The State of the House of Lords: Falling Backwards Gender Diversity

There are many ways in which, despite being the world’s 2nd largest legislative chamber (nearly 800 members), the House of Lords remains highly unrepresentative of the population of the United Kingdom. This report (the first of three on representation in the House of Lords) focuses on perhaps the most glaring of diversity failures - the gender imbalance of the House of Lords.

This matters because we are not drawing on the full pool of talent for membership of Lords. It matters because it means that important perspectives are absent from decision making. It matters because a group of largely old white men shouldn’t have a stranglehold on decision making in a democratic Parliament.

For nearly 40 years after the first woman MP was elected in 1919, the House of Lords remained an all-male chamber. In 1958, the Life Peerages Act was passed and for the first time, women were allowed to sit in the House as Life Peers. Five years after that, the Peerage Act of 1963 finally allowed for women to sit in the house as hereditary peers. However other rules meant that this was very unlikely to happen. 

Baroness Swansborough became the first female peer to take up her seat on the 21st October 1958.