---

Jobs for the Girls: Two Years On

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. I do not for one moment suggest that only gender is stereotyped. People can be stereotyped for other features in their lives. Being from a poor or deprived background may also lead to a lack of aspiration and expectation, but being from a black or minority ethnic community background may not: being the son or daughter of an immigrant may mean that there is more aspiration in the family. These things are not simple and easy to compute and they do not always translate directly from the stereotype into success or failure in job terms. That is one reason why the consequences of stereotyping and discrimination are quite difficult to tackle and remove. It is indubitable that we are making progress but we accept that we need to do more, and so do all hon. Members in this Chamber. The fact that we wish to do so is welcome. Now all we have to do is work out precisely how and then march forward to a better place, because that is what we are looking to do in respect of this issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley made some points about these matters being cross-Government and she is right. She is right to suggest that it would be a good idea for Select Committees dealing with other Departments to take an interest in this matter. I am sure that she will use her good offices to encourage that and I am sure that hon. Members in this Chamber who are involved with other Select Committees will do the same—as Ministers do, by the way. Part of my job in the Government Equalities Office is to get hold of other Departments where equality issues matter and focus their minds on doing something about this agenda in their day-to-day work. That is partly what the Government Equalities Office does and that is, partly, now my role as a Minister. A great deal can be done, but always and everywhere we have to keep reminding policy makers and civil servants that these issues should be high up the list, not low down the list, or off it altogether, because it is simple for them to slip if those things are not always in mind. It is important to have women at high levels in the civil service and in Parliament across the board—I encourage Opposition parties to get many more women into their parliamentary parties, as we have, although we still need to do better—because women will keep raising this issue. I am not saying that it never happens in a room full of men, but this subject is not necessarily as high up the list if there are no women involved. We all bring our life experiences to the jobs that we do, whether we are signalmen on the railways or MPs. That is why it is important to have better representation at all levels, whether on company boards, in ordinary work forces in small or large companies, in Parliament, in the council chamber, in policy making or the health service. That is why we need diversity. It is not because we just want some numeric equivalence to the general population, but to try to ensure that we tackle discrimination that has arisen not necessarily deliberately—society has not been set up to discriminate—but as a result of the way in which it has been run in the past. Only by tackling those issues everywhere where we come across them can we eventually make the progress that we want to make.