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Why does the UK have so few women MPs? Gillian Slovo talked to leading politicians about heckling, urinals and thick skins â€" and turned their experiences into a new show

In the months leading up to the last election, I found myself talking to women MPs. From our long and sometimes circuitous taped conversations, I was to compile the verbatim section of the Women, Power and Politics season at the Tricycle theatre in London. I wanted to explore two questions: why does the British parliament have such a low number of women? And, after an election campaign when women seemed mostly to be restricted to the arms of their husbands, should we care?

With 22% of its MPs female, Britain is number 50 in the league table of women in parliament, a dubious distinction it shares with the Czech Republic, Eritrea, Latvia and Uzbekistan. Rwanda is number one with 56.3%, Sweden is second with 46.4%, and South Africa third with 44.5%. Other countries, including the US, fare even worse â€" and the league table ends with Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all of whom have no women representatives. But what I needed to understand was why the mother of parliaments came so low in the table.

I moved from one office to the next, interviewing the old wave on the cusp of the new. From the high atrium of Portcullis House, its cloisters occupied by the likes of Clare Short (who retired on 6 May) and Britain's youngest MP, the Conservative Chloe Smith (re-elected), to the bowels of the Commons, where Jacqui Smith's office seemed to emphasise her fall from grace (she lost her seat), and on again to the cosiness of the base that Ann Widdecombe, on the brink of retirement, was soon to vacate. Although I interviewed each separately, it was clear that our conversation stretched across the political divide.

"I came in here to do a job," said Widdecombe. "I've done it, I've enjoyed doing it, I've had successes, I've had failures, I've competed with the men and won, I've competed with the men and lost, but I've enjoyed it, and I never . . . came in here with a whingeing, miserable 'Ooh, I'm going to have a grievance every five minutes' kind of attitude." It was a characteristically defiant stand by a woman who probably suffered more abuse than any other for her refusal to play the appearance game. Her disdain for any positive discrimination was clear. She didn't want anyone, let alone a "patronising man", smoothing her path. That would be degrading. As for the low number of women in parliament, that did not bother her. What mattered, she insisted, was the calibre of each MP, be they male or female.

Smith, one of the "Blair babes", selected on an all-women shortlist and proud of it, couldn't have been more different. To her, a parliament that purports to represent the electorate needs to be truly representative. King, another "Blair babe", although she detests the moniker, pointed out that companies such as Sky spend millions trying to reach all households in Britain, something that government should be equally interested in doing. If diversity is unimportant to parliament, she said, then it will end up adrift from its democratic mandate. Or, in Smith's words: "If you've got a parliament in which more MPs are called John than are women," then what you have is an essentially unrepresentative government. Smith argued that women-only shortlists had changed the very nature of parliament, not least because women's concerns are often different from men's. Domestic violence, tax credits for families and public health were prioritised.

The public school ethos that King encountered in her first days, evident in the shouts of "melons" that greeted a woman who rose to speak, had been worn down by male MPs forced into working proximity with women. The parliament she left was a different place to the one she had joined.

Shirley Williams described how, on her first day in the Commons in 1964, she had opened a door marked "MPs only" to find herself in a urinal. In those days, she said, there were MPs, all men, and then there were "Lady MPs", in whose special room was chintz furniture and an iron.

Edwina Currie insisted she was not "a lady". Elected in 1983 and an opponent of women-only shortlists, she talked with bemusement of the Conservative women MPs of the time, the wives or widows of establishment figures, in contrast to Labour women such as Barbara Castle, "hardbitten old hands" who had come up through the trades union movement. Like Widdecombe, Currie emphasised equal rights. Once these were won, then women could enter parliament "on the basis of competing with the men".

But why are there still so few women in parliament? Widdecombe insisted it is the fault of women who don't step forward. Smith recalled that when she was first an MP, women would ask how they, too, could become one. But now, with intense media scrutiny and corresponding public humiliation, what they wanted to know was how she could bear the job.

What became clear was that these women are unusually thick-skinned. An MP's job is a combination of social work and high politics and, other than for those with a London constituency, in two entirely different locations. As a result, a woman with children has to be unusual, or to have an unusual partner, to consider standing. Widdecombe would say: parliament is parliament and if women don't like it, then it doesn't much matter if they keep away. But Smith argued: politics is a collective effort and it is women who, traditionally, know how to work collectively and who are put off by the unrelenting combat.

When I did my first verbatim piece, the Tricycle's Guantánamo play, I learned that the way people speak is almost as powerful as what they say. Reading the MPs' words, what came back to me was their quirky individuality: Widdecombe's clipped, defiant accuracy; Smith's quiet solidity even under siege; King's uneasy defensiveness; Curry's warm, flirtatious insecurity; Short's earthy mix of optimism and pessimism; Williams's warm, calm long view. Each was different and each admirable in their determination not to let anything stand in their way.

I had intended to compile a set of monologues to be placed among eight short dramas, each exploring a different aspect of women's involvement with power and politics, from suffragetism to an imaginary female prime minister. I didn't expect to find myself in the midst of such a passionate exchange. From the material, I shaped a dialogue about what a parliament is and what it should be.

And then came the election and the new cabinet, in which there are fewer women than ever. It reminded me of something Short had said: "It's funny now when I see old pictures, [or] film of the UN . . . when some historic thing was decided, and they are all men. It feels laughable and wrong â€" you know, half of humanity isn't there." The signs on the toilets might have changed, but will there ever come a time when we view our current lineup with the same sense of old-fashioned hilarity?

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