Women and minority candidates are good enough to be MPs already – it’s the party that needs the diversity motion

I understand why people dislike targeted shortlists. I don't like them, in principle. To me, liberalism is all about giving people the greatest personal choice, and in an ideal world I wouldn't support them, which is what I said on the stage at autumn conference in 2014.

But we don't live in an ideal world, and that's why I'm supporting the diversity motion at this Spring Conference.

The classic arguments just don't hang together any more. People say we need a level playing field. We do need it, but right now we don't have it - and our diverse approved candidate list proves that's not because underrepresented groups refuse to put themselves up for selection.

People think it will lead to tokenism, and god knows I don't want to be treated as the token woman. I know I'm not a token, I know if I ran to be an MP it would be because I felt I was good enough to do it whoever I was up against, and I trust that any local party that had gone to the effort of selecting me would too, which is what really matters.

But I know plenty of people who treat me like I'm a token for being young and a woman in the Lib Dems even without targets. They do it because young women in the Lib Dems are so uncommon (at least compared to young men) that we're the proverbial unicorns - get a young woman in your event photo and you've hit the diversity jackpot. Why don't young women join the party that fought for fair parental leave and equal pay audits? Well, we know our lack of diversity drives away voters and potential members.

So why aren't people getting selected if it's not through their own choice? Even though the Lib Dem's problem isn't (usually) overt sexism, racism, homophobia or ablism we all have unconscious biases. If selectors aren't used to having women on a shortlist, they won't notice when there isn't one, and a list where women make up 50% of the list or more stands out as a weird anomaly - even though all-male lists happen quite often.

Why do I think the diversity motion will fix that problem? Because all the evidence suggests the short, sharp shock of targets like these changes attitudes, and that those changes are irreversible. Like the introduction of many more women to the UK parliament in 1997, or to parliaments in Sweden, Norway and Denmark under party targets, this policy has the potential to fundamentally alter not just the way the party talks about diversity, but the way it acts. All the evidence suggests after a few years of targets nobody will be asking if women could win a selection on "merit": it will be an accepted fact. Once that shift has happened, we can get rid of the targets.

Other diversity efforts have been great for helping us find and support women candidates, but they haven't had the drastic effect this motion could on attitudes party-wide. We've been mentoring and supporting women candidates since the party was founded but it hasn't made a huge difference. In fact, diversity initiatives like mentoring are ideal for people who don't think the party needs to change: they get to pay lip service to diversity by voting for it, send the people involved off and let them get on with it, and you only have to hear about it once a year in a conference report. These great initiatives will continue if the motion passes, but it is the targets in this motion that will really get everyone engaged in changing how we do things.

So no, the motion isn't perfect, but then neither is the world we live in or the party we represent. This Spring conference, please vote to give us a real chance to change that.

* Alice Thomas stood for Islington Council in St George's ward this May, and she is also the Liberal Youth Liaison to Liberal Democrat Women. She joined the Lib Dems in her hometown of Bromley & Chislehurst in 2006, just in time for her first by-election and has been campaigning ever since. She is a trainee solicitor, who spends her free time baking, and then running to make up for all the cake!