That the Grand Committee takes note of International Women’s Day and the United Kingdom’s role in furthering and protecting the equality of women in the UK and internationally.
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to open this International Women’s Day debate, but I begin by saying that my thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by the events in Ukraine at this very difficult time. We continue to stand united with our international partners in supporting the Government in Ukraine and condemning this reprehensible assault on its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
I will looking to more positive matters. After years of unfair detention by the Government of Iran, British nationals Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori returned from Iran yesterday. Morad Tahbaz has also been released from prison on furlough. It is the result of tenacious and creative British diplomacy. This outcome is the result of intensive efforts over the past six months. We thank our Omani friends for their help in bringing our nationals home. This is a moment of great relief. We have the deepest admiration for the resolve, courage and determination that all three individuals have shown.
I returned this morning from New York, where I took part in the 66th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. The priority theme of this year’s event is “Achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the context of climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes”. I therefore feel it fitting that we have the chance today to reflect on our role in the international community in prioritising women and girls, as well as marginalised and vulnerable groups, in responding to humanitarian crises. It is easy to feel powerless when faced by threats such as the current situation in Ukraine, but the Commission on the Status of Women provides the perfect opportunity to work with international partners to build coalitions to fight those threats. In fact, while I was in New York I was privileged to attend, in part, the concert that the Met put on for the Ukrainian people; that was really emotional. What was even more emotional was that I was able to meet, for a few minutes, the Ukrainian ambassador out there and pass on my message of support. I am pleased that we are negotiating progressive agreed conclusions that will help to protect and promote women’s and girls’ rights around the world.
It is a great pleasure to follow the Minister in today’s International Women’s Day debate. I congratulate her too on looking so cheerful after flying overnight to be here with us this afternoon. I know she will have attended a great conference; I have been myself and it is inspiring to be there. I thank her for at least turning up today after a stressful time.
I am very pleased to be taking part today but, as I raised with the Minister a week or two ago, why has it taken so long to have this debate? International Women’s Day was on 8 March and it is now 17 March, St Patrick’s Day. In future, I hope that we will have the debate either on the day or on one of the days either side of 8 March, and that we can have it in the Chamber not Grand Committee. Only 20 Peers have put their names down to speak today, which is the lowest I have ever seen for this debate. Nevertheless, I am sure we will have a good debate.
Although women have come a long way in the battle for equality, there is still a long way to go. If we look at women in politics in the UK, we see that since 1918 there have been only 559 women elected to the House of Commons but 4,500 men. It has taken us 104 years to get 559 women elected, which is not really a very good record. There is still a way to go before there is equality on numbers in the House of Commons, despite the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002, which allowed political parties to have all-women shortlists of candidates for elections. The Act included a sunset clause; it would have expired at the end of 2015 but was extended by the Equality Act 2010, allowing all-women shortlists to be used until 2030.
Will the Minister agree to look at extending the sunset clause, which will expire in 2030 unless action is taken? It is vital to allow political parties to use all-women shortlists because the elected institutions should look a bit like the people they represent. It is interesting to note that the new devolved institutions do a lot better than old ones. For example, the Welsh Senedd has always had a good number of women elected, and in 2003 broke all records by having 30 men and 30 women elected. That was regarded as a world record; bear in mind that it was in Wales, so it was a really big achievement.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. I agree with her remarks, especially the ones at the start highlighting the regrettable change from the precedent that she and my noble friend Lady Northover worked so hard to create: the annual debate in the Chamber to allow for all the considerations for International Women’s Day to be carried out.
My remarks today will focus more on the international side, as I am the foreign affairs and international development spokesperson for my party. I declare an interest in overseas travel, which I will refer to later. I also commend the Minister on her stamina during her overnight journey. She is respected in the House but I hope she will forgive me because, a little later in my remarks, I will highlight some of the areas where I believe that the rhetoric in her speech is not met with the reality, particularly of development policy.
Before I depart from the Minister, let me say that I very much agree with her on the news of the return of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and others. I pay tribute to noble Lords, including those from my own party—in particular my noble friend Lady Northover, who has been such a consistent and doughty campaigner in making sure that the case for those dual nationals held in such circumstances was constantly on our agenda. I commend and pay tribute to her work. The Minister knows that my noble friend will leave this Committee to cover the Statement in the Chamber; it is absolutely appropriate that she does so, meaning no discourtesy to the Committee.
I wish to refer to the international side in particular, but I will also refer to what the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, indicated is here in Parliament. Recently—two weeks ago—I was in both Baghdad and Beirut. I was supporting the induction of new MPs in Iraq. It has the highest proportion of directly elected female MPs and is in its fifth term of Parliament after democracy was restored. Many of those MPs come from the protest movement and were driven by their disgust at the corruption in government to become active in Parliament. Their impact will be meaningful, I think. Equally, in Beirut, I was supporting a project that mentors women to become candidates in elections and, as the Minister said, overcome bias and implied bias. It is the whole range, from actual violence through to political violence, media violence, implied bias and absolute bias. Many of these women have had to overcome enormous barriers that I have never had to face as a political candidate. They are an inspiration. When it comes to municipal and parliamentary elections, they will have an impact in transforming that system and, in many respects, in tackling the confessional system that is based in many countries around the world. Indeed confessional systems, almost by definition, retain the patriarchy of structures in society, faith and politics, which has meant that the barriers are hard to overcome.
My Lords, it is my pleasure to speak in today’s debate and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed. Like him, I will begin by focusing on international issues. I did put the word around to see if any of my female colleagues were available, because they are more qualified to speak than me, but none of them were today so you have to put up with me. I am glad to have this opportunity.
First, there is much I want to celebrate. As part of my brief, I take special interest in two of the poorest nations on earth, Burundi and Lesotho—one of the others is South Sudan. These nations are making great progress on women’s equality. It has been my privilege to visit Lesotho a couple of times and Burundi very many times. I would like to share some examples.
