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Women, Justice and Gender Equality

I thank the hon. Lady for that contribution, but we are not allowed to say such things in our party either. However, once the words are out it is not possible to unsay them; it is not possible to get the genie back into the bottle. If somebody has said something, it has been said. I wish to refer to a parliamentary trip I went on to Iran in 2001, soon after I was elected to the House. It was a cross-party visit for women MPs on women’s issues. There were 14 committees in the Iranian Parliament, and there was one woman MP on each committee. The trouble was that none of them spoke English, and I could not speak their language. Therefore, we were entirely reliant on interpreters. Every time I met one of those women, I asked the same question: ““Are you involved in the whole spectrum of policy formation, or are you just consulted on how a particular policy will affect women?”” My question was in my language, her answer was in her language. What happened as the words went back and forth I do not know, but I never did get an answer to that question. The real challenge is equality of opportunity. It is not an easy matter because of one unavoidable, fundamental difference between men and women—that is, women have children and men do not, and that will never change. All the inequalities for women relate to that basic fact. Babies and children are treated equally, whichever gender they happen to be. In education, girls and boys are treated equally, although that has not always been so. I will not disclose how long ago this was, but when I was in grammar school—I went to a co-educational grammar school, which was quite advanced for its time—it was not unusual for a male teacher to say to a girl pupil, ““It doesn’t really matter if you don’t understand, because you’re only going to get married.”” The word ““only”” made the remark even worse. It was demeaning because it implied that we were second class citizens of less significance than the boys, who would do all the important things in life. Happily, that would not be tolerated in our schools today, and the thought would not even pass through the heads of the teachers or head teachers in my schools. The trouble starts when girls get into their teens. That is when they are extremely vulnerable because they are the ones who will produce the next generation. One of the places we fall down is in sex education in schools, which relies on the provision of a great deal of sex information. What girls need to be told is that if they become sexually active very young, they run the risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, which can last for many years and affect their fertility, which the hon. Member for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor) referred to in her remarks, or it can lead to unwanted teenage pregnancies and abortions, which can have long-term emotional and physical consequences. What girls need to be told in those lessons is the realities of life; that if they indulge in precocious, under-age sex, often with unsuitable boys who have not the slightest intention of getting married or being a father, and certainly have no means of supporting any resulting child, those girls will bear full responsibility for bringing up a child at a time when they are still children themselves. Their education, training and employment prospects will be severely curtailed for quite a few years.