General elections tend to gloss over stories about women – this is how we keep them at the top of the agenda

Until this week when Labour announced promises regarding maternity rights, parental leave and menopause, women have been largely neglected in discussions around Brexit and the general election.

It’s not surprising, mind. So-called “women’s issues” often become the virtue-signalling tool slipped into campaign promises and manifestos at the 11th hour when political parties remember that half of of the population is female and they should probably think about what they might want too.

Discussions around Brexit, for example, have hardly even scraped the surface of what it will mean for women: the portion of the population who occupy most of the jobs likely to be under threat and will be most impacted by a recession. Nor have they touched on the maternity rights, human rights and domestic violence support for which we rely on EU legislation.

Often it feels as though the people making the decisions (usually men) still see women as otherworldly creatures. Case in point: when US investment bank Goldman Sachs announced this week that they’d be providing staff with stipends for egg-freezing – so they could continue working and not have their career progression or efficiency in the office curtailed by babies, one assumes.

It’s positive to see Labour’s suggestions of fines for companies who don’t close their gender pay gaps. And yet Labour isn’t one to point the finger either. It remains the only main political party that has yet to have a female leader and has had consistent accusations of a lax approach to misogynistic harassment, online abuse and, of course, antisemitism. Boris Johnson doesn’t fare better: he is hardly known for his feminist credentials, from alleged knee-squeezing to Islamophobic comments. And under a Conservative government, we’ve seen a DUP partnership that delayed the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland and continues to drag its feet when it comes to enforcing buffer zones outside abortion clinics.

And while political bickering distracts from the real issues affecting hundreds of thousands of women across the UK today, we put them front and centre in our women’s section, and will continue to do so throughout election season. So, to the man who commented under my column about Goldman Sachs this week, saying, “when you spend so much of your time twisting everything to further a self-proclaimed feminist agenda, it becomes really difficult to take most of what you say seriously”: sorry you’re struggling, I hope we can make it a little easier for you over on the lifestyle section.

Yours,

Harriet Hall

Lifestyle editor