This month, the Women’s Investment and Development Bank has been introduced in Burundi. This has been praised by the UN as a step towards women’s economic empowerment in that nation. The bank will grant low-interest loans to women’s collectives and their development projects, and will provide training on profitable business.
No one will be surprised that another of my particular interests is how the Church operates in these countries. Today, I want to recognise the incredible work of the Mothers’ Union worldwide—one branch works tirelessly on this front in Burundi—in campaigning for equality for women and girls all over the world. I also mention the national leader of the Mothers’ Union in Burundi, Mrs Claudette Kigeme. She co-ordinates its work and also works with the Five Talents agency, which sets up savings-led rural community groups to train people in growing small businesses.
It has been my and my wife’s privilege to visit a number of those small financial units and hear testimonies from, interestingly, sometimes men as well as women of the impact that microfinance has had on their lives and developing their savings groups. It has utterly transformed their lives and empowered the women. Often, alongside the microfinance, they do literacy and business training because they recognise that the best businesspeople in Burundi are the women. They are much more entrepreneurial and much more reliable in running their businesses well. That is where the testimony of the men sometimes comes in. I have stood in those groups and men have stood up in front of me saying, “My life has been transformed by the way my wife has been empowered—that has developed and changed our whole lives.” Mrs Claudette Kigeme was recently honoured for her work by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, being given the Langton Award.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate, and how wonderful it is that so many men are speaking in this debate today: I think we have nearly as many men speaking as women. Thank you to all the men who are here to support us.
I thank my noble friend, having come back overnight, as we heard, for finding time for this important debate today to mark International Women’s Day and for her introduction. I congratulate her on her speech at the CSW at the UN. This is our opportunity to pause and reflect on the status of women both here and across the world.
Before I begin, I draw attention, as normal, to my various roles listed on the register of interests.
This debate is usually a time to celebrate progress and achievements, but this year, I feel that we are in a difficult place. Without doubt, the women who are most at risk and with least rights are those in conflict countries and unstable situations.
The scenes coming out of Ukraine are truly horrific. It feels very close, and I am delighted that the UK is being so strongly supportive and I applaud how generous the British people are in responding to help, donating through the Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal, sending clothes and supplies and offering accommodation. We have seen heart-rending pictures of women and children trying to leave the country and escape the cruel bombardment by the Russians.
However, sadly, Ukraine is only the most recent example of war. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports that there are currently 45 countries affected by conflict and violence. This is on top of the state of crisis induced by more than two years of the Covid pandemic, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, told us, has typically hit women and girls hardest.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. I have indeed attended the meeting in New York with her in the past and I know her commitment to working with women in conflict areas. I have learned a lot from her about that.
However, the noble Baroness is also right that we are meeting at a very difficult time to talk about this. The pandemic has exposed the risks women face here and around the world. Here, we have seen frightening levels of domestic abuse and sexual exploitation, with perpetrators taking advantage of lockdown. Changing Lives, a charity based in the north-east that I have a long association with, did some work to look at the particular exploitation of young women on the internet. It was really scary and is something that the young women of today have to face in a way that my generation never had to. I hope the online safety Bill can help to deal with that.
Inevitably, I want to talk about the position of women in the developing world, and the increasing evidence that our decision to restrict aid has had negative and really difficult effects on millions of women. High commissioners, as well as charities, are clear that development has not just stalled during the pandemic but gone backwards—by at least 10 years, they tell me. This, of course, affects everyone in the developing world, but it particularly affects women and children. They have been hit by a range of global crises that are almost intersecting. They are at the forefront of the climate emergency, experiencing extreme weather events such as droughts and floods more frequently, and the effect that has on their ability to find water and grow food for their families and villages.
Women are increasingly experiencing a higher burden of care from both climate change and the impact of Covid-19. I was very pleased that the Minister was proud to champion the drive to tackle inequalities. The problem is that at the moment, this is just not working from the Government. I hear the rhetoric and the determination, but on the ground I also hear how much more difficult things are than in the last few years, certainly pre-dating the pandemic.
My Lords, the International Women’s Day debate gives us an opportunity to highlight the empowerment and success of women around the world, as well as the inequalities, discrimination, violence and oppression faced by women in various parts of the world. Violence against women remains a major issue in the development and advancement of women. The violation of women’s rights during conflicts remained an issue in the 20th century and, if not corrected, will surely affect women not only in the 21st century but in the next millennium.
As per the reports of various NGOs and human rights agencies, hundreds of thousands of women have been the target of sexual crimes at the hands of armed forces in Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar, Kashmir and elsewhere. These NGOs have documented incidents of gang rape of young girls and grandmothers alike. Sexual abuse, sometimes in the presence of male family members, is used as a weapon of war. Rape by armed forces is a gross violation of international human rights and humanitarian law, and it has to be condemned. The report of the UN special rapporteur on violence against women notes that rape is the
“destructive combination of power, anger and sex which incites sexual violence against women. The victims of rape suffer a disorder, anxiety, and the ‘Rape Trauma Syndrome’ which causes them to constantly relive their rape through a series of flashbacks, dreams, nightmares and body memories.”
I focus my comments on the misery and suffering of the women of Kashmir. As Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and many other credible organisations have time and again stated that the Indian army is involved in illegal detentions, torture, extrajudicial killing and rape in Indian-administered Kashmir. All of this is happening with complete impunity under the Indian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.
According to recent reports of Genocide Watch, Kashmir is at the verge of genocide, yet world powers, including Britain, choose to ignore these warnings. According to reports, more than 100,000 people have been killed so far in Kashmir, while thousands of men and women are locked up in prisons across India, and thousands of women are known as half-widows, whose husbands are missing. The discovery of more than 3,000 mass graves adds to their agony—not knowing whether their missing husbands or family members are among those buried in those mass graves. Constant curfews, crackdowns, house-to-house searches, arrests, torture and communication shutdowns have become part of the daily life for women in Kashmir.
