Since the foundation of the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) 18 months ago, Sophie Walker has been busy. She’s run for Mayor of London, successfully campaigned to keep feminism on the history A Level curriculum, and is preparing for her first party conference. Now she is in Cambridge to speak to the local branch, and to promote the national ‘What Women Want’ survey.

The first question I ask her is simple: is equality for women achievable?

“Yes,” she says instantly. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this. The reason it’s not happened so far is that there hasn’t been the political will – because our political establishments, and indeed all our institutions, have been dominated by men for centuries. That’s not to say they’re all nasty horrible men that are trying to keep women down, but unfortunately, when you don’t have a diversity of voices, you don’t have an understanding of other people’s experiences.”

Despite coming from a political family, Walker is not a career politician. She is a former Reuters journalist who went along to the first meeting of the WEP after offering to help put the chairs out.

She started thinking seriously about women’s issues, she tells me, when her daughter was diagnosed with autism. “It all sort of came together in a moment where I thought: ‘okay, so I have lived with a certain amount of discrimination my whole life; my daughter is now going to live with a double discrimination as a young woman with a disability’”.

“It really opened my eyes to a whole intersectionality of experience that affects women that I had not really seen before. And it also opened my eyes to how really bad we are as a society at understanding and embracing difference.”

Perhaps Walker brings that up self-consciously, because a lack of intersectionality is one of the criticisms that has been flung at the WEP from the first – arguably, since before it had been able to do anything to combat those allegations. So whose votes does the WEP envisage getting, and what does she have to offer minority or working-class women who aren’t currently engaged with politics?

“Let me be very clear. The Women’s Equality Party aims to represent real women, because women are not a homogenous mass. We can’t be effective as a political party unless we represent the diversity of all women’s experiences.”

Walker is keen to emphasise the strides her party have made to embrace diversity. The WEP’s policies are crowdsourced, but particularly notable is its offering of bursaries and childcare support to its candidates, “so that women who typically were not able to come forward have come forward”. At the most recent candidate selections, “our list was 30 per cent LGBT+, and 30 per cent BME – it was the most diverse list of candidates of any party.”

The party’s diversity may once have been a legitimate concern, but it’s clearly a question she is tired of hearing. “I have a friend who is a member of the Women’s Equality Party, who is white, working-class and gay. When this question gets asked she finds it very difficult, because to her that is erasing her intersectionality.”

“A room full of white people is not a room full of white middle-class people, and that [question] makes assumptions about the huge amounts of diversity that we do represent in this party.”

As she speaks, I realise how unusual it is to hear ‘women’s issues’ discussed on a political platform, rather than in an aside – and to hear a nuanced, rather than reductive or reactionary, response to these issues. For instance, the unchanging systemic pressures of the fashion industry which leave women vulnerable to poor body image, and sometimes eating disorders: Walker criticises the “tiny little clothes that women can only fit into after weeks of malnutrition.”

“But,” she adds, “I’m not going to have a go at models, because as soon as we do that it becomes an issue of blaming women for their bodies.”

The word ‘feminist’ is conspicuously absent from her speech, just as it is from the party’s home page, and their list of objectives. However, Walker seems offended when I ask if it’s a concept from which she wants to dissociate herself.

“We are a party for women. If you choose to call yourself a feminist, that’s brilliant – I am a very proud feminist – and one of the things I hope we can do with this party is to reclaim that word from 20 or 30 years’ deliberately misogynistic PR that slowed us all down. It kept us from creating the practical change we might have been able to do because we kept being diverted into conversations about ’are you a feminist or not?”

She doesn’t quite roll her eyes as she poses the question: “Can you wear lipstick and heels and still be a feminist?”

“For me, my brand of feminism is about action, and it is about making change. If you don’t feel comfortable calling yourself a feminist, but you want to sign up to the work we are doing and you care very much about diversity and inclusivity, that’s great.”

Last year, The Telegraph ran a piece heralding WEP as “UKIP for women”. While this is surely a tag Walker would be keen to reject, her adoption of different political conventions, and her emphasis on a ‘new kind of politics’, may appeal to disenfranchised women just as Farage was able to with his audience. She and her party are steadily calling attention to the fact that discussion of ‘women’s issues’ still takes place within the proverbial drawing room.

I, for one, think she might be onto something.