International Women’s Day

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 1:06 pm on 5 March 2020.

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Photo of Maria Miller Maria Miller Conservative, Basingstoke 1:06, 5 March 2020

It is a great pleasure to follow Anne McLaughlin with her passion and her verve and her ability to speak Malawian—if that indeed is the language that they speak in Malawi.

I wish to start my contribution by thanking the Leader of the House, who has done something very important today. He has allowed us to hold this debate in Government time. I hope that that is a trend for the future, because, while I have huge respect for the Backbench Business Committee and the work that it does, this debate should be held in Government time as it shows a recognition of, and a respect for, the importance of the things that come out of this debate.

I look forward to International Women’s Day every year, but I would like to share with the House that this is not only for the opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women, but because as well as being the birthday of the hon. Member for Glasgow North-East, it is the birthday of my youngest child, James. Year after year, that has caused enormous conflict in my household. This year, he is now 18 and an adult. I hope that Members and others can forgive me for not supporting the rally on Sunday, as I will be taking him out for a slap-up meal and perhaps a pint of beer to celebrate the fact that he is now a fully-fledged adult.

When we celebrate International Women’s Day, it is important to acknowledge that many young men, and older ones too, struggle with discrimination—ageism, perhaps because they are also LGBT, or because they may be disabled—but this does not take away the importance of having this opportunity to celebrate women and girls, their contribution and the challenges that they still face, both here and across the globe.

My hon. Friend Philip Davies has demonstrated that International Men’s Day provides a great opportunity for men to talk about the issues that they face. I hope that the respect for this particular event, International Women’s Day, and the debate around it is seen for the opportunity that it is—to debate the achievements of women. And celebrate them we should. My right hon. Friend Caroline Nokes, the new Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee —on which I congratulate her—is absolutely right that we should celebrate. We should celebrate the record numbers of women in work, the record numbers of women in Parliament, and now the record number of women who are graduating from our universities with the best degrees. More women than men are actually now graduating with science-based degrees, which is showing some progress, the foundations of which were sown very early on in 2010 when the Conservative Government was first formed. Some of that real progress is due to the very hard work of hon. and right hon. Members sitting in the Chamber today.

But many of the women who we are inspired by as constituency Members of Parliament do not sit on these green Benches and do not fill the history books; they are women who do extraordinary things day in, day out to make our communities better places in which to live. I would like to give the House three examples from my part of Hampshire. Diane Taylor, the mayor of Basingstoke, is an extraordinary woman of compassion and of support for our community. Catherine Waters-Clark set up the fantastic local charity Inspero and has taken it to being an award-winning charity in a handful of years. And most of all—I think other Hampshire Members may agree with me on this—I pay tribute to Olivia Pinkney, who is our chief constable in Hampshire and is one of a very small number of female chief constables in the whole country. On a day like this, we should remember those inspiring women, who have pushed the barriers, gone that extra mile and made our communities even better places in which to live.

Let me touch on the role of Parliament. As a legislative body, we have a duty to scrutinise the effectiveness of Government policy to ensure, as the Minister said in her opening statement, that everybody has the opportunity to live the life they choose—that people are carried by their ideas, character and talent, and not held back by their gender. Of course, she is entirely right. It is right that we now have a Select Committee to scrutinise those policies formally every week of the year, but International Women’s Day gives us another channel of scrutiny and another way in which to throw a sharp light on the issues that women need us to address.

The number of events in Parliament has grown organically every year that I have been here, and this year there has been an opportunity to take part in some extraordinary events, including a fantastic exhibition in the Upper Waiting Hall called “Motherworks”, masterminded by Fiona Freund and showcasing the dazzling capabilities of working mums. With the all-party parliamentary group on women, peace and security, I have been able to meet incredible women on the frontline of fighting for women’s rights in countries such as Syria and Nigeria. I have been privileged to be able to launch Birmingham University business school’s fathers in the workplace toolkit—because if we do not get it right for dads, we will never get it right for mums—and last night to have been at the launch of Plan International UK’s call for action for young women living in conflict areas.

Does Parliament actually have an opportunity to do a bit more? There is a strong argument that the parts that make up International Women’s Week, as I think it has become, would be stronger if we tried to knit them together to demonstrate this Parliament’s significant commitment to International Women’s Day. Perhaps we could bring events together in a more coherent programme, and—as we are now no longer members of the EU—use it as an opportunity to be keep in close contact with some of our colleagues across our neighbouring European countries. We have inspiring women in Parliament, in business, in medicine and in teaching, and International Women’s Day is an opportunity for us, as a body, to play our part in showcasing their talents in order to inspire the next generation. I hope that, as parliamentary colleagues, we might think about how we can make this event an even more significant part of the parliamentary diary. We could continue to support the excellent work of 50:50 Parliament, as I know many of us do, and we could involve more young people—and perhaps some old people as well—in thinking about being a Member of Parliament as part of their life work.

