International Women’s Day: Progress on Global Gender Equality

Baroness Hodgson of Abinger Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, and I much admire her wonderful work on promoting family planning, reproductive health and safe abortion.

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day, and this year it is particularly special. A few weeks ago we debated the role of women in public life and the progress made in increasing their representation in Parliament, 100 years after women—some women—were granted the vote. It was an occasion to look back and see how far we have come. I welcome today’s debate, so ably introduced by my noble friend Lady Williams, which gives us an opportunity to look forward.

There is still no country in the world where women are equal to men in political, economic and social terms. We are indeed lucky to live in a country with a Government dedicated to gender equality and who put women’s rights at the heart of international development. I congratulate DfID and the Secretary of State on their Strategic Vision for Gender Equality: A Call to Action, which was announced yesterday. This recognises the need for all of us to take action to make gender equality become a reality. We have come a long way but, as others have already mentioned, there is still a long way to go both in the UK and globally.

I take this opportunity to declare an interest, due to my involvement with GAPS and other NGOs as listed on the register. The UK has a global reputation as a leader on gender equality, but yesterday nominations closed for places on CEDAW—the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Why have we never put forward a candidate? CEDAW consists of 23 experts from around the world. Every country that signs up to CEDAW is obliged to submit reports, and the committee, having considered these, addresses its concerns and recommendations to the state party as concluding observations. What kind of message does it give to other countries that the UK continues to ignore this very important global committee?

Goal 5 of the sustainable development goals adopted by the UN in 2015 seeks to,

“achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”,

and includes nine targets. Ensuring the inclusion of that goal was a big achievement. However, it is only in the years to come that we will see how effective it has been. Too often, countries sign up to international conventions but then not enough is done to implement them. After all, all countries that are members of the UN have to sign up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, yet 70 years later we are still pushing for gender equality.

I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s focus on girls’ education, because it is hard to take part in today’s world without any. Still, an estimated 131 million girls worldwide remain out of school.

The statistics are stark. About a quarter of girls today between the ages of 15 and 24 have never completed primary school and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate people are women. As we have heard, poverty drives some parents to deny their daughters education as they need them to work. In some countries, parents pull their daughters out of school when they reach puberty because they are worried that they will be raped and, if pregnant, they are then unmarriageable. In poor countries, people cannot afford to have an unmarriageable girl.

I mentioned rape, but violence against women is still an epidemic across the world, with one in three women experiencing it in their lifetime. Despite all the work and publicity, even here in the UK two women are killed a week. Nothing can be more frightening for a child than seeing their mother being beaten up. This will have a profound effect on them for the rest of their lives and on the whole community.

Conflict causes rates of domestic violence to rocket. In countries such as Afghanistan, it is estimated that 87% of women suffer from domestic violence. At a symposium in Kabul last summer, I heard a psychologist talk about the fact that, because of high levels of violence in the family, it will be hard to achieve a peaceful society there.

The Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative, launched in 2012 by William Hague—now the noble Lord, Lord Hague of Richmond—brought this issue to global attention. As noble Lords are aware, I was a member of the Select Committee on this issue, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, and sit on the steering board of the initiative. The initiative was always going to be a marathon and not a sprint, as the situation was of such magnitude that it needed sustained effort. So I press the Minister to ensure that the UK does not lose focus on this important issue. Will the UK lead another global summit in 2019 to assess progress?

One has only to look at the conflicts raging today and the high levels of sexual violence committed by Daesh against the Yazidis to see how relevant the initiative is. Ending impunity is key to this. Were any Daesh men held for these war crimes when Mosul and Raqqa fell? What has the UK done and spoken out about in relation to this?

Since the adoption of the women, peace and security agenda in 2000, only 27% of peace agreements have referenced women. Between 1992 and 2011, women made up only 9% of negotiators in peace processes and 4% of signatories, and between 2008 and 2012 this fell to 3%. Yet we know that where women are included in peace processes there is a 20% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least two years and a 35% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least 15 years.

The UK holds the pen at the UN on women, peace and security, and we launched our latest national action plan in January. However, 18 years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, why are Syrian women not allowed at the peace table? We should not have to justify why women should be included in peace processes; we should ask men to justify why they are excluded.

In the aftermath of the Kabul process for peace and security co-operation last week, we must not forget the Afghan women who have put their lives at risk to take part in public life. It is imperative that their rights are not traded away to bring the Taliban around the table. How can we in the UK exert global influence to make sure that more countries adhere to what they have signed up to?

Next week, like my noble friend Lady Anelay, I and many other women from around the world head to the UN for the Commission on the Status of Women. The theme will be rural women, with the review theme looking at women in the media and information and communications technologies. What would we like the effect of this meeting to be? The CSW is the second-largest meeting of the year at the UN, yet almost nothing is heard about it in the media. Around 5,000 women from around the world attend, and we should send out a strong message about some of the terrible suffering endured by women right now, today: the Rohingya women; the women in Yemen and South Sudan; the women and their families being bombed in eastern Ghouta, to name but a few. While CSW is enormously welcomed as a meeting, I hope that the UK will work with others to improve its impact to resound across the world.

I enormously welcome this debate, because we still have much work to do. I look forward to helping our Government to further the cause of gender equality both here at home and around the world.