Women: Economic Empowerment

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a trustee of UNICEF UK and a patron of Christian Blind Mission.

Five years of coalition government has meant that 2.3 million women overseas have been helped to get jobs and more than 5 million girls have been helped to attend school. As we know, education levels are a key indicator of the ability to obtain self-sustaining jobs and careers. Those statistics show our commitment to and responsibility for the most vulnerable women and girls in the world. It is not by chance that we have committed 0.7% of GDP to international development. That is part of our achievement in this area and it is important that it continues.

I shall focus my speech on the subject of women’s position in the international economy. Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the UN, said:

“There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women”.

This rings true in so many parts of society but is particularly apt for today’s debate. Many studies on economic development have found what Annan put so succinctly to be the truth—namely, where women succeed and are given economic opportunity, society succeeds. Today, I want to recognise how far women have come, but discuss equally how far we have to go.

As my noble friend Lady Jolly said, the world truly has changed for women, especially working women, even within the past few years. The PricewaterhouseCoopers 2015 Female Millennial report notes that women today are more educated than ever before: they earn more bachelor’s degrees and tertiary degrees than men. They are more confident than ever before, too: just under half of all women beginning their careers believe that they can rise to the top with their employers. They are more able to choose from a wide range of opportunities than their predecessors. However, while we should celebrate their successes, it is important to hold them under scrutiny.

Companies today are more aware and place a higher importance on recruiting women than they did even just a few years ago. Another international study conducted by PwC found that 64% of CEOs have and utilise strategies to increase diversity and inclusiveness in their businesses, and a further 13% plan to form such a strategy. This is a significant improvement on a similar survey conducted four years ago, in which only 1/10th of CEOs voiced plans to change their companies’ recruitment and retention policies to increase women’s presence in their companies.

Yet, we are not seeing results from these initiatives. Improvement to the wage gap has been stagnant across OECD countries, and although more women than ever before serve as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, they still stand as just 4.8% among the body of their peers. Women continue to face difficulty in advancing their careers. In a separate international study of “millennial working women”, it was found that nearly three-quarters of women feel that companies are “all talk” when it comes to equality. They felt that although their companies speak about diversity and inclusion, access to opportunities is not yet equal for women. More than that, it was found that women grow increasingly discouraged about their chances of promotion or of furthering their careers as they progress in them. The percentage of women who believe they are capable of rising to a senior level with their current employer falls by 10 points in just a seven-year period. When the level of talent of the women in today’s economic market is so high—higher than ever before—these statistics are disappointing, to say the least. I do not mention this to temper excitement over the gains that women have made in economic empowerment, but merely to insist that we can and must do better.

I turn now to the economic advancement of women in much different circumstances—women who are not trying to advance professional careers but simply trying to survive and support themselves and their families. For the poorest women in the world, economic empowerment is often just a dream. Up to 45% of women living in the poorest parts of the world have absolutely no say in how their household income is spent, even when it includes their own income. In Bangladesh—a country in which almost half the population survives on $1.25 a day, and in which the disparity of treatment and status between men and women is astounding—situations like this are not uncommon.

However, we should note the groups of organisations that are trying to combat this—the microfinance service providers, in particular the Grameen Bank, which is a microfinance titan and the originator of the micro- financing scheme. Grameen began its operations in Bangladesh just over 30 years ago and exists because, in the words of its founder, Muhammad Yunus,

“the financial system … only serves the top one-third of the world; two-thirds are left out”.

Grameen holds particular significance in our debate today, as nearly all of its 8.4 million clients are women, and women make up the majority of the bank’s management board. Through its microfinancing program, Grameen empowers women to start and sustain small businesses, to support themselves and their families. The benefit of this is felt especially by widows, many of whom are left without resource or recourse after the passing of their spouse.

A recent study by the World Bank found that microfinance, especially microfinancing for women, is beneficial in alleviating poverty and raising income and education levels. With only a 10% increase in women’s borrowing, household spending and women’s participation in the labour force both improve—and improve at higher rates than with a similar increase in men’s borrowing. My hope is that the Grameen Bank continues on this path of achievement and sees similar success in Glasgow, where Grameen UK has opened its first branch. We need microfinancing projects for women here in the UK too.

The final group of women I would like to highlight today is women with disabilities, who face even greater hurdles when seeking economic empowerment. A recent survey by the World Health Organization found that, across the 50 countries studied, only one-fifth of disabled women were employed, compared with one-third of women without disabilities. Many factors contribute to this disparity, but inaccessibility of workplaces, transportation to workplaces, discrimination and lack of education are prime concerns. These factors are amplified in developing countries, where disabled women’s inaccess to accommodation for their disability can severely restrict their ability to receive education, hold a job and participate in society.

To illustrate these key points, I want to share with noble Lords the story of Abena, a Ghanaian woman living with a disability as a result of a childhood bout of polio. She was supported by Christian Blind Mission: given a tricycle that transformed her life and the lives of those around her. CBM is the major disability charity in the world. It runs this initiative aimed at raising awareness of the link between disability and poverty. Abena says:

“I realised that I could not walk. But I was so serious to go to school because the children would go to school and come with their books and be reading. So I would crawl to school. Sometimes at the school the children were playing, jumping and I will be sitting down looking at them. I felt like I am alone. So I decided to stop the school. I said, ‘This one is a waste.’”.

She later reflected:

“I was feeling like I’m not a human being. I felt frustrated and lonely. But when I received the tricycle it was better. I decided to go into trading. I used the small capital I had and bought some groundnuts, biscuits, and I sell pure water. I will use the profit and buy the things again I had. So I think this one is very good”.

Abena has now become a disabled women’s organiser for the Disabled Society in Builsa South district, her area of Ghana, and works to inspire and encourage other disabled women to take on work and lead their lives normally. Abena’s case so aptly shows us how, with a little bit of empowerment, a woman’s life can improve drastically.

John Stuart Mill, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton in 1869, said:

“The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves”.

Abena is testimony to that.