International Women’s Day

Debate between Anne McLaughlin and Liz Saville Roberts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Anne McLaughlin]

I am an international woman.

For many years, I had my niece and nephew believing that the day was named in honour of me. They were wide-eyed at the celebrations the world over—all for me. At the same time, I regularly adjusted my age for them, so it was a bit of a running joke that I could not face up to reaching the upper stages of my youth. It all came unstuck for me in 2011, when the world marked 100 years of International Women’s Day. They found it amusing to discover that I was around more than 100 years ago.

There are some lessons in there somewhere, and one of them is about age. As we celebrate women, let us celebrate all women and note those who often face barriers in addition to those presented by their gender. That might be for any number of reasons: race, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, income and, yes, age. Age International reports that nearly a quarter of the world’s women are over the age of 50, yet they are routinely excluded from policy and practice that aims to address gender inequality and violence against women, including sexual violence.

We, and I include myself in this, also need to stop talking about age as if it were a bad thing—it is clearly better than any other alternative. We talk as if women, in particular, are past it once they reach a certain age—a certain age I have yet to reach, obviously. While we are talking about age, let us not forget the regular exclusion of young women from the policy-making process.

International Women’s Day is not just about looking at barriers and inequality. As we have heard, it is also about celebrating successes and the barriers that have been overcome. However, until we have true equality in every walk of life and in every sense of the word, we have to keep talking about why we do not have equal opportunities in this life. So today I want to do three things. I want to read out a roll-call of just some of the women who inspire me. I also want to talk about some fundamental barriers facing women and how our male allies can help break them down, and I will end by asking two things of the Government. That will allow me to explain why I started off speaking in a different language.

On the roll-call, I sometimes think we have our famous women we pay tribute to, and then we have our so-called ordinary women. I am just going to mix them up and read a list of women who inspire me. Some are constituents, but they are by no means the only woman in my constituency who inspire me—I would need the entire debate to mention them all. The women are Mary Seacole, Helen Carroll, Marie Curie, Winnie Ewing, Mags Watson, Gemma Coyle, Rosa Parks, Mary Hunter, Marie Stopes, Janet Connor, Harriet Tubman, Laura Clark, Bessie Watson, Josephine McCusker, Catherine Yuill, Tracy Pender, Donna Henderson and, finally—I am going to say something about the last one—Chief Theresa Kachindamoto, also known in Malawi as the marriage terminator. She became the chief of over 900,000 people and immediately dissolved the child marriages of 3,000 girls. I like the name “the marriage terminator”. I want those on the list who are still with us to know that they inspire me. If they do not know why, I will tell them when I see them.

The second thing I want to talk about is the fundamental barriers facing women. I want to say a bit about how I came rather late in life to understand the barriers that I face because of my gender, in the hope that it will help others who want to understand. I am not going to talk about children and childcare. It is an obvious, although necessary, matter to refer to, but it sometimes allows people to simplify the issue. It allows those who regularly ask, “When’s International Men’s Day?” to argue that women who have full childcare or who have no children are barrier-free, and that is just not the case. I do not have children, so I cannot say that childcare duties prevent me from doing some of the things I want to do, but for my entire life I have experienced the fundamental barriers that almost all women experience—I just did not know that that is what it was.

Many of my peers were elected long before I ever was. I thought that that was because they were better, that I would not be that good anyway and that politics was not for the likes of me. I also did not like the combative and competitive nature of party politics, so if there was an internal battle for selection, I just refused to put myself forward. I remember my friend Shona Robison, who went on to be the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport in the Scottish Government, phoning me and saying, “It’s the first Scottish Parliament, Anne. We need more women. Why don’t you stand?” I just point-blank refused. No matter how much she encouraged me, and no matter how she tried to persuade me, I told her it was not for me.

I believed that the thing holding me back was me and my lack of ability, but I was not lacking in ability, and it was Nicola Sturgeon who opened my eyes to that. We were talking about gender balance mechanisms, and I said what I have heard many women say: “I would only ever want to get somewhere on merit.” She said, “Well, that’s fine—if all the men you see elected are there on merit alone too. Until they are, we need these gender balance mechanisms.” That got me thinking, and it set me on a path where I ended up spending the last two years working in different countries, mainly trying to get more women into politics. I made that argument about merit, and I could see other women’s eyes opening.

I also used something else Nicola pointed out to me that day: ask a man to tell you three things he is really good at, and he will. He is quite right to do that, because you have asked him to do it, but if we ask a woman to do the same, most women—of course, I am generalising, but I think we can use general points here—will start by telling us what they are not good at, and I could list many more than three.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The hon. Lady is making a very powerful argument. One thing we should be doing is giving women the licence to try, fail and come back to something. So many of us will not put our names forward; we are afraid of failing. We are told that if we fail once, that is it. All of us need to be fairer on ourselves and fairer on each other to encourage people to come forward.

[Anne McLaughlin]

I absolutely agree. I was just going on to say that even when we cajole some women and say, “Come on, just tell me something you’re good at,” they will say things like, “Well, my friends think I am quite good at—” It is very difficult to get things out of them.