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, and his sobering report on the plight of women and children in Kashmir, of which I was certainly not aware. To mark International Women’s Day, I wish to step back and look at the gifts and qualities that women bring to the whole of human life, which are often unrecognised and undervalued. If they were more valued and recognised, they would certainly help in furthering and protecting women’s equality in the UK and globally.
As American comedian Rhonda Hansome says:
“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. A woman must do what he can’t.”
The most obvious thing is that women bear and give birth to the next generation. We ignore the qualities that women bring to their roles as homemakers and child-rearers at our peril. Of course, they do so much more than that, and men often now take a home-front role, but women are almost always the central hub figures in families.
This is not just gender stereotyping. Research has found that it is much more common for a woman than a man to know her children’s friends, hopes, dreams, romances and secret fears, and to know what they are thinking, how they are feeling and when their doctors’ appointments are. Although there is infinite variability within the two sexes, there are clear sex-based differences in tendencies flowing from how male and female brains tend to be wired and their respective physiology, hence the Government bringing forward a women’s health strategy—and, I hope, a men’s strategy, following the report from the APPG for men and boys, of which I am a vice-chair.
Differences are wired into us at the deepest level. For instance, in terms of hearing, women’s discomfort level is half that of men. On smell, women are relatively sensitive and men relatively insensitive. On touch, the most sensitive man is less sensitive to touch than the least sensitive woman. On people orientation, baby girls exhibit twice as much eye contact as baby boys by the age of three.
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I had a busy programme while I was in New York. I met Ministers from a number of other countries to exchange ideas and compare notes. It was fascinating to hear the experiences of Ministers representing countries such as Ireland, Denmark and Sweden. I also led side events to showcase the work that we are leading on gender equality here in the UK. I will tell you more about that work later in my speech. It was my first experience of the Commission on the Status of Women, and I was incredibly proud to have the opportunity to demonstrate the UK’s continued leadership on gender and climate change and to highlight the importance of women’s empowerment as we recover from the wide-reaching impacts of the pandemic, as well as tackling the challenges to come.
All over the world, International Women’s Day is marked in various ways. There are events in local communities and debates across countries, much like the one taking place today in your Lordships’ House. As I have said, it is a privilege to be just one part of these celebrations. This year’s International Women’s Day global theme is “Break the Bias”, encouraging everyone to call out bias, smash stereotypes, break inequality and reject discrimination. That is a theme I am happy to champion. With that in mind, and as we move through one of the biggest challenges this country has faced in decades, we need to keep on working to ensure women and girls have equal access to opportunities so that they can thrive. We know that the pandemic has exacerbated existing challenges that women face. Although challenges mean that women need more support to access opportunities in work and life. I am pleased to have this time today to talk about many of the different areas in which the Government are leading the way in supporting women and girls in the UK and around the world.
I want to talk first about women’s economic empowerment, because it is critical to our post-pandemic recovery. Covid-19 has prompted even greater potential for wage inequalities for women—although, of course, it is not just women who face these difficulties. Your Lordships will have seen the work that I announced on International Women’s Day: a project working with employers to improve pay transparency and a programme to encourage more women to return to STEM careers after taking time out for caring.
Evidence shows that when salary information is not transparent, this has an impact on how people negotiate pay and results in increased inequality in earnings. We need to make it easier for employees to understand if they are being paid fairly and how decisions about their pay are made. That is why we want organisations to be more transparent about what they pay and how it is determined. We want to empower women to negotiate their pay on a level playing field by giving them the information they need to understand the value of their skills and prevent them being held back by their previous earnings.
We are calling on employers to provide salary information on job adverts and to stop asking about pay history during recruitment. We will build an evidence base of the positive impact of this greater transparency and support employers by working with them to develop and pilot a methodology that will enable them to publish salary ranges for all roles in their organisations.
I am also proud to tell the Committee about our progress overseas since last year’s International Women’s Day. FCDO’s flagship women’s economic empowerment programme, Work and Opportunities for Women, has now wrapped up activities that allowed the programme to reach more than 100,000 women across south Asia and Africa, providing them with improved access to higher-productivity and higher-return jobs, more diversified roles and improved working conditions in global value chains.
Empowering women of course goes further, and I am pleased that in December 2021 we launched our Ending Preventable Deaths of Mothers, Babies and Children by 2030 approach paper, setting out our ambitious commitments and emphasising that good health is critical to the empowerment of women and girls.
We know that unpaid care work, especially childcare, is disproportionately done by women. Taking time out of work or limiting work hours can have a big impact on pay and progression. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, not working full-time tends to shut down wage progression, especially for more highly educated women. That is why funding childcare services across the country is key.
Since 2010, the Government have doubled free childcare, adding 15 hours per week, worth just over £6,000 per child per year for eligible working parents. In January 2021, nearly 330,000 children were registered to receive 30 hours’ free childcare. We have also introduced tax-free childcare. For every £8 that parents pay into their childcare account, the Government add £2, up to a maximum of £2,000 of childcare support a year for each child up to aged 11 and up to £4,000 per disabled child until they are 17. Furthermore, those working universal credit households can also claim up to 85% of their childcare costs, up from 70% under the legacy system.
I am pleased that the Government pledged a new £1 billion fund to create more high-quality, affordable childcare, and we are delivering on this pledge with a £200 million-a-year holiday activities and food programme to provide enriching activities and a healthy meal for disadvantaged children in the Easter, summer and Christmas holidays.
