International Women’s Day

Baroness Laing of Elderslie Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

It is a privilege to close the debate for my party. It has been a pleasure to listen to many eloquent and important speeches from Members of all parties. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for securing this debate.

I found it difficult to know what I wanted to say this year. I felt there was so much that I might want to cover, particularly given the situation in Ukraine—I will try to touch on some of that—but I also felt a bit deflated, if I am honest, because in other ways I could easily have given the same speech today as I gave last year.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I should say to the hon. Lady that although I indicated to her that she did not have long to speak, people have fortunately been quite brief, so she has a little longer than I indicated.

[Kirsten Oswald]

I am grateful for that, Madam Deputy Speaker. We will see how we get on.

It does sometimes feel a wee bit like groundhog day in these debates, because women still have to strain every sinew and despite that, not so much changes. But there are bright spots, as the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) put it well, and I want to acknowledge and celebrate them as well.

Nobody here will be anything other than deeply concerned about the women and girls in Ukraine as they walk away from what were their perfectly normal lives in this unimaginably terrible situation, leaving everything that they have known behind them—and, as an aside, for goodness’ sake let us waive the visas and let these women in. All of us will have seen the footage of the women who had gone into hospital to give birth, but instead were being carried out, heavily pregnant and injured, on stretchers. They were under fire at the very time in their lives when they were at their most vulnerable. It is almost too much to comprehend. We will probably, and hopefully, never know what it is to walk in those women’s shoes, but we absolutely stand with them in the face of this wickedness.

There are so many shocking tales from Ukraine, no doubt familiar to women and girls in war zones across the world, as the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare) set out so clearly. I also saw footage of a whole bunch of pushchairs and prams parked up outside a railway station in Poland by mums who must have known that the mums who were fleeing Ukraine with their wee ones would need them. I thought that that was amazing and it was a chink of light in the darkness there.

I know that the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “breaking the bias”, which is a welcome focus. At home and further afield, the lens through which everything is seen, including the decisions that affect our lives across the world, is still a male one. That applies whether we look at work, at health—we have talked about the recovery from covid—or at politics. Too often that bias, those barriers, or that ingrained misogyny remain.

I was very pleased to see Baroness Helena Kennedy’s report on misogyny and criminal justice in Scotland. It is a welcome step forward. As the report highlights, not all men are misogynists, but all women experience misogyny. I am heartened, too, by the continued laser focus on this by our First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and her gender-balanced Cabinet. The Scottish Parliament continues to become more diverse, slowly but surely changing—to be honest it has been far too slow—to reflect the Scotland that we know, and we are the better for that, because we need our representation to reflect all of us. Making sure that we actively support marginalised communities in all of that is important.

Regardless of that, politics might not always be a comfortable space to inhabit. I take the point of the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) that we should enjoy it as much as we can, but there is often a nasty undercurrent—online in particular—which is wearing. None the less, we do need women in politics. A woman’s place is in politics. A woman’s place is in decision making. We can see that, where that is true, there are better ways to do things. In Scotland, for instance, we have seen world-leading legislation to provide free period products; legislation developed directly with women’s organisations that acknowledges domestic abuse as much more than just physical violence; and a determination to incorporate into Scots law the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women.

We also have a fantastic women’s health plan in Scotland, which is so important. The focus on the menopause, which, for far too long, has not been spoken about, is profoundly helpful. I have been very pleased to hear a number of hon. Members mention the menopause today.

I really welcome that focus on women’s health. I am a woman with polycystic ovary syndrome, and I am not alone in that: 10% of women worldwide experience either PCOS or endometriosis, yet less than 3% of UK research funding goes into researching women-specific conditions—that is women-specific conditions as a whole, not the condition that I am referring to. PCOS is little understood. Basically, there is a black hole where research should be. If Members want to know how it might impact on the menopause or on becoming an older woman, they can forget it. The information does not exist, but I have no doubt that, if that condition affected men, the research would have been done. Moreover, if men experienced the levels of sexual violence that women do, we would not have seen the disgraceful pantomime of Raith Rovers and Clyde football clubs transferring, retransferring, and then trying to untransfer a man who had been ruled in a civil case to be a rapist. I must say that I felt that Raith Rovers’ International Women’s Day tweet, waxing lyrical about forging women’s equality together, was somewhat bold, or just extremely offensive, given the circumstances.

I have seen some people—men, actually—ask why that had never seemed to be a problem before. “Why now?”, they ask, suggesting, and some actually saying, that those of us who are unhappy about it are jumping on a bandwagon. I will tell them why: we are ground down by this kind of thing day in, day out, and thank goodness we have made enough progress over the past few years that women feel able to say “Enough.”

I take my hat off to the incredibly brave woman who found herself at the heart of that situation, and these strong, principled female players, coaches and teams who were not willing to stand for it any longer. To the men who stood up with them, I say thank you. We all need to stand up if we want to break that bias at every level, but it is not easy, and that sorry episode should never have happened.

