International Women’s Day

Baroness Moyo Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Moyo (Con)]

My Lords, I join today’s common refrain in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. We very much look forward to hearing her maiden speech, as well as her many contributions to come in the future.

As has been mentioned, International Women’s Day offers us an opportunity to take stock of our achievements toward the economic inclusion of women, and to highlight where more work needs to be done towards greater equality. The debate has been shaped around the economic disparities that persist between men and women globally. Women generally face lower pay, higher levels of informal employment and more unpaid care work than men, as has been repeated multiple times.

I will spend some time talking about signs that there are improvements occurring that are quite meaningful and ought to be stressed. It would be a missed opportunity if I did not highlight several important gains in women’s participation in the economy in recent times. In doing so, I will focus on progress in areas of corporate leadership. While it is arguably a narrow purview, it reflects my own experience in economics and finance, and on the boards of a number of global corporations. Specifically, I will offer three data points that demonstrate clear improvements in women’s economic inclusion.

First, on corporate boards, according to Cranfield University, female directorships in the FTSE 100 have risen from 5.8% in 2000 to nearly 40% in 2022. Secondly, as of just a few weeks ago, in February 2024, 10% of FTSE 100 companies have female chief executives; this is still low, but the number is double the 5% level of a decade ago. We see a similar trajectory in the United States where, in 2023, 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies had women CEOs. A quarter of the 52 leaders had become CEOs in the prior year, obviously suggesting that there is momentum. A third area of positive momentum for economic inclusion is that women are now showing up more as entrepreneurs. In 2022 the Rose review revealed that women in the United Kingdom established more than 150,000 new companies, more than twice as many as in 2018.

Even more encouraging is that a growing proportion of these start-ups—approximately 17,500—were founded by young women aged 16 to 25 years old. In 2022, one in five UK businesses were all-female led, compared with one in six in 2018.

Notwithstanding these positive trends, more effort, particularly targeting a broader base of women, is urgently needed, and clearly this is a message that has become clear in the debate that we have had so far. After all, scrutinising the most senior positions does not offer a true representation of women across the economy. Indeed, when we look over women’s inclusion across the broader economy, it is easy to identify specific areas where much more progress is needed.

Notably, returning to the framework of this debate, the 2023 United Nations sustainable development goals report noted two things. It noted that women spent about three times as many hours in unpaid domestic and care work as men, and that on average, women in the labour market still earned 23% less than men globally. In the United Kingdom specifically, the gender gap—which has been mentioned a number of times already—was at 14% as of April 2023. As has been mentioned previously by my fellow Peers, the Office for National Statistics has stated that the median weekly earnings for men are £666 and are £491 for women.

I was not yet elevated to the Lords, so I was not able to participate last year, but last year’s report by the Financial Inclusion Commission stated that there are 11 million women who are denied access to mainstream financial products, and that women also pay higher interest rates on credit cards—an extra 0.8%—and are less likely to be pre-approved for credit than men. It is here that public policy can and should make a real difference.

Meaningfully addressing economic inclusion matters importantly, because it will reverberate into improved health equalities, educational attainment and, ultimately, social mobility. As has been stated on a number of occasions, this is absolutely foundational if we are to hope for human progress and economic growth.