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International Women's Day

What a pleasure it is to see you, Madam Deputy Speaker, in the Chair during this international women's day debate. The hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) made some excellent points about the issues in the countries of the south, and my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) made some excellent points about the way in which the coalition Government are trying to turn the clock back to the 1950s in this country. I do not need to repeat what she said, but the policy is backfiring spectacularly, because it is inspiring a whole new generation of feminists to fight for their rights, and I shall tell the House about three of them. The first is Lucy O'Sullivan, who has researched women's representation in government and concluded that women Ministers make a real difference to the effectiveness with which women's interests are represented in practice. She has also tracked the number of women Ministers whom we have had. During the 1980s and 1990s we were bumping along at 5%; then in 1997 we jumped up almost to 20%; and by April 2010 we had seen a steady increase to the point where 30% of Ministers were women. However, after the May 2010 election that figure crashed by 50%, and now it is at a 14-year low, as a result of this coalition Government. The second example of the new feminism is the campaign to increase the number of women in the media. I am sure many hon. Members will have seen the research demonstrating that only 22% of newspaper articles are written by women. Broadcast magazine has a good campaign, called ““Expert Women””, to get more women into the media, and the one trade union with a woman general secretary, Michelle Stanistreet of the National Union of Journalists, is holding a meeting next week to organise the fightback to improve women's representation in the media. Colleagues on both sides of the House will know of my concern about the issues of body image—I was pleased to join the all-party body image group that the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) established—and about the urgent need to close down ““ano”” websites, which encourage young women to starve themselves, so they may be surprised at my third example of the new generation of feminism. It is Cosmopolitan magazine—a collective made up entirely of female journalists. Alongside its ““We use the F word—do you?”” campaign, it has now set up a petition for equal pay, and I advise all hon. Members to go to its website and sign it. It states that"““it's scandalous that the pay gap still exists. Laws on equal pay have existed for more than 40 years yet women working full-time…are still paid on average 14.9% less… At the current rate of change a baby will not achieve equal pay until she is 97 years old. Enough is enough.””" So will the Government take up its challenge to make equal pay auditing compulsory next year?