It is all to do with conditioning. Boys are brought up, on the whole, to be ambitious, bold and confident and to expect to be important in life. Girls are brought up to look after everyone else, including those important men, to be the peacemakers and to look pretty. How many times, when we meet a little girl, is the first thing we say to her that she looks really pretty? How many times do we say to a little boy how clever he is? Clearly that girl will grow up judging herself on how she looks or how she does not look, and the boy will focus on being clever and running the world.

I am not talking just about parents, although they obviously have an influence. I was brought up by two parents who regularly drummed into me that I was as good as anyone else—no better, no worse, but as good as. I was encouraged by them to conquer the world, but not by the society I grew up in. The influences around us, such as the media, teachers and other people involved in a child’s life, can be really powerful, so I was really impressed to read that the Scottish Government last month held the first meeting of a taskforce to tackle gender stereotyping in the classroom. We need a lot more of that.

The other thing we women need is our male allies. I am happy to say that there are many in here. There are many on the SNP Benches, and many in my own life. I want to make one suggestion about how men in politics can be our allies on a practical level, but before I do, I want to go back to the issue of conditioning and to acknowledge that not all the conditioning that boys receive is positive. One area where girls and women fare better is talking about emotions. We are allowed to do that, but boys and men are not. When I talk about conditioning, it is not to suggest that we get it right with boys either.

What can our male allies do to support women in politics? I did quite a bit of work last year in the Gambia to support political parties to get more women, among other groups, involved in politics. Almost every female political activist told me she needed training in public speaking, but I spotted something far more fundamental, which I have spotted in other countries, including our own. Many of the women were not even speaking in the small roundtable party meetings; those who did regularly had their sentences finished for them, and they accepted that. I am not singling out the Gambia, because mansplaining is a worldwide phenomenon, as we all know. I realised that I had work to do with the women on how to make their voices heard on a more fundamental level. I also recognised that I had work to do with the men. It is like all forms of unconscious bias: most people do not intend to practise bias. Most men would likely be horrified if they discovered that they were creating barriers.

The one thing that men can do is to look at their behaviour in meetings. They need to recognise that just because a woman says nothing or little in a meeting does not mean that she has nothing or little to say. It is simply that we often communicate differently. We are also often surrounded by very confident men who have a lot to say, and that is absolutely acceptable, but our voice inside starts to tell us to doubt the validity of what we were going to say. Women MPs may hide it well, but we are not immune to this behaviour. For example, right now, my pages are covered with notes saying, “Cut, if they are bored.” “Cut, if they are bored.” And, “Cut, if they are bored.” I had assumed that people would be bored and that I would have been talking for too long. Perhaps I am, but I am going to force myself not to cut my speech, if that is alright with you, Madam Deputy Speaker—yes, it looks like it is okay.

I am not just talking about women MPs; I am talking about people who come into Parliament for meetings with us. I am talking about our party members. I am talking about support staff. I have lost count of the number of times that I have left a meeting and been approached by a woman who did not speak a single word and who starts talking to me on a one-to-one basis and giving me some really important and interesting information. Therefore, one thing that our male allies, and also other women, can do is invite individuals to speak and not allow their sentences to be finished for them.

I did some training with women MPs—they were, in fact, Deputy Speakers—in Nepal this time last year. I was there to help them get media coverage, because the male MPs were getting it all. I turned up at the conference hall and it was half full of men. They had heard about the training—this is the male MPs—and they felt put out that they had been excluded. The women felt sorry for them and invited them to join the session, but it changed the entire dynamic and had I not found ways to work around it, it would have defeated the purpose of my being there at all.

I think it would be helpful to say how it changed the dynamic. When I was trying to establish what holds women MPs back from engaging with the media, I asked a number of questions. One was, “Hands up if you ever feel that what you have to say to a journalist is probably not that important after all.” Not one woman put her hand up, but I knew from speaking to them privately that most of them did experience that self-doubt; they just did not want to talk about it in a roomful of confident men. Some men put their hands up, but it was to tell me how vitally important their stories were to the media. Therefore, they gave me the opposite of what I was asking. As I have said, I found ways around that and one was to say, “May I take the first three responses from women, please?” That works in a larger setting. It is something that I have seen male allies do. In the more intimate setting of a round-table meeting, I ask men to please just remember that a woman who is saying nothing is not doing so because she has nothing to say.

Finally, I conclude with two asks of the Government. I spent recess in Malawi. As an aside, just because so many women have mentioned this, let me say that I went on a constituency visit with an MP, and her MP colleague gave the most passionate speech to hundreds of people about why they should retain her—there is a campaign called “Retain Her Malawi”. I thought that it was really nice that these two women in the same party were supporting each other. But they were not in the same party at all—it was the equivalent of my going along to a constituency in Scotland with a Conservative or a Labour MP, saying that they must vote for her next time. It was really interesting to watch the way that the women in that caucus supported each other.

Members will see that I have a piece of cloth wrapped around me. It was given to me by Linga, Oxfam’s Malawi director. I was in Malawi, as I have said, for the women’s caucus conference for all 44 women MPs in Malawi—23% of its Parliament is now made up by women. The conference was organised by Oxfam and supported by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. The cloth is printed with the words, “Take action, say no to violence against women.” A lot of good work is going on in Malawi, much of it funded by both the Scottish and the UK Governments, so that is fantastic.