Last year was also a year of UK leadership on girls’ education. With the G7, we agreed new targets to get 40 million more girls in school and 20 million more girls reading by age 10 by 2026. In July, we co-hosted the Global Education Summit with Kenya, raising an unprecedented $4 billion—£2.9 billion—for the Global Partnership for Education. At the summit, the UK pledged £430 million—our largest ever pledge. At the UK’s successful hosting of COP 26 Gender Day last year, we showed that girls’ education is essential for responding to the climate crisis.
In 2022, education remains a top priority for our Prime Minister. Earlier this month, he launched a new Girls’ Education Skills Partnership programme on private sector investment in girl’s education. This is a new programme to support adolescent girls overseas with 21st-century skills to give them the knowledge and qualifications they need for employment and enterprise.
The UK put gender equality at the heart of its G7 presidency last year. We convened a gender equality advisory council to bring fresh ideas and new voices to the G7 discussions, galvanising ambitions on gender equality to ensure that our presidency really delivered for women and girls. Education, and especially STEM, is one of the key areas that the council has been looking at, because we recognise the importance of improving gender representation in these industries. We have made great progress in increasing the number of girls studying STEM subjects, but at present women make up only 24% of the STEM workforce in the UK. We need to do more to get women into STEM careers to meet the demands of today’s workforce.
We are encouraging more girls to take STEM subjects at school, college and university. The Government have rolled out several programmes and committed substantial funding to support STEM uptake across all key stages, but there is still more to do, and we must increase the number of women moving from STEM studies to STEM careers. As part of this, we want to support women who are looking to return to the STEM workforce. We will launch a new STEM returners programme to encourage those who have taken breaks to care for others back into STEM, giving them the opportunity to refresh and grow their skills in sectors where their talents are most needed. This pilot will build on previous government returner initiatives and will seek to address the barriers that returners face when re-entering the workplace.
We are committed to improving women’s health outcomes and reducing disparities. This Government are making women’s voices heard and placing women’s voices at the centre of this work. In December, we published Our Vision for the Women’s Health Strategy for England, which is informed by analysis of the call for evidence. This publication sets out an ambitious and positive new agenda to improve the health and well-being of women across England and reduce disparities. We will publish the strategy this year. Alongside the vision, we published the results of the call for evidence survey. We are grateful to the nearly 100,000 individuals across England who responded to the survey. We will soon publish the analysis of the over 400 written submissions.
We all share concerns about online safety. Tackling online harms, especially when it comes to abuse, is paramount. That is why we announced the online safety Bill, with the aim of making the UK the safest place in the world to be online while defending free expression. Under the new laws, platforms will need to take swift and effective action against illegal online abuse. They will need to proactively remove illegal content, such as revenge and extreme pornography. They can impose sanctions against offending users, or change their processes and policies to better protect their users.
The biggest social media companies will need to stop the vile misogynistic abuse on their sites. Following consultation with Ofcom, priority categories of legal but harmful content for adults will be set out in secondary legislation. These are likely to include some forms of online abuse, including misogynistic abuse.
We all know that women and girls have been among the hardest hit by the indirect impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, both in the UK and globally, including a shocking rise in domestic violence. To respond to the urgent need to scale up the prevention of violence against women and girls, the UK began the “What Works to Prevent Violence: Impact at Scale” programme in October 2021, investing up to £67.5 million in the first ever global programme to systematically scale up proven approaches to prevent violence against women and girls worldwide. This is the largest investment by any single donor Government to prevent violence against women and girls globally.
Tackling violence against women and girls is a government priority. That is why in July we published a new strategy on tackling violence against women and girls, to help better target perpetrators and support victims of these crimes. As part of that strategy, the Government also announced a new package of measures which will strengthen protections for those affected by harassment at work. As soon as parliamentary time allows, we will introduce a new duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as explicit protections against workplace harassment by third parties, such as customers or clients. We are also supporting the Equality and Human Rights Commission to develop a statutory code of practice on workplace harassment, and are preparing our own practical guidance for employers on preventing sexual harassment in the workplace, which will be published in due course.
The steps we are taking will not only raise awareness of the nature and prevalence of sexual harassment in the workplace, but motivate employers to prioritise prevention and ultimately improve workplace practices and culture. Every woman should be able to live without fear of harassment or violence, in the workplace as much as anywhere else, and these measures will help ensure that people feel safe and supported to thrive. In addition, I am pleased to say that the UK Government on 7 March strengthened their world-leading efforts to end violence and harassment in the workplace, becoming the 11th country to ratify the International Labour Organization’s Violence and Harassment Convention. This is the first international treaty to recognise the right of everyone to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence and harassment. The UK played a leading role in developing the treaty over two years of negotiations. Attending the ratification ceremony in person at the ILO in Geneva, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Thérèse Coffey, has now completed the ratification process for the UK.
However, it is not just within our own borders that we have a responsibility. The Foreign Secretary has committed to putting women and girls at the centre of the United Kingdom’s foreign and development policy, and this will be demonstrated clearly later this year with the publication of the FCDO’s new strategy on women and girls. The Foreign Secretary has made sexual violence in conflict one of her top priorities. In November, she announced a new package of funding of over £22 million to end child marriage, support survivors, and fund women’s rights organisations on the front lines of tackling violence against women and girls around the world. She also made a commitment to explore all options for global action, including her intention to work towards a new convention on sexual violence in conflict. This is an opportunity to strengthen the international response to preventing these atrocities, supporting survivors and holding perpetrators to account.
The UK is a global leader on action to tackle sexual violence in conflict. We have trained over 17,000 police and military personnel and deployed the UK’s team of experts on preventing sexual violence in conflict over 90 times since 2012 to build capacity of Governments, the UN and NGOs. The UK also plans to host an international “preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative” conference in 2022. This will be a key opportunity to show UK leadership and rally international support to agree further action to eliminate this crime, as well as tackling wider gender equality issues.
