As mentioned in my introductory piece, I was lucky enough to be
awarded a fully-funded Masters and PhD by the Economic and Social Research
Council's Welsh Doctoral Training Centre (DTC). This post will explain a little bit about the process of applying for the 1+3 award and will briefly outline my proposal.
The Process:
The application process was rather lengthy and involved the writing (and
extensive editing) of a 500-word research proposal, a cover letter, and an
interview with the Director of Postgraduate Studies and my prospective PhD
supervisor.
Deciding one's PhD thesis before you've even ended the final year of
your undergraduate degree is, admittedly, a daunting task. I found myself
constantly aware that what I chose as the topic for my PhD had to both persuade
the DTC that I was a good choice of studentship recipient, and remain something
I would still be interested in after 4 years.
The Inspiration:
Whilst trying to decide on a topic this important, I decided that it
would be sensible to choose an area or phenomenon to study which is of personal
interest. As I explained in my previous post, one of my main areas of interest
in terms of academic study is inequality. Having previously written, as part of
a module in the second year of my undergraduate degree, a 5000-word project on
gender inequality in small left-wing meetings, I decided that this was
something I would like to explore further for my PhD. Additionally, my third
year module Power, Politics and Policy helped to drill down my broad topic area
of gender inequality further to focus on the substantive representation of
women in legislative settings, considering Critical Actor Theory and Critical
Mass Theory.
However, whilst the content of this module focused almost entirely on
the legislative settings of Westminster and the Welsh Assembly, there was very
little focus on the representation of women in local-level governance i.e.
local councillors. This, in my opinion, was extremely concerning and surprising
given that local governments, although they may have a poor reputation, also
have a lot of power. House of Commons statistics show that, despite local
government being judged as ‘more accessible’ to women, only 32% of local
authority councillors in England are female. This percentage further drops to
26% in Wales. Given that local government spending accounts for 1/4 of all public
spending, this means that a high number of important decisions are made at a
level where women’s voices are not being heard.
Furthermore, recent cuts to local government spending across England and
Wales, are hitting women especially hard with cuts to key services including
childcare, social care and services such as domestic violence protection.
Recent House of Commons analysis has found that 86% of the savings in the 2016
budget will ‘have come from women’s pockets’ (Women's Budget Group, 2016) . Having few women
around the table in local level political settings will mean, therefore, that the
decisions about which services to cut, and how severely, will be made without consulting
those who will be disproportionately impacted by any changes.
The Main Aims:
Being highly concerned by
the issues outlined above, I decided that my research should analyse the impact
that gender has on the substantive representation of women in local government,
addressing the relative lack of attention this is given in current research. I
aim to explore the role different political parties and the structures and
processes of local government play in facilitating or, more commonly,
frustrating the substantive representation of women. In contrast to existing
research, I will also explore the ways that the female councillors themselves
mediate or seek to involve their own feminist concerns with their other
ideological or party-political views.
Another lacking in the literature that I wish to address is an analysis
of how successfully the substantive representation of women at local government
level is shaped by positive action measures such as the All-Women Shortlists
used by the Labour Party in 1997.
The Method:
Inspired by the methods used by West and Zimmerman (1983) in their Small
Insults study of how men and women hold conversations, I will conduct in-depth
qualitative interviews with the female councillors to discover whether they
feel encouraged to speak in council meetings and discover if women’s views and
issues are side-lined during discussion. In addition, I intend to use participant
observation to analyse the nature of discussions at local government meetings,
and uncover how gender inequalities are reproduced through the linguistic
techniques and conversational style of male and female councillors.
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