US Edition There’s a few things in life that really get my hackles up.
People standing on the wrong side of escalators. Kim Kardashian. And the assumption that girls only like (cutesy, unintimidating, slightly babyish) pink.
So when I saw Labour’s women’s bus… my heart sank.
For the next three months, some of the party’s most impressive female minds will be travelling around the country drumming up support in a 17-seater mini bus. That happens to look like the lovechild of Barbie and Sheila’s Wheels.
The deep pink van with Woman To Woman splashed across the side will ferry Labour’s Harriet Harman, election co-ordinater Lucy Powell and Shadow Women’s Minister Gloria de Piero on a female-focused election road trip.
There’s a lot to like about the women’s campaign, which will focus on key issues like childcare, family care, equal pay and tackling domestic violence.
At the last election 9.1 million women didn’t vote, and young women in particular are disproportionately switched off from the election process. Anything to re-engage female voters has got to be a good thing.
Harriet Harman said: “I don’t think it’s at all patronising to recognise that women have got different patterns of their working lives, there’s different patterns in families between what women do and what men do. That is to recognise the reality and to say public policy needs to address that.”
So far, so sensible. But it’s hard to get past the – well – pinkness.
When I asked about the colour of the bus at the campaign launch, there was much skirting around the P-word. Harriet Harman said it was “magenta” while Gloria de Piero called it “cerise.” When I asked who came up with the colour, I was simply told “a collective”.
Finally Ms Harman acknowledged: “We could have had red but that would look like all the other Labour vehicles, and we wanted to mark that this was something different. Then we looked at a darker red but it looked like a Pret a Manger van. We wanted to it to look conspicuous and therefore a white van wasn’t going to do the job. We were not going to have it blue or any of the other [party] colours. We wanted it to be visible and I think it’s a great colour.”
Full disclosure: I may be slightly biased against the pink bus.
I was the kind of child who was more likely to play pirate ships with my brother than dolls. As a baby, strangers assumed I was a boy and I always looked faintly ridiculous in pretty dresses.
But there is a serious point here.
You have to search to find toys aimed at little girls that aren’t pink. Women’s trainers in sports shops are invariably splashed in pink. Kids’ bracelets and hairbands are pink, pink, pink.
If pink is for girls, the subtle message is that all the other colours aren’t. Half the population is being treated as a kind of niche group. It builds up a stereotype that all women are the same, and they all like pink (not blue, not green, not black or brown.)
That’s why Labour’s pink bus is slightly troubling.
The thinking behind it is entirely reasonable – women are under-represented in parliament, so politicians should get out there and listen to what they have to say.
But the bright pink bus – a colour that has the underlying message that women all love pink – gives the impression that women are a niche group of homogenous people who care about the same things.
This is plainly rubbish. Mothers are hugely affected by childcare policy – those who don’t have kids aren’t. Female business owners may be concerned about corporation tax or Brussels red-tape, women who work for the NHS might find health policy is their priority area.
Women don’t vote the same way either. It’s often trotted out that David Cameron has a “women problem”, for instance. In fact the polls paint a far more complex picture – older women are disproportionately supportive of the Conservatives, younger women are the opposite, and if you put them together they cancel each other out to a roughly neutral position.
I believe that Labour’s women’s campaign comes from a good place, and isn’t trying to lump an entire gender together into one big stereotype. The MPs behind the initiative genuinely care about listening, engaging and representing.
It would be a shame if the atrocious pink bus masked that.