I feel privileged to open today’s debate with so many noble Lords who share my staunch commitment to improving gender equality. I am proud to be part of this Government, and it is an honour to be part of the work we are doing. We will continue to fight for gender equality across the UK and the whole world.
The Labour Party has always made good use of all-women shortlists, which is why we have more Labour women in the House of Commons and the Senedd than all the other parties have together, and other parties are now starting to use the shortlists. We use them not because women cannot achieve, but because in all political parties the local members do not seem too happy about selecting women. We have fantastic women in all the institutions now because of all-women shortlists.
One thing the Government could take action on is to enact Section 106 of the Equality Act 2010. This section says that political parties should keep an audit of candidates to show how many women candidates, BAME candidates and disabled candidates they have. By doing this, each party would have the data and know where it needs to improve. I cannot understand why the Government will not implement Section 106. Does the Minister agree that to solve a problem, one must have the data to identify it? That is the reason for Section 106.
Once political parties publish this data, if they are allowed to do it, it will show for the first time whether any action is required to improve the diversity of candidates. Parties can then take a number of measures that they feel necessary, which is what Labour did to increase the number of women candidates. Does the Minister agree that there is a need for all parties to improve the diversity of candidates, which would eventually lead to all our elected institutions beginning to look like the people they represent?
When the coalition Government was elected in 2010, one of the first things they did was to close down the Women’s National Commission. At that time, the commission had existed for 40 years. It had 650 women’s organisations as partners and communicated regularly with them, including holding an annual conference. The coalition Government said at the time that the work of the WNC would be brought in-house by the Government Equalities Office.
Can the Minister tell the Committee how the GEO communicates with these 650 women’s organisations in the UK, since the coalition Government closed down the Women’s National Commission? I have asked this question several times and the answers I get lead me to believe that the GEO does not, in any shape or form, do any of the work that that commission carried out. This is such a shame, and an indication that the Government have no interest in the work of these organisations, as they do not communicate with them and do not allow them a voice to government, as they had during the time of the Women’s National Commission. If we only had that body now, it could have been doing really valuable work during the pandemic, for instance. I am hoping that the Minister can give me a good answer on that.
I also want to ask when the Government are planning to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, which is better known as the Istanbul convention. This Government signed the convention in 2012 but have yet to ratify it. The UK is way behind other countries, which have already ratified the convention. Can the Minister give an assurance that its ratification will take place in 2022?
I have highlighted several issues which relate to the theme of this debate and suggest three things to the Minister if she wants to see an improvement for women, as I know she does. First, the Minister could discuss implementing Section 106 of the Equality Act 2010 with the Prime Minister and her colleagues. Secondly, the Government should ratify the Istanbul convention in 2022. Thirdly, she could find out how the GEO communicates with the 650 women’s organisations—and all women’s organisations—and discuss with them how they are ensuring the work that the WNC carried out on behalf of women is being dealt with, as that was the commitment in 2010. Nothing I have seen or asked about leads me to believe that that is now happening now. If the Minister succeeds with this, it will go some way to improving the position of women nationally and internationally.
As a former Member of the Scottish Parliament, I was struck when the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, was speaking that, when I was elected to that Parliament, it had 40% representation of women. That has declined slightly, which is regrettable, but it is nevertheless still very strong. I thought I would check the figures. I commend the Labour Party: the majority of its MPs in the House of Commons are women. It has 94 men and 104 women. The Conservatives have 273 men and 87 women. The SNP has 29 men and 16 women. My own party has 13 MPs. Only four of them are men; nine are women. The challenge for us is to retain that proportion when our number of elected MPs grows massively—as will inevitably happen. That is the challenge ahead; we will tackle it with relish.
I will focus the remainder of my speech on development policy, because I regret that, in this area, the Government’s rhetoric is not matched by the reality. I have previously spoken in the Chamber when debating the prospect of an international development strategy, and I referenced the discussions I had had with my colleagues from our sister party in Canada, which has developed the first feminist international assistance policy. There are strands in it directing future government policy but through a gender approach, under the titles of human dignity; quality healthcare, nutrition and education; growth that works for everyone; environment and climate action, and climate finance to reduce barriers for women, particularly in the services sector and finance; investments; inclusive governance; and peace and security. All are directed through a gender lens and all form a very strong international strategy. I am on the record in my party for saying that the Government have an opportunity, when they publish their international development strategy, which is likely to be in a number of weeks, for it have a UK gender focus. I hope it does. If I understood the Minister correctly, there will be a separate women’s strategy for development afterwards. That is a missed opportunity. The opportunity that presents itself is to ensure that the entire strategy is a feminist, gender strategy.
Perhaps it speaks to a deeper truth. The Minister said that women are at the centre of the FCDO, but the Government could not even bring themselves to publish a gender impact assessment, which they had carried out internally and which predicted that programmes supporting women and girls would be disproportionately affected across all ranges of development policy and all the areas that the Minister highlighted. The government officials themselves knew that the spending cuts and the unlawful reduction from 0.7% to 0.5% would disproportionately affect women and girls. We have seen that most clearly as a result of the pandemic, which has seen women and girls struggle far more and be disproportionately affected by the global response.
As far as the development policy on physical violence, I regularly review the UN assessments and that on sustainable development goal 5—equality for women—highlights that 736 million women still suffer physical violence. That has been relatively unchanged over the last decade. But, as we learned through a leak, the Government’s gender impact assessment for their own cuts highlighted that there would be a 70% to 80% cut in programmes on violence against women internationally. It is simply not credible to say that the UK is a global leader.
