Women’s Contribution to the Economy

Debate between Fiona Mactaggart and Sharon Hodgson

Thursday 6th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

It was a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I am sorry that you are leaving, but you are being replaced by the lovely Mr Sheridan, under whose chairmanship it is also a pleasure to serve.

It is great to be here for this excellent debate on international women’s day. Many important issues have been covered at length, as one is able to do in a three-hour debate when half our number are engaged in an important debate in the main Chamber. However, what we have lacked in quantity we have more than made up for in quality. The debate has not suffered for the lack of Members present.

I am pleased to be in the debate with the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod), who has organised a full programme of excellent events today, culminating with tea with the Speaker in Speaker’s House for women MPs who are being shadowed by young women from their constituencies. Most of us are being shadowed by at least one young woman today, although the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) is being shadowed by six—she is a pied piper leading the way on this issue. I thank the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth for organising today’s events, which are appreciated by us and the young women who are shadowing us. I thank the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) and my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) for securing the debate and enabling us to gather here to talk about such important issues.

Women helping and inspiring other women is obviously a key recurring theme of international women’s day. It is right that we promote it as a means of increasing women’s participation in the economy and public life, particularly at the higher echelons. When it comes to the scale of the challenges that we still face in promoting women in the workplace and harnessing their potential to contribute to the economic success of the country, everyone needs to pull together in the same direction to achieve the kind of change that we need.

The Minister will be well aware that the director general of the Confederation of British Industry made an important intervention on that theme earlier this week, on the back of a PricewaterhouseCoopers report that ranked Britain 18th out of 27 OECD countries for the participation of women in the economy. He rightly called for the current generation of top executives to set a much better example and really drive through the changes that will see women progress much further in the private sector. As part of that, he advocated the use of targets for women in senior positions, as a signal to the whole organisation that its leaders want those changes to happen.

That call has seemingly been heard by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, who has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission for advice on whether all-women shortlists for top jobs will be legal. That apparent reversal in the Government’s position is very welcome, as indeed it was to hear the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire talk about the fact that her party is now looking at all-women shortlists. As she knows, I was selected under an all-women shortlist, and they have been very successful for the Labour party in raising the number of women in Parliament, so it is very welcome to hear that her party is looking at that.

With regard to top jobs, targets are not just a means of promoting equality, which is an important end in itself; firms with greater representation of women in the boardroom and in senior positions throughout the organisation are much more likely to be successful businesses. However, the Minister and her colleagues might want to look a little closer to home. This is where, in this celebratory debate, I may come across as a bit critical, but I am the Opposition spokesperson, so you would surely expect nothing less, Mr Sheridan. It is also important to be brutally honest when discussing these important issues, and not just talk about the good bits.

I asked a series of parliamentary questions and I was quite shocked at some of the answers. Almost half of Government Departments are failing to meet the targets for women on boards that Ministers expect of top businesses. It is particularly poor to see that the Ministry of Defence, for instance, has no women on its board at all, and that only two Departments have more women than men on their boards. That is symbolic of a wider trend in senior appointments by the Government since 2010. Only 17 out of 114 Privy Counsellors appointed are women, and 13 out of 85 policy tsars are women. Fewer than one in five ambassadors and a quarter of permanent secretaries appointed since 2010 have been women.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

On the point about public appointments and women, I have been chasing Government Departments since 9 February—for a month—to try to find out what proportion of paid public appointments are given to women. I keep going round a particular circle, which gets me to a published statement by the Cabinet Office that gives the total number of appointments of men and women but does not state how many are paid. Frankly, the vast majority of those appointments are, I think, women to the magistracy, because the vast majority are in the Ministry of Justice. We really need those figures to be more transparent.

[Mrs Hodgson]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point.