International Women’s Day

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this International Women’s Day debate, and I welcome the Minister to her new role. I should perhaps declare an interest, since I contributed several chapters to the two-volume series The Honourable Ladies, short biographies of all the women MPs up to 1996, which she edited with Iain Dale.

This is my fourth International Women’s Day speech in your Lordships’ House. In previous ones, I have uncovered buried, silenced voices of women from the past, and I was terribly tempted to do that this time. For women in science, there are myriad possibilities: from Aganice, an Egyptian princess during the Middle Kingdom who worked on astronomy and natural history, through to the 17th-century scientific illustrators Giovanna Garzoni and Maria Sibylla Merian—particular favourites of mine, both of whom, atypically for their time and centuries hence, treated insects as independent actors and agents rather than stiff, dead subjects to be pinned for the human gaze. It is possible to draw a direct line of ecological thinking by women from them to Suzanne Simard, the discoverer of what has been dubbed the “world-wide wood” of interrelationships between various species in woodland environments.

However, I could not focus on history today, not in the world of 2025. Instead, my speech will be, if I may humbly say so, a companion to that of the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox of Soho. The official theme of this International Women’s Day is “Accelerate Action”, but, rather than that, we need, as the noble Baroness said, to feel the perilous nature of the moment. To put it in one verb, I would say our theme should be “Resist”, for what we are seeing is a dual and interconnected attack on women and on science by the leaders of the world’s most powerful state, the United States of America, which was, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, responsible for 32% of global science and research funding in 2021.

It is not like we were not warned, for the destructive ideology of the Trump Administration was constructed in plain sight, in the form of Project 2050. I give a local woman’s voice—from the US National Women’s Law Center—to explain what is now being implemented in Washington. She says that this project

“seeks to impose a hierarchical, gendered, patriarchal vision of society … focused on enforcing a vision of the family that relies on fixed and narrowly defined gender roles, and in undermining protections that enable women and LGBTQIA+ people to thrive outside of a male-dominated heterosexual family. It also seeks to reinforce racial hierarchy”.

We have to note that this is a world envisaged without democracy. If noble Members have not read The Sovereign Individual, I would urge them to. It was republished in 2020 with a preface from Peter Thiel, co-founder of the tech company Palantir, a name I recognise particularly from my time in the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme due to its pervasive presence across our military. The book claims that the “information revolution” will bring about the “death of politics”, for which might be read the death of human rights, the rule of law and what so many women and men have fought for over decades and centuries.

That attack on women and girls, a desire to restrict their human potential, is all too evidently part of a broader attack on science. I note an article in the journal Nature today stating the US National Institutes of Health has begun mass terminations of research grants that fund active scientific projects. The aim is to cancel grants in any way related to gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion in the scientific workforce, environmental justice and climate change. Those ongoing projects are all to be cancelled.

I finish with some questions to the Minister. Of course, sitting in this Chamber we have limited influence on what happens in the United States—perhaps no real influence at all as it increasingly aligns itself with Russia rather than its traditional allies. However, this Government have a responsibility for what happens here in the UK.

I note that on Bluesky today there was an advert from a French university seeking applicants for a “safe place for science programme” that was explicitly directed towards US researchers. Will the Government work with UK institutions to similarly provide a refuge for researchers now based in the US?

Companies such as Google, Amazon and Meta, and firms with tentacles right through the UK Government such as KPMG and Deloitte, are all withdrawing, cancelling or reversing what are known as diversity, equality and inclusion programmes. Will the Government ensure that wherever they operate in the UK, particularly but not solely in the UK Government, British values and laws on diversity and inclusion will be upheld here on our soil?

To pick up on a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, the slashing of budgets has had a huge impact on global efforts against polio, HIV, malaria and particularly tuberculosis. Are the British Government going to try to pick up the slack? I note that, with TB, there is great concern about antimicrobial resistance.

I want to finish by being a little positive. Final plans are now being made for 32 co-ordinated “stand up for science” rallies across the US and affiliated walkouts and protests around the globe, put together on the initiative of five early-career researchers. Will the Minister join me in supporting that call to stand up for science and agree that UK institutions, such as the Royal Society, should be doing just that?