The £430 million declaration on girls’ education is of course welcome, but it will be over five years and will backfill cuts. Therefore, we know that 700,000 fewer girls will receive the education they would have received if development cuts had not been in place. The Minister refers to the Foreign Secretary restoring cuts to women’s and girl’s programmes, before the decision to cut overall. That was four months ago, and we are yet to see any programmes restored after the cuts. The 0.5% is capped, so we know that any restoration of those programmes will displace others. When we know that one of the secondary impacts of the Ukrainian crisis has been an increase in food prices, and there is no lift of the 0.5% cap, any support for Ukraine, which is fully justified, will squeeze out other programmes. That £220 million for Ukraine is welcome, but it means £220 million less for other programmes, when we know that women are disproportionately affected in conflict areas.
I will close by giving two examples of such areas. Last week, I was in Sudan. In the country to its immediate south, South Sudan, the UK has through its crown agents, in effect, been supporting the delivery of healthcare. UNICEF put it horrifically:
“Giving birth on the floor, cutting the umbilical cord with a stick. That is the reality for some women in South Sudan”.
We have cut our health support for South Sudan by 10% and, quite unbelievably, there is another round of discussions, which has not yet concluded, about further cuts. In that country, one in 10 babies dies before the age of five.
We also know that women and girls have been disproportionately affected in the horrific conflict in Yemen. More people rely on food programmes there than on many places on earth. The cost of their food has gone up and we have cut our support for women in Yemen by nearly 60%.
It is correct to highlight progress in certain areas and I welcome that. It is also very important that we are self-aware about the damage being done, the moral vacuum being caused and the fact that we are simply not seen around the world as a global leader. When we say that we want to rally international support and we ask others to step up, other countries are having to backfill areas which we have retreated from and cut. That is not the backdrop we should be seeing to the international development strategy. It is not too late. We should lift the target back to 0.7% immediately, we should have a feminist development strategy and we should act on all the worthy ambitions which I hope we all share.
The second of my friends in Burundi is Mathilde Nkwirikiye. She has led the way in many aspects of fighting for gender justice and equality for women in Burundi. One issue on which she and others are currently working is the right of women to have access to land. Sadly, the law of that land does not currently allow women to inherit land. When you live in an agriculturally based economy, this is a massive injustice which needs to be corrected. Mathilde is one of the women leading the way to see that law changed. Mathilde has championed women’s rights, led work against gender-based violence and engaged in international peacemaking. These two women are utterly remarkable. Meeting them, and seeing them at work, has changed my life and I want to honour them.
I turn to Lesotho and the new Bishop of Lesotho, the right reverend Dr Vicentia Kgabe, who was appointed at the end of last year. She is the first woman Bishop of Lesotho, and the third in the Anglican province of Southern Africa. I contacted her about this debate and asked what she would want to say about the situation in Lesotho and southern Africa. She pointed out that she is a leader in a country which is still patriarchal, where top leadership positions remain a male domain. She notes that education remains male-oriented and that exposure, mentoring and support structures necessitated her to work harder than any of the men to counter this. She is a leader of steady and intentional progress on narrowing the gender gap in Lesotho, and stands as a great figure of reconciliation. Sadly, in recent years the story of the Anglican church in Lesothohas been riven with disputes. One reason why Dr Kgabe was appointed as the bishop from outside Lesotho—she was previously in South Africa—was the recognition that a woman leader, at this point, was the most likely person to bring reconciliation in conflict.
After presenting these examples, I have a couple of questions for the Minister. Will she affirm the leading role played by civil society and the Church—as well as other faith organisations—in addressing gender-based violence and working for equality in many poorer nations? Will she confirm the commitment of Her Majesty’s Government in using overseas aid and development spending to assist this work? Following the question of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, will she please tell us when we will return to 0.7%?
There are many more celebrations than challenges, but I turn to the latter. I noted the Minister detailing ways in which the Government are encouraging women here with work incentives and childcare programmes. These are welcome. However, the reality is that the gender gap is arguably at its worst for women with young children. This is especially so where they have a larger family. Noble Lords, noble Baronesses and the Minister know this, and they know my passion for this issue.
The two-child limit is a policy against which I have campaigned since its outset, for a range of reasons, but one reason pertinent to today’s debate is its disproportionate effect on women. The Child Poverty Action Group estimates that 29% of households affected by the policy are single-parent families headed by women, compared with only 1% of single-parent families headed by men. The Pregnancy Advisory Service reported that, during the pandemic, respondents to its survey described being
“‘forced’ by their financial circumstances into ending a pregnancy”
that they otherwise “would have wanted”. Has the Minister carried out any assessment of the specific impact of the two-child limit policy on women, and the poverty of women with more than two children? I hope that she will consider undertaking one if she has not. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s responses, both to the international questions and to this specific question about the two-child limit, in due course.
“Violence, conflict, political and humanitarian crises have displaced 82.4 million people from their homes; 115 million people are living in extreme poverty; and 100 million do not have enough to eat—up from 77 million last year. Around the world, from Afghanistan, to Ethiopia, to Myanmar, women’s human rights defenders have come under attack and the wave of political violence against women in politics and media has risen.”
In short, the rights of women and girls have been significantly rolled back on all fronts, and I fear we are in no way near this year’s theme for International Women’s Day of “Break the Bias”.
While the media spotlight is on Ukraine, we must not forget the situation in other conflicts. Only last week, it was the 11th anniversary of the Syrian uprising, and we should not forget the terrible scenes in Afghanistan last August, with the takeover by the Taliban. The UK had spent 20 years helping to bring democracy and order to the country. Was it perfect? No, but it was a great deal better off than it had been in 2001, when it was described as the country that was worst in the world to be a woman, with no women being seen in public. With encouragement and support, so many brave women came forward to take their part in society. There were women MPs, judges, Ministers, diplomats, in the army and police, teachers, lawyers—in all professions—yet today, once again, the women in Afghanistan are being brutally suppressed. Women who had a public life have had to flee for their lives or are still in hiding. Many are stuck in third countries. Once again, they have been airbrushed out of public life.
