International Women’s Day and Protecting the Equality of Women in the UK and Internationally

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, and his sobering report on the plight of women and children in Kashmir, of which I was certainly not aware. To mark International Women’s Day, I wish to step back and look at the gifts and qualities that women bring to the whole of human life, which are often unrecognised and undervalued. If they were more valued and recognised, they would certainly help in furthering and protecting women’s equality in the UK and globally.

As American comedian Rhonda Hansome says:

“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. A woman must do what he can’t.”


The most obvious thing is that women bear and give birth to the next generation. We ignore the qualities that women bring to their roles as homemakers and child-rearers at our peril. Of course, they do so much more than that, and men often now take a home-front role, but women are almost always the central hub figures in families.

This is not just gender stereotyping. Research has found that it is much more common for a woman than a man to know her children’s friends, hopes, dreams, romances and secret fears, and to know what they are thinking, how they are feeling and when their doctors’ appointments are. Although there is infinite variability within the two sexes, there are clear sex-based differences in tendencies flowing from how male and female brains tend to be wired and their respective physiology, hence the Government bringing forward a women’s health strategy—and, I hope, a men’s strategy, following the report from the APPG for men and boys, of which I am a vice-chair.

Differences are wired into us at the deepest level. For instance, in terms of hearing, women’s discomfort level is half that of men. On smell, women are relatively sensitive and men relatively insensitive. On touch, the most sensitive man is less sensitive to touch than the least sensitive woman. On people orientation, baby girls exhibit twice as much eye contact as baby boys by the age of three.

Flowing from all this, the leadership literature is clear as to the many strengths of what has broadly been termed a “female leadership” style. I caveat again that I refer throughout to tendencies, including prosocial behaviour, women’s more marked relationship orientation, stronger social competence and the panoramic view that they bring to decisions. They accept ambiguity more readily, are more inherently flexible and honour intuition as well as pure rationality. That is something I have always wondered at; it is extraordinary to see how correct female intuition is. Women more commonly try to take everything and everyone into consideration, and their strong social competence allows them to collect information from all sides and consider all perspectives of a situation. It can also give them titanic powers of persuasion, which I say ruefully from experience.

Many sectors of the 21st-century economic community urgently need the natural talents of women: a capacity to read non-verbal cues; emotional sensitivity; empathy; greater patience; an ability to do and think several things simultaneously; a penchant for long-term planning; and a preference for co-operating and reaching consensus. Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan’s classic study found that women want to connect. While men are self-oriented, women are other-oriented; men are rights-oriented and women are responsibility-oriented. Men have an individual perspective where the core unit is “me”; women have a group perspective where the core unit is “we”. Men take pride in self-reliance; women take pride in team accomplishment and focus naturally on empowerment rather than power.

The business guru Tom Peters describes how we have not advanced much since the days in the cave. As a hunter, a man needed vision that would allow him to zero in on targets in the distance, whereas a woman needed eyes to allow a wide arc of vision so that she could monitor predators sneaking up to the nest. That is why, he says, modern men can find their way effortlessly to a distant pub but can never find things in fridges, cupboards and drawers. Women guarded and defended the cave community while the men went out hunting. Men are either switched all the way on or, when in a resting state, only 30% on. Women are never turned off; they are on guard 24/7 and their resting state is 90% on. Men are tuned in or out, seldom in between— I think the Committee gets the picture.

That is why, on International Women’s Day, we have to and should celebrate women. We cannot avoid defining who women are or allow them to be stealthily redefined. As we know, women have recently been called “cervix havers”, “menstruators”, “birthing bodies” and, perhaps most distastefully, “bleeders”. Reducing women to their bodily functions is dehumanising and disgusting.

Returning to the definition of “woman”, the dictionary is clear that a woman is an adult human female. The Equality Act 2010 is also clear: Section 212 states that

“‘woman’ means a female of any age.”

This word needs to be politically detoxified so that politicians no longer quake when asked to define it. The most high-profile recent examples of this happen to have come from the Labour Party’s ranks, but politicians across the spectrum are terrified of getting on the wrong side of what is just the latest incarnation of a misogynist orthodoxy. There is nothing new under the sun. Without being able to use the word “woman” and understand what we mean by it, women’s needs can be obscured and even ignored, but those needs are shared by 51% of the electorate.

It came to this because powerful lobby groups and powerful men insist that anyone can be a woman. I am not a scientist but I know that humans simply cannot change their sex. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, who is a scientist and a professor, categorically said this on the BBC’s “Question Time”:

“You cannot change your sex. Your sex actually is there in every single cell in the body.”


We can change our bodies with hormones and, in some cases, surgery to resemble the opposite sex more closely, but we should not minimise or soft-pedal how difficult this is in practice, and how arduous and costly will be the need for ongoing medical intervention. Unsurprisingly, therefore, fewer than 3% of those who identify as transgender women have undergone such modifications, but many who are naturally sympathetic to trans women—and, of course, trans men—are unaware that the vast majority are still bodily intact.

Yet when a female rape victim asks for a woman to examine her, she needs to be sure that her request will be respected, as does one’s elderly mother who requests that only female carers provide her with intimate and personal care. Women in these and similar situations who have objected when confronted with a bodily intact man who identifies as a woman have been called bigots and transphobes. Women’s prisons can, and do, contain male-bodied rapists. Newspapers talk about “her erect penis” when describing sexual assault. Female prisoners can be punished for misgendering the natal, intact males in their prison. In sport, women and girls are being beaten, sometimes even injured, by bigger, faster and stronger males in their own sports—women’s sports.

Extreme ideologies are breaking down the social norms, the social contract between males and females where we make room for each other’s needs and respect the sex-based differences that I have described. One recognised weakness of women leaders’ pro-social engagement and willingness to see everyone’s point of view is their abandonment of their own interests. Their tendency to want to share success can mean that they doubt their own competence. Women quite simply do not always feel able to stand up for themselves. When I have argued for women’s rights to single-sex spaces in hospitals and prisons, I have been surprised to receive many gentle cards of thanks from those who sign off simply as mothers and ordinary women. The ones who tend to empower others often feel very disempowered in this debate.

Returning to the need to celebrate women, we cannot do that without an agreed definition and freedom to speak the truth respectfully but without fear of being cancelled, pilloried or criminalised. There was global condemnation when Russia meted out that treatment to the courageous Russian female journalist, Marina Ovsyannikova. She did not just hold up a sign—she is a sign and, in my contribution today, she has the final word.