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Women

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, for securing this debate and for all her work in the field of equal opportunities. This has been a wide-ranging and very moving debate. People have looked at the recognition and representation of women, the pay gap, pensions, women in sport, the different workloads and the implications of family responsibilities. I am becoming very well aware that no sooner do you think your children are grown up than you find that you need to care for your elderly parents. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, with enormous clarity, pointed to the different life patterns of men and women and explained why, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, also pointed out, so many women end up in poverty. I was profoundly depressed not only by what she said but also by the incredibly perceptive contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Giddens. As my bouncy, slender 12 year-old enters her teens in 12 days’ time, will she fall prey to what the noble Lord identified as the pressures of social change? Does anorexia await her? What will her future be? Will she, like Joanna, end up in poverty? That is certainly not how she views her future. So change needs to be faster and more fundamental—not half-hearted. I know from bitter experience how thankless a task pushing for such change can be. I was chair of Women Liberal Democrats as we battled to ensure that more women were elected for our party. I am very glad that during my time we adopted zipping for the European elections—and gained an equal number of women and men in the subsequent elections under PR. In that regard, we are still ahead of the other parties in the European Parliament: 45 per cent of our MEPs are women, compared with 33 per cent for Labour and 8 per cent for the Conservatives. Speaking personally, I admire those who ensured that the Labour Party adopted women-only shortlists. I could see very clearly what a difference that made to the House of Commons. As others have pointed out, there was that critical mass that made the difference on so many of the issues that we have heard about here. I was very angry, but not at all surprised, that the press made the gibe about ““Blair’s babes””. I thought that that was typical, but I note that women journalists got just as angry about it and I welcomed that. Our party apparently has the problem of not really knowing where it is going to win seats, and therefore sorting out twinning and pairing is difficult. As in all parties everywhere, there is fierce controversy over the so-called ““fixing”” of things for a fairer outcome. But, for me, that is no excuse: Labour now stands at 28 per cent; we have all sorts of mentoring and places on the shortlists but no guaranteed provision, and we moved from 10 to 16 per cent in the last election; and the Tories remain on 8 per cent. For me, that is insufficient progress in the 21st century. I have always been absolutely certain—I have the flak-jacket to prove it—that, unless we do something to level the playing field, we will simply not end up with sufficient representation of half the population. I admire what the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, managed to achieve in Wales, and I draw support from those in other parties who are fighting the same battles as us. When we have been ahead of the party opposite, I hope that the measures we have used have helped it in its battle. Labour in the Commons is clearly ahead of us right now and its battles help us. The Speaker of the Lesotho Parliament recently pointed out a couple of things to me. She told me that only in Lesotho and the UK was the second Chamber partly hereditary. The second Chamber in Lesotho has a number of chieftains in it, and the only women among them are the widows whose sons are still children. She asked me what we could do about hereditary and appointed Chambers in this, the democratic 21st century. What could I, as an appointed person, say? Secondly, she asked me what we were doing to ensure that women were elected to our democratic institutions. It is embarrassing, to say the least, to discover that a patriarchal country like Lesotho ensures that women are elected in local elections, and yet in this country we tiptoe around on eggshells on the subject. She rightly took me to task on that. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, it used to be only the Scandinavian countries that were ahead of us in this area. But now the UK is 50th on the list of countries in terms of the proportion of women in Parliament, with 49 others—countries such as Rwanda, Belarus, Vietnam, Croatia, Latvia and China—all ahead of us. We would not even be at that position were it not for Labour’s women-only shortlists. A while back, I attended, with the noble Baronesses, Lady Gale and Lady Flather, a conference of European and Middle Eastern women parliamentarians. The Middle Eastern women looked to us to help them as they sought to ensure that their rights were realised, and they were astonished to hear from us how difficult it still was. Given the astonishing number of Parliaments that look to how we organise things, we have a responsibility, wider than the UK, to move things forward on this issue. It is the ““abroad”” part of this debate that I especially wish to address, and I think that I am the only speaker to do so. For us, it matters a great deal with regard to policy and equal opportunity that our Parliament should be better balanced in terms of gender, that women should have equal pay and that other inequalities should be addressed. But the position of some women around the world in the social pecking order is actually a matter of life and death. Let us take the problem of AIDS. In sub-Saharan Africa, 80 per cent of 15 to 19 year-olds who are HIV-positive are girls and women. That is very, very significant in terms of the issues that we are talking about. The pandemic is propelled by gender inequalities and the denial of rights to women. Girls often do not have a choice about whether they have sex. They are expected to be faithful; men and boys are often not. A married woman is not in a position to demand that her husband uses a condom, and he does not. UNAIDS lists marriage as a risk factor for HIV. Nor does the married woman have much influence over whether her husband sleeps with other women, and she is therefore extremely vulnerable. In very poor societies in particular, sex is sold for food, education and shelter, and older men often think that they are entitled to sex with young girls. I was stunned recently to hear an African Minister pride himself on his contribution to the reduction in the incidence of AIDS in his country. He said that he ““no longer availed himself of young girls””. In one study in India, more than 90 per cent of the HIV-positive women were married and monogamous. The same pattern could be found in Thailand and elsewhere. This is a key issue. When I first discovered that, I felt very angry, but I wondered whether I had the right to that anger. Was I judging people by different cultural standards? I have now met many African women—HIV-positive and not—who reject the inferior position dealt out to them and who argue that this epidemic cannot be tackled without tackling gender inequality. I support them in that anger. Mary Robinson, the former Irish President, is surely right to say that rights for women are human rights. They are absolute and brook no cultural interpretation. If we are to tackle AIDS effectively, we must begin by placing the rights of women at the centre of our response. If anything positive is to come out of the disaster that is, in particular, hitting Africa, it must surely be on the position of women, which will have to be revolutionised if it is to be tackled effectively. Gender inequality is thus not something that we can address down the track, or wait another generation or two before sorting out. We have to make the changes in the UK on which so many in this debate have done so much over many years, but we also have to take that onto a wider stage. We have to support those who are fighting for that millennium development goal of gender equality around the world. The implications of not addressing that are surely unthinkable.