International Women’s Day

Justine Greening Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening (Putney) (Con)]

I would like to praise my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for a fantastic opening speech and the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) for her hugely powerful speech.

Gender equality is a crucial agenda for the whole planet. The reality is that we simply will not fix the many challenges that the world faces today with half the world’s population locked out of being able to contribute to any of the solutions. It is five years since we held the Girl Summit in 2014, while I was Secretary of State for International Development. It was an international summit to use the UK’s role as a major aid investor to step up to the plate on gender equality. In doing so, we wanted to highlight two key issues that I felt did not get anywhere close to the level of attention domestically and internationally that they needed for the many women they affected: female genital mutilation, and early and forced marriage. It was all too easy for many people in Britain to think that those two issues were other countries’ problems. In fact, it turned out that they were actually ours as well. The Girl summit in 2014 was our attempt to try to provide some momentum not only to an international agenda that needed it, but, as I and the then Home Secretary—now the Prime Minister—felt, to a domestic agenda that needed it, too.

I am proud of what we have been able to do since. I wanted to say in this debate that I very much hope it will not be the last Girl summit this country hosts. I very much hope that, as UK aid steadily shifts, we can make sure it keeps at its heart the issue of tackling gender inequality. In the end, countries that are not able to use all their human capital simply will not be successful, whatever broader development programmes they have under way. It is now crucial that the UK plays its role in delivering the sustainable development goals, particularly goal 5 on gender equality. This country worked so hard to make sure that that goal had a list of issues to tackle that could transform the lives of women wherever they were in the world, which included the issues we campaigned on at the Girl summit.

Before I turn briefly to the domestic agenda, I want to finish talking about the international agenda by saying that I am proud of what UK aid does in helping other countries to achieve gender equality alongside the path our own is on. I do not accept that there is a choice to be made between an aid strategy in our national interest and an aid strategy in our global interest. Anyone who suggests that there is somehow such a choice is misunderstanding the fact that we live in a common world, where helping other countries escape from poverty is one of the best ways to ensure our own future as well as theirs. I would be very opposed to seeing what I think has been a very effective aid strategy under the Department for International Development subsumed into a Foreign Office one. Our aid strategy should be about pioneering work on things such as gender equality; it should not be used simply to curry favour with other countries around the world.

The other thing I want to say is that, since that Girl summit, many things have continued to change in the world, not least the issue of social media. I want to finish by looking at the aspect of gender equality in the context of that social media challenge. The reality is that, while social media platforms can be amazing platforms for the voices of girls and women to be heard loud and clear, they will not prove to be successful platforms for any of that if those voices are just drowned out by trolling, abuse and the kind of domestic abuse that happens offline, sometimes with fatal effects, if it shifts on to the online world as well.

I very much join others in calling for more action to be taken in relation to the social media giants, and for Facebook and Google to step up to the plate to do more of what they can to combat this. It is interesting that when we look at some of the surveys by organisations such as Amnesty International, we see that they are completely shocking in relation to the impact of social media on women. Amnesty International’s research back in late 2017 showed that one in five women it polled said they had experienced abuse or harassment through social media. Of those, more than a quarter, shockingly, had received direct or indirect threats of physical or sexual violence, while 47% had experienced sexist or misogynistic abuse and nearly 60% said that they had no idea who the perpetrator was. Many MPs and colleagues in this House will know what it is like, as I do, to be targeted online purely because of the views we hold, which is totally unacceptable.

We can and should do much more about this. I think we need domestic action, and I would like to pay tribute to the many companies that are now actually stepping up to the plate and showing that they can use social media for a positive good. For example, Avon has a fantastic campaign called “Stand4her”. There are brands such as Missguided, which has the #keeponbeingyou movement, which will do no more photoshopping; it will just use models as they are—all kinds of models. They will look as beautiful as they are in real life; they do not need any touching up or anything like that. Other brands include Emily Atack and #ITSjustgotreal, which says that

“we will not be smoothing out any lines, wrinkles, lumps or bumps to sell you something that just is not real.”

That is the kind of leadership we need, but I would like to see it matched by our social media companies as well. If we can have stronger domestic action on this, we can perhaps, as we have on the international gender equality front, lead on this gender equality campaign too.