International Women’s Day

Mhairi Black Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP) [V]]

I echo the comments made previously about the horrific news we are hearing about Sarah Everard. My thoughts go out to her and her friends and family.

Celebrating women for one day alone is not enough. Women’s issues are not challenges on the periphery that can be addressed in isolation, and the problems that women face are firmly embedded in our everyday politics, systems and lives. Year after year, the overall experience of women largely remains the same, and women are still more likely to experience inequality, poverty and abuse.

As with all forms of oppression, understanding how women are held back requires an ability to reassess everything as we know it, but through a different lens. For example, women make up the majority of part-time employment, and when we create an economy in which such work is often low paid and insecure, is it a surprise when women disproportionately suffer the consequences of that? When we have a Budget that will not implement a real living wage, we know that the consequences of that will disproportionately affect women. When we have a stigmatising social security system that includes things such as the rape clause, are we helping women?

I do not want to sound ungrateful for the progress we have made. Organisations such as Rape Crisis and Women’s Aid serve to educate me just as they inspire me, but as policymakers we must reflect on whether we are giving such organisations the support they need, and treating their opinions with the value they deserve. The inequality, harassment and poverty that women disproportionately experience does not come about by nature; it is enabled by our institutions and culture.

Human beings are varied and complex, and intersectional feminism provides a greater level of clarity as to how inequality can impact different people. For example, the experiences of a woman with a disability are likely to vary from the specific experiences of a woman of colour. Only by taking time to look through those additional lenses can we begin to unpick what enables that inequality, and learn how we can better support each other as women. Rather than trying awkwardly to cram women into institutions that undervalue them, and structures that were built long ago for men and by men, we must reimagine and reorganise those very structures, but this time build them with women, especially marginalised women, at the heart of everything we do.