How I came to found the Women’s Equality party

“That pink bus! Oh my god, the pink bus!” Back in March 2015, I was in a café waiting to watch a panel at the Southbank’s Women of the World festival (WOW). A group of women at the next table were discussing the bus that Labour Party deputy leader Harriet Harman had dispatched across the UK ahead of the general election in a mission to engage female voters. The intention was noble but it was hard to get past the pinkness, which threatened to provoke the response it was supposed to head off. The women were considering not voting at all.

A tube train rumbled beneath us—or perhaps it was Emmeline Pankhurst spinning in her grave at Brompton Cemetery. Then again, Pankhurst overestimated the transformative power of suffrage. Women’s votes cannot on their own create gender equality. No country in the world is gender equal and most remain male fiefdoms. Just 15 of the world’s 144 full or partial democracies are led by women. The biggest companies in the UK and the United States are more likely to be run by men called John than women of any name.

This represents a huge missed opportunity—and not just for women. A large-scale statistical comparison discovered that men in more gender-equal Nordic countries are healthier and happier than their peers in more patriarchal cultures. A recent McKinsey report estimates that simply narrowing the gender gap in the workforce by 2025 would boost global GDP by $12 trillion. Research by Credit Suisse suggests that companies with significant numbers of women in decision-making roles are more profitable.

And study after study points to the benefits of diversity at all levels of organisations and the concomitant damage to institutions that draw from too narrow a base. Westminster is a classic case. Next year marks the centenary of the first enfranchisement of female voters, yet there are as many male MPs in the current Parliament as there have ever been female MPs elected.

WOW had invited three of those still-too-rare female MPs, Labour’s Stella Creasy, the Liberal Democrats’ Jo Swinson and the Conservatives’ Margot James, to tell us what their parties planned to do for women. They are all compelling speakers but on this evening they failed to convince. If their parties valued women, surely this talented trio would have risen higher. So when Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre and the event’s moderator, invited the audience to volunteer proposals to speed gender equality, I found myself clutching the microphone.

“I, like many other people, come to this election knowing that whatever the outcome, it will be disappointing. It would be so much more exciting—we would be spoiled for choice—if the three of you were the leaders of the parties,” I said. The audience whooped in agreement. I pointed out that the established parties had responded to Ukip’s electoral pull by contorting themselves into Ukip-shaped positions. Might it be possible to repeat this trick in the service of gender equality?

“The questions you’ve all been asking this evening are about not only how we make progress but how we hold onto progress. So what I would like to do is invite anybody who wants to come to the bar afterwards or interact with me on Twitter to consider whether one way of doing this might be to actually found a women’s equality party.”

“Are you buying, Catherine?” asked Creasy.

People followed me to the bar and yet more joined the discussion in the perpetual pub of social media. To my great alarm, some assumed that I was proposing to found a party myself. I returned home to an empty house and an empty fridge and before going to sleep left a post on Facebook to amuse friends who knew of my musician husband’s dedication to eating well. “Andy’s only been on tour for 24 hours and I’ve already had a sandwich for dinner. And started a women’s equality party. Want to join? Non-partisan and open to men and women.”

“I’m in!” replied the writer Stella Duffy almost instantaneously. “Me too,” declared Sophie Walker, a Reuters journalist who could not have anticipated that within months the party would have solidified into a reality and she would have been chosen to lead it. By the next morning, the thread had lengthened considerably and all the responses were similar.

I called my friend Sandi Toksvig, the comedian, about the proposal. Her response wasn’t quite as I anticipated. “But that’s my idea,” she said. Each year she concocted a show called Mirth Control as a finale for WOW and for 2015 was planning to bring onto the stage cabinet ministers from an imaginary women’s equality party. She’d been on the point of ringing me with a proposition. “Darling,” she said. “Do you want to be foreign secretary?”

The idea of someone with no cabinet experience and a habit of making off-colour jokes becoming the UK’s premier advocate abroad made me laugh—though that was before Theresa May appointed Boris Johnson to the role. A few days after our phone call, Sandi and I sat down together and began planning.

We didn’t want to lead the party. We feared we were too metropolitan, too media, to rally the inclusive movement we envisaged; the idea was to make space for other women, not to occupy it. For the party to be effective, it had to be as big and diverse a force as possible. That meant getting away from the assumption that the left had sole ownership of the fight for gender equality. It meant a commitment to a collaborative politics dedicated to identifying and expanding common ground, and that in turn demanded we build in diversity from the start, including a wide range of political affiliations.

Sandi also realised she would have to give up her job as host of the BBC’s satirical current affairs show, The News Quiz. It was a move her fans didn’t easily forgive. After the announcement in April, the ranks of my regular trolls swelled with angry Radio 4 listeners venting their displeasure.

Even before Sandi’s public involvement, our meetings, advertised only on Facebook and by word of mouth, drew hundreds. By July 2015, WE registered as an official party. October saw the launch of our first substantial policy document, compiled in consultation with experts, campaigning organisations and grassroots support that already amounted to tens of thousands of members and activists. WE raised over half a million pounds by the end of the year. In May 2016 we contested our first elections and secured more than 350,000 votes for London Mayor, the London Assembly, the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament.

A month later, I attended the birthday gathering of a politician. Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father and a former member of the European Parliament, shouted at me from across the room. “Catherine,” he said, “I heard some terrible news about you!” The room fell silent, heads swivelled. “I heard you’d become a feminist!”

Later that evening I talked to a Labour peer who berated me for splitting his party—a feat it was managing without external help. What the peer meant was that we had taken Labour votes. Westminster was no longer patronising and dismissing us, but it wasn’t yet sure what to make of us either. At the same event, prominent members of both Labour and the Conservatives confessed to me that they had voted for our party.

This is an edited extract from Mayer's new book "Attack of the Fifty Foot Women: How Gender Equality Can Save the World!" (Harper Collins)