Women: Economic Empowerment

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Jolly]

That this House takes note of women’s economic empowerment and the progress in achieving it that has been made in the United Kingdom and internationally.

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to address the House today in celebration of International Women’s Day. My noble friend Lady Garden and I started the day at a reception for British businesswomen at the British Library. The list of speakers today is really impressive, with a fine record in women’s rights and achievement over the years, following the record of many Members of this House—too many to mention —who have campaigned hard and achieved so much for the rights of women.

Today we should remember two noble Lords who died over the past year. They both, in their time and in their fields, played a key role in women’s rights. Baroness Miller of Hendon was a stalwart member of this House who received an honour for her services to women’s rights. She was an entrepreneur and a campaigner for more women MPs. Baroness Platt of Writtle was a trailblazing aviation engineer. I read that when she completed her engineering studies at Cambridge in 1943, women did not receive the same honours as their male counterparts. As such, she was not awarded a degree, only a “title of degree”. I am in no doubt that it was this injustice that propelled the noble Baroness to dedicate her life to the advancement of women in science and technology careers.

These two women fought in the hope that their work could be the spark for the aspirations of women and girls today and future generations. It is because of women like them that the journey of gender equality in this country has ultimately been one of progress. Nowhere is this journey of progress more evident than in the theme of today’s debate—women’s economic empowerment, at home and abroad.

The breakthroughs that we have achieved since International Women’s Day first came into being over a century ago are nothing short of remarkable, but the coalition has also made quite a few significant breakthroughs in recent years as well. On coming into office five years ago, one of the first commitments that we made as a Government was to put women at the heart of our economic recovery and long-term plan for growth. We made this our priority because promoting equality of opportunity and equal treatment is not just the right thing to do—it is the key to promoting growth. Five years later, our plan is working. Today there are more women in work than ever before. There are more women running their own businesses than ever before. There are record numbers of women at higher levels of management. Indeed, thanks to the tremendous work of my noble friend Lord Davies, for the first time in the history of our country we have a woman on every single FTSE 100 board. On top of this, the latest ONS statistics show that, for both full-time workers and overall, the gender pay gap is at its lowest point in history. All around the UK, women are breaking new ground and succeeding in careers previous generations could only dream about.

There is a consensus in the country which certainly was not there when I was growing up; and if you should ask any number of men and women whether they believe that their daughters should have the same opportunities as their sons, the resounding answer you would get is “of course”. These parents will be the gender equality ambassadors for a whole new generation of girls and their impact should be seen right across the economy. Our challenge today is that, in spite of the progress I have talked about, this consensus is still yet to be fully grounded in the running and practices of our economy and places of work. As a result, many women continue to face barriers at every stage and at all levels of their economic life—barriers around pay, promotion, choice, and work-life balance.

It is particularly fitting that we are having this debate as the 59th UN Commission on the Status of Women is about to get underway in New York and as we mark the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action. Written in 1995 at the historic UN Fourth World Conference on Women, it was signed by 189 Governments from across the world, all pledging to end gender inequality across 15 different areas, including economic empowerment. While we have much to celebrate, we cannot ignore the fact that there is not one country in the world that can say that it has achieved this ambition. It is a reminder of how pertinent it is that we push for real change so that we do not find ourselves uttering that infamous phrase “We’ve made progress, but” in 20 years to come.

We in Government remain more focused on this task and the progress we have made over the past five years gives us a strong platform to work from. We know that if we are to fulfil our ambition of creating an economy that creates opportunities for everyone, then we need fundamentally to rebalance it. It means a paradigm shift around how men and women operate their lives, how businesses invest and how workplaces operate. Above all, it means focusing our efforts not just on professional women and the few near the top, but to make sure we give all women, regardless of their age, background or stage they are at in their career, the opportunities to pursue their own choices and happiness in life.

Our ambition starts with sweeping away the archaic rules and assumptions that can make it near impossible for women to balance work and family life. Last year, we extended the right to request flexible working to all employees and next month will see the introduction of shared parental leave so mothers and fathers can decide for themselves how to balance their family and work life. But even with these changes, we know that we will still continue to see women drop from the labour market unless we do more to make work pay. So we are expanding the amount of free childcare available to make it easier for people to take time off to look after their babies and then return to work. From next month, we are investing an extra £750 million in tax-free childcare worth up to £2,000 per year for each child. This is in addition to our offer of 15 hours a week of free early years education for every three and four year-old as well as for two year-olds in those families most feeling the squeeze. This comes on top of a raft of measures, such as raising the personal allowance threshold and increasing the national minimum wage to its highest ever rate, to ensure that women on low and middle incomes can keep more of the money that they earn.

