The Home Office has four female ministers and five men, while the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has three men and three women. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) does better: six out of its 10 ministers are women. Of the Great Offices of State, the Treasury has two women ministers, both of whom are white, compared to four men. The paucity of women’s representation contradicts the Prime Minister’s claims in his Conservative Party Conference speech that “we believe that women should be secretaries – Secretaries of State”.
Only five men in the Cabinet are black or ethnic minorities, alongside 17 white men. The Cabinet itself only has eight female Secretaries of State, of which two are black or ethnic minorities: Home Secretary Priti Patel and Attorney General Suella Braverman. The MoD has no female and no special advisors who are people of colour. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ( BEIS) has no female ministers at all, while the Ministry of Defence ( MoD) only has one unpaid female minister – Baroness Goldie – to four men. Eleven Government departments have no women of colour ministers, while eight have no men of colour ministers, according to data analysed by Byline Times.
