International Women’s Day

Thursday 12th March 2026 Commons Chamber

12:57

[The Minister for Equalities (Seema Malhotra)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered International Women’s Day 2026.

It is an honour to open this International Women’s Day debate, which is being held in Government time for the first time since 2020. International Women’s Day was forged in the labour strikes of the early 20th century as women came together to call for better pay, shorter working hours and voting rights. It has become an important milestone that celebrates the achievement of women, promotes gender equality and acts as a call to action.

In this debate, I have no doubt that we will hear about pioneering pathfinders, including women who smashed the glass ceiling in Parliament and paved the way for us today, such as Constance Markievicz, the first woman elected; Nancy Astor, the first to take her seat; and Margaret Bondfield, the first woman Cabinet Minister—I recommend her new biography by Nan Sloane, who is a driving force behind the Labour Women’s Network. I am sure that hon. Members will mention the first woman Prime Minister, who took office in 1979. Labour has had the first female Chief Whip, the first female Chancellor and the first black woman MP, the inspirational right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott). We have also had Barbara Castle, Ellen Wilkinson, Jennie Lee and, of course, Baroness Harman in the other place. That is not to forget you, Madam Deputy Speaker—the first non-white Deputy Speaker and the first female Muslim Minister.

I have many greats and firsts sitting behind me—and probably in front of me—including my hon. Friend the Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler), who was the first black female Minister and the first black woman to speak from the Dispatch Box. I am proud that many of those were also Fabian women, and that we are marking 21 years of the Fabian Women’s Network this year.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Talking of strong women, there is my mum, my wife, my three daughters-in-law and my three grandchildren. Those three wee girls are at a very young age, but I tell you what: they have the potential to be leaders as well. They are fierce women and they are strong, and I am very pleased to see that.

Ever mindful that today we are celebrating International Women’s Day across Northern Ireland, the Minister will know that another lady was killed there last week. Of the women murdered in the whole United Kingdom, the highest proportion has been in Northern Ireland. Does the Minister share my concern that while we celebrate women, we also have to protect women? Our society must do that.

[Seema Malhotra]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments and wish all the women in his family a very happy International Women’s Day. Let the message ring out from this House that every girl is a leader. He is absolutely right that we must look at where women come under threats online or through violence, and do everything to protect women and girls across the UK and around the world.

We speak today about the agenda of women’s progress, but we must remind ourselves that although we have made progress, men and women are still not equal—not equal at home and not equal abroad. Indeed, we face the new challenge of a misogynistic insurgency that is determined to roll back women’s rights. When we look at the level of online abuse, sexual harassment and intimidation, it is horrifying to see products that appear designed to make money out of the sexual harassment of women.

Today, I want to make three main arguments: that women are still not equal, that we must be uncompromising in resisting the backlash against women’s rights, and that in these fragmented times women must work with women around the world.

In a world where inequality persists in society, in the economy and in power, I am proud that Labour, led by a Cabinet that is 46% women, is putting the progress of women at the heart of its missions. That is not a coincidence. Women’s representation in politics drives new conversations and puts wider issues on the agenda. Of the 695 women ever elected to the House of Commons, 405, or 58%, were first elected as Labour MPs and 182, or 26%, as Conservative MPs.

[Ann Davies (Caerfyrddin) (PC)]

I am proud to have joined this Parliament as part of a record number of women elected for Plaid Cymru in 2024, and part of the record 40% of women elected in that same year. We are clearly on our way towards a gender-equal Parliament. With that historic milestone in sight, would the Minister commit her Government to Centenary Action’s call to commence section 106 of the Equality Act 2010, which would require political parties to publish diversity data on candidates, to increase transparency?

[Seema Malhotra]

On the hon. Lady’s comment about women making up 40% of the House of Commons today, that is an important milestone, but we are not yet at 50%. I am proud that the Labour party has got close to it, and in fact pretty much reached that level. It is important that we continue to look to the centenary, as she said, with a range of measures to push forward the progress of women’s representation and political parties’ role in that, but also to look forward to the progress of women in every part of society and of our economy.

I recognise that this is about the choices we make. Labour’s manifesto committed to action to tackle gender inequality, from strengthening rights for women in work and reducing the gender pay gap to halving violence against women and girls. Our groundbreaking violence against women and girls strategy begins a decade-long, whole-of-Government and whole-of-society effort to halve violence against women and girls, backed by over £1 billion of funding. I know that every Member of this House will want to get behind that goal.

I want to acknowledge the incredible efforts of my friend and colleague the Minister for Safeguarding—my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips)—who I am proud to stand alongside in today’s debate. [Hon. Members: “More.”] Exactly!

We are not just acting at home: we have made tackling violence against women and girls a priority in our foreign policy, too. Recently, the Foreign Secretary launched All In, a new international coalition to scale up action to end violence against women and girls. It brings together global leaders, experts and campaigners, and focuses on preventing violence before it happens.

Labour is working to prioritise women’s health, with a refreshed women’s health strategy to be published soon. Our plans to make work pay are putting in stronger protections for pregnant women and new mothers at work, and tackling maternity inequality. We are reviewing parental leave and making flexible working more easily available. With two consecutive years of minimum wage rises, we are putting more money in the pockets of working women.

[Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)]

The Minister is making a brilliant speech that lots of us will be feeling very emotional about. Does she agree with me and Members across the House that although increasing the minimum wage is really important, as it disproportionately affects female workers, we also need to restructure how we value women’s work and the workforce predominantly made up of women?

[Seema Malhotra]

I thank my hon. Friend for her comments. That debate continues, and I will touch on some relevant issues later in my speech.

Last week, alongside the Minister for Women and Equalities, I was proud to launch our voluntary action plans. Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, employers with over 250 employees will be asked to submit action plans showing how they will reduce their gender pay gaps and support employees going through the menopause. We are working with business leaders, civil society organisations and trade unions, because we cannot reach workplace equality without the support and commitment of all.

The removal of the two-child limit will lift 450,000 children out of relative poverty in the final year of this Parliament. As we know, poverty impacts women, whom the Women’s Budget Group describe as the “shock absorbers of poverty”.

On business, the Chancellor has backed the Invest in Women taskforce, launching a funding pool of over £600 million, including £130 million from the British Business Bank, to be invested in women-led businesses. It is the largest fund of its kind globally, addressing the enormous barriers to access to finance that exist for women.

Alongside that, the Government are supporting more women in the UK’s tech sector. Every year, the economy loses an estimated £2 billion to £3.5 billion because women leave the tech sector or change sectors due to barriers that should not exist. Men outnumber women by four to one in computer science degrees, which is a subject I studied. Women are less likely to enter tech, stay in the sector or rise to leadership roles.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Will the Minister talk about not just the tech sector, but how there is such a glass ceiling in engineering—there is a huge number of engineering jobs in my constituency—that women rarely manage to get through it? There is also a similar race equality issue in the higher tiers of engineering.

[Seema Malhotra]

Never a truer word was spoken. To building on the hon. Lady’s comment, it is worth the House knowing that, at the current pace, it will take 283 years for women to achieve equal representation in tech. That is why I am proud that the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has launched the Women in Tech taskforce to champion diversity in the UK tech sector, with a pipeline strengthened by stronger engagement with tech in the classroom. There are spaces in which our economy is going to grow, and we need a plan for women to be part of that.

Throughout history, women have consistently been the backbone of our communities, giving their power, time, ideas and more. They have done this in our classrooms, in our offices, in our hospitals, in our military and in the home. History has taught us that despite giving so much, women do not always gain equally to men. Every day, women and girls across the UK challenge the stereotypes so often thrown upon them, but they are our scientists, our teachers, our business leaders, our astronauts, our athletes and so much more. There is nowhere that women and girls should not be able to reach.

But while this Government have women’s equality firmly on the agenda, the battle is not yet won. Increasingly loud voices attempt to dismiss the necessary protections for an inclusive culture at work. Some argue that our existing equality framework has gone too far—that it hinders progress. Let us be clear: these protections embody the British values that women should be treated equally with men, and that people should be treated equally regardless of their race. That is a core British value. It was fought for.

In a Westminster Hall debate last September, a now Reform MP described the Equality Act 2010 as fuelling “a corrosive culture” of grievance. He then called for it to be abolished. It is not a grievance to recognise that a woman who is made redundant for being pregnant, or who leaves work because her employer does not make reasonable adjustments for the menopause, leaves us poorer as individuals, as an economy and as a society.

In this battle, these voices are taking up space online, too. When we see the level of online abuse and intimidation, we must tackle the misogynistic insurgency that threatens to roll back women’s rights and that is having a huge impact on the wellbeing and aspiration of women and girls across our country. The online abuse of women athletes is set to be discussed at the next women’s sports taskforce meeting. I am proud that the offence of creating intimate images without consent was signed into force last month, and that our female Secretary of State announced that it will be made a priority offence under the Online Safety Act 2023, delivering for users the strongest protections from such content.

But this happens against a backdrop of changing social attitudes that we are only just beginning to address. New research from Ipsos MORI and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College business school shows that 31% of gen Z men—born between 1997 and 2012—agree that a wife should always obey her husband, and one third, or 33%, say that a husband should have the final word on important decisions, according to a new global study of 23,000 people in 29 countries. We are in a renewed battle of ideas and new conversations about progress and rights. We also see pressures and influence through online social influencers. This demands our engagement. It is through conversation, legislation, education and campaigning that this Government are determined to keep us moving forward.

With the challenge to women’s inequality now being international, so must our response be. In the year 2000, we led the first UN Security Council resolution on women, peace and security. It was a simple but transformative idea: that peace is more durable when women help to shape it. UN statistics show that when women meaningfully participate in peace processes, the resulting agreement is 64% less likely to fail and 35% more likely to last at least 15 years. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by conflict and more likely to see their rights curtailed. Some 60% of preventable maternal deaths and 53% of deaths of under-fives take place in settings of conflict and displacement.

We continue to use our voice at the United Nations to push for women to be embedded in peace processes, resolutions and humanitarian responses. Indeed, this week Baroness Smith of Malvern and the UK special envoy for women and girls, Harriet Harman, are leading our delegation in New York at the Commission on the Status of Women, because this Government stand in solidarity with women and girls not just in the UK but around the world.

International Women’s Day marks the beginning not only of a month-long celebration of women’s history, but also, I hope, a year of progress and action. The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Give to Gain”, the aim of which is to emphasise the power of reciprocity and support, whether through advocacy, education, mentoring or time, to help to create a more supportive and interconnected world, building new networks in our communities to bring hope, leadership and change, and renewing our determination. Connecting with our sisters at home and abroad will give us a renewed frontline to resist the roll back of our rights and push forward for the progress of women and girls for generations to come.

But this month is about more than reflection; it is about maintaining momentum. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg said:

“Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.”

That is not an observation; it is a directive. It is for us to hold the light up to highlight progress, and to keep fighting for a better world for women and girls everywhere.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the shadow Minister.

13:15

[Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

It is a privilege to respond to the International Women’s Day debate and to follow the Minister for Equalities. It is wonderful to hear her talk about her passion for fighting inequality, fighting for rights and fighting the gender pay gap. I hope very soon to see her in shadow Cabinet—[Interruption.] Yes, I mean the real Cabinet, not with us. That would be terrible for you; you wouldn’t like that! [Laughter.]

This topic is what unites us today in the Chamber: we may have differences of opinion on every topic and come at issues from every ideological point of view, but we are united in our ability to exercise that right to debate and to stand up for women. I am so grateful to be a part of this country and to have those rights that so many women no longer have across the world.

I would like to pay tribute to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and not only for your amazing work here in the Chamber keeping us all under control—a full-time job for anyone. I want to highlight the incredible work that you have done to champion Uyghur women and girls. When everyone was turning their back on Uyghur women and girls, you led the campaign. You tirelessly campaigned across the world to make sure their story was heard and their voice was heard. You worked cross-party on that, so from everyone across the House: thank you for your incredible work. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I am incredibly grateful. It is why I was then sanctioned by the Chinese Communist party—but there are a lot of very powerful women in this room who will not be deterred, regardless of any sanctions.

[Joy Morrissey]

I feel that if one has received sanctions, it is a badge of honour.

First, to honour the international scope of the debate, I would like to take this moment to think about the women of Afghanistan, who have suffered under the Taliban. The life of all human beings is intrinsically valuable and should always be remembered. Afghan women, whose rights have been systematically dismantled with 100 decrees to restrict their freedom of movement, education, work and expression, to visit a doctor or to have financial freedom. There is no protection there against violence, beatings and forced child marriage. May we remember them today and how quickly the rights we take for granted can disappear.

Across the House and throughout our great country, women have shaped our communities, strengthened our institutions—throughout the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth—and led with courage, determination and resilience. Women are leaders in business, education, science, the armed forces, charities and voluntary organisations, and, of course, here in Parliament.

We must also recognise the women who contribute but who are often not recognised: the carers who support their families every day, with no thanks and no recognition; the volunteers who hold our communities together; the mothers, daughters, sisters and friends who provide strength and stability in the times we need it most. I have often spoken in this House about the importance of service, both to our communities and to our country. That spirit of sacrifice and service is embodied by countless women across the United Kingdom who quietly make an extraordinary difference in the lives of others. May we recognise their contributions today.

[Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend join me in thanking and celebrating the fantastic women of Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, who do exactly what she has just described in businesses, in our local democracy, in our third sector and in shaping the futures of our girls in community groups and schools?

[Joy Morrissey]

I wholeheartedly agree about praising the unpraised volunteers—the community organisers and those who make our towns and villages what they are. It is so important that we highlight their contributions today.

In my constituency of Beaconsfield, Marlow and the south Bucks villages, I see inspiring and dedicated women every single day. I see carers fighting for their disabled children, like Hazel, who is fighting for the Burnham day centre to remain open. I see healthcare professionals at Wexham Park hospital. I see entrepreneurs like Ally and Lissie Mackintosh, who are now global presenters for F1 and leading the way in lifestyle influencing—I wish I had their social media talents. I see volunteers dedicating their time to strengthening our communities. Their contributions should remind us that leadership is not confined to these corridors of power, but exists in every town, village and neighbourhood across the nation.

I pay tribute to the Taplow and Hitcham women’s institute for its tireless service to our community and for its wonderful 100th anniversary celebration of the branch and its building, which was opened 100 years ago by Lady Astor. We owe a great debt to the women who went before us, and none more so than Nancy Astor, who was a pioneer for women in Parliament—and, with her early pioneering, brought early exposure to the American accent in this place. It has taken this place 100 years to recover, and it will probably take another 100 years to recover from mine, but we live in hope!

Nancy Astor was a pioneer in other ways, too. She fought for children and, more importantly, the vulnerable; supported initiatives to protect children, including raising the age of consent; and fought to tackle children living in appalling conditions, helping countless women and girls. In Nancy Astor, we saw a female leader prepared to confront the uncomfortable and to endure hostility and carry on, including when many opposed her campaigns—even Churchill. It is wonderful to follow in her footsteps. That leadership and determination to fight for the voiceless lives on in many outstanding women today.

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

The hon. Lady raises Nancy Astor, of whom there is a statue in Plymouth. There are 11 statues for people to view in my constituency, but none are of women. Does she agree that it is important that women throughout history are also represented in statue form? Would she therefore join my campaign to erect a statue outside Chichester cathedral of the amazing suffragist, Ethel Margaret Turner—known affectionately as Madge Turner? She was our own suffragette in Chichester, and this campaign has been launched by Chichester Women’s History. Does the hon. Lady agree that we should all get behind it?

[Joy Morrissey]

I absolutely agree. I support the hon. Member in pursuing this wonderful statue for Madge and lend my full support to that campaign.

It is fitting that the UN’s theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls”. Those are three important words—rights, justice, action—that matter to women and girls. It is fitting because there are many areas where rights, justice and the call to action have been pursued by inspirational women in the face of hostility not dissimilar to what Nancy Astor faced in her time. Many Members across the House have also faced similar challenges. No matter what party they are from, I must respect the courage of many women who have gone before me, blazing the trail by coming to this Chamber and fighting for our rights, including the right to be heard. It is thanks to their contributions and sacrifice that we are allowed to debate today.

I would like to mention a Member of this House who has battled for safe spaces for women and sex-based rights, which is the foundation from which true protection for women and girls needs to start. None has fought that battle with more energy, resilience and determination than the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield). She has fought tirelessly to protect children and women and girls, and deserves our thanks and respect for all she has done. In the other place, my noble Friends Baroness Jenkin of Kennington and Baroness Davies of Devonport led the way in protecting women and girls; they too faced much hostility, but were never deterred from doing what they believed to be right.

A champion of women-only spaces and the defence of biological sex outside of this House is J. K. Rowling, a woman who has been nothing short of inspirational. She has faced down personal threats to her safety, determined to ensure that the rights of women are heard. The Leader of the Opposition has also firmly taken a stance to protect women and girls for years when very few joined her to stand up for those safe spaces. It is for that reason that we must also be clear that, as a society, we have failed many young girls for far too long.

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

I would like to make the point that there are many people with different views across this House, many of which I agree with. The hon. Lady makes a very good point in naming some individuals, but there are also many other women who stand up for sex-based rights. I would like to say that on the Floor of the House. I thank her for her words.

[Joy Morrissey]

I thank the hon. Member for that point. Many women from all kinds of different ideological perspectives have contributed to this debate, and I thank them.

[Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)]

We should also recognise that some people have also been transphobic. We must be mindful that a lot of trans people feel very vulnerable at this time; some have committed suicide. Can we also hold them in our thoughts in this debate?

[Joy Morrissey]

I thank the hon. Member for that very nuanced contribution. I also thank her for being the first female of colour at the Dispatch Box, leading the way, and Chairman of a Select Committee. She is someone who all Members of this House, from every party, respect and admire; I thank her for everything she does.

As we try to protect young women and girls, there has been no clearer or more scandalous a failure than the rape gangs scandal that we are confronting now. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) who have raised this matter in Parliament, along with Alex Stafford, who is no longer in this place, and the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson)—a cross-party effort—who have raised this issue time and again, while very few other Members of this House did. I commend them for being brave enough to do so. [Interruption.] Yes, there are so many I am not able to thank today, but I want to recognise them as best as I can. Baroness Casey has said that too many shied away from the issue of ethnicity in the rape gangs scandal. Those hon. Members did not, and that shows real leadership by Members in a cross-party way to protect women and girls.

This International Women’s Day, let us unite in clear determination. Where Nancy Astor led in confronting