Women and Leadership: Examining the Relationship between Llanito and the Absence of a Female Chief Minister in Gibraltar

The ascent of women to high political office in Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory, has progressed at a markedly slow pace: the territory is yet to see a female Chief Minister. This is the first study to investigate the underlying factors contributing to this phenomenon and how Llanito, a code-switched dialect local to Gibraltar, affects this slow progression. The transmission of Llanito has been connected to working-class mothers in Gibraltar. I originally propose that negative attitudes towards Llanito, informed by colonial mentalities, are symptomatic of the attitudes that have placed barriers on women entering politics in Gibraltar. My study uses a combination of Social Reproduction Theory and Anti-Colonial Theory to present Gibraltar as a test case for pluralist social reproduction theory, to position the home as a space for both reproducing and resisting coloniality. This combined lens reveals the effects of analysing the postcolonial politics of Gibraltar as founded upon the idea of women as victims during the evacuation of WWII. Semi-structured interviews with Gibraltar’s political elite are used to reinstate Gibraltarian women into narratives of self-determination, and help to investigate whether officialising Llanito, as an anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal act, can make space for women at the political top.