Women: Economic Empowerment

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I wanted to speak in this debate not because I have especially great expertise on women’s issues, but because I think it is vital that we see men being proactive by standing up and speaking up. It is of concern to me that too few men take part in these important International Women’s Day debates.

The second thing I want to say is that women’s rights and equality issues should not be seen as the preserve of just one political party; it is the work and contribution of Members across this House that is important. Indeed, year after year all the Oral Questions on International Women’s Day have come from just one Bench. How refreshing it is that there has been a change this year. I thank my noble friend Lady Jolly for leading this debate and for her excellent opening comments, and I look forward to my noble friend Lady Garden’s closing remarks. I have learnt so much from listening to the debate, and I just wish that more people could hear the comments that Members have made.

International Women’s Day provides us with the opportunity to raise awareness, continue discourse and ultimately accelerate action on women’s economic empowerment in the UK and beyond. As the chief executive of UN Women said, we must,

“push for women’s economic empowerment alongside other priorities, because this is essential to ending poverty and advancing gender equality”.

A major priority must be education, and I believe that the universal provision of education will pave the way for women’s long-term economic empowerment by ensuring that every child gets the best possible start in life. If our ultimate objective is gender equality in business, we must focus on the education of our future business leaders. When we have an educated, literate citizenry, we will pave the way for effective and inclusive economic development.

But gender equality should not be seen as just a women’s issue. The World Bank’s research, Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment, found that improved economic opportunities for women led to better overall outcomes for families, societies and countries. Inclusive and sustainable economic development can be achieved through gender-equal educational provisions, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs across the board and long-term business networks for all.

Education has been defined as one of the top 10 priorities by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, and the ratio of female-to-male enrolment in secondary education is often a crucial indicator of gender equality across the world. Let me tell noble Lords of a real success story. Currently, DfID’s programmes in India support a range of human-related activities that have a positive impact on the lives of women and girls, including assistance with government education and health initiatives. For instance, helping girls to stay in secondary school as part of India’s Right to Education Act can push back the average age of marriage, increasing the potential for greater social entrepreneurship and allowing more young women to become beneficiaries of different social ventures. DfID’s investments have addressed, and continue to address, a variety of different issues that left unchallenged can often act to reinforce each other and affect sustainable development in the long term.

In the UK, economic development should reflect British values and be governed by freedom, democracy and inclusivity. Recent attempts by the Government Equalities Office have sought to step up efforts to attract qualified women to public positions, while ensuring that working practices and conditions are consistently family-friendly. So far, we have been able to help many women reach their potential in the workplace and enabled many businesses to get the full economic benefit of women’s skills, including through the work of the Women’s Business Council, Women on Boards and the Think, Act, Report programme. We have also made a concerted effort to ensure that women’s interests are always represented in government by regularly meeting women’s groups and campaigners and listening to women across the country. Furthermore, more than 4,500 grants have been paid out to those establishing new childcare businesses, with a further £2 million extension of the scheme for the rest of this year.

I am reassured by the progress that we have made so far, but even in the UK many women still lack access to adequate childcare provision, flexible working conditions and balanced career advice. It is encouraging to hear stories of women’s economic empowerment from around the world, and I hope that we can take inspiration from places as far afield as Cambodia and China, in which it has been shown that increasing adult female income by 10% of the average household income increased the years of schooling for girls and boys.

High pupil enrolment and attainment figures are, of course, promising. However, we need to continue to ensure that pupils who are enrolled in our education system can make informed decisions about their future, including the pursuit of STEM subjects from GCSE onwards. At A-level, there are currently almost twice as many boys taking maths as there are girls, and almost five times as many boys take A-level Physics. I find it incredibly worrying that the UK still has the lowest percentage of female engineers in Europe, and even more so that only 4% of engineering apprentices are women.

Some businesses and multinational companies should be commended for their efforts thus far to actively increase the number of women in science, technology and communications, and for their work in enabling young women to develop the necessary skills. Cisco Systems’ Global Education Initiative is an example of good practice that has been able to teach core subject skills to young women around the world in conjunction with the World Bank.

We need to make sure that the 2 million apprenticeships that this Government have created over the past four years are accessible to young women, and that young people from all backgrounds can benefit from the opportunities on offer. Ensuring that we have a diverse range of young apprentices in the UK will mean that we are better placed to compete with our European neighbours in the important fields of science, technology, engineering and maths, in addition to our impressive track record in the arts. We must ensure that the new national careers company effectively addresses the gender disparity in the uptake of STEM subjects and empowers young women to make informed decisions about their futures.

I believe that we have a great opportunity on this International Women’s Day to create real change and discuss the root causes of economic disempowerment. By linking together women’s economic empowerment and the role of education in youth, we can help women directly but also widen the talent pool in the future and with it the potential for market-related innovation. I thank noble Lords for their dedication to this subject, both nationally and internationally, and urge them to consider diversity in the future, primarily as a means of empowering women but also as a strategic business advantage.

Finally, I was interested to hear the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, and her remarks about women in the world of business, yet there are still huge areas of our society where women are absent and little progress has been made. Like the noble Baroness, I do not believe in enforcing targets, but I do believe in role models, action programmes and, perhaps most effectively, naming and shaming. Perhaps in her reply my noble friend might consider my suggestion that the Government from time to time publish lists of areas where very few women are represented.