International Women’s Day

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Spelman]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We need to speed up the debate a little because we are running out of time. There are still a number of speakers waiting to contribute. I ask subsequent speakers to aim for speeches of 10 to 14 minutes, which would be very helpful.

[Mrs Spelman]

I thank you for your guidance, Mr Deputy Speaker. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod), who has done outstanding work on the all-party parliamentary group on women in Parliament, leading to the report “Improving Parliament”. I hope it will be taken up and that the changes it calls for will be made.

Let me deal briefly with economic empowerment in the United Kingdom, without repeating what others have said. I want to take up a theme about FTSE 100 companies. It is true that significant progress has been made in ensuring that every single FTSE 100 company now has a female on the board, yet still only 6.9% of their directors are female. I throw out a challenge to a female figure in the City—Fiona Woolf, for example—to invite all the chief executives from the FTSE 100 companies to come and present their female board members and two mentees from their own organisations whom they seek to promote to senior leadership roles. There are examples of good practice. Antony Jenkins, the chief executive officer at Barclays, set a target of 26% of senior leadership positions being held by women, and Barclays is on track to meet it. There are other such examples.

The Government have taken important action to empower women in our country economically, looking at issues such as the pay gap, recruitment, retention and promotion. I agree with the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) that we should work together across the House to deal with anomalies such as women, particularly older women, being seriously left behind on wage differentials. We should take action on a cross-party basis.

There are still many areas for improvement. Research produced by Cambridge university’s Murray Edwards college, entitled “Women Today, Women Tomorrow”, clearly showed that the most difficult challenge its respondents faced in their careers was still the non-supportive culture of their workplaces.

The workplace of Parliament is a difficult workplace for women. I call on you, Mr Deputy Speaker, as well as the Front Benchers, to take forward the recommendations in “Improving Parliament”, particularly that calling for the creation of a new Select Committee on equalities to consider departmental policies and programmes and scrutinise Government performance on equality. It is significant that the House’s own workplace equality network, principally a staff network, strongly supports the call for such a Select Committee to be created—the conditions in which women work affect our staff just as much as female Members of Parliament.

Let me finish with the simple observation that we need more women in this place—and, in the spirit of this year’s theme, we need to make it happen.