Her supporters claim that Lady Thatcher’s success should be considered a boon to all feminists. President Obama even commented that it showed ‘our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered’. However, her critics argue that succeeding as a woman in a man’s world is not enough, and that Thatcher’s policies did little to help the advancement of ‘ordinary’ women in arenas of power. This is a common debate among feminists and the evidence here is mixed.
Figure 1 shows female Members of Parliament (MPs) from each party elected in all UK general elections from 1945. The x (horizontal) axis is the election year, the y (vertical) axis the number of women who won seats. When Thatcher became prime minister in 1979 there were only 19 female MPs. By 2010 there were 143, or 22% of all MPs. So maybe she did have an effect. However, these data also suggest that the real advance for females seems to have been in the Labour Party — from 1997 onwards.
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