Second reading: The new blog from the House of Commons Library

Second reading was launched today with three posts to coincide with Parliament Week 2013, which has the theme Women and Democracy.

In one of them, "The history and geography of women MPs since 1918 in numbers", Richard Cracknell tells us:

Since 1918, women have been more likely to be MPs in towns and cities than in rural constituencies. This at least partly reflects the tendency for Labour seats to be in urban areas and the higher number of women Labour MPs, compared with other parties. But women MPs have also tended to cluster in constituencies in some of the UK’s biggest cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow.