International Women’s Day

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP) [V]]

It is 2021—it is more than 100 years since women got the vote and more than 50 years since the Equal Pay Act 1970. We have come such a long way, and although we are standing on the shoulders of those who came before us and fought for equality, we still have such a distance to go.

My children are growing up in a deeply unequal world with deeply unequal experiences. They are pigeonholed and they are stereotyped. Even now, in 2021, little girls are told to be kind, to be nice and to smile, while little boys are told to be brave, to be fast and to be strong. How often have we picked up a toy teddy beer, looked at it and said “he”—used the word “he” to describe it—unless it has a pink bow? In all of those cases, we will say “he” for those things. That is because this is drummed into us, and this is drummed into our society works.

We must consider this—we must look at stereotypes—and we must always consider intersectionality: we must check our own privilege. Younger women, ethnic minority women, bisexual women, trans women and disabled women are more likely to be domestically abused. Terry Pratchett wrote:

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”

But I also think it begins when we remove anyone’s agency or we remove their right to make their own choices. Before we embark on criticising a focus that someone has, we should all check our own actions and we should check our own privilege. We have the ability to fight on behalf of others, but we have that ability because we have our own agency and we have our own rights to make choices. Before we can fight for anyone else, we need to have a measure of privilege that gives us that those options and the energy to do so.

The social security system and this UK Government have done what they can to remove that agency and to remove those choices. We can see that by the number of women who have had abortions during the course of this pandemic and have said that the two-child policy and the rape clause have created the financial situation that has forced them into this position. That is horrendous. In Scotland, we are putting dignity and respect at the heart of our social security system. Instead of drowning out the voices of sidelined minority groups with our own concerns, we should be hearing their voices, we should be listening to their voices and we should be amplifying their voices.

Before #MeToo women were experiencing sexual harassment, before George Floyd BAME people were being murdered and before Sarah Everard’s murder women were scared to walk home alone. We should not be waiting until somebody is murdered before taking their voices seriously.