Women: Equality and Advancement

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

My Lords, I am honoured to follow the noble Lord, with whom I have worked over many years. He may be male but no one can say he is stale or pale, and on that basis he is welcome as part of the debate. He was, of course, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists during the time I was in government, and we all welcome his enlightened and practical approach. I also commend his work as chancellor of the University of Dundee; I shall say a little more in a moment about Hull, where I am the chancellor. I also warmly congratulate my noble friend on raising this critically important subject.

I feel as though my lifetime has coincided with the Commission on the Status of Women, as it was started a year before I was born—my birthday is in March. I remember only too well when we finally got the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women; the International Women’s Year in 1975, when I was a magistrate and working in a poor area in south-east London; and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The CSW is also about the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. It is about participation and leadership at all levels and the encouragement of women and girls in education, training, science and technology. It is not only about an element of prohibition but a sense of promotion.

It was well said that, in many ways, last week was a great week for women, with the reshuffle and a remarkable number of women joining the Cabinet. For the first time we have a woman Leader and a woman Chief Whip in the House of Lords, and any number of other appointments over the last year which quite took me aback. We have Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve in the US, the IMF managing director Christine Lagarde and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Time and again, we have had female firsts. That is a cause for celebration but it certainly is not sufficient.

When we look at the evidence of what is happening around the world we are witnessing extraordinary polarities. In the UK, as in the US and Hong Kong, female life expectancy is now 82 and has virtually doubled in 150 years. It is quite extraordinary what has happened to women and their health and well-being in the UK. However, in Sierra Leone, the Congo and Swaziland, women’s life expectancy is under 50 or hovering around 50. There is an appalling and unsustainable gap.

There is a similar picture with maternal mortality. In the UK, something like eight women die out of 100,000 live births. The figure in Sierra Leone is what it was in the UK 300 years ago—1,100 out of every 100,000 births are fatal—and the figure is only slightly lower in Chad, the Central African Republic and Somalia. In Sudan, the Congo and Côte d’Ivoire, the figures for women dying in childbirth are the same as they were in the UK 200 years ago. The issue of female health and reproductive medicine is extraordinarily serious and particularly intolerable as the disparities in different parts of the world are so strong. It is a similar story with perinatal mortality rates. Fortunately, in the UK it is very rare now for a child to die at birth, about eight out of 1,000, but it is five times that figure in Pakistan and many other countries. We cannot be confident until we have tackled those issues.

Much of this, of course, goes back to literacy. I remember long ago when I was PPS to my noble friend Lord Patten, when he was the Minister for Overseas Development. I commend particularly the work of many women who have held that job. The noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, was at ODA, as was Clare Short, and now we have Justine Greening. Women in that role can make a particularly powerful contribution. Whereas in the West 100% female literacy is expected, in Afghanistan it is 12%, in Niger 15% and South Sudan 16%.

This refers back to the noble Lord’s point about schooling. One of the millennium development goals is to achieve universal primary education. In Uganda, the number of girls getting to the last grade of primary education is one in four—25%—while in Angola it is 27%, in Mozambique 29% and in Ethiopia 42%. In many countries, fewer than 50% of the girls get through to the last grade of primary school. This is an extraordinarily serious issue. Taking up the comments of my noble friend when she opened the debate, I believe that these are specific, practical issues which must be addressed. They cannot be avoided or ducked.

I return to the issue of evidence. I feel very privileged to be involved in the University of Hull, and of course William Wilberforce was born in Hull. During his pioneering work on the abolition of slavery, he said, rather wonderfully, that:

“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know”.

We must address this, not only in this House but at the UN. We cannot say we did not know. We do know these facts and this evidence. Amusingly, William Wilberforce was highly criticised by some other humanitarians at the end of the 18th century. Elizabeth Heyrick and others regarded him as extremely unenlightened about the role of women and not very interested in the issue of poverty at the time. However, such is the way of social reform.

At the University of Hull, there is a particularly impressive centre for gender studies. It was the first UK university to have a mainstream department for the subject, building on the legacy of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, which has recently developed a slavery index, suggesting that there are still 29 million in slavery in the world, so many of whom are female. The work at the centre, particularly that led by the most impressive Dr Suzanne Clisby, suggests that the evidence on abuse against women is still far from reliable. There has been a survey of 42,000 women across the EU and the evidence of self-reported, compared to reported, violence is hugely different. Until we can have reliable and accurate information, we cannot seriously develop effective programmes.

Apart from the issues in Europe, there are still harrowing situations in different parts of the world. In Haiti, there is an appalling situation where many of the older women lure children and young girls into people trafficking. Because they are older, grandmotherly types, the girls often feel they can trust them. Families give up their girls and young women into slavery, believing this will lead to a better life. In Mauritania in west Africa, there is deeply entrenched hereditary slavery and child marriage and human trafficking are a particular burden on women. In Pakistan, there is a very serious situation of slavery and exploitation of women. Another research project conducted by the University of Hull in Bangladesh concerned women on construction sites carrying rubble, cement and bricks to earn money. They are then cast out by the community because they are changing the norms of purdah. They are vulnerable to exploitation, and sexual difficulties are only too evident.

Finally—this relates to the noble Lord’s point about children in school—some work in Ghana is trying to avoid gender-based violence prevalent in the secondary schools there, where girls are often raped and abused both by male staff and by male pupils. They have to drop out of school because of pregnancy or shame or have to walk long distances to school, again being picked up by predatory men. There are schools where there are very few toilet facilities where the girls can have any privacy.

The situation around the world is extraordinarily ambiguous. I always take India as an example, where there is a 65% female literacy rate but, unlike anywhere else in the world, in India there are 10 female chief executives of banks, which is quite extraordinary. It is that contradiction that makes it all the more difficult for the international institutions to provide coherent programmes.

My noble friend talked about raising the status of CSW. She talked about NGOs, civil society and Governments. I believe that to achieve change in the world there is a very potent force that can be used to hugely positive effect, and that is the role of business. The global brands take the issues of corporate social responsibility, avoiding female exploitation, developing female health facilities and encouraging literacy in enlightened workplaces extremely seriously. If you talk to the people at Standard Chartered, Tesco, BT, BAT or Coca-Cola—many, many businesses—they can be a far greater force for good in many of the countries facing the most difficult circumstances than can their Governments, with all the difficulties that they face.

I warmly congratulate my noble friend and, like others, I am pleased about progress so far, but we are left with a vast amount more to do before the women of this world can live to have the expectations that they rightly deserve.