ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of the author research into womens involvement in four different communities of practice within the public sphere. It focuses on women who enter British parliamentary politics. The glass ceiling effect is difficult to account for in a political party like the Parliamentary Labour Party which, theoretically, seems committed to equal opportunities for men and women. It becomes more explicable when it is recognized that the institutional orders of masculinist political discourse and the equally masculinist discourse of the print media operate through fraternal networks to segregate and subordinate women once they have entered the arena of party politics. The coverage of the 1994 Labour leadership campaign needs, therefore, to be seen in this broader context of media bias against individual female politicians and, more generally, against feminist strategies aimed at challenging masculinist practices in party politics.
