International Women’s Day

Matt Warman Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

It is a privilege to speak again in the debate on International Woman’s Day. It has become something of a cliché for men speaking in this debate to talk about themselves as having suddenly awakened to feminism when they become fathers of daughters, and to me that has always rather prompted a question about what sort of world those fathers thought that the mothers of their daughters lived in. None the less, it is perhaps not a wholly useless lens through which to look at some of this debate.

I sent my daughter, Eleanor, to school on World Book Day dressed as Rosie Revere, Engineer, a character from a book by the American author Andrea Beaty. It is a series called “The Questioneers”, which includes a character called Sofia Valdez, Future Prez. For five-year-old Eleanor, the idea of a female Prime Minister is very much already on the table, and that is an idea we can all get behind, be we fans of Margaret Thatcher, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) or indeed the Deputy Leader of the Labour party. Perhaps the fact that I made Eleanor’s dress for World Book Day myself is also a glass ceiling smashed, although it reminded me that there is no word for “seamstress” that does not imply that only women can sew. We still swim in a soup of linguistic everyday sexism, and the fact remains that engineering and other male dominated professions have a long way to go.

When I was a Minister at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, I was able to foster massive growth in the diversity of people working in AI and cyber only because we started from such incredibly low numbers. Strategies are in place. They start at school, and we cannot go fast enough. However, there is something that I would like to go slower, which is time. The vast majority of young women and girls report that they have been harassed or groped at some point. YouGov reports that more than two-thirds of women have felt unsafe walking at night, and only slightly fewer report feeling unsafe in taxis, with a tradesperson in their home, or even walking alone in the daytime. Those experiences are wholly alien to the vast majority of men, and that total disconnect is a huge part of the problem.

To put that another way, today Eleanor is five. How long have I got before she comes home to tell me that she was harassed, or worse, on the school bus? How long has she got until I worry when she has to call the plumber to a student house? How long has she got before she fears the route she takes walking home? What can we, from this privileged platform in Parliament, do in the meantime to try to address some of those fairly sickening thoughts? The answer, of course, will never be enough.

I commend the Government’s approach to putting more resources into the police and—crucially—into prosecution, to tackle the worst of violence against women and girls, as well as into education and beyond, to tackle the culture that will, in due course, see more women doing supposedly male jobs, and more men doing traditionally female jobs. We must all show, rather than simply say, that it can be done, although I am sure my dressmaking skills will be left to myself. This is society’s problem, not solely that of Parliament. This debate must be about equity as much as it is about equality, and providing everyone with the same opportunities to live, work and play safely means providing different people with the different tools they need to get over the same obstacles. I wholly endorse the approach of the Welsh Government to the telemedicine that was referred to earlier in the debate, and I hope that this Government will come to the same conclusion when they review that.

If I could pick just one area in which to urge the Government to go even further than they currently do, it would be tackling the multiplicity of factors that mean childcare still falls disproportionately on women—something exacerbated hugely by covid. In everything from the design of our towns and cities and the attitude of employers to the average time spent commuting, we can do so much more to give men and women equal opportunities to succeed. By tackling childcare we can perhaps unleash the productivity of half the population even further.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call Liz Saville Roberts.