India, July 18 -- As Andy Burnham prepares to become Britain's next prime minister on Monday, more than a century after Labour first formed a government, the party still cannot claim what its Conservative rivals have delivered three times over: a female leader.

That gap, once treated as an awkward footnote, has become one of the loudest questions swirling around Westminster this summer.

More than 125 years after its founding and over a century since it first entered government, the Labour Party is on the verge of installing its latest leader, and once again, it will be a man. Andy Burnham's near-uncontested rise to the top of the party has revived a question that has dogged Labour for decades: how can Britain's self-declared party of eq...