International Women’s Day

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Crawley (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure, always, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, and to be a veteran of these International Women’s Day debates.

We clapped for carers, most of whom of course are women, so perhaps at least this week we can whoop for women. As we all come out from under another Covid lockdown, we know that it is women who have had to shoulder so much of the mental burden over the past 12 months. The ONS confirmed as much this week. As that TUC report of January 2021 put it:

“Working mums … were struggling with the strain of being expected to carry out their jobs as normal, while balancing childcare and home-schooling.”


Nine out of 10 mothers responded to the TUC by saying that

“the disruption had a negative impact on their mental health, with increasing levels of stress and anxiety.”

An earlier IFS report showed that, when it came to home-schooling, mothers were able to do only one hour of uninterrupted work for every three hours done by fathers. How quickly we have reverted to gender stereotypes, as we see women doing more housework and more childcare in all households, except for those in which the man has stopped doing paid work.

The TUC calls on the Government to act to stop the reversal of decades of progress that women have made in the workplace. I am sure we can all amplify that call and, this year, give a big shout-out for women in science and engineering particularly.

This week, we welcome the Government’s Statement on women’s health, and not a moment too soon. I know the Minister does not need me to tell her that the pent-up trauma of women over the past 12 months will have to be faced with unprecedented policy and resources for mental health services, with young women and teenage girls being particularly affected.

Many of us in this debate are also involved in the very important Domestic Abuse Bill. Its coming into law is eagerly awaited by us all, not least by those thousands of women who have been trapped in violent homes during Covid-19. As Women’s Aid puts it in its report A Perfect Storm, abusers have used the pandemic

“as a tool for abuse”.

Calls to women’s specialist services and helplines have surged at times during the pandemic. This is not only the pattern in the UK: the United Nations has described the worldwide increase in domestic abuse as a “shadow pandemic” alongside Covid-19—my noble friend Lord Rooker referred to that. It is thought that, worldwide, cases have increased by at least 20% in lockdowns internationally. I ask the noble Baroness the Minister: how is enfeebling our development budget going to help?

As always, there is so much left to win as far as women’s equality is concerned. The legacy issues of unequal pay and pensions, as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, has set out, have not gone away. British women were paid an average of £25.73 a week less than men in the state pension last year.

For those who might be ambiguous these days about the word “woman”, and believe that it can be replaced by “person”, I whoop for women more than ever this year.