By Professor Rosie Harding, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham

Over the last few days, my social media news feeds have been populated with commentary on the Conservative Party leadership contest. For the first time ever, two women, Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom, will be the candidates on the Conservative Party membership ballot for their next leader. That next Conservative party leader is guaranteed to be the next Prime Minister of the UK. I was tempted to write a rant post about the implications for “democracy” that just 150,000 Tory party members get to choose our next Prime Minister, but I will resist (for now). Instead, I want to explore some of the gender and sexuality dimensions of this leadership context.

Boris Johnson (perhaps not the most trustworthy of sources, given recent events) has reportedly lauded the Conservative parliamentary party for choosing two women as leadership candidates, suggesting that this now makes them the “most progressive party in Britain”. Other commentators, like Laurie Penny, have been less impressed by the feminist potential of these particular leadership candidates.  A quick glance at the track record of both candidates gives those of us who are interested in gender and sexuality equality cause for concern.

Theresa May was famously photographed wearing a Fawcett Society “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt, and was also the first to warn the Tories that needed to drop their ‘nasty party’ image back in 2002. But she has a mixed record when it comes to equality and human rights: she voted against equalising the age of consent in 1998, against adoption by same sex couples in 2002, and against the repeal of Section 28 in 2003. More recent years, have seen a change in her approach to LGBT rights, however, with positive votes for both civil partnership in 2004 and same sex marriage in 2013. Yet May is famously unenthusiastic about the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and has previously been reported as arguing that the UK should not only repeal our Human Rights Act, but also withdraw from the ECHR and from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. She has gone on record as part of her leadership bid acknowledging that there is not currently enough support for such a withdrawal. Yet without the equality protections that have their roots in EU law, domestic applicability of the ECHR will be more important than ever. Should May become our next Prime Minister, it is clear that we will need to redouble our efforts to protect our human rights.

The second contender, Andrea Leadsom, has been in Parliament for a much shorter period than May, so any assessment of her record on gender and sexuality equality issues is harder to make on the basis of her voting patterns. Helpfully, she recently clarified her approach to same sex marriage in a widely reported recent ITV news interview. Unfortunately her position demonstrated a woeful ignorance of the law. Mainstream reporting on that interview suggests that she was against same sex marriage, but the picture is rather less clear than that. Leadsom actually said (after saying that she supported civil partnerships for both gay couples and heterosexual couples, but that marriage in the biblical sense was between men and women) that “civil partnerships are called marriage as well…registry office marriages are still marriages.” What Leadsom misunderstands is before the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, gay couples did not have access to registry office marriage. Instead we had civil partnership, a mirror institution that was created primarily to prevent same sex couples from using the word “marriage”, whilst giving access to the same rights and responsibilities associated with marriage. The legislation she disliked so much had precisely the effects she now claims she wanted: equal access to civil marriage and protection for the Anglican church. Leadsom would be well advised to read some of the socio-legal scholarship on the differences and similarities between civil partnership and same sex marriage.

Leadsom is also reported as having argued in 2012 that small businesses should be exempt from the minimum wage, unfair dismissal and maternity and paternity rights. I must confess I struggle to see how she squares this belief with her reported, “real passion for giving [children] the best start in life”. It’s not clear to me how allowing small employers to unfairly dismiss employees, pay poverty wages or refuse to financially support women (and men) in taking time off work to care for their newly born children can possibly do anything other than ensure that even more British children spend the early years of their lives in poverty.

If ‘Brexit’ becomes a legal as well as political reality, we will need our parliament to be staunch defenders of equality, for women, for LGBT* people, and for all other minorities.  I am not a member of the Conservative party, so I will have no say in which of these candidates becomes our next Prime Minister. I’ll have to wait until the next General Election (whenever that may be) to make my democratic difference. In the meantime, I can only hope that the Labour party end their current self-destructive path and unite in opposition to whichever candidate emerges victorious. It seems to me that these two candidates offer more cause for concern than celebration when it comes to gender and sexuality.