International Women’s Day

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, Lady Boothroyd—Betty—was and is an inspiration and role model to so many, mainly those trying to get into Parliament. As someone who still runs a campaign trying to get more Conservative women MPs, I often use her quote:

“My desire to get here”—


Parliament—

“was like miners’ coal dust; it was under my fingers and I couldn’t scrub it out.”

The language may be a little arcane today, but the message is absolutely clear.

The run-up to International Women’s Day, and our Lords debate in particular, is always a period of reflection for me. In our busy lives, I find I no longer have the bandwidth to think about women and girls on a daily basis; too many things and issues in daily life distract us. But International Women’s Day is different. I made my maiden speech in this same debate 12 years ago and have not missed many since. A public holiday in much of the world, this annual event is a chance to celebrate advances towards gender equality as well as highlighting ongoing persecution, prejudice and constraints. It is a pleasure and a privilege to welcome my noble friend Lady Lampard today, with her excellent maiden speech. Although I already knew that she would make a real and important contribution to our deliberations, we have seen proof of that in her speech today.

In previous years I have felt more hopeful than sadly I do today. In many countries, women remain officially second-class citizens. They are denied education, freedom of movement and speech, and the choice over what they wear, who they marry and where they live. Afghanistan is, of course, an extreme example, and I am sure I am not alone in feeling almost too ashamed to look at and think about what is going on there. The Taliban’s additional restrictions on women and girls, even since the last International Women’s Day, will horrify us all. It is now 536 days since they banned girls from going to school, and 81 days since they banned women from university. Women are no longer allowed on board any flights without a male chaperone. In May, women were banned from playing sports, and in November they were banned from gyms, parks and public bathhouses.

Women-owned bakeries have been ordered to stop operating. Women are banned from working with NGOs. All women are to cover their faces, and female doctors and health workers have been warned that legal action will be taken against them if they do not do so. The latest outrage is that women are now forbidden to divorce—although men can, of course—and any women who divorced before the Taliban took control, many for domestic abuse reasons, are now considered adulterers who can be flogged and imprisoned for this new crime. And yet these brave women continue to protest, as they do in Iran, against these injustices. It is hard for us to imagine what they are going through, but we must try. It is encouraging to see the UNHCR suggesting that the persecution of women in Afghanistan could be a crime against humanity, but I am far from convinced that this will happen in my lifetime.

However, it is not all doom and gloom. Our Government’s focus on girls’ education is one of the four top priorities in our international development strategy and a key pillar of the women and girls strategy published earlier this week, which is very welcome. Investments in school-age girls have the highest returns in tackling future inequalities. Achieving universal girls’ education would practically end child marriage, halve infant mortality and drastically reduce early childbearing—some of the main drivers of gender inequality in the first place.

I briefly draw your Lordships’ attention to the Global Innovation Fund, a non-profit, impact-first investment fund set up and supported by the FCDO—and a well-kept secret. It invests in social innovations with the potential to transform the lives of people living on less than $5 a day and has a particular strategic focus on enhancing the agency of women and girls. The Global Innovation Fund’s innovating for gender equality fund aims to demonstrate how innovation can address gender power imbalances, filling a gap in impact-first financing. It is specifically and exclusively focused on finding and funding scalable innovations to transform unequal gender relations and empower the world’s poorest women and girls. I would like to talk more about it, but time is tight.

I now turn to the UK, where women are still paid less than men for the same work—although luckily not in this place. They are underrepresented in powerful jobs. Prominent women are depressingly familiar with online threats and abuse based on their biological sex, and with suffering intimidation in public. Yesterday’s survey by Ipsos UK was worrying. Over 50% of Gen Z and millennials think that society has gone so far in promoting women’s rights that it is now discriminating against men, compared with well under half of baby boomers and Gen X. The same survey found that people in Britain are increasingly afraid of promoting women’s rights, for fear of reprisals. This raises significant concerns about freedom of speech and the climate of fear in which so many women now live. We in this Chamber have a responsibility to speak up for women’s sex-based rights, which are still being challenged in many areas of policy. Any view that progress has rendered International Women’s Day irrelevant is woefully premature.