Women Members of Parliament: Background Paper

This briefing paper provides a list of all the women who have ever been elected to the House of Commons, since the passage of the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918, which allowed women to stand as parliamentary candidates from 1918.

Following the 2019 General Election, of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, 220 are held by women MPs. This is the highest number of women MPs ever to sit at the same time in the House of Commons.

At the 2017 General Election, 208 women were elected – a record number, at that time.

During the 2017 Parliament, women MPs were elected at all five by-elections (see the Library Briefing, By-elections since the 2017 General Election). They replaced three men and two women, so by the end of the Parliament, the number of women MPs had increased to 211

In total, since 1918, there have been 552 women MPs.

This list provides the names of the women MPs in order of first election, the party they were first elected for, the constituency or constituencies they represented and the dates during which they sat as MPs.

In 2018, to mark the 60th anniversary of the first female life peer, the House of Lords Library compiled a list of current and former female peers:

• House of Lords Library, Lords Membership: List of Current and Former Female Peers, LLn-2018-0014, 30 January 2018