So what if Labour’s next deputy leader is a woman?

In the wake of Angela Rayner’s recent resignation as deputy UK prime minister and deputy Labour leader, Labour grandee Harriet Harman declared that her party’s next deputy leader ‘needs to be somebody from outside London and it definitely needs to be a woman’. And so it will be, with Lucy Powell and Bridget Phillipson set to battle it out after Alison McGovern, Paula Barker and Emily Thornberry dropped out of the race.

For some, Harman’s call for so-called positive discrimination was welcome. It certainly will have given Wes Streeting a convenient reason to keep his hat out of the ring, rather than confess his ambition for a pop at the boss’s job. For the rest of us, it’s hard to see why it matters all that much that the deputy leader is a woman. Never mind that it took a Supreme Court ruling to get Harman, Phillipson and other Labour MPs to actually recognise what a woman is.

Though she herself was Labour’s deputy leader under both Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, Harman clearly thinks Labour still has a ‘women problem’, and that a female deputy will help fix it. Yes, it is true that Labour has never had a woman leader, while the Tories have had four female leaders and three female prime ministers. But women are hardly underrepresented in the current cabinet.

As it happens, the majority of Labour’s resignations under Keir Starmer’s leadership have involved members of the fairer sex. And they have brought their sackings entirely on themselves. There’s Angie and her dodgy taxes, Rushanara Ali’s rack-rent landlording (evicting her tenants, only to up the rent by £700 in search of richer ones), Tulip Siddiq’s corruption trial in Bangladesh, and Louise Haigh’s fibs about stolen mobile phones. Sure, there have been a few scandal-prone men – think Andrew Gwynne’s nasty texts about his constituents and Peter Mandelson’s bad taste in friends. But it’s the ladies who have been giving Starmer the biggest headache since he came to power.

Harman’s recent comments were revealing for another reason. She doesn’t just want a woman, she also wants an acquiescent one. The Labour Party needs ‘somebody who is not a counterpoint to the leader, but is complementary to the leader’, she told the Today programme earlier this month. This is a nice way of saying a Yes woman. Phillipson certainly fits the bill, having quietly worked her way through the Labour machine and into the favour of the prime minister by saying very little. Powell might be more tetchy, given Starmer only sacked her recently in his forced reshuffle, but she’s hardly an outside pick.

Harman’s remarks expose Labour’s biggest problem with women: it treats us like window dressing. Long before it forgot who is and isn’t a woman, Labour’s identity-politics obsession was all about quotas for women and all-women shortlists. It didn’t care what its female ministers thought or believed, just that they were women. It mattered less what they did than that they did so in a nice skirt suit.

The election of Phillipson or Powell will certainly do very little for women. As cabinet members, both supported the government’s two-child benefit cap, a policy area in which change would make an immediate difference to struggling mothers across the country. Even worse, Powell belittled the suffering of thousands of girls who were abused by the grooming gangs, dismissing concern about the scandal as a ‘dogwhistle’.

Nor would their presence as deputies do much for Labour’s flagging electoral fortunes, particularly the threat posed by Reform UK. Phillipson revealed her true colours by voting not only against Brexit but also in favour of a second referendum, while Powell’s support of a ‘Common Market 2.0’ was hardly any better. Both have positioned themselves explicitly against the public’s populist aspirations.

Having a lady for his deputy party leader might soften Starmer’s wooden edges on screen, but it’ll do nothing to save the Labour Party – and let alone do anything for women.

Ella Whelan is the author of The Case For Women’s Freedom, the latest in the Academy of Ideas’ radical pamphleteering series, Letters on Liberty.