Women: Economic Empowerment

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a joy and a privilege to take part in this annual Women’s Day debate. It always goes off in marvellous and unpredictable directions. A by-product of today’s wonderful debate is a strong call for more memorial statues to women, including Sylvia Pankhurst. I underline my noble friend Lady Dean’s strong call for more recognition for the SOE women of the Second World War. I am delighted to report back to the House that after our debate on the SOE women some years ago, we managed to raise a statue to those women in Tempsford, near the airfield that they flew out of in their highly dangerous missions. Much thanks goes to Tazi Hussain, Tempsford Parish Council and His Royal Highness Prince Charles, who unveiled it last year.

Despite much progress outlined very effectively by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, women’s equality in the world today is as stable as Madonna’s footwear at the O2 Arena last week. It is really not that gender equality is so much unfinished business; it is that the business has barely started to serve its worldwide customers. As my noble friend Lady Gould said, in December 2014, the highly respected World Economic Forum released its Global Gender Gap Report, showing that the UK had slipped from 18th to 26th in the world for gender equality. Perhaps the Minister, when she replies to the debate, could share with us what she thinks about these worrying conclusions.

Yes, of course there is the good news. As the World Bank review recently stated, women’s participation in the labour market globally has, since 1980, increased sharply over time, at each level of income, showing that more women are now engaged in economic activity outside the home than ever before. Indeed, here in the UK, in the last quarter of 2014, 68% of women aged 16 to 64 were in employment. As the ONS put it, that number was,

“the highest since comparable records began in 1971”.

However, much of this, according to the House of Lords Library, reflects the ongoing changes to the state pension age for women, resulting in fewer women retiring between the ages of 60 and 65.

There is also the bad news. Employment gaps globally between men and women continue to persist well into the 21st century, as the ILO has emphasised in its recent data on the subject. It stated that:

“Women continue to suffer from lower rates of employment, are less likely to participate in the labour force and face higher risks of vulnerable employment”.

In the UK, too, as well as large gaps in access to employment between men and women—according to the European Commission—there are also data from Unite the union showing that the gender pay gap between men and women in their 20s has doubled in the past three years and is on the rise between men and women in their 30s. This is becoming a youth problem.

On average, women are still earning just 81p for every male pound, despite the 46 years that have passed since the T&G women at Ford in Dagenham first went out on strike for equal pay and the 30 years that have passed since they finally achieved it. If we look at part-time working, taken up by 42% of all working women in the UK, we see that it is an area where women earn more than one-third less than their full-time equivalents. Does the Minister think that it is time that large companies were required by law to publish the average hourly pay of men and women in their workforce to expose this continued pay gap? Many of us in this House certainly do.

Our colleagues on the coalition Benches might say to me, “Why so gloomy? Look, for instance at the number of women starting their own businesses in this country”. Indeed, we have heard powerful testimony from my noble friend Lady Howells about the challenges for black women going into business on their own. Yes, the good news is that, in 2014, 1.4 million women were self-employed in the UK. Let us rejoice at that. In the past five years, the number of self-employed women has increased by 34%. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, has told us, the top three sectors for women going into self-employment are those golden oldies that we all know, and that do not have very much gold at the end of the rainbow: cleaning, childminding and hairdressing. These are, of course, important and necessary businesses, but businesses that have not traditionally made a big impression on the pay gap. What more can the Minister tell us about the Government’s plans to assist women both financially and in terms of training to expand opportunities for those women wishing to go into self-employment in this country?

Across the world, of course, the picture of women’s participation in entrepreneurship varies markedly. According to the 2012 figures by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the numbers range from 1% of women in Pakistan to more than 40% of women in Zambia who are engaged in entrepreneurship activity. Can the Minister tell the House what priority DfID gives to the encouragement of women into self-employment, globally?

The International Women’s Day theme this year is, as has been said, “Make It Happen”. For us, that must mean making it happen for the most vulnerable women in society. In the UK, according to the Resolution Foundation, one in four women are now earning less than the living wage; many of those are in the caring professions. Why has it not been possible for the Government to match Labour’s proposal to support families on low pay by raising the minimum wage to £8, which would not only give 3.9 million low-paid women a pay rise but make their place in the labour market far more stable? As a member of the rural task force that feeds into the Prime Minister’s challenge on dementia, I often engage with carers and managers. While the proposed introduction of the care certificate for newly appointed healthcare assistants and social care workers is to be welcomed, the issue of low pay in this caring sector, as has been pointed out by several noble Lords this afternoon, cannot be left to one side. Such staff in this sector provide some of the most personal and fundamental support for people with dementia—people who deserve the best possible care.

In conclusion, if we are to continue working towards women’s economic empowerment, both at home and abroad, the last thing this country needs is to come out of the European Union. Farage is a feminist issue. The EU is not only the UK’s largest economic market, but also the body that helped established standards for working men and women on their rights at work. Having worked, many years ago, with colleagues to bring about the 1992 maternity leave directive from Europe, I would not want to see women in the UK lose out on future rights at work through withdrawal from the European Union.

I hope Kathy Lette will forgive me if I steal one of her jokes to make a point. She said that no wife ever shot her husband while he was vacuuming the living room carpet. Be patient with me on this one, but because of our membership of the EU today we can say—perhaps less pithily—that no wife ever shot her husband while he was on paid paternity leave. In other words of course, progress has been made both nationally and internationally. We all recognise that in this House today. However, the work must be relentlessly pursued nationally and internationally.