| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Baroness Northover: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, for securing this debate and for all her work in the field of equal opportunities. This has been a wide-ranging and very moving debate. People have looked at the recognition and representation of women, the pay gap, pensions, women in sport, the different workloads and the implications of family responsibilities. I am becoming very well aware that no sooner do you think your children are grown up than you find that you need to care for your elderly parents.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, with enormous clarity, pointed to the different life patterns of men and women and explained why, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, also pointed out, so many women end up in poverty. I was profoundly depressed not only by what she said but also by the incredibly perceptive contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Giddens. As my bouncy, slender 12 year-old enters her teens in 12 days' time, will she fall prey to what the noble Lord identified as the pressures of social change? Does anorexia await her? What will her future be? Will she, like Joanna, end up in poverty? That is certainly not how she views her future. So change needs to be faster and more fundamental—not half-hearted.
I know from bitter experience how thankless a task pushing for such change can be. I was chair of Women Liberal Democrats as we battled to ensure that more women were elected for our party. I am very glad that during my time we adopted zipping for the European elections—and gained an equal number of women and men in the subsequent elections under PR. In that regard, we are still ahead of the other parties in the European Parliament: 45 per cent of our MEPs are women, compared with 33 per cent for Labour and 8 per cent for the Conservatives.
Speaking personally, I admire those who ensured that the Labour Party adopted women-only shortlists. I could see very clearly what a difference that made to the House of Commons. As others have pointed out, there was that critical mass that made the difference on so many of the issues that we have heard about here. I was very angry, but not at all surprised, that the press made the gibe about "Blair's babes". I thought that that was typical, but I note that women journalists got just as angry about it and I welcomed that.
Our party apparently has the problem of not really knowing where it is going to win seats, and therefore sorting out twinning and pairing is difficult. As in all parties everywhere, there is fierce controversy over the so-called "fixing" of things for a fairer outcome. But, for me, that is no excuse: Labour now stands at 28 per cent; we have all sorts of mentoring and places on the shortlists but no guaranteed provision, and we moved
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1379
from 10 to 16 per cent in the last election; and the Tories remain on 8 per cent. For me, that is insufficient progress in the 21st century.
I have always been absolutely certain—I have the flak-jacket to prove it—that, unless we do something to level the playing field, we will simply not end up with sufficient representation of half the population. I admire what the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, managed to achieve in Wales, and I draw support from those in other parties who are fighting the same battles as us. When we have been ahead of the party opposite, I hope that the measures we have used have helped it in its battle. Labour in the Commons is clearly ahead of us right now and its battles help us.
The Speaker of the Lesotho Parliament recently pointed out a couple of things to me. She told me that only in Lesotho and the UK was the second Chamber partly hereditary. The second Chamber in Lesotho has a number of chieftains in it, and the only women among them are the widows whose sons are still children. She asked me what we could do about hereditary and appointed Chambers in this, the democratic 21st century. What could I, as an appointed person, say? Secondly, she asked me what we were doing to ensure that women were elected to our democratic institutions. It is embarrassing, to say the least, to discover that a patriarchal country like Lesotho ensures that women are elected in local elections, and yet in this country we tiptoe around on eggshells on the subject. She rightly took me to task on that.
As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, it used to be only the Scandinavian countries that were ahead of us in this area. But now the UK is 50th on the list of countries in terms of the proportion of women in Parliament, with 49 others—countries such as Rwanda, Belarus, Vietnam, Croatia, Latvia and China—all ahead of us. We would not even be at that position were it not for Labour's women-only shortlists.
A while back, I attended, with the noble Baronesses, Lady Gale and Lady Flather, a conference of European and Middle Eastern women parliamentarians. The Middle Eastern women looked to us to help them as they sought to ensure that their rights were realised, and they were astonished to hear from us how difficult it still was. Given the astonishing number of Parliaments that look to how we organise things, we have a responsibility, wider than the UK, to move things forward on this issue.
