When I first joined the world of politics, I never would have batted an eyelid to a lack of women getting involved, because the truth is, at the time, it wasn’t what I was seeing. I had a female association chairman, half of my association executive were women, as were most of my associations branch chairmen and committees, and this may have been due to having such a fantastic CWO branch, I guess I’ll never truly know. Even as I joined my CF area executive, women dominated, with the two largest branches being run by females. It was only as I worked up the ranks that I found things seriously began to change, I found myself to be the only female on the regional executive, and it was here the trouble began. I actually received a message saying something along the lines of “why are you involved? Women don’t belong in positions of power”, the same person sending later messages attempting to manipulate me followed with “why won’t you just do as I say you silly girl” and calling for my resignation because I wouldn’t allow him to tell me what to do. Baring in mind we were the same age, I was horrified, and I wish he’d pulled his head out of the eighteenth century and this was only a couple of years ago, he has since defected to UKIP.

 Later on when I joined the National executive, I found that it had dropped from having 3 women in the previous term, to now just one. Me. It’s surprising just how many misogynists still exist, and it’s not the slightly innocent sexist banter that friends throw about each other, but cold hearted ignorant arrogant sexism. It could be seen in plain sight during the most recent internal elections, with the objectification of candidates, “who was the ‘Tory Totty’”, where clearly the politics was ignored and replaced with an image contest. I think this is why so many women don’t get involved; because of the unsolicited hounding from sex deprived young men- we need more women to get involved to give them a good verbal “slapping of the face”.

Over the past year, I have seen more females getting involved and I am ecstatic about this. Conservative Future Women have held fantastic training and networking events with more planned.

From now on when a guy is less than kind I won’t get angry with him, I shall pity him, for being so small minded with ignorant arrogance.