I will close by reflecting on the difference that individual women make, going about their lives but improving the lives of others as they do so. We all know those women. They are all around us—our families, our friends—and they are absolutely worth celebrating in this debate. They are women such as my three East Renfrewshire councillor colleagues Angela Convery, Annette Ireland and Caroline Bamforth, who work tirelessly day in, day out to improve the lives of others. They are women such as the three young East Renfrewshire women named in the YWCA Scotland “30 under 30” list, Marissa Roxburgh, Elise Kelly and Kira Hendry. They are women such as Rena McGuire, Ashley McIlvenney, Annmarie Strain and Oonagh McKinnon, who work tirelessly to deliver transformational change in our community—I am sure hon. Members will wish them all well; they are up against one another for a community award, but they probably all deserve to win.

I could go on adding the names of amazing women in my community; I could stand here all day and do that, and I am confident that all hon. Members here could do the same for their constituencies. There are also women such as Carolyn, Nix, Tracey, Katie and Freya, who support me as I support constituents. These women, and women the world over going about their business, stepping up, stepping forward, making things better for others and for those coming after them—they are the women who inspire me daily. Let us all try to be more like these women. Let us always stretch a hand out to others as we continue to push forward, and maybe then we will see real and sustained equality.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is such a pleasure to speak in this debate as we mark International Women’s Day. I thank the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for proposing the debate and the Backbench Business Committee for securing it.

Has it not been wonderful to hear so many examples of incredible women this afternoon in fields from science to business, health, education, the arts, politics, trade unions and more? Has it not also been important to celebrate, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) rightly said, how wonderful it is to be a woman?

As we celebrate those examples, however, that celebration is tempered, as was mentioned earlier, by the realisation of the dreadful situation so many other women are in. The International Development Committee statement before this debate drew attention to the appalling circumstances of so many women and girls in Afghanistan, which was rightly underlined by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) in her remarks. Many speakers have also expressed sympathy for and solidarity with the women and girls of Ukraine.

As so many have said, it is hard for us here to imagine the horror and anguish those women and girls have faced over the past few weeks, whether they are still in Ukraine under Russian bombardment or have fled for safety, leaving brothers, fathers, partners and sons behind. Many have referred to what took place yesterday, with the Russian army bombing a maternity hospital in Mariupol—almost too appalling to contemplate. For many of us, it is also horrendous to contemplate the circumstances for those women now having to give birth in bomb shelters in those areas under attack. Putin’s invasion is an attack on sovereignty, democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and women. Yesterday, Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska, offered her testimony from Ukraine. In it she named some of the child casualties of the war such as Alice, Polina and Arseniy. In their name, we fully support—I am sure I speak for the whole House—providing the people of Ukraine with all possible political, economic and practical support to repel Putin’s forces.

This afternoon we have heard another awful list of names—that read out by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips). Her testimony, delivered every year in this debate, highlights the shocking scale of the epidemic of violence against women in this country, without losing sight of the individual tragedy that lies behind every statistic. As she said, the perpetrators killed, but we in power can and must do better. My colleagues here and in the other place have time and again brought pressure to bear, not least during the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. We argued for the inclusion of domestic abuse and sexual offences in the definition of “serious violence”; for violence against women and girls to be a strategic policing requirement, giving it the same prominence as terrorism and organised crime; for safeguards on the extraction of data from victims’ phones; for a lifting of the limit on the prosecution of common assault or battery in domestic abuse cases; and for a review, finally, into spiking so that we can get to the bottom of this appalling practice. None of those measures was included in the original Bill; they were all the result of campaigning with powerful women’s organisations beyond this House, and they were all achieved, I am sorry to say, in the teeth of Government opposition. Outside that specific legislation, it was also pressure from those organisation and from the Opposition that resulted in violence against women and girls becoming a strategic policing requirement, giving it the same prominence as terrorism and organised crime.

But there is so much more to do. As my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) said, we need drastic action that recognises that this is an emergency. Will the Government now introduce the other measures contained in Labour’s comprehensive Green Paper? Will they ensure that there will be a specialist rape unit in every police force area? Will they bring in minimum sentences for rape and for stalking? Will they make misogyny a hate crime, as has rightly been called for? Will they publish a perpetrators strategy, as the Domestic Abuse Bill requires this to happen before the end of next month?

Violence against women and girls—male violence, as was rightly said—is not just a criminal justice issue; it is also a public health one. More than 60% of women accessing mental health services have experienced domestic abuse—an appalling statistic at the heart of the Women’s Aid campaign, #DeserveToBeHeard, rightly promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum). That is one of many reasons why we have committed to guarantee mental health treatment within a month for all who need it and enable 1 million more people to access treatment.

We had high hopes that the Government would be similarly ambitious when, this time last year, they announced that we would have a new women’s health strategy by the end of 2021. Well, it is now March 2022 and we are still waiting. In fact, we are waiting longer and longer—for cervical screening appointments, for breast cancer appointments, and for routine gynaecological treatment. We are seeing services cut, or in line to be cut, such as the access to telemedicine for early abortion that has rightly been referred to by so many Members today, and we are seeing areas of extreme need, such as PCOS—polycystic ovary syndrome—and endometriosis, still not being dealt with properly.

