Britain's coalition government may have made history, but campaigners warn a lack of women in the new cabinet undermines Prime Minister David Cameron's promise of a "new politics".
The senior position of home secretary has gone to veteran lawmaker Theresa May, but she is only one of four female ministers in the cabinet -- fewer than in ex-Labour premier Tony Blair's first cabinet in 1997.
This is despite voters sending a record 142 women to parliament in the May 6 election, although this is still fewer than a fifth of the total of 650.
And it means Cameron has a long way to go before fulfilling his promise that a third of his cabinet would be women by the end of his first term.
"It’s as though feminism never happened," said Ceri Goddard, chief executive of the Fawcett Society lobby group.
"It would seem that while many of our politicians have managed to overcome party tribalism and age-old loyalties to form a coalition, this new approach to politics has not seen them cast off the sexist attitudes that mean women, as a rule, are excluded from the top tier of British government."
Cameron's Conservatives won the biggest number of seats in the election but not the majority needed to eject Gordon Brown's Labour government, and so entered into a power-sharing deal with the third-placed Liberal Democrats.
It is the first coalition in Britain since World War II and Cameron said it heralded a "new politics".
But critics argue there is nothing new about the lack of women in power, more than 90 years after they won the right to vote, with only May and Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman appointed to senior roles.
The other two cabinet ministers are Cheryl Gillan, Welsh secretary, and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a minister without portfolio who becomes the first Muslim woman at the top table.
Warsi defended the appointments, saying: "We have some phenomenal women and we have Theresa May as home secretary -- what could be better than that?"
But long-serving Labour lawmaker Margaret Beckett, who was one of five women in Blair's first cabinet, admitted the lack of female representation could alienate voters.
"I think it could and that would be a pity, because one of the reasons that they probably haven't got more women in the cabinet in senior roles is simply because of the dearth of people coming through," she said.
Other commentators noted there were also few women on the campaign trail, other than the three main party leaders' wives who stood loyally by their husbands and endured endless debate about what they were wearing.
"The wives were the Madonnas, the good women; the women MPs the bad. All were silenced," said one leading newspaper commentator.
The parties have tried to boost their female intake, however.
Labour introduced all-women shortlists ahead of the 1997 election and came to power with a record 101 female MPs, dubbed "Blair's babes", out of a total of 120 women elected that year.
In this election, the party put many female candidates in what were considered winnable seats. Only 81 were elected but out of a total of 258 Labour MPs this is a higher proportion than before.
The Conservatives pursued a similar policy as part of Cameron's attempts to modernise his party and make it more diverse, and they boosted their number of female MPs from 18 to 48, out of a total of 306.
His partners in government, the Lib Dems, did not push women into safe seats but relied on mentoring female candidates, with the result that only seven of their 57 MPs are women.
Nan Sloane, director of the Centre for Women and Democracy, says the problem is not a lack of women coming forward -- record numbers stood for the Tories and Labour in this election -- but the attitude of local party members.
"They're not getting selected," she told AFP, arguing that only positive action will change the gender imbalance.
Sloane highlighted a law in Spain that says at least 40 percent of candidates must be female. Currently, half the Spanish cabinet are women.