Women and Girls: Economic Well-being, Welfare, Safety and Opportunities

Baroness Eaton Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, has initiated this debate today, which will consider the status of women and girls in the UK. I am hugely honoured to be a Member of your Lordships’ House, a prospect that seemed completely out of the question to me as a woman when I was growing up. My selective single-sex grammar school did nothing to engender aspiration in any of us. The choices of careers were made clear to us: as girls we could as aspire to be a teacher or a nurse. Both are very valuable professions, but limited choices in a world that should have had so much more to offer.

It was a great pleasure to see the hugely improved opportunities in practically all walks of life for women and girls, and I share with others the pleasure that there are four women standing for the election of our new Prime Minister, showing how much attitudes have changed. Women can now move more readily, aim for the top, and actually reach the top in so many fields.

Having seen a generation of women growing in confidence and success in so many fields, I have at present a real worry that there is a very great danger that this is being seriously undermined. Obscure, dehumanising terms are frequently used to replace ordinary words such as “women”, “girl”, and “female”. As the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, has mentioned, we hear of “birthing people”, “menstruators”, “chest feeders”, and “people with a cervix”, and we have all heard the embarrassing interviews with leading politicians who were unable to define what a woman is. The Lancet, a trusted medical journal, on its cover in 2021 called women “bodies with vaginas”. Our so-called national treasure, the NHS, is removing words such as “mother” and “female” from its website, and replacing them with unacceptable, dehumanising terms such as “birthing people”.

Women most definitely are not a collection of sexual organs, bodily excretions and reproductive functions. Such language reduces women’s power as a political constituency. Women’s needs are erased by turning us into a series of micro-groups—“menstruators”, “birthing bodies”, “lactators”—when actually they are all the same group. All these things are done in the name of inclusion, making sure that men who identify as women are not upset by being reminded that women are a group with characteristics that no man can ever have, and making sure that women who identify as men are not left out when we talk about women’s issues. In the name of inclusion, all these actions and words actually exclude many more women. By using language such as “people with a cervix”, women and girls who do not speak English as a first language may miss out on important health messages. Older women, women with a history of sexual assault, teenage girls suffering sexual predation, women from certain faith traditions—all may have a greater need for privacy and women-only spaces.

It grieves me to think that girls are growing up in the United Kingdom and receiving such undermining messages about their status as young women. Having seen society recognise the valuable role that women and girls can and do make in society, we should use clear, polite language for the two sexes, ensuring the dignified provision of single-sex facilities, and keep all males, however they identify, out of women’s sport. These are all inclusion measures, ones essential to the dignity of women and girls, giving them status and full participation in society.