Back in June, Melanie McDonagh wrote that “the Tories are desperate to regain the female vote”. Today’s Guardian scoop, a government memo on the need to better appeal to women, proves she’s right.
In places, the document reads as if it were written by a group of men to whom women are very much from Venus. They are careful to spell out the revelation that “of course women’s views differ as much as men’s”, and their response to discovering their weakness was apparently to find whoever they could in Number 10 without testicles and ask what they were doing wrong. However, it does at least show that the government recognises that it’s losing ground with women at the moment, and that it’ll take more than footage of Cameron taking his kids to school to recover.
Melanie wrote that:
“The Tories – and it always feels like they are men, second-guessing What Women Want – seem unable to grasp that women don’t just vote according to how we feel, but by what we think, and by what we reckon is in our interest.”
Well, now it seems they may be beginning to grasp exactly that. Some of the suggested solutions are still mainly symbolic – more female candidates, celebrating women in business. Theresa May seems to have already taken on board the “key theme” that “women are key to British growth and success”. But others are concrete proposals that demonstrate (the government believes) a determination to improve women’s lives. These can broadly be split into three areas: helping women financially (by tackling the pay gap and giving the Universal Credit to them by default), improving education (free schools and changing the school calendar) and making it easier to raise children (a proper ban on advertising).
So have they identified the right issues? Only time will tell, although it’s worth noting that there’s no evidence that a woman is any more likely to care about education – or to support free schools – than a man. Here, though, are two issues where there does appear to be a big gender gap, according to recent YouGov polling:
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