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Jobs for the Girls: Two Years On

I congratulate and thank the Select Committee on Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform for enabling my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber) and her colleagues to produce this interesting report. In the main, I agree with practically everything that has been said, although I must admit that I have my doubts about role models, because I am of a generation raised almost exclusively by women. They were my only role models, as all the males in my environment were away fighting in the second world war. Those women managed to run the country as well as their homes and families with great expertise. Of course, once the war was over, as at the end of the first world war, they were patted on the head and told politely, ““Thank you very much for all your hard work. It was marvellous. Now go away and do what you do best, which is look after children and cook.”” We have moved on slightly from that position, but this debate prompted me to revert to my early days in this place. I looked up our debates from 1993 on sex equality and from 1994 when, for a short period—I am happy that the practice has been restored—the House would debate women's issues on international women's day. I was rather shocked that, despite all the good work that our Government have done and the major changes that our party has made to encourage and support more women in putting themselves forward for election to the House, we have not moved very far. There is still an enormously long way to go. My hon. Friend, the Chair of the Sub-Committee, said that it would be 80 years before we achieved equality of pay. That is much too long. The Labour party made huge strides in ensuring that more women were given the opportunity to present themselves to constituency parties, to be selected and to present themselves to the electorate for election to this place. In Government, we have broken down so many barriers. In a speech in the House in 1994, I made the point that a woman had never been Home Secretary. We have certainly broken through that barrier, and there is no Department of State that is not more than well represented by female Ministers—they are excellent—but when we come to evaluating women's work as having innate value, we still have an enormously long way to go. There have been changes; that is a theme that I wish to develop. For example, it is now entirely acceptable to see female doctors on television, whether in a soap opera or answering questions. We see female lawyers, female barristers and occasionally female judges, and women in the armed forces, but it is rare to find a woman plumber. It is even harder to find a woman electrician. They do exist; they have a confederation based in London and the south-east. It is extremely difficult to get one to come do a job, as they are always inundated with work because the quality of their work is so high. One of the training schemes in my borough, Camden, ran classes in those skills. Initially, they were coeducational—men and women worked there together—but after a few weeks, the women were made to feel so uncomfortable by their male colleagues that they left, so the local authority set up segregated classes. For the introductory year of the programmes, whether for plumbers, electricians, painters and decorators or carpenters, women worked exclusively with women. By the second year, they could take on the men with no problem, and they had no trouble completing their courses. That brings me back to another point. Not only is women's work undervalued in this country, but women undervalue themselves. They do not believe that they are capable of doing anything and everything. It must have been 25 years ago that there was a falling roll because we were having fewer children. Business, industry and employers in general were concerned to attract mature women back into the work force. The BBC, which had an educational film unit—I do not think that it has one anymore—made a series of films in which I was the link person. I remember distinctly one session in a major employment agency that was working hard to get mature women back into the work force. It had set up a series of seminars around the country. One interviewer said to me, ““A woman came in to speak to me and I said to her, 'What have you done?' She said, 'I've not done anything. I left school, I worked for a couple of years in an office and then I had the children. I've raised the children, I've run my home and the kids are all away in university now.'”” The interviewer asked her, ““Well, what have you done in the last three months?”” She replied, ““I haven't done anything in the last three months. I've organised a wedding for 300 people.”” The interviewer said, ““But don't you realise that those are major skills? A price can be put on them and they can be actively evaluated.”” She had not realised that. That is an attitude that still informs women, and society as a whole, far too much. The matter on which I want to concentrate—it is of vital importance, and the Committee touched on it—is education. If, as I suspect, school careers officers now are pretty much like careers officers when I went to school, which was a very long time ago, the job is given to a teacher who has a spare hour every afternoon and has no particular responsibilities in any area. That is not good enough. We need properly skilled, properly paid, highly motivated individuals whose sole interest and purpose in life is to broaden their pupils' horizons about what is actually out there in terms of interesting jobs and professions, whether those pupils be girls or boys. I am concentrating on girls at the moment. A week or 10 days ago, as part of the excellent House of Commons educational programme for young people, I was asked to take questions because the MP for the schools touring the Palace that day could not meet the pupils after the tour to answer their questions. I said, ““Yes, I've got a spare hour or so; I'll come along and speak to them.”” There were dozens and dozens of highly intelligent, attractive young girls and one solitary boy, and they asked interesting questions—when I eventually got them to ask some. All the girls, with the exception of six, were taking courses in child care. That was what they wanted to do. A teacher said to me, ““Why are the Government not encouraging boys to enter child care?”” I said, ““We are””—we are clearly a Government committed to equality across the range—““but to transfer your question to my constituency and the families that I know, nine times out of 10 it is parents who don't want their daughters to do any job that will get their hands dirty.”” It is parents who push the caring professions, which we were all raised to regard as the natural field for women to work in. There were dozens of young girls there who were committed to what they were studying and wanted to be good at their jobs, and there were six girls—six girls out of three schools—sitting behind them. I do not believe that they were deliberately segregated. I asked, ““What are they reading? What are they going to do?”” They were reading law. That is a tiny, anecdotal microcosm of a problem that we must get to grips with. We must concentrate much more on opening horizons to all our children, but particularly to girls. We must do it not only in schools—where I think we must start much earlier than 13, 14 or 15—but by working much more closely with employers and companies. Not infrequently, when a school looks at potential careers for its pupils, even if it is absolutely committed to opening every available door, it looks only at the doors available in its own immediate area of employment. Schools are not looking further afield. I can understand that, certainly now as the world enters a slowdown—I know that we are not allowed to use the R-word—