Election 2010: so what happened?

Well, I was going to post a rousing speech about voting on polling day, but blogger was playing up so I'll save it for the inevitable next election in a few months time. Until then perhaps you'd like to have a look at the hard stats when it comes to the women MPs who've been elected this time round. Centre for Women and Democracy have put this list together:

142 women MPs - only 22% of the total 649 (there were 126 women MPs - 19.5% of the total).

The number of Conservative women MPs has risen from 18 to 48 - an increase from 9% to 16%.

The number of Labour women MPs has fallen from 94 to 81 - but the fall in the overall number of Labour MPs means that there is a percentage increase of 4% (from 27% to 31%).

The number of Liberal Democrat women MPs has fallen from 9 to 7 - a decrease from 15% to 12%.

The unusually high number of MPs retiring at this election meant that the loss of Labour women in marginal seats was balanced out by 50% of Labour candidates in seats where the Labour MP was retiring being women. Had this not been the case the number of women in the House of Commons would have declined significantly.

In addition to the women elected for the main three parties, there was one woman elected for the Green Party, one for the SNP, one for Sinn Fein, one for the SDLP, one for the Alliance Party, and one Independent.

None of Plaid Cymru's three MPs are women, and none of the DUP's eight.