As a Cosmopolitan survey reveals women would rather vote for reality star Joey Essex than the current prime minister, the principal of Newnham College has warned that young women are uninspired by today’s politicians.

Dame Carol Black, the principal of Newnham and an adviser to the Department of Health, claimed that a lack of female politicians has led to women feeling underrepresented in Parliament.

She called for more “female politicians significant enough for women to be inspired by”, citing the fact that “the average MP is white, male and over fifty” as a key source of disillusionment amongst women.

Her comments came after a survey carried out by the magazine Cosmopolitan of 1,000 women between the ages of 18 and 30, which found young women have an overwhelmingly negative perception of modern politics. Only one per cent of women described politicians as ‘hardworking, intelligent and essential’ whilst 62 per cent agreed with Russell Brand in describing the political system as "broken". When asked to vote from a hypothetical line-up of candidates, three per cent of women voted for The Only Way is Essex star Joey Essex, as opposed to one per cent voting for David Cameron or Nick Clegg.

This political disillusionment among young women seems to be directly linked to a reluctance to participate in politics. 84 per cent of respondents claimed that they would never consider going into politics, with a political career only marginally outranking being a stripper. Preferred career choices included teacher, doctor, journalist, model and banker.

Dame Black links this directly to the harshly critical reception of women in the public eye, particularly female politicians, which discourages young women from pursuing political careers. She added that “I think there’s a question on whether a woman will be heard and respected as much as a man in that same space.”

Only 147 MPs out of 650 elected representatives are female, with only three women in a cabinet of 23 ministers. Since the resignation of Maria Miller, the former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, following an expenses scandal, there are no mothers in the current cabinet, despite there being over 10 million mothers with dependent children in the UK.

Some students, however, feel there is a more pervasive sense of political apathy amongst young people as a whole, rather than between young women. Lydia Price, a first year Classicist at Clare, feels that politicians are too out of touch with ordinary people, describing them as “posh boys who only care about their friends and their companies”.

The Cabinet has major flaws in representation beyond gender, as none of its members are from ethnic minorities, apart from the recently-promoted culture secretary Sajid Javid MP, who is of Asian descent. There are also no openly homosexual people, no single parents and no one under the age of 38. Of 23 ministers, 17 graduated from Oxford or Cambridge.

Lilly Posnett, an Education with English and Drama student at Homerton, did not vote in the local and European election on Thursday. She agreed with Dame Black that she would be more likely to vote if there were more female MPs, but also emphasised that a fresh perspective is needed within Westminster: “I feel like [politicians] are all the same, really, and all saying kind of the same things, or disagreeing with each other rather than actually saying anything different that’s going to make a difference [ …] when they’ve all come from the same background, they all sort of think of the same solutions, and it’d be nice to have someone with a different perspective.”