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Women

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for introducing this debate and thereby enabling us to look at the progress of women in its historic context. It is so easy to forget what change has been made and to take the change and the progress for granted. I recall as a very na&-uml;ve young woman hearing a speech by a remarkably able woman suffragette about how the vote for women had been won. I remember saying to her, ““You did everything—there is nothing left for us to do””. I soon learned how wrong I had been. Not only did equal pay and sex discrimination begin to come into focus but, just as those pioneers had won the battle for women’s suffrage, we needed to consolidate women into politics. That is a mountainous task with which we are still struggling, as my noble friend indicated, although there has been some progress in the past decade. Looking back to 1975, the task facing the new Equal Opportunities Commission, of which I was founder chairman, was enormous, and spanned the whole range of political, economic and human activity. The remit was to eliminate discrimination on grounds of sex and to promote equality of opportunity. The tools were: legal enforcement through the tribunals and courts; establishing case law; introducing codes of practice; making recommendations to government on changes to the law; formal investigations; and education and persuasion—the latter two being of great importance. With a limited budget, the commission’s strategy was to act as a catalyst on all other institutions and policy makers. Our tactics were to establish precedents through the courts and to use those precedents in our enforcement and educational work. Some early cases of indirect discrimination revealed a whole range of unexpected and unintended practices and problems arising from a male-dominated culture, which we are now beginning to tackle. However, many of the consequences remain with us and have shown up new challenges. The prime challenge today is how to balance the essential economic and social aspects of women’s and men’s work and family life in a more equal sharing environment. Having accepted this as today’s norm, I was nevertheless surprised at an ICM poll for the Equal Opportunities Commission showing that 59 per cent of those questioned thought it harder for working women to balance their work and family lives than it was 30 years ago, and 45 per cent of men and 36 per cent of women thought it harder for men to balance their work and family lives than 30 years ago. My surprise was not that women and men are finding this difficult, but that they were comparing it with the completely different culture of 30 years ago, when these problems were just beginning to emerge. The lifestyle at that time was that men worked and women were the homemakers. Of course, even then there were exceptions. There were exceptions in some industries, where women worked for the majority of their lives, such as in my native county of Yorkshire and the textile industry. However, the accepted lifestyle was of the male worker and the female home worker. Today’s young person of either sex would be completely unbelieving to be taken back three decades to a time when the Sex Discrimination Act first became law. Then girls were seen to be of less importance than boys in education. After all, they would probably work for a few years upon leaving school, then marry, have children and be provided for by their husband for the rest of their life. If he died before them, which was most likely, his pension rights would provide for her, unless there had been a breakdown in the marriage previously, when women would be completely unprotected. Girls were behind boys in O-levels and, even more so, at A-level. At university, only 35 per cent of students were women; now it is something like 55 per cent. Anticipating the new Act in 1974, the medical and veterinary schools abandoned their informal quotas of a maximum of 12 per cent of female students—it had been felt that a profession could not cope with more women than that. Fewer than 10 per cent of lawyers—both barristers and solicitors—were women; so too with accountants and the majority of other professions, except of course nursing and teaching. A woman vice-chancellor was unheard of, women were regarded as too lacking in gravitas to be newscasters and even the few women who had made it into journalism were not allowed to stand at the bar and talk over the latest news items with their male colleagues in the Fleet Street pub, ““El Vino””, until after the successful sex discrimination case in 1982. Women were not allowed into the majority of clubs, except as guests in specially reserved areas, and they were not expected to get mortgages and other loans or credit in their own right. I recall that when I came to London to take up a new post, I went into the local departmental store to open an account. I was asked to provide a male guarantor. When I protested that no male could guarantee my income, a sprightly young man appeared and said, ““It’s alright, madam. I’ll sign the form for you””. With as much dignity as I could summon, I said, ““Thank you very much, but I will take my business elsewhere””, and left. That was the kind of indignity that women had to put up with. We were certainly second-class citizens. Women were not legally responsible for their own tax affairs. Men were automatically classed as head of household. A wife’s income was not taken into account in any financial arrangements except after a battle with the authorities, because of course a wife might become pregnant and stop earning. Nor were the social structures in place to support married women at work and women’s independence. There was no statutory paid maternity leave with a right to return to the job. Paternity leave was a laddish joke. Pre-school childcare was largely confined to voluntary playgroups. Children’s allowances started with the second child and were inadequate. Women were not building up their own pension rights; and so one could go on. It was a world unrecognised by today’s standards and cultural attitudes and it is important that we do not lose sight of where we came from. Of course, not all discrimination has been eliminated. Some most intractable problems remain. Equal pay has not been achieved, as has been indicated by my noble friend Lady Gould and in the report of the commission of my noble friend Lady Prosser on women and work. The pay gap between women and men lies deep in our cultural heritage. The consequences of yesterday’s unequal education and training opportunities for girls remain with us. Women’s natural function of childbearing will always be with us but it can and is being accommodated in more focused family policies. As we progress and modify our culture, new problems emerge. The issue of life/work family balance linked with women’s pensions is the new challenge of the present generation. That is a challenge not for women alone but for women and men together.