Gender imbalance

IN her letter Nadiyah Kahild (Nov 28) claims parties are male-dominated and so “regardless of how capable women are, they have a far lesser chance of being selected as a candidate by a party.”

However, at the last election, the percentage of independent candidates who were female was even lower than the percentage of party candidates who were female.

Could it not simply be that relatively few women put themselves forward, rather than any specific gender discrimination within parties?