Life expectancy and outcomes for many women are actually worsening. As my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) has repeatedly emphasised, black women are now 40% more likely than white women to experience miscarriage and four times more likely to die while pregnant, yet we still lack any hard targets for improvement. Waiting lists were already at record highs even before covid-19 hit, but we can do something about it: previous Labour Governments reduced waiting times from 18 months to 18 weeks. We have to learn from that change, act on it, and secure the future of our NHS, providing the staff, equipment and modern technology it needs to treat women on time.

As so many have said, we also need change for women in our economy, now more than ever. My party introduced the Equal Pay Act 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Equality Act 2010, rightly referred to by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) as a Labour achievement. Those advances were often delivered hand in hand with the trade union movement. We understand that our society, our economy and our country are poorer if women cannot play their part. Women hold the key to a stronger economy. Women-led small and medium-sized enterprises contribute about £85 billion to economic output, and companies in which women are more prominent are ultimately more successful, yet women are still less likely to be able to access as much finance as men when they try to set up companies, and only eight of the FTSE 100’s chief executive officers are women.

Backing women in business is not just the right thing to do, but makes hard-headed economic sense, yet we are still dragging our feet. We cannot do so any longer. That is why we have committed to 100,000 new businesses, many of them run by women, in the first term of a Labour Government. It is also why we would act to boost family-friendly employment rights. Last year, the gender pay gap actually increased—one of the few statistics that has not been mentioned in this debate—but that followed a decade of slower reductions than under the Labour Government, as referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy).

As my hon. Friends the Members for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) and for Coventry North East (Colleen Fletcher) said, much of this precarity for women has been accelerated during the pandemic. We need gender pay comparisons across companies as well as ethnicity pay reporting in order to tackle compound inequalities. We need to tackle workplace harassment, including third-party harassment. We need to implement the International Labour Organisation’s convention against workplace harassment, and we need to ensure that flexibility is in the hands of women workers, not just their employers, as is currently so often the case. We must recognise childcare as the fundamental economic infrastructure that it is, not the afterthought it so often seems to be for too many women and families in our country. Finally, we need to measure the impact of policies on women, as the Government legally should do.

International Women’s Day is always a bittersweet moment—a chance to celebrate how far we have come, to note with regret how far we still have to go, and to recommit ourselves to the struggle for women and girls today and for our daughters and granddaughters tomorrow. My party now has as many women MPs as the proportion of women in the country, aiding us in this struggle, but there is still so much more to do—particularly in local government, as the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare) said. It is also critical that we prevent the abuse of women on social media. The hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) spoke powerfully about the impact of this abuse on women politicians, and I commend her on her honesty. To reflect on some of the discussion that took place previously, it always makes sense to check what a woman has actually said, rather than what a man suggests she has said on social media.

Women across our country deserve security, prosperity and respect. That is what a Labour Government will seek to ensure, and as long as we are on these Benches, it is what we will deliver as we seek to break the bias.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call Trudy Harrison.

--- Later in debate ---

[Trudy Harrison]

I am afraid that I cannot give way.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) referenced the importance of language, and it is so important that, as he says, we protect the language of females—of women, adult human females, girls, mothers, women who breastfeed and mothers who work. I think that is so important. It has been a pleasure to speak in this important debate.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call Maria Miller.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have given notice to the hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) that I would raise this point of order. She challenged me to clarify exactly what she had said, and to correct the record if I was wrong in suggesting that she had not answered a question clearly. The question she was asked by Emma Barnett on “Woman’s Hour” was very simple. She was asked:

“And Labour’s definition of a woman?”

and she answered:

“Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things. I mean, obviously, that’s then you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition.”

I suggested that that answer was unclear. I think I am correct in my representation of that answer.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. He said that he would endeavour to correct the record, and he has sought to do so. Would the hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) like to follow that point of order?

[Anneliese Dodds]

Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) for giving me notice that he was going to make a point of order, but he actually stated that I was unable to define what a woman was. That is not true. I am a woman, obviously. Okay, we all occasionally might use the odd “um” or “ah” in an interview, but if he listened to what I said, I said “adult female, under the Equality Act.” Also in that interview, which he did not quote, I said that the Equality Act protects on the basis of sex, although some of his comments and those of others intimated that I did not. I stated that there is a biological definition and also a legal definition. If he wants to dispute whether any of those definitions are extant, I am happy to have that discussion. I do not think that his argument would hold water, because it would not be a correct one. I feel that he should still withdraw those original remarks, but I accept that, at least from his point of view, he has attempted to set out his view. I do, however, think it is a mistaken one.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the hon. Lady for answering that point of order. There is clearly a difference of opinion, and that is not a matter on which the Chair can adjudicate, and nor should the Chair try to. The facts have been satisfactorily put on the record, and I am grateful to everyone concerned for doing so.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this house has considered International Women’s Day.