Record Number Of Women Running In UK 2019 General Election

A record number of women will are running in the United Kingdom’s December general election .

Provisional analysis, carried out by the Press Association news agency, shows that a total of 1,120 female candidates have registered, or 34% of the total.

This is the highest-ever proportion of women candidates in a U.K. general election, up from 29% in 2017 and 26% in 2015.

More than half of all Labour candidates are women, a first for a major U.K. political party. By contrast, around three in 10 of those standing for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are women.

There are currently a total of 3,322 candidates running in next month's election,  a slight increase over the 3,304 candidates who stood in the 2017 general election. 

The total for 2019 could be revised slightly in the next few days, after the PA has completed its final verification of candidate data.

The news comes just a day after it was revealed that women featured in just one-fifth of election coverage so far , despite taking leading roles in some of the U.K.’s most prominent political parties. 

There are 631 Labour candidates running (not including the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle); 333 — or 53% — are women.

The percentage of women candidates has risen considerably since the 2017 election, in which 42% of Labour hopefuls were women. 

For the Conservatives, 190 of their 635 candidates at this election are women, making a total of 30%, compared to 29% in 2017.

Of the 611 Lib Dem candidates, 188 (31%) are women, up from 29% last time.

The Brexit Party has the smallest percentage of female representation: 54 of their 275 total candidates, or 20%, are women.

Two of the smaller parties have higher levels of female representation at this election than both the Tories and the Lib Dems. The Greens have 498 candidates and 204 (41%) are women. For the Scottish National Party, 20 of its 59 candidates (34%) are women. Meanwhile, exactly a quarter of Plaid Cymru’s candidates are women: nine out of 36.