrations are in full swing as members of the 2008: Women and the Vote campaign are today marking eight decades of universal suffrage.

But the fight is not over yet for women aiming for complete equality and now the campaign alliance is calling on the British, Scottish and Welsh Governments to put gender inequality back to the top of their agendas.

Latest figures show that despite 80 years of equal voting rights, 1 in 5 MPs are female.

Nan Sloane, Director of the Centre for Women and Democracy commented: 'It has taken us 80 years to achieve 127 women MPs (out of 646), and the quality of our democracy is the poorer for the lack of women's active participation in it.'

She added: 'We don't want to see another 80 years elapse before our grand-daughters get anywhere near parity of representation - we think this problem can and should be solved much more quickly than that, especially since democracies elsewhere in the world have already managed it.'

Wednesday 2 July 2008

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