ABSTRACT
A major study of key political leaders in western Europe in the postwar period thought fit to include just three women out of a total of 71 major figures.1 Included in the volume were two out of the three women who have succeeded in becoming prime ministers in western Europe: Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, and Gro Harlem Bruntland, Norwegian Prime Minister on three occasions in the 1980s and 1990s. A third Prime Minister, Edith Cresson, who briefly headed the French government from 1991-2, was not included. How can we explain the absence of women in leading positions? The first part of the explanation must relate to issues covered in previous chapters, particularly the difficulty women have had in gaining selection by political parties as parliamentary candidates. Unless they have first been elected to parliament, it is highly unlikely that women will enter government, since the few who do become ministers without a parliamentary background tend to require a high profile in business or the trade unions, both of which are heavily male-dominated. But the low number of women in parliament (see Table 8, p. 105 for numbers of women MPs in the ten countries between 1945 and 1999) forms only a part of the explanation for the lack of women in the very top political jobs. As the data below reveals, women are beginning to enter national governments in growing numbers, but the posts they occupy remain disproportionately at the lower end of the ministerial ‘hierarchy’. At the beginning of this new millennium, there is still an almost total absence of women in the very top posts in government.