I have been helping to co-ordinate a group of senior women Afghan refugees here—former Ministers, judges, lawyers and MPs—as they try to come to terms with what has happened and how they would like to see the future for their country. We must not let them be airbrushed out of the international scene and forgotten. I thank my noble friend Lord Ahmad for having helped facilitate those meetings and taking the time to meet these women.
Now more than ever it is vital to include women’s voices in peace processes. Evidence that gender equality is essential to building peace and security has grown substantially since UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was adopted in 2000. In fact, involving women increases the chances of longer-lasting, more sustainable peace, yet women continue to be excluded. You cannot build peace by leaving out half the population—look at Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. We should not have to justify why women should be included; we should ask the men with guns why they are there when they have caused all that misery. How do we ensure that women play a meaningful role and that their voices are heard? Will the Minister agree that the women, peace and security agenda is now more important than ever and should be a core part of every FCDO policy?
I very much welcomed the Foreign Secretary’s commitment to increasing spending on women and girls back to previous levels and look forward to hearing the new strategy. I also welcome her renewed energy in the vital preventing sexual violence in conflict agenda. I am delighted that we will have another conference in the autumn. We simply must not give up on this agenda after all the work put in and the progress made; this was always going to be a marathon, not a sprint. We must take care not to risk losing the progress already made by allowing language used around PSVI in international commitments to be watered down. What steps can be taken in tandem to push for greater implementation and to hold perpetrators to account?
As we have heard, this week is the Commission on the Status of Women meeting at the UN in New York, which I and others have previously been to. Have we heard anything about it in the press? I wonder whether any of the men present even know what it is. It is the second-largest meeting at the UN during the year, yet there is a conspiracy of silence. We urgently need to make changes to this meeting to ensure that it is used as a platform to amplify the voices of women being persecuted across the world.
I end by quoting Sheryl Sandberg:
“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”
We may find that they deliver a much more peaceful world.
There is rollback on women’s rights globally. Space for engagement by women in decision-making processes is shrinking; inequality of opportunity, which affects access to health, education and income, is increasing and exacerbating discrimination against women. We think too of the horror of children not even being able to attend primary school in the last couple of years. That means that there is another huge backlog in getting them anywhere near being able to do STEM subjects. I recently met some young people from Kenya virtually. Their schools were closed for virtually two years. The inability to catch up in those circumstances is just terrifying.
Many people and organisations work in this area. Inevitably—I am sure noble Lords will all say “she’s doing it again”—I will mention VSO, partly, of course, because I know the level of transformation that VSO can make for volunteers and those with whom they work. However, I will talk about one thing that I am not sure that the Government—or at least the Minister—are really aware of: the change in VSO means that it is a much better organisation now than when I worked for it many years ago. It recruits and trains volunteers within the developing country, not just from this county. That means that it is training the potential leaders for tomorrow. It is giving them skills, confidence and voice.
I met young people in this place three weeks ago, at an event hosted by VSO, who returned from a programme initiated by the coalition Government called ICS. They had been working on gender-based violence in different countries in Africa and in Pakistan. They were remarkable about what they had learned, how that had changed how they saw things in this country, what they were prepared to do and how it was working. That programme finished, and I know that the Government are trying to find ways of getting it going again, even though, of course, all the people employed here and around the world lost their jobs, so we would have to start again to build the infrastructure. The Minister would be inspired if she met some of these young people. That can be organised very easily. I met some of the young people who were part of the African teams, because every team from this country is matched by a team of local volunteers. They too, very clearly, had developed leadership skills and their own confidence, resilience and determination to work on issues that would improve their communities. That is what we need internationally.
Actually, our aid cuts are undermining that. Yes, VSO has been given money for the next three years, but it was a lot less than they were given for a year when I was last on their board. It will continue to work and do what it can, even though it is in far fewer countries than it used to work in. I am sure that it is talking to the Government about reinstituting the ICS programme.
There is so much we know that does work, yet we thought, in this country, that cutting aid would be beneficial to us. It is not, because we lose that quality of leadership, determination and knowledge of how things work in the world, and it is certainly not beneficial to the countries that we have been working with. I too say to the Minister that it is absolutely critical to at least restore aid to 0.7%. This is not just about the reputation of the country but about the opportunity of people around the world, and opportunities for people in this country to grow to an understanding of what is going on in the world and contribute to it. That is particularly pertinent for women, because most of our aid was going on women, children and young people. They are the ones suffering most coming out of Covid, and they are the ones suffering most from climate change. We really do have a responsibility to be better.
There are many well-documented and widely reported rape cases at the hands of the Indian security forces. According to various reports, in 1991, as many as 100 women and girls were gang-raped by Indian troops at Kunan Poshpora in the Kupwara District of Kashmir. Two women, Asiya and Neelofar, were abducted, raped and subsequently killed by men in uniform in Shopian in May 2009. A nine year-old, Asifa Banu, was abducted and gang-raped by Indian police personnel and fanatics affiliated with Hindu extremist groups in the Kathua area of the Jammu region in January 2018. The list goes on.
Last week, I received a letter from the chief executive of Luton Borough Council. At the council meeting on 25 January, the following motion was put forward for the council to:
“Raise awareness of the plight of women of Kunan Poshpura village in Kupwara District in Kashmir. These women and girls have been fighting for justice after being gangraped in 1991. Human Right Organisations determine that at least … 100 women were gang raped by the Indian Army in a horrific event. These women have never received any support from the government of India and still wait for justice. The psychological effect of this has tarnished their lives. Although we cannot change the past, this council can help to raise the public awareness of this egregious event, condemn and abhor violence against women in all its forms and against whomever it takes place and requests both our local members of Parliament and Lord Qurban Hussain to raise this in Parliament to take the matter to the government of India and ask the Supreme Court of India to take all reasonable steps to support these women in their campaign to obtain justice and to request an update report back on this case.”
