International Women’s Day: Progress on Global Gender Equality

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness and I pay tribute to the work that she has done over her lifetime, from which many people have benefited.

Are men from Mars and women from Venus? I pose it as a question that I will leave hanging in the air because, perhaps as this debate progresses, we can take a decision on it. There are differences. I am not somebody who believes that there are no differences that need to be recognised. The question is how we harmonise the differences that need to be harmonised in order to bring about equality.

Back in the 1980s when I did a proper job, I trained people in business. I recall very much then, particularly in the manufacturing sector, how the change in corporate culture, particularly in management style, was starting to come in, mainly because of things such as the Japanese just-in-time system. I can recall then having long discussions—I looked this up at the weekend—about a chap called Hofstede. We used to talk about whether the cultures in certain countries were masculine or feminine. Hofstede wrote a paper that said a masculine culture was a society that emphasised assertiveness and the acquisition of money and material things, whereas femininity was a cultural dimension describing societies that emphasised relationships, concern for others and the overall quality of life.

At that time—many decades ago—he found that Japan had a masculine quality and the Nordic countries and the Netherlands were the most feminine. I was quite interested to see on the front page of the briefing prepared for this debate by the House of Lords Library that it states:

“Gender disparities continue to exist globally, including in the UK”—


which is something we would all agree with.

“A World Economic Forum analysis of the global gender gap, taking into account economic participation, education, health and political participation, found that weighted by population, the average progress on closing the global gender gap stood at 68 percent in 2017. The UK had a gender gap of 33 percent, and was ranked 15th out of 144 countries for overall gender parity. The top three countries were Iceland, Norway and Finland”—

the very Nordic countries which, all those decades ago, had already identified a culture where the things that were important were to the fore. We are talking here about hard-edged management tools and management approaches of societies that emphasise relationships, concern for others and overall quality of life.

In order to bring about this equality, there needs to be leadership on a global level and on a national level. It is needed in our institutions and in our corporate sector, and it is also—this has been touched on once already today—needed in the home. Mothers particularly can have a huge influence on their sons. You might have thought I was going to say “on their daughters”. Mothers can influence the way in which their sons develop. Many of the issues are not just things that worry us but are effectively criminality, not just nationally but around the globe. If they are to be addressed, the culture has to be changed at all levels.

Again, going back many years—I promise I will not keep harping on about the past, but at my age people tend to—when I was a Minister back in the 1990s I also had the privilege of being the government co-chairman of the Women’s National Commission. It was a very fine body of women. Many people around this Chamber were involved with the WNC. I was very sorry that it was a Conservative Government who decided to dispense with it. I think it did very good work. It was exactly the right group of people to bring women together and to make their views known directly to government.

I attended the 1995 UN conference on women in Beijing. I can see others in the Chamber who were there and who were involved. From that came the platform for action that resulted in a decision to make mainstream throughout government departments legislation and policy being looked at through the prism of how it affects women.

I want to add at this point—it has already been mentioned, I think by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover—something about Sightsavers. Sightsavers is incredibly concerned about the United Nations. Of course it has to be a global leader. If the UN is not the global leader, then which organisation is? However, in terms of the women with disabilities, which Sightsavers has flagged up, it says:

“Our attention is focused on the United Nations where, of the ten United Nations treaty bodies, women are currently underrepresented on seven”,


And, even worse, there is only one woman member on the committee that looks at the rights of persons with disabilities. This is quite disgraceful, and that one person will retire in July. I urge my noble friend on the Front Bench to say that the Government will make representations on that to the United Nations through ministerial communications and through our representatives in the UN.

As has been mentioned, very often there is more than just one discriminatory area—disability is one; we all know what the others are: sex, religion, colour, race and, I would add, class. I want to complete what I am saying today—because it is, I hope, a day of celebration—by saying thank you, particularly to those women who trod the path or sat on the green Benches before those of us who have had the privilege of serving down in another place. When you read what they went through, not just to get there but when they were actually there, it is quite astonishing. I include all of them in that. It is quite interesting that, although we often mention Margaret Thatcher in terms of being the first woman Prime Minister, it was not just because she was a woman that she had to fight. She fought criticism of the class she came from, from men who thought they were far superior to her, because she was a grocer’s daughter. So very often class prejudice—and it goes both ways—adds to what often is a double or sometimes a triple burden.

I would like to finish—it sounds like the Oscars, I know, but I will never get an Oscar—by saying thank you to my mother, my long-deceased mother, I have to say. She was a working mother of three children. I grew up in a household where it never occurred to me that it was not the norm for married women with families to work. She was just a great role model for me. Thank you to all of the people who have spoken in this debate, many of whom should be getting an Oscar for the work they have done for women.