International Women’s Day and Protecting the Equality of Women in the UK and Internationally

Lord Sikka Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to speak in this debate—I have learned quite a lot—and to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. I am glad that she referred to education because my background is the world of business schools. The language there is entirely male and aggressive. Accounting and finance are all about domination, control, slicing, selling, asset-stripping and plundering. Nobody cares if workers are fired and have no home to go to at the end of the day. None of that ever comes into any accounting calculation. Nobody ever considers the social impact of redundancies, wage reduction and tax avoidance. However, women are more concerned about nurturing, supporting and growing things. There is a stark difference. Women who enter business schools are increasingly forced to leave their feminine selves outside and behind. That is fundamentally wrong. Women need to be valued in their own right in what they bring, not in how they compare to men. That requires fundamental thought. I hope to return to this issue another day in another debate.

I note that the Motion says

“that the Grand Committee takes note of International Women’s Day and the United Kingdom’s role in furthering and protecting the equality of women”.

I wonder what had happened to equity—where is it? Equity is very important too. Without it, many people will never attain fairness and equality. In many ways, equity and equality are elusive. They are always in the process of being made but they never finally are because of many social divisions. That requires constant vigilance, new approaches and searching to deal with social problems. I would have preferred to see equity mentioned as well.

We are in a strange scenario where we have more women in government than ever before yet women’s economic progress seems to have stalled or is slowing down. That is a paradox. I wonder whether women in government are increasingly asked or forced, perhaps unconsciously, to adopt male objectives rather than the female approaches to which I referred earlier, such as growing, nurturing and supporting. Again, that needs to be looked at.

Life expectancy has stalled, if not gone into reverse. Life expectancy for women has now declined, according to ONS data, from 83.6 years to 82.6 years. Inevitably, the poorest women are most negatively affected, yet the Government are doing incredibly little to reduce poverty. If anything, inequalities have increased. More people live in poverty than ever before—14.5 million. That was even before the pandemic, the situation is far worse now.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 promised an era of equal pay for equal work but that remains elusive. Women’s median hourly rate is 10.2% less than men’s. The latest statistic we had from the Government on the gender pay gap for full-time and part-time employees was 15.4%. Why are we yet to reach a goal that we set ourselves 50 years ago? What exactly are the Government doing? I know that we will hear about the many things that the Government are doing—X, Y and Z—but the facts as indicated by the data pose this question: has enough been done? Why has enough not been done?

We are referring here to women, but, of course, women are not a homogenous category. They are differentiated by age, class, disability, ethnicity and many other social factors. Black women are the least likely to be among the UK’s top earners. They face the double hit of gender and ethnicity, which is why I referred earlier to equity. What can we do to lift them up? They are the most underrepresented group in the top percentiles of income in the UK. Some progress could be made by mandatory ethnicity pay reporting but the Government are vehemently opposed to that. It is hard to see how progress on the ethnicity pay gap can be made when the Government accept the principle of gender pay gap reporting for women but not on the basis of ethnicity. That does not help many women; I hope that the Government will revisit it.

Low pay for women results in low occupational pensions, low contributions and, eventually, low pensions. This condemns them and their dependents to poverty and insecurity, especially in later life. We have 1.25 million retired women living in poverty. The Government’s response is to cut the triple lock on the state pension, which pushes even more people into poverty. Again, that is unsatisfactory. The state pension for women is always less than for men, according to the statistics published by the DWP. Why does it have to be less? Of course, over the years, women may pay less in, but is that the only way we are measure somebody’s value—that they have paid less in so they get less out? Is there no other basis on which to think about it, such as humanity, decency, morality or ethics? The two should really be equalised. The state pension for women needs to be lifted up and should be at least as much as what is given to men.

The Government publish all kinds of budgets—we will have the Spring Statement next week—and lots of other legislation but they are never really accompanied by a gender impact assessment. What is the gender impact assessment of what the Government propose in a budget? We struggle to see it. I raised this last year, when I got a lot of soothing noises from Ministers—I have also raised it at other times in the House—but there have been no developments whatever. We now have income tax being hiked by stealth and national insurance contributions being increased as well, but there is no gender gap analysis. Who will suffer the most? What about single mothers? Will they really suffer the most? The answer, possibly, is yes but absolutely no attention is paid to that.

In his Budget Statement last October, the Chancellor used the word “women” just once in his speech but there was not even one gender-specific policy to help women—not one. However, there was a policy that would hurt women: the cut in universal credit of £1,040, affecting 4.4 million families. The Government took back £4 billion from the poorest and gave it to the bankers. Many of the households affected by that are led by single mothers but no help was given to them at all; they are basically condemned.

There is a gender division of labour in our society. Many women are confined to low-paid jobs, whether in teaching, nursing, social care, supermarkets, hospitality or other sectors, yet the Government have imposed a wage freeze. Again, they hurt women the most in pursuit of their economic objectives—although I have never really understood what those objectives are.

The take-home pay of many women has declined as a result of these austerity policies and wage freezes. They are therefore prevented access to nutritious food, good education, healthcare and other essentials. There is again a gender issue here.

We have a paradox: a female worker in social care or a supermarket is getting paid and will pay extra national insurance of 1.25 percentage points, but a speculator speculating on how much economic surplus those individuals will generate will not pay anything from the capital gains made from those speculations. They will not pay any national insurance, never mind the extra 1.25 percentage points. Who are the winners? Who are these speculators? Mostly, they are men. At the very least, the Government could see that the gains picked up by men through speculation are shared with women on whose backs they are made. I see no analysis of or sensitivity to these gender issues in the Government’s policies.

There is no equity or equality of tax treatment of earned and unearned income. That again has gender consequences, because women in low-paid employment are paying taxes at a higher rate than those who are making money through other sources, such as dividends or capital gains. Again, the analysis shows they are predominantly men. Government policies have also condemned many to use food banks; again women suffer, because they are on low pay.

Take just one more example. We have an increase in homelessness all around us these days. You see it as you enter Tube stations and other places. Two-thirds of homeless Londoners living in temporary accommodation are women, so 42,000 women are homeless in London alone. Of the homeless households living in temporary accommodation in London, 39% are headed by a single mother. Many are homeless because of domestic abuse or poverty, or they cannot afford to pay rents because their income is low and the tax system does not do much for them. Unaffordable housing is a key factor and women bear the brunt of housing policy failures.

The cost of living crisis, on top of cuts to universal credit, housing benefit and sexist policies such as the benefit cap, makes it much harder for women and their families to keep a roof over their heads. The Government can help by reversing the damaging welfare cuts and increasing all benefits, at least in line with inflation. That would help to reduce homelessness among women, single mothers and their children. By building high-quality homes with rents linked to local wages, not what the landlords want, the Government can prevent more women becoming homeless. Let us celebrate this year and I hope the Minister makes some positive promises in return.