On behalf of Luton Borough Council and more than 1 million British Kashmiris, I put this case before the Committee as a testimony. What have our Government done so far to raise the grave human rights situation in Kashmir with the Government of India? What response have they received? Furthermore, will the Minister promise to raise the issue of human rights in Kashmir—particularly the Kunan Poshpora gang rape—with the Indian Government at the next opportunity and write back to me with the response as per the request from Luton Borough Council?
Finally, given the serious reports of human rights abuses in Kashmir produced by Genocide Watch and other credible NGOs, can the Minister say why India is not included in the FCDO’s annual report of human rights priority countries? Can she assure the Committee that it will be included in future reports?
Flowing from all this, the leadership literature is clear as to the many strengths of what has broadly been termed a “female leadership” style. I caveat again that I refer throughout to tendencies, including prosocial behaviour, women’s more marked relationship orientation, stronger social competence and the panoramic view that they bring to decisions. They accept ambiguity more readily, are more inherently flexible and honour intuition as well as pure rationality. That is something I have always wondered at; it is extraordinary to see how correct female intuition is. Women more commonly try to take everything and everyone into consideration, and their strong social competence allows them to collect information from all sides and consider all perspectives of a situation. It can also give them titanic powers of persuasion, which I say ruefully from experience.
Many sectors of the 21st-century economic community urgently need the natural talents of women: a capacity to read non-verbal cues; emotional sensitivity; empathy; greater patience; an ability to do and think several things simultaneously; a penchant for long-term planning; and a preference for co-operating and reaching consensus. Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan’s classic study found that women want to connect. While men are self-oriented, women are other-oriented; men are rights-oriented and women are responsibility-oriented. Men have an individual perspective where the core unit is “me”; women have a group perspective where the core unit is “we”. Men take pride in self-reliance; women take pride in team accomplishment and focus naturally on empowerment rather than power.
The business guru Tom Peters describes how we have not advanced much since the days in the cave. As a hunter, a man needed vision that would allow him to zero in on targets in the distance, whereas a woman needed eyes to allow a wide arc of vision so that she could monitor predators sneaking up to the nest. That is why, he says, modern men can find their way effortlessly to a distant pub but can never find things in fridges, cupboards and drawers. Women guarded and defended the cave community while the men went out hunting. Men are either switched all the way on or, when in a resting state, only 30% on. Women are never turned off; they are on guard 24/7 and their resting state is 90% on. Men are tuned in or out, seldom in between— I think the Committee gets the picture.
That is why, on International Women’s Day, we have to and should celebrate women. We cannot avoid defining who women are or allow them to be stealthily redefined. As we know, women have recently been called “cervix havers”, “menstruators”, “birthing bodies” and, perhaps most distastefully, “bleeders”. Reducing women to their bodily functions is dehumanising and disgusting.
Returning to the definition of “woman”, the dictionary is clear that a woman is an adult human female. The Equality Act 2010 is also clear: Section 212 states that
“‘woman’ means a female of any age.”
This word needs to be politically detoxified so that politicians no longer quake when asked to define it. The most high-profile recent examples of this happen to have come from the Labour Party’s ranks, but politicians across the spectrum are terrified of getting on the wrong side of what is just the latest incarnation of a misogynist orthodoxy. There is nothing new under the sun. Without being able to use the word “woman” and understand what we mean by it, women’s needs can be obscured and even ignored, but those needs are shared by 51% of the electorate.
It came to this because powerful lobby groups and powerful men insist that anyone can be a woman. I am not a scientist but I know that humans simply cannot change their sex. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, who is a scientist and a professor, categorically said this on the BBC’s “Question Time”:
“You cannot change your sex. Your sex actually is there in every single cell in the body.”
We can change our bodies with hormones and, in some cases, surgery to resemble the opposite sex more closely, but we should not minimise or soft-pedal how difficult this is in practice, and how arduous and costly will be the need for ongoing medical intervention. Unsurprisingly, therefore, fewer than 3% of those who identify as transgender women have undergone such modifications, but many who are naturally sympathetic to trans women—and, of course, trans men—are unaware that the vast majority are still bodily intact.
Yet when a female rape victim asks for a woman to examine her, she needs to be sure that her request will be respected, as does one’s elderly mother who requests that only female carers provide her with intimate and personal care. Women in these and similar situations who have objected when confronted with a bodily intact man who identifies as a woman have been called bigots and transphobes. Women’s prisons can, and do, contain male-bodied rapists. Newspapers talk about “her erect penis” when describing sexual assault. Female prisoners can be punished for misgendering the natal, intact males in their prison. In sport, women and girls are being beaten, sometimes even injured, by bigger, faster and stronger males in their own sports—women’s sports.
Extreme ideologies are breaking down the social norms, the social contract between males and females where we make room for each other’s needs and respect the sex-based differences that I have described. One recognised weakness of women leaders’ pro-social engagement and willingness to see everyone’s point of view is their abandonment of their own interests. Their tendency to want to share success can mean that they doubt their own competence. Women quite simply do not always feel able to stand up for themselves. When I have argued for women’s rights to single-sex spaces in hospitals and prisons, I have been surprised to receive many gentle cards of thanks from those who sign off simply as mothers and ordinary women. The ones who tend to empower others often feel very disempowered in this debate.
Returning to the need to celebrate women, we cannot do that without an agreed definition and freedom to speak the truth respectfully but without fear of being cancelled, pilloried or criminalised. There was global condemnation when Russia meted out that treatment to the courageous Russian female journalist, Marina Ovsyannikova. She did not just hold up a sign—she is a sign and, in my contribution today, she has the final word.