Global Gender Equality

Baroness Tonge Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tonge (Non-Afl)]

My Lords—or, I should say, mostly noble Baronesses—I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate, because I was at the Women Deliver conference in Vancouver. In fact, it was the fourth Women Deliver conference I have attended over the years, and they are getting bigger. As you have heard, there were over 8,000 people this time. I declare an interest, too, as chair of the All-Party Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health.

Among the many hundreds of meetings one could go to, one stood out for me. It made a change from the usual diet of women’s reproductive health issues, which I will come to later. At an absolutely packed meeting, I heard a report called the State of the World’s Fathers. It was given by an organisation called Promundo, which I know, and is leading a global campaign called MenCare to promote the involvement of men and boys in childcare and domestic duties. I chaired a meeting in the House for its first report four years ago, and again last week for this recent report. By the way, I am sorry that only one male Member of this House is speaking, but I guess every other male noble Lord will read the debate tomorrow evening while their wife prepares the dinner, clears up afterwards, gets ready for bed and sets the breakfast. I am sure that is true.

I am not entirely joking, because the report points out that women do most of the work in the home, regardless of their other duties. To achieve a 50:50 balance, it is calculated that men need to do 50 minutes of housework and childcare every day, if they are to be fair to their partners. Of course, many men do help with caring and housework—please do not get me wrong—particularly in some societies. But I vividly remember my first trip with the International Development Committee, which was to Uganda. We were taken to a village right out in the sticks, where the women had prepared a presentation of drawings and speeches to tell us what their day was like. It was amusing as well as informative, and their day consisted of getting up very early in the morning to fetch the water from some distance; cleaning the yard; making a meal before getting the children off to school; waking their husbands and feeding same; working in the fields until dark; preparing dinner; clearing and settling children; and serving dinner to the men, who had been sitting under the trees all day. They had drawn a lovely picture of that. The men, we were told, were discussing important matters and had to do this most days. It was a regular day for the subsistence farmer families in Uganda at that time.

I quote from the State of the World’s Fathers report:

“Globally, women spend significantly more time than men—sometimes up to ten times as much—on unpaid care … and domestic work. If this is calculated on the basis of an hourly minimum wage, it could make up 9 to 11 percent of global … GDP”.


This rather amused me in the report:

“In 2018, 606 million women of working age”—


I do not know if all 606 million were personally interviewed, but it got the figure from somewhere—

“around the world said that they were unable to take on paid work because of unpaid”,

domestic “responsibilities”. That rings true to many of us. It continues:

“In countries where women spend twice as much time as men on unpaid care, their average earnings”,


when they do outside work,

“are less than two-thirds of men’s... This disparity lies at the heart of gender inequality; it keeps women, families, communities, countries, and the world poor”.

The women in Uganda expressed very forcefully how hard women work. In many ways though, they are not that different from many women in developed countries, who work all day outside the home, but are still responsible for all the childcare, domestic work and shopping arrangements. Added to that, they still do not get equal pay for the work they do.

The World Economic Forum has said that a country’s GNP improves substantially if women are encouraged to work outside the home. Our Government encourage mothers to work outside the home, but—and it is a big “but”—if they are to do this, and many do, better facilities must be provided for childcare. In this country, they are still woefully inadequate, and partners must do more to help.

Policy changes suggested in the report are better education for boys on home responsibilities and childcare—that is creeping into our schools; talking to my grandchildren, I think that it is beginning to happen—and not just equal pay for equal work but equal fully paid, non-transferable parental leave for all parents. That is central to setting the foundation for fathers’ involvement with their children from an early age.

This is all very well and one hopes that it is starting to happen, but there can never be liberation and true empowerment of women until they have power over their own bodies—that is my favourite sentence. This means, of course—my favourite subject, too—that they must have access to affordable or free family planning and safe abortion, so that they can choose how many children to have and not just be breeding machines until they die of exhaustion. I know that this Government and the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, are committed to this subject, but perhaps she could tell us just how committed they are in changing circumstances.

In this country—I know that it is not the Minister’s responsibility, but it is that of her Government—family planning services are rapidly disappearing as council budgets are cut and women either have to travel long distances to find a specialist service or go to their GP, who in many cases prescribes only the pill and gives them little choice over what method to use. I note that abortion rates in older women are rising, which could be due to such lack of provision. I hope that she can comment on this.

On international development, will funding to NGOs providing sexual and reproductive health services be provided in coming years? They were not last year, because there was a different system, so there is a big gap to fill worldwide in those services since President Trump reintroduced the gag rule—we have heard about that already; I do not need to explain it. That affects all NGOs providing sexual and reproductive health services whether or not they include abortion.

How will the Government maintain their fine reputation in this field? To do so means constantly repeating the policy on abortion after rape in conflict, which should be provided under international humanitarian law whether or not the national law of the country concerned allows it. Will the Government confirm that they will stick to 0.7% of GNP being spent on international development, of which 10% should be on sexual and reproductive health?

I congratulate the Government—it is hard for me to congratulate a Tory Government—on what they have done so far for women’s rights, and women’s reproductive rights particularly, worldwide. I trust that they will try even harder in the future.