Women: Economic Empowerment

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to put on the record at the outset my admiration for women and men all over the globe who by their bravery and hard work advance the cause of women and girls, particularly those who risk violence to do so. However, my comments today concern how women’s primary responsibility for bringing up children impacts negatively on their economic empowerment. I hope that noble lords will forgive me if my words start from a personal perspective.

A month ago, when the nominations for the Oscars were announced, there was an outcry that none of the nominees for best director was a woman. In the 87 years of the Academy Awards, out of the 429 nominations for best director, there have only ever been four women, so no surprise there, really. Only in the writer categories do women make a showing, but even there at less than 10%. Women make up less than 1% of sound nominees, there has only ever been one female nominee in the effects category, and for cinematography, none at all. And, as has been the case every year for the last decade, media outlets rang and professional associations set up urgent debates to discuss why.

But this year I was approached by a powerful blogger from LA who had written to every female director they were able to find and asked for an “anonymous” response. My response was to say that the authority and centrality implicit in the role of “the director” is something that is trained in to young men and out of young women, Even if they do make the leap and imagine themselves as film directors, and then advance through the bruising ups and downs of the critical perception of creative genius, box office acumen and adamantine self assurance, just at the point that it may pay off in terms of a stable and highly paid career, many—although clearly not all—become mothers. Being an artist at that level requires a selfish devotion to your art; being a primary carer requires selfless devotion to your charges. It is not an insuperable contradiction to brook at any individual moment, but over the length of an entire career, it defeats many.

Female directors rarely want to highlight their gender, and as it turned out I was the only person, across several continents, who responded to the blogger. The email I got back said, “Spot on analysis. It is hard to get people to talk about this even anonymously ... unless I get three other people responding ... I’m not going to run anything”. Nothing ran.

The rarefied world of the Oscar nominee is hardly the cutting edge of gender inequality. However, an Oscar nomination has an almost magical “multiplying effect” on the financial success of a film and the subsequent career of its director, which, in turn, makes it more likely that when we think of a film director, we think of a man.

Of course, this cycle plays out across many professions. Several years ago I was transfixed by a radio interview where a female politician was being pressed to explain why she was not running for party leader. The interviewer implied that she was failing in her duty to party and people. Eventually, and somewhat reluctantly, the politician explained that she had three young children. Her husband was running in the same race, so presumably had the same three young children. Why did the interviewer not ask what cultural and structural changes the politician thought were necessary to enable women with young children to occupy high office? Why cast the woman as failing in her duty to public and party—why not question whether male politicians are routinely failing in their parenting duty? Why did the interviewer remain entirely silent on the fact that Messieurs Blair, Brown, Cameron and Clegg all had young children when they became party leader—as indeed did Ed Miliband, who was the eventual victor in that race?

As a result of taking on the unequal responsibilities of parenthood, women routinely occupy lower-status work than men, in all fields, with the inevitable downgrading of their economic prospects. On “Question Time” last month a Minister joyfully talked about parity of wages between men and women under 40. I was horrified that a Minister would consider parity of wages under 40 as a measure of victory for women at all. As others have already said, it is not at the beginning of their journey that women experience the most discrimination and difficulty, but as they become mothers. Data show that the gap gets exponential as careers progress, including that published by the Chartered Management Institute last year, which reported a 35% executive pay gap between the earnings of men and women over 40. Figures from the Office for National Statistics on all UK pay show that in their 20s women earn 1.1% more than men, but by their 50s they earn 18% less. As the ONS report said:

“This is likely to be connected with the fact that many women have children”.

To be clear, it is not because women are in a position to “choose” to be at home, in some sort of apple pie or yummy mummy fashion. Some 70% of women in the UK with dependent children are in the labour market, routinely taking lower paid or lower quality work in order to balance duties of parenting and earning a living. For the same reason, it is women who make up the vast majority of part-time workers. The ONS statistics on the UK labour market from February this year reported 6.14 million UK women and just over 2 million men working part time, with the inevitable blight on career progression and greater risk of poverty in old age.

All parts of the political spectrum express belief in gender equality and fairness, but then fail to account for the overall contribution to society, family and the economy by those who bring up the next generation. In failing to account for that contribution we continue to perpetuate a system in which women, who by fourfold are the primary carers, see the possibility of well rewarded or competitive employment recede as they struggle with the dual demands of work and parenthood.

I do not diminish in any way a man or woman who wishes and is able to choose to do full-time childcare. On the contrary, my point is that there is an unsustainable contradiction between our collective duty of care to the next generation, the burden on women as they disproportionately fulfil that duty and our desire for gender equality in public and economic life. Nor is this only a first-world issue. Four years ago I sat at the feet of an elderly woman in Karnataka in south India. She was desperately trying to persuade her 12 year-old granddaughter into sex work. Furious at the young girl’s resistance, she demanded of me, “What shall I do? I am old, my daughter is dead, my brother is disabled, there is rain coming in. How will we feed the children if she does not go to do this work?” How indeed? I had no answer.

The grandmother was not a bad person. The economic options available to her family group were limited to her granddaughter doing sex work. In her world view, she had a responsibility for her daughter’s children and was fulfilling that duty by sacrificing one child who, when she was gone, would be able to support the rest. The girl in question received help, at least in the short and medium term; but this scenario is repeated throughout the world. Estimates suggest that of 40 million sex workers globally, 80% are female. Three-quarters of them are aged 13 to 25 and many are pushed into sex work to support their families.

On every stratum, on every continent and in every context, the outcomes for women are distorted by the unequal responsibility for parenting. So unless and until we see the raising of children as a collective endeavour across gender, family, communities and nations, we will never achieve economic empowerment for women in any context. We will never be able to protect girls and women from sexual exploitation in communities where women do not have access to other forms of paid work. Unless and until we recognise that the unequal responsibility for children is a direct obstacle to women’s advancement and proactively take steps to redress the balance, not only in fragmented corporate and third sector initiatives but as a priority from the centre of government and all parts of civil society, we will never have enough female voices in the system to make the structural and cultural changes necessary to deliver the economic empowerment for women that is the subject of today’s debate.