Hello and welcome to this special episode of Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Hannah White.

Now this Wednesday, which is when your podcast landed in your podcast feed, is, of course, International Women's

Day. And here at the IFG, we've done a lot of work tracking the representation of women in public

life, in government, parliament, and civil service, and thinking about how the number of women

in senior roles could be increased. So I'm absolutely delighted to be joined today by two great women

who are also think tank directors, Charlotte Pickles of Reform and Polly Curtis of Demos.

Hello. Hello. Nice to do you.

And what the three of us wanted to do today was to have a conversation about what could be done to bring more women into politics and to policy-facing roles, including think tanks,

to explore why diversity of thought matters and what difference it makes to policy outcomes.

So I just wanted to kick off with a question to each of you, maybe start with you, Charlotte. You've worked

in and around Westminster for many years across lots of different sectors, in fact. What changes

have you seen in the representation of women over that period? So I'd like to be really positive

about this. And I do think that, you know, as you see, I've been kind of in and around

policy government think tank for about 15 years. And I do think there has been some progress.

And I think if you look at the policy world, you look at, you know, kind of senior levels of civil

service, there are more women.

But, and this is the big but, not as much progress as I think we should have seen and I would want to see.

And I think you can see that in lots of ways. So if I think about think tanks, which is where we all are at at the moment, there are still an awful lot of think tanks, particularly those you would deem as the sort of classic Westminster think tanks, that not only are led by men, absolutely fine, but actually where every part of the senior level of the think tank is still men, or think tanks where you mostly see women in either the more junior roles or you see them in roles that are not necessarily the research or the policy content, but perhaps HR or kind of events delivery.

So I think there is still some way to go. But the fact that we're all sitting here,

three of us, as female directors of think tanks, I think is a mark that things are starting

to change and that's positive. And probably, you've got lots of experience in journalism. And that's

really changed, hasn't it, in recent years? Journalism has changed dramatically. So if you look at the number of editors across Fleet Street or women, it's gone up so markedly.

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