Women should not have to choose between their job and their families, and all these changes will help them to find a balance that works for them. Supporting more women to set up their businesses is another way in which we can help them to achieve greater flexibility between work and family life. We are stepping up our efforts to invest record amounts in support and training for female business mentors and to encourage greater female take-up of the Business Bank’s Start Up Loans programme. We also want to make sure that starting a business is an option for everyone, so we have introduced a new enterprise allowance, offering expert business mentoring and financial support to people living on benefits. Our message is simple: if you have drive, determination and a good idea, we will do everything we can to help you get that idea off the ground.

We are also determined to tackle the ongoing injustice of gender pay and doing all that we can to reduce the pay gap further and faster. It is, however, a complex problem to solve. It is not as simple as demanding that women be paid the same as men for equal work. Thankfully, the Equal Pay Act 1975 means that cases of outright discriminatory practices are illegal and few and far between. When they happen, we have been very clear that these employers should be dealt with through the full force of the law. Reforms we brought in last year will now mean that companies found guilty of pay discrimination will be required to produce pay audits, to give greater confidence that such discrimination will not happen again.

However, the causes of the gender pay gap are multiple and far more deeply embedded in our culture and in our labour market for them to be solved by changing laws alone. A major factor can be explained by career choices, which remain strongly gender-biased. More women than men choose to work in the caring professions of social work, nursing and teaching, which historically have had lower rates of pay. This gender bias starts early. A 2013 report showed that half of state coeducational schools did not see a single girl progress to A-level physics. That is scandalous. That is why we are pouring our efforts into working with schools and parents to open up young women’s eyes to a much wider range of careers—hence our support for fantastic schemes such as the Your Life campaign to encourage more girls to study subjects in traditionally male-dominated and higher-paid areas like science and engineering.

Of course, that cultural change we are looking for in the classroom also needs to happen in our places of work. Many companies are doing fantastic work to support their female employees, but the fact remains that this kind of corporate support is still not translating into the wholesale shift in attitudes that we need. Institutional discrimination, the old boys’ club and unconscious bias are still in full swing in many places of work. We are working hard to promote greater pay transparency and introducing measures and guidance to help companies to identify and tackle their own pay gaps. For example, through our Think, Act, Report initiative, we are encouraging firms actively to look at how their female employees are faring, take action to address any issues and report publicly on their progress. More than 270 companies have signed up so far, including major employers such as BT, Tesco, Specsavers, Unilever and BAE Systems. That means that more than 2.5 million employees are working in organisations signed up to Think, Act, Report. In December we announced a range of additional measures to ensure that we keep up this momentum. These include free pay analysis software and new simplified guidance that will shortly be available to employers to make calculating their gender pay gap easier and quicker. There is also £2 million of funding towards helping women move from low-paid, low-skill work to higher-paid, higher-skill work.

These are just some of the measures we are taking across Government to improve the prospects of women and girls at every level and in every field. But that work does not begin and end at home. We know how important it is that we use the UK’s position as a leader in development to improve the lives of women and girls across the globe as well. I recently read that a girl in South Sudan is more likely to die in childbirth than to complete primary school. No other fact could so eloquently underline the responsibility that we have to take action, but, as well as there being a strong moral imperative, experience has shown time and again that in development there are few better options than investing in women.

We know that in the Ivory Coast alone an increase of just $10 in women’s income achieves the same nutritional and health outcomes for children as an increase of $110 in men’s income. That is exactly why we have put girls and women at the centre of our development efforts and our engagement with the world. Through the Girls’ Education Challenge Fund, we have raised £355 million with the aim of getting up to a million girls into school in some of the most difficult parts of the world. We have provided nearly 27 million women with access to financial services, such as savings, credit and insurance.

We are helping more women find work through skills and leadership training and business development. For example, our Zardozi project in Afghanistan—“zardozi” means “embroidery”—has created jobs for 6,500 women in the handicraft and textile sector and supported them to set up their own businesses and to become entrepreneurs. I could go on providing hundreds more examples and statistics but I am sure your Lordships have your own to bring to the debate. You may, however, be asking yourselves, “What does all this actually mean for the lives of women and girls?” so I will end by giving examples of two exceptional women our programmes have supported.

The first is a young girl, Immaculate, from Uganda who was forced to leave school after her father died. Determined not to give up, she heard about one of our programmes and walked for three days in a bid to win a scholarship to go back to school. Her efforts paid off and she ended up winning that support to return to education. A few years later, she is now a highly articulate woman determined to become a teacher and to put back into her society what she herself had been able to draw from. The second is a 28 year-old woman, Angelique, from Rwanda. Like most Rwandans, she makes her living from cultivating land, but she has less than a quarter of a hectare of farmland to support her family of three. However, thanks to UK support, she found employment and opened her first savings account. With her first salary, she bought school uniforms for her children, and with her second and third salaries she bought a goat so that her children would not have to go hungry again, and she is now planning to use her savings to build a house for her family. These women are symbols of everything we are trying to achieve and our reason for doing more.

This House has been at the forefront of the journey that women’s rights has taken in this country and across the world, and we look to noble Lords to help us continue that journey.