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Women

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Gould of Potternewton on having initiated this debate. When I look down the list of speakers I can appreciate the meaning of the term ““odd man out””. I am also the odd man out in another way because I do not want to talk about the usual stuff such as work and the home, unequal pay or the proportion of women in business or in Parliament. However, it is interesting to notice that the country that has the highest proportion of women in Parliament is Rwanda, with 48 per cent. It is followed by the usual suspects of Sweden and Norway, but it is a remarkable achievement by that country. I am sure that other noble Lords will speak about those topics but I do not want to speak about them. I want to speak about problems of the emotions and the identity of women in contemporary societies, especially those of younger women. I would like to introduce your Lordships to Jennifer Hendricks, who lies dying in a hospital bed. She has only a few days to live. She has been in and out of hospital for something like five years. Over that period she has spent only two months out of hospital. She contracted her disease when she was about 14. She is 25 when she dies. She left some notebooks that describe her journey and her ordeal through her illness, which were edited by her father and create a most moving document. It was published as a book, Slim to None: A Journey Through the Wasteland of Anorexia Treatment. Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and obesity are all phenomena of an affluent society.      I remember when I became interested in these topics and was reflecting on their importance for the position of women in contemporary society. By chance, on the same day I bought two Sunday newspapers. I do not do that any more because they are much too large, so you have to throw away most of them when you get them. In one there was a picture of an anorexic girl, a white American, emaciated to the point of death. On the front of another was an article about starvation in Africa, including a picture of a girl emaciated to the point of death. Of course, she was black. What struck me about this was that here was the same outcome, with totally different dynamics, in these two situations. In the first case you have someone starving themselves to death in a society which, for the first time, has more food to go around than it can possibly consume; in the other, you have classical starvation, where people die because they do not have enough food. Anorexia is rapidly expanding in our society. It is about nine times as common among girls and women as it is among boys and men. It started mainly among teenage girls, but has now spread upwards. We even find people becoming anorectic for the first time in their lives in their fifties. It is also spreading downwards; girls as young as seven or eight are beginning the process of starving themselves. Anorexia and other food disorders are unknown in previous history, although there are examples of saints starving themselves to death. Starving yourself to death, or overeating, bingeing and being sick are mainly secular phenomena of our society, dating more or less from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is calculated that in the United States, for example, fully one third of female college students suffer some form of clinical eating disorder, requiring psychiatric treatment—a massive proportion. A study in Germany followed the cases of about 100 anorectic women, aged 25, for 12 years. It found that only 30 per cent of them recovered over that 12-year period, and even they did not make a complete recovery; they still had problems. Thirty per cent did not recover and the rest were somewhere in between. The death rate among these women was 8.8 per cent, which is about nine times that of women of the same age in the ordinary population. So this is quite an extraordinary phenomenon, to which we should add something alarming that goes on in our schools, which also affects far more girls than boys: self- harm and self-mutilation. A study carried out in 2002 showed that a minimum of 11 per cent of girls, across a range of UK schools, self-harm by cutting themselves or self-harm in other ways. Having looked at some of these studies, I suspect that the true proportion is much higher. You do not self-harm in order to display yourself to others; you self-harm as a private affair and a lot of it is hidden. About three per cent of boys seem to self-harm, so this again seems to be a heavily female activity. What is going on here? What is affecting so many young women and, increasingly, older women in our society, which somehow intersects with the changes affecting our lives. The interesting backdrop to this is that the position of women in our society does not fit the classical idea of women and inequality; that is, that women have always been unequal to men, they are still unequal to men and that is just how life is. Recent material on this shows the opposite. It shows the amazing progress made by women in most western countries over the past 20 or so years in terms of earnings and penetration of occupations they were not in before. It was said this would be true over the longer term, but this is happening in the very short term now. In education, girls often overtake boys, but thereby become subject to all the competitive pressures this involves. This is very interesting. There is a major secular change to the position of women in our society, and, on the face of it, it is, on the whole, for the better. The statistics show that men’s average wages increased by 13 per cent between 1997 when the Government came to power and 2004, whereas women’s average wages increased by 31 per cent. This finding is echoed in all the EU countries, with the exception of Italy, and in the United States. Italy seems to be mired in stagnation. It is probably no coincidence that Italy has the lowest birth rate of any country in Europe. What is going on here? I think that the pathologies I am describing are actually pathologies of the changing position of women, not of the traditional position of women. It is incumbent on us to take them seriously: they have political and economic outcomes of a formidable and manifest kind. So what is going on? First, you can trace the extraordinary spread of anorexia and other eating pathologies to the rise of supermarket culture, which is the late 1950s and 1960s. I am not blaming supermarkets for this; it is simply the fact that you can get any food you want at any time of the day and you have to construct a diet for yourself based on how you want to be and who you want to be. Secondly, this imposes special strains on women. These are the strains of halfway emancipation. Women have been freed from many of their traditional roles and traditional tasks and are able to compete, certainly in schools, very freely alongside boys. As I say, they do better than them in some cases. However, women are still subject to the sexual gaze of men. Women are still judged by their appearance. Women still have major identity and emotional problems which relate to this halfway position—maybe it is even a three-quarter way position—of emancipation. It is important to recognise that anorexia and other eating disorders are active conditions: you have to work at it to get that thin. So, anorectic girls will often go to a gym perhaps every day of the week or monitor their diets very carefully. Think of Bridget Jones, because Bridget Jones is a kind of comic take on what it is like to be a woman in this confusing kind of world when you are struggling with an identity in a partially still male-dominated world but still where you want and expect to be free. A lot of its purchase comes from its comment on that, I think. I think there are some policy implications and I should like briefly to close with those. The first is: no going back to the traditional family. Personally, I am 100 per cent opposed to the idea that the traditional family was a happy place for women and that modern societies are causing them strains. It is not the fact of emancipation, it is the halfway nature of emancipation which is causing this very worrying spread of emotional and identity problems. Secondly, politicians and policy makers should take seriously self-esteem and self-identity, because in a more fluid and open society we all have to wrestle with these things. It is not only women. There is a very interesting book called Work to Welfare, which reverses the Labour mantra, which is about men in their fifties who lose their jobs and cannot get jobs again. They have immense problems with self-esteem and self-identity. They do not self-harm in the same way but I think they self-harm in a kind of psychological way. I think the Government need to confront some of those problems and integrate them with the very admirable agenda in the report of the women’s commission—because they are not very visible there. Most people will recall, I hope, the work of my noble friend Lord Layard, who has recently written about mental illness. He says that the big problem for our society is no longer unemployment but mental illness. You have more people who are mentally ill today, costing the economy about £2 billion a year, than you have unemployed. There is an important intersection between those, because if you want a good job, you have to have self-esteem and initiative to go out and get it.