After a year’s hard work, we were proud to announce the release last month of our second MK Fawcett Discussion Paper of 2020 entitled ‘Women’s participation in local politics’. The project began over a year ago with the observation of three meetings in the MK Council chamber - the last being in January 2020, just before the lockdown saw all Council meetings transferred online. We wanted to see whether women had an equal opportunity to participate in Council discussion and, if not, why not. This in turn prompted us to seek out all the information we could find on how women came to get elected as councillors in the first place, as well as the roles they were appointed to on Council committees. We quickly realised that we couldn’t get a full picture of the decision-making processes that underly all these outcomes without consulting all the different kinds of people involved at different stages, whether Council officers, councillors or local party members. We made sure that all the key p