It is the "abroad" part of this debate that I especially wish to address, and I think that I am the only speaker to do so. For us, it matters a great deal with regard to policy and equal opportunity that our Parliament should be better balanced in terms of gender, that women should have equal pay and that other inequalities should be addressed. But the position of some women around the world in the social pecking order is actually a matter of life and death. Let us take the problem of AIDS.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 80 per cent of 15 to 19 year-olds who are HIV-positive are girls and women. That is very, very significant in terms of the issues that we
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1380
are talking about. The pandemic is propelled by gender inequalities and the denial of rights to women. Girls often do not have a choice about whether they have sex. They are expected to be faithful; men and boys are often not. A married woman is not in a position to demand that her husband uses a condom, and he does not. UNAIDS lists marriage as a risk factor for HIV. Nor does the married woman have much influence over whether her husband sleeps with other women, and she is therefore extremely vulnerable. In very poor societies in particular, sex is sold for food, education and shelter, and older men often think that they are entitled to sex with young girls. I was stunned recently to hear an African Minister pride himself on his contribution to the reduction in the incidence of AIDS in his country. He said that he "no longer availed himself of young girls".
In one study in India, more than 90 per cent of the HIV-positive women were married and monogamous. The same pattern could be found in Thailand and elsewhere. This is a key issue. When I first discovered that, I felt very angry, but I wondered whether I had the right to that anger. Was I judging people by different cultural standards? I have now met many African women—HIV-positive and not—who reject the inferior position dealt out to them and who argue that this epidemic cannot be tackled without tackling gender inequality. I support them in that anger.
Mary Robinson, the former Irish President, is surely right to say that rights for women are human rights. They are absolute and brook no cultural interpretation. If we are to tackle AIDS effectively, we must begin by placing the rights of women at the centre of our response. If anything positive is to come out of the disaster that is, in particular, hitting Africa, it must surely be on the position of women, which will have to be revolutionised if it is to be tackled effectively.
Gender inequality is thus not something that we can address down the track, or wait another generation or two before sorting out. We have to make the changes in the UK on which so many in this debate have done so much over many years, but we also have to take that onto a wider stage. We have to support those who are fighting for that millennium development goal of gender equality around the world. The implications of not addressing that are surely unthinkable.
3.20 pm
Baroness Morris of Bolton: My Lords, it is a pleasure to begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, for securing this important debate on the advancement of women both here at home and abroad. As you would expect from such a stellar cast, our debate today has been wide-ranging, thought-provoking and moving. There is no doubting the positive and lasting contributions that women have made to society and I pay particular tribute to the powerful women in your Lordships' House.
Perhaps I may say to the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, that I too was that woman who could not raise a business loan without it being secured
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1381
by her husband. I can tell the noble Baroness, Lady Billingham, that I am very interested in sport, having been a long-time director of Bolton Lads and Girls Club. We have lots of football teams; several of them for girls, with waiting lists and too few pitches to satisfy the demand. In my thanks today, I want to include the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, who has shown that he is well and truly in touch with his feminine side. I was moved by his speech on anorexia and self-harm—areas in which I take particular interest within my brief on children and young people. One big problem there is the lack of access for children to adolescent mental health services.
I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, was having a slight dig at us by saying that there were no speakers from the Conservative Back Benches. That is not for the lack of some people wanting to speak; this Motion went down quite late in the day and a lot of my colleagues are today at the memorial service for Lord Alexander of Weedon. They may not be here in person, but certainly are in spirit.
There is so much to celebrate with regard to the advancement of women. Access to good education, innovations in health, better working practices, and serious and dedicated role models have all played their part in transforming life for many women. Yet, for many, life remains hard. Women do two-thirds of the world's work but earn only 10 per cent of the world's income; meanwhile, approximately half a billion of the world's women and girls live in slums. Although UN-HABITAT recognises that there are difficulties for men and women, the nature of a woman's life—providing water and looking after her children—means that the burdens are more acutely felt by women. They also face rape and killing when forced eviction takes place, and widows and daughters whose ownership of property is not recognised find it particularly difficult to escape poverty.
Here in the UK we are a world away from such extremes. While we are all acutely aware of our own significant problems, a greater recognition of and a willingness to confront challenging and taboo subjects—such as domestic violence, the stark facts of which were brought home to us by the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, "honour crimes", forced marriages and female genital mutilation—has made life more bearable for many more women. Nevertheless, both at home and abroad there is still much to do.
Last weekend, the phone rang at my home. When my daughter answered, the person on the other end said that were conducting a survey on behalf of the trade unions and could they please speak to the man of the house who works. My daughter replied that he was not available, but that she could pass him on to the woman of the house who works. Like my daughter, I grew up in a house where my mother worked and so took it for granted that all women worked. I am in awe of women who choose to stay at home, or give up their job to raise their families, often at great financial sacrifice. We should value and support that decision
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1382
while paying heed to the situation of older women, which the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, highlighted.
