International Women’s Day

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Crawley (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure, always, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, and to be a veteran of these International Women’s Day debates.

We clapped for carers, most of whom of course are women, so perhaps at least this week we can whoop for women. As we all come out from under another Covid lockdown, we know that it is women who have had to shoulder so much of the mental burden over the past 12 months. The ONS confirmed as much this week. As that TUC report of January 2021 put it:

“Working mums … were struggling with the strain of being expected to carry out their jobs as normal, while balancing childcare and home-schooling.”


Nine out of 10 mothers responded to the TUC by saying that

“the disruption had a negative impact on their mental health, with increasing levels of stress and anxiety.”

An earlier IFS report showed that, when it came to home-schooling, mothers were able to do only one hour of uninterrupted work for every three hours done by fathers. How quickly we have reverted to gender stereotypes, as we see women doing more housework and more childcare in all households, except for those in which the man has stopped doing paid work.

The TUC calls on the Government to act to stop the reversal of decades of progress that women have made in the workplace. I am sure we can all amplify that call and, this year, give a big shout-out for women in science and engineering particularly.

This week, we welcome the Government’s Statement on women’s health, and not a moment too soon. I know the Minister does not need me to tell her that the pent-up trauma of women over the past 12 months will have to be faced with unprecedented policy and resources for mental health services, with young women and teenage girls being particularly affected.

Many of us in this debate are also involved in the very important Domestic Abuse Bill. Its coming into law is eagerly awaited by us all, not least by those thousands of women who have been trapped in violent homes during Covid-19. As Women’s Aid puts it in its report A Perfect Storm, abusers have used the pandemic

“as a tool for abuse”.

Calls to women’s specialist services and helplines have surged at times during the pandemic. This is not only the pattern in the UK: the United Nations has described the worldwide increase in domestic abuse as a “shadow pandemic” alongside Covid-19—my noble friend Lord Rooker referred to that. It is thought that, worldwide, cases have increased by at least 20% in lockdowns internationally. I ask the noble Baroness the Minister: how is enfeebling our development budget going to help?

As always, there is so much left to win as far as women’s equality is concerned. The legacy issues of unequal pay and pensions, as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, has set out, have not gone away. British women were paid an average of £25.73 a week less than men in the state pension last year.

For those who might be ambiguous these days about the word “woman”, and believe that it can be replaced by “person”, I whoop for women more than ever this year.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, and acknowledge the work he does on behalf of widows. Congratulations are due also to the noble Lord, Lord Ranger, who so effectively reminded us why we all miss our mothers.

It is always a pleasure to take part in International Women’s Day and I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, to her new post—I hope she enjoys it —and indeed the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg.

I acknowledge the work the Government are doing to support women, especially the long-awaited introduction of the Domestic Abuse Bill and the annual obligation for employers to publish the gender pay gap in their companies. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that many women have been very hard hit by years of austerity, as my noble friend Lady Healy said in her excellent speech. Unless the Government get a grip on the problems for low-paid workers—many of them women—beyond what they have already published on statutory sick pay in this coronavirus crisis, many women in part-time and unprotected sectors could see very challenging times this summer and beyond.

I was interested that the UN is aligning this year’s International Women’s Day theme, “I am Generation Equality”, with its campaign to mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995. It took me back to the time I chaired the Women’s Rights Committee in the European Parliament and we were preparing for our participation in that Beijing conference. The organisation UN Women has described the Beijing Declaration as

“the most progressive roadmap for the empowerment of women and girls everywhere.”

Heady days!

It is a shame that another anniversary, last month, to celebrate 50 years of the Women’s Liberation Movement and its first conference in Oxford was marred by the no-platforming of individuals. There is a need in the cacophony of online abuse of women and of misinformation to listen to each other calmly, not to no-platform each other.

Once again, International Women’s Day shines a light on women's pay—many noble Lords referred to this. It is 50 years since the Equal Pay Act and, while the latest ONS statistics found that the gender pay gap among British employees decreased from 17.8% in 2018 to 17.3% in 2019, British women working full-time earn less, on average, than men across all sectors of our economy—even where women outnumber men in full-time work.

We know that women are more likely than men work in low-paid sectors but, even in sectors dominated by women, such as the caring and leisure professions, they often earn less than men. In fact, astoundingly, according to the ONS the only job sector in the whole economy where women are in a majority and earn slightly more than men is being a receptionist. This is 2020 in the western world.

Let me put in a word for the cross-party campaign I am involved in, to get justice for the war widows who have not been treated equally in their attempt to reinstate their pension rights. Their treatment has been shameful—we are talking about a few hundred, mostly older women who would have to divorce and remarry their present partner to get their pension reinstated—a pension they received on the death of their former partner, involved in conflicts such as the Falklands War, the first Gulf War and the Northern Ireland Troubles. They subsequently had to give up those pensions. I ask the Minister if she is able to tell us if the Government have rethought their position on this or if they are still hiding behind the principle of retrospection.

Finally, the World Economic Forum has said that it will take 99.5 more years to close the international gender gap in all aspects of life—across health, education, economic participation and political empowerment—at the rate of progress we are seeing today. That is nearly 100 years; our work, it seems, is never done.