International Women’s Day

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Lampard, on her maiden speech. She will make many more fine speeches in your Lordships’ House, and I assure her that none will feel as stressful to her as today’s.

Can the 35th of 36 Back-Bench speakers find anything new to say after so many powerful contributions? Well, here goes. In preparation for the debate, I went to the United Nations, which adopted International Women’s Day in 1977, although it dates back 115 years. Since then, the status and rights of women have certainly progressed. However, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in his International Women’s Day message,

“we also recognize the enormous obstacles”

women

“face—from structural injustices, marginalization, and violence, to cascading crises that affect them first and worst, to the denial of their personal autonomy and rights over their bodies and lives.”

As the Minister said when opening the debate, this year the UN is using International Women’s Day to focus attention on the need for technology and innovation to advance gender equality. Technology can lift the lives of women and girls around the world in many ways, such as through greater access to education, healthcare and financial services, but there is a real need to confront the ability to close the connectivity gap. Today, 3 billion people are still unconnected to the internet, the majority of whom are women and girls in developing countries. The barriers that keep women and girls in those countries offline must be broken down; barriers such as the stereotypes, as we have heard in other contributions today, that discourage girls from studying science and maths—an issue highlighted very effectively and powerfully by my noble friend Lord Stansgate. Other barriers are the low levels of education and training in digital skills, and a lack of access to digital devices, data and job opportunities.

The developed world has also erected barriers. Today, women make up less than one-third of the workforce across science, technology, engineering and maths. In cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence, just one in five professionals is a woman. There is an urgent need to increase women’s participation and leadership in those areas, and that must start with broader recruitment pipelines and using quotas where they are deemed necessary.

I am not known for talking up the independent sector of education, but I commend the positive action taken this week by the Girls’ Schools Association, which has announced that it will adopt what it terms a gender-equitable approach to its investment management. It will in future invest only in companies with female leaders or a strong female presence on boards, and I say fair play to them for that initiative.

I also commend the British Chambers of Commerce. As my noble friend Lady Twycross mentioned earlier, it marked International Women’s Day by undertaking a survey involving more than 4,000 of its members to measure the impact that childcare, caring responsibilities and the menopause have on women’s career prospects. It found that two-thirds of women believe they have missed out on career progression as a result of childcare responsibilities, while almost half the women surveyed feel that they will miss out on career opportunities as a result of the menopause. The BCC is now launching a three-year gender equity campaign to tackle these issues with the estimable aim of, in its words, ensuring

“not only … the wellbeing of our women and workplaces”

but guaranteeing a stronger and more equitable economy. Such initiatives are necessary because the pace at which the pay gap in the UK is closing is glacial.

My noble friend Lady Chakrabarti has just mentioned the Equal Pay Act. I have had an active interest in that issue for a considerable time. Indeed, my university thesis in 1974 was on the implementation of the Equal Pay Act. Although that Act got on to the statute book under Labour in 1970, there was a five-year lead-in period for employers to make the changes necessary to accommodate the changes required by the legislation. That was always an optimistic aim, of course, but I doubt anybody then would have predicted that, 50 years later, more than a quarter of the gender pay gap would remain to be filled.

In 1974, women earned 36% less than median male hourly earnings; the latest available figure, issued by the Office for National Statistics in April last year, is, as other noble Lords have mentioned, 8.3%. That represents the comparison between full-time workers and excludes overtime earnings. Of course, more men than women work overtime and more women than men work part-time, so the 8.3% figure gives a distorted view of the gap in actual take-home pay between men and women. Taking all employees into account, the gender pay gap in 2022 was 14.9%. That surely reveals the scale of the task that remains to bring to an end the discrimination faced by women in the workplace.

Joining a trade union would be a useful first step, but this matters to women not just in financial terms but psychologically too. A survey by the Fawcett Society in 2019 found that two-thirds of women said pay discrimination had a detrimental impact on how they feel about their job or their employer. This included feeling less motivated and even wanting to leave their job.

However, all is not lost; help is at hand, because soon there will be a Labour Government. Our paper, A New Deal for Working People, will introduce a raft of measures to transform women’s working lives. These will include banning zero-hour contracts and fire and rehire; 57% of those on zero-hour contracts are women and they are common in sectors that women dominate. They also include ensuring all working women are afforded the same basic rights; implementing flexible working as a right from day one; and introducing paid carer’s leave. The Labour Government will also commit to taking menopause seriously at work and across society. Under Labour, large employers will be required to submit a menopause action plan, detailing how they are supporting their employees who experience symptoms of menopause at work, alongside their gender pay reporting each year.

Earlier, I quoted the UN Secretary-General’s International Women’s Day message. It included these words:

“Gender-based discrimination harms everyone—women, girls, men, and boys. International Women’s Day is a call to action.”


We must all ensure that we answer that call.

Social Mobility Commission

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they intend to review the skills and experience required for the role of Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, following the resignation of the previous chair.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)]

My Lords, leadership of the Social Mobility Commission requires a strong understanding of, and a demonstrated commitment to, the cause of social mobility, particularly in education and business. We sought a chair with excellent leadership and persuasive communication skills. Both Katharine Birbalsingh and the interim chair, Alun Francis, displayed these skills in abundance through their initial recruitment and their work at the commission in delivering a fresh approach to deep-rooted challenges. We have no plans to review the job specification for this role.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is working overtime today. To ensure she is on the appropriate rate, I suggest she has a word with my new noble friend Lady O’Grady of Upper Holloway, whom I am very pleased to see in her place. I thank the Minister for her reply, but the resignation of Katharine Birbalsingh came after just 14 months and after a number of statements were made which demonstrated that she was ill equipped for the role. She was appointed in addition to her day job as a head teacher. The issues of social justice that need to be addressed are so pressing that I do not believe it is realistic to expect the person tasked with leading that work to do so in their spare time. Will the Government recognise those pressing issues and the increasing level of child poverty—which, incidentally, used to be in the title of the Social Mobility Commission—by refocusing, by renaming the body the social justice commission and by making its chair a full-time role?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have no plans to do that. Katharine made very clear why she left in her article in Schools Week. The Minister for Women and Equalities has been very clear about how grateful she is to Katharine for her time as chair and also to Alun Francis, her deputy, who has now taken over as interim chairman. The commission has done excellent work under Katharine’s chairmanship and Alun’s deputy chairmanship, and that work will go on, so we have no plans to change anything at the moment.