UK News: Record Number of Women Elected to Westminster in 2024 Cohort

The 2024 general election produced the largest cohort of women Members of Parliament in the history of the Westminster Parliament, with the proportion of female representatives across all parties approaching 40 percent for the first time. The historic milestone reflected both the particular circumstances of the election — including the size of Labour’s landslide majority, which brought large numbers of new MPs to Parliament many of whom had been selected through the party’s all-women shortlist process — and longer-term shifts in the parties’ approaches to candidate selection and representation.

Labour’s all-women shortlist policy, contested at its introduction in the 1990s but maintained through successive elections, has cumulatively produced a Labour parliamentary party that is now close to gender parity. The large majority of 2024 meant that the party’s candidate selections in seats that had previously been considered safe Conservative territory were returned in unexpected numbers, bringing a wave of new female Labour MPs from constituencies that would not have delivered Labour victories in previous elections.

The Conservative and Liberal Democrat parliamentary parties also saw increases in their female representation, though from lower bases and through different mechanisms. The SNP’s Westminster group has maintained relatively high levels of female representation, reflecting the party’s longstanding commitment to equal representation as a matter of principle as well as politics.

Research published by the Fawcett Society and Hansard Society noted that while the headline proportion was a genuine milestone, female MPs remained underrepresented in certain roles — including select committee chairs, shadow cabinet positions and within the party leadership hierarchies — suggesting that the battle for genuine parity of influence rather than mere numerical representation continued.