International Women�s Day

Alex Brewer Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alex Brewer (North East Hampshire) (LD)]

Ahead of International Women�s Day this Saturday, I want to celebrate women�s achievements. I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) on securing this important debate today, on being a trailblazer for this Parliament�s diversity, and on speaking so passionately.

We have made the most amazing progress since the inaugural International Women�s Day following workers� rights protests in the early 20th century. Women in this country can now vote, start a business or undergo surgery on their own body without consulting a man. The absence of those rights might feel faintly ridiculous now, but they were hard won in our relatively recent past, and we must remember that they do not apply universally across the world. We must also recognise that, while so much progress has been made, given the current global political environment, this progress has never felt so precarious.

This year marks 250 years since Jane Austen�s birth, in our beautiful Hampshire countryside. Austen�s novels, despite high praise and popularity, were published anonymously, and it was her brother who often dealt with her publishing negotiations. One of her first books was simply written under the authorship: �By a Lady�. As we celebrate World Book Day today as well, it is a perfect opportunity to reflect on the enduring impact of authors such as Austen, who not only shaped our literary world but challenged the societal norms in their time.

Thankfully, women�s literature in the UK is no longer published anonymously, but we still live in a world where 122 million girls are out of school, 496 million adult women worldwide cannot read or write and women make up two thirds of the global illiterate population. Issues of education and illiteracy will be worsened by the recently announced cuts to international aid. That policy, as highlighted by the hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington), will disproportionately harm women.

We need foreign policy with gender equality at its heart not just because it is the right thing to do, but because countries that educate girls do better economically for everyone. We must also increase international development funding initiatives that aim to eradicate sexual violence and abuse in areas of conflict. The UN confirmed a 50% rise in conflict-related sexual violence between 2022 and 2023. Women and girls made up 95% of the victims. It is not just sexual violence: 61% of preventable maternal mortality�that amounts to about 500 deaths a day�occurred in 35 crisis-affected countries, and the average incidence of child marriage was 14.4% higher in conflict-affected countries than in non-conflict settings.

Women continue to be abused across the world. Murder is still the leading cause of premature death in women, and as we have heard, every 10 minutes a woman or girl is murdered by her intimate partner or a family member. We heard powerful testimony from the hon. Member for Bolsover (Natalie Fleet) on rape and sexual assault. We must develop our support mechanisms by embedding domestic abuse specialists in every police force, increasing protections for refugees and expanding our rape crisis centres to tackle these crises.

I am proud to be the first female Member of Parliament for North East Hampshire�the 658th female MP on the list�and a Member of the Women and Equalities Committee. I support the powerful personal and professional testimony of our Committee Chair, the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), who spoke on health inequalities, as did the hon. Members for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), for Monmouthshire (Catherine Fookes) and for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball).

Strides are being made in the House to improve the lives of women and achieve equality. The Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019, which was originally introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), criminalised upskirting.

It has been heartening to hear such powerful speeches across the House on a wide range of topics, but women must also be protected financially. Right now in the UK, women continue to be economically disadvantaged in the workplace. Median hourly pay for women is 7.7% less than for men, and in Hampshire that gap almost doubles. The gender pay gap also worsens with age: among full-time employees aged 40 and over, the gap widens considerably due to the motherhood penalty. That is not a fact that we should accept. Women deserve better from their workplaces and from the societal structures that enable that to continue. Policies such as increased paternity leave will help women to have a fair share of wages. Improving policy for women also improves it for men. As the hon. Member for Kettering (Rosie Wrighting) said, equality benefits everyone.

Today, I speak proudly as a progressive, internationalist, cosmopolitan woman inspired by the strength of women leaders. Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand impressed the world with her management of crises from terrorism to the pandemic while being the second-ever elected world leader to give birth in office. Kamala Harris was the first female, the first black and the first Asian-American Vice President of the USA. Sanna Marin, who became the world�s youngest Prime Minister in 2019, guided Finland to become the 31st member of NATO. In the face of sexism in political life, who can forget Julia Gillard�s 2012 speech on misogyny in which she powerfully addressed the sexism to which she had been subjected? It is that persistence, resilience and fortitude that women and girls must continue to have in political, public, professional and private spaces across the globe so that we continue moving in the right direction towards equality for all women. We are not there yet, but our progress must be celebrated.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the shadow Minister.