I return to my mother, who was then very much the exception rather than the rule. She worked from the age of 14 to the age of 68 but because she took some time off to look after me was entitled only to a meagre pension. When my father died, his small private pension died with him; my mother was left with an inadequate amount of money to live on after 54 years of hard work, so she had to come and live with me. That was a great privilege for me, but I am not sure that that was how she saw the end of her working life.
Today, 12.2 million women work but, some 22 years after my mother retired, women still face real unfairness in pensions. Only 14 per cent of women who are aged 55 to 59 are eligible for a full state pension, while 2.2 million women are not building up even a basic state pension. Here I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis. I was bowled over by her speech in the debate on the humble Address and she spoke equally persuasively today. The thought of an alliance between her and the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, to take on the Government over the Turner report would be a terrifying one.
During the general election campaign, David Willetts sought to address that inequality by proposing that people who had taken a career break to look after their children or to care for a relative—who will usually be women, because the burden of care will always fall more heavily on their shoulders—should be able to buy back their pension credit. That idea obviously caught the Government's eye and I am delighted to see that they are adopting it.
I know I will have support from the whole House in saying that it is outrageous that when a woman is as well qualified and productive as a man that she should ever be paid less. As the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, said, one key driver of the gender pay gap is the concept of occupational segregation. Excluding workers from occupations is wasteful of human resources; it increases labour market inflexibility and reduces an economy's ability to adjust and change. So, we on the Conservative Benches were pleased to welcome the recommendations of the Women and Work Commission which tackles so many of these gender stereotypes.
As my right honourable friend David Cameron said in a speech to the Equal Opportunities Commission earlier this week:
That is why the very first speech that he made as leader was about electing more women MPs. That leads me to a passion of mine which is clearly also that of the noble Baroness, Lady Northover: candidates.
Men and women are different but complementary. The more enlightened organisations not only recognise that but celebrate it. Talk to the head of any successful company and they will tell you that
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1383
encouraging and employing women is a critical factor of their success. So it is with politics. I shall quote David Cameron again. He said:
"I believe that the gross under-representation of women on the Conservative benches short changes not only women . . . but also the Party itself. How can we draw on all the talents of the country when we habitually exclude half the population?"
In 2001, Iain Duncan Smith rang me to ask whether I would be vice-chairman of the party with responsibility for candidates and the express task of encouraging a more diverse list of them. I thought to myself, "Trish Morris, you've opened your mouth once too often". I shared the job at the beginning with my noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold. We met the most amazing women but, however good they were, they needed persuading. We were, of course, inundated with bright and talented young men. After all, they had to fill in that awkward gap between university and becoming Prime Minister. Yet women have the perfect skill set for politics—the very qualities that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, spoke about. Their ability to listen, multitask, and deliver on promises are all much-needed attributes in the life of a modern MP, so we redesigned and professionalised our assessment process to capture those very skills, with the result that we more than doubled the number of women on the list and fielded the largest number of women candidates in the party's history.
If history had been different and we had won all our target seats we would now have 45 women MPs. I will gloss over that for the moment because, sadly, that was not to be, but we are at the start of an exciting journey. I readily acknowledge—as did the noble Baroness, Lady Northover—that we in the Conservative Party have a long way to go. We are way behind the Labour Party and the sight of all the new Labour women MPs on those Benches—the visibility mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Dean—gave us all a jolt. However, I am sure that with our new priority list, which will be 50 per cent women and 50 per cent men, we will see the further advancement of talented women in the parliamentary party. More women in Parliament in all parties can be only a good thing.
Throughout the 20th century and now into the 21st, the perception of both men and women of what women are capable of has been utterly transformed. At the beginning of the 20th century, suffragettes were considered by many—probably the majority—to be troublemakers pursuing a fantasy that women might have a right to vote. What a change we have witnessed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Dean of Thornton-Le-Fylde, mentioned; women are at the very top of politics and taking their leading roles in the arts, education, the sciences and industry. Now at the beginning of this new century anything is possible.
Because of the achievement of so many outstanding women and the vast numbers who fell in behind them everything is expected. Over decades, the demand for women to be recognised in the UK and the developed world could not, was not and will not be denied. In other parts of the world, local culture seeks to hold women back, expecting women to accept inequality as
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1384
their due. Now we have set an example which, with modern communications, cannot be ignored within those societies. Surely, we can hope that our freedoms will become universal freedoms and how much better the world will be for that. As the Vice-President of Taiwan, Annette Lu said:
1.32 pm
| Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |