Women: Economic Empowerment — House of Lords, 2015-03-05
Topic: Civil Rights
Susan Garden (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, the debates in the House of Lords for International Women’s Day are always outstanding, and this has been no exception As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said, it has gone off in wonderful directions. I was pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady King, said that there was clear agreement on much that was mentioned in the debate, although she then seemed to go off in another direction I am delighted to attempt to respond to contributions which have covered a very wide range of topics and themes from both men and women. Any hope of ending gender inequality will be achieved only with the active involvement of men. The noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby, my noble friend Lord Storey and others spoke of men as being the agents of change for gender equality. At the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, the UN will mark the HeForShe campaign My personal experience mirrors that of some other speakers. My noble friend Lady Perry spoke of our mothers being on these Benches. I was reminded that my mother achieved a first at Cambridge in the 1930s, but never became a graduate. It was not until 1948 that Cambridge accepted that its women students were members of the university and awarded them degrees. What is more, she had to resign from the Civil Service as soon as she married I was at Oxford in the 1960s when, as the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, said, only 6% to 7% of people went to university, and at Oxbridge there were seven times as many places for men as for women. This was a feature of the single-sex college set-up. Our university careers office advised women who might get married that teaching or secretarial work would be sound futures to consider. For me, who married an RAF officer, that was definitely not a route to economic empowerment, but I have never for one moment regretted my marriage. As the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, said, we were the wife division of the human race. Astonishingly, no one suggested that we might aspire to be a football club CEO. My noble friend Lady Brady has chosen a challenging career in which her talents and hard work have led to great achievement, and she has totally ignored glass ceilings, quotas and targets. These days, equal numbers of men and women go to university, and no careers office would last long offering women the narrow set of options that we were offered Looking to education, many doors have been opened but there are still barriers to be overcome. I pay tribute to the right reverend Prelate and the church for all that it does in education in this country. How exciting it was to have in this House the Bill on women bishops, which is going to fast-track women on to the Bishops’ Benches. I am not sure how far the role brings economic empowerment, but I am sure that spiritual empowerment should be equally valuable. Too many girls feel that their career options are limited because of stereotypes about jobs being more suitable for boys or girls. We heard that from my noble friends Lady Mobarik, Lord Storey, Lady Perry and Lady Evans, and the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield. This can start from a very young age. In an experiment in the United States, primary school children were asked to draw pictures of a scientist before and after a visit to a lab. In the "before" drawings none of the boys and only 36% of the girls depicted a scientist as a female. In the "after" drawings, although, interestingly, still none of the boys depicted a scientist as female, for girls there was a 58% increase in female scientist representation. There is much research showing that aspirations are indeed formed at a relatively young age, and that gendered influences in particular begin very early. A recent Ofsted report found that girls as young as seven and eight thought of conventionally stereotypical jobs for men and women. This is one reason why it is so important that we get careers advice and people from business and the outside world into schools for the very earliest ages Expanding the apprenticeship programme and improving careers advice help to open the eyes of young women to options and aspirations that they may not have considered—or, if they did, considered them inaccessible. We have heard of the programmes to raise girls’ aspirations, and to encourage them to study STEM subjects and pursue careers in science and engineering. I am glad to hear that my noble friend Lady Perry’s glass was half full, and to hear my noble friend Lord Watson affirm that girls are not biologically wired not to be able to do maths and science. The noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, spoke with great expertise and wisdom on STEM subjects, and I join her and the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, in recalling Lady Platt and all she did for WISE—Women into Science and Engineering—a fantastic programme that continues to help young women Compared to 2010, a thousand more girls are studying physics at A-level every year and two thousand more are studying maths, but they are still too few. As the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, said, we need to open up the thrill of science to get more young people engaged in the excitement of it. There have been 1,260 new science-based apprenticeships since 2010. Again, we are getting there but they are too few. The STEM Ambassadors programme is a network of 28,000 volunteers, of whom 47% are women, who work with women to encourage science uptake. Organisations such as Athena SWAN do excellent work in trying to encourage this, too The Government are setting up a new employer-led careers and enterprise company to support greater engagement between employers, schools and colleges. As my noble friends Lady Brady and Lady Brinton pointed out, it is important to change the culture of the workplace. We have just launched Your Daughter’s Future, an online guide to help parents support their daughters through qualification and career choices. We are working with the media to tackle gender stereotypes and improve diversity of representation. I also salute, with the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, "Woman’s Hour" and other programmes that have, over the years, helped to empower and educate women, and encouraged them to take up interests much wider than they have found at home Even in the field of education, women are less likely to be in positions of authority, as head teachers, principals, professors or vice-chancellors. My noble friend Lady Bottomley lamented the shortage of women vice-chancellors. The latest data show that 20% of vice-chancellors are female. That, my friends, is up from 17% two years ago. So there we are; there has been meteoric improvement. We believe that sector should go much further to seek out and harness the diverse talent available. HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, is continuing its active programme to try to identify senior managers from more diverse groups. In the world of work more generally, women’s strengths and skills remain an untapped resource I turn to employment and enterprise. We have been berated about the measurement which showed that the UK had plummeted down the gender gap ladder to number 26. That was based on a particular set of measures. It does not represent the gender pay gap as it stands in the UK. That is now at 19.1%, the lowest level ever, and the pay gap has been virtually eliminated among full-time workers under the age of 40.