So where does the challenge really lie? Today—indeed, this week—is all about celebrating women, but it is also about being honest about the challenges still faced. I agree with the Minister that there should be intrinsic equity for men and women, but there is not because of the attitudes and culture that still prevail in this country and across the globe. It is important that the Government recognise that, because it is the reality of women’s lives. The Minister’s vision is inspiring, but the reality can sometimes be less so. One of the strengths of having a Women and Equalities Committee is the work that we are now able to do to amass the evidence and see what needs to be acted on. I will focus the remainder of my comments on three specific challenges that I passionately feel need addressing.

The first challenge is that although we may have record numbers of women in work, too many still do not reach their full potential. As a country facing challenges with our productivity levels, we have to take that very seriously indeed. I welcome the Government’s commitment to improving childcare—the 30 hours of free childcare for three and four-year-olds, and the commitment to more investment in wraparound care, are hugely important—but there are three elements that we have to fix if we are going to enable women really to reach their full potential at work as we need them to do.

First, there is a lack of quality flexible working, despite the Government’s policy to encourage businesses in that area. Secondly, we need to tackle the fact that women are being discriminated against simply because they are pregnant or new mums. Many hundreds of women are being put in a position where they feel they need to leave their work simply because they are pregnant, and that situation has actually worsened over the last 10 years, according to the Government’s figures. The third element that I really want the Government to think about in this respect—unsurprisingly, just a few days after the conviction of Harvey Weinstein—is that women are still today suffering sexual harassment at work, only to see it covered up through the use of pay-offs and non-disclosure agreements to exit them from their workplace, leaving the offending individuals in place to continue to abuse others. This is not right and it has to change. Women trust us to get it right, and at the moment we are not. We need to make all jobs flexible by default unless there are business reasons not to do so; to adopt the same protections that are in place in Germany for pregnant mums and new mums to stop women being forced out of work when they are pregnant; and to outlaw the use of non-disclosure agreements to cover up allegations of sexual harassment.

The jailing of Harvey Weinstein does not solve the problem. We have to change the way in which our employment tribunal systems work for the better in order to remove the disincentives to bring forward strong cases in the first place. We also have to stop NDAs being used to cover up allegations of sexual harassment or discrimination, to put in place standard confidentiality clauses and to strengthen corporate governance. Members of the Select Committee in the last Parliament will remember the importance of insisting on the reporting up of sexual harassment cases to board level, in order to ensure that those leading our companies and institutions are aware of what is going on. I just remind colleagues of the excellent publications that the Select Committee has already produced; those reports are evidence-based, and the Government should be able to get some good ideas from them.

In short, we need to reshape jobs and the workplace because most jobs and most workplaces are still shaped around a model that has existed for hundreds of years and that too often did not fit women; and as a result, it is not working for women. I am mindful of the time, so will briefly mention the other two areas that I wanted to cover, the first of which is digital abuse.

I wholeheartedly applaud the Government’s real commitment to online reform, and the online harms White Paper was a real step in the right direction, but now we need to see the legislation. Yes, it is important to put in place a duty of care on digital platforms, but the legislation also needs to consider sexual abuse images. At the moment, we have a patchwork of legislation in areas such as upskirting and revenge pornography. We need legislation that can stand the test of time and does not need updating every time a digital platform finds a new way of abusing women through the use of sexual images. Deepfake is a very current example, and of course the issue of anonymity cannot be neglected either.

Last, but by no means least, I turn to Parliament itself. Back in 2016, when we took evidence in the Select Committee from party leaders about their aspirations for the role of women in Parliament, I was heartened that all the party leaders agreed that the House of Commons would be a better place if we had as many women here as men. We have a duty to make this place the best legislative body it can be, yet still only one in three parliamentarians is female—and, yes, the problem lies with the Conservative party. We have record numbers of women MPs. I applaud the Labour party for achieving 51% female MPs. Now we really have to examine things on the Conservative Benches as to how we can achieve a similar situation.

How confident are we that Parliament is as appealing a workplace as it can be to women? How can we make sure that it becomes a more appealing workplace for women? These are the issues that we need to think about and have to tackle. Retaining Members of Parliament—this applies to all parliamentary parties—is something we are failing to do at the moment. At the last general election, all parties lost good women who decided that this was not a place where they could work and balance their caring responsibilities. That should concern us all deeply. It is a problem for MPs to solve, not for those on the Treasury Bench to solve. It is our responsibility. With that in mind, it is crucial that this, as a place of work, works for everybody. I am delighted to be a member of the new Administration Committee, and I look forward to seeing how some of these issues can be addressed through the work of that Committee.

The Government have an ambitious policy to eliminate the gender pay gap—to level up our country, giving everybody the opportunity to be the best they can be, regardless of background. I was born in a council house and went to my local comprehensive school in south Wales, and I am proud to be the 265th woman ever to be elected to this place. The Government are right in their ambition to level up. That levelling up goes for women, too, both in work and in this place, to give everybody the opportunity to live the life they choose based on their talents, ideas and characters, and not to be held up or held back simply because they are a woman.