UN Women

Debate between Denis MacShane and Kate Green

Thursday 10th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacShane]

I am following my hon. Friend’s argument closely. This is not just about fair trade. Some 30 years ago, I was working in Malaysia and visited the factories of multinationals including Bosch and Motorola, all of which were full of women making products such as car radios. Actually, those women were being liberated from the patriarchal oppression of village peasant existence, but many of the liberal and left community around the world say, “Oh no, they’re being exploited.” Does my hon. Friend agree with Joan Robinson of the London School of Economics, who said there’s only one thing worse for a woman than being exploited by a multinational, and that is not being exploited by a multinational?

[Kate Green]

I am sure my right hon. Friend would not wish to suggest that there is a continuum of exploitation and a point on that continuum at which women—or, indeed, men—ought to be satisfied to find themselves located. He raises an important issue about the relative roles women perform in paid work and the domestic sphere.

The economic justice questions that we are discussing are not just challenges for developing economies; they are a challenge for us here in the UK too. As we know, here in the UK women struggle to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. The majority of child care is still undertaken by women, and although many men fulfil caring roles, it is women who are most likely to drop out of paid employment when they start to have caring responsibilities. Many male carers perform their caring responsibility alongside paid work however, and as a result do not suffer the same degree of economic disadvantage.

In recent years, the debate about the appropriate balance and recognition we should give to paid work, domestic responsibilities and caring responsibilities has become distorted, and we need to revisit that. That is not in order to trap women back in the domestic sphere, but to open up a debate about the value we should give to the caring role, and to make sure our societal structures properly recognise that role and offer both women and men a genuine choice about participating in paid work and wanting, and needing, to take time to fulfil domestic responsibilities. That is not an argument that, when I was as a young feminist in the 1980s, I would have believed I would have heard myself making. However, as I have watched that choice for women squeezed out by successive male-led Governments of both the left and the right, I have to say that a gender issue is a choice issue, and choice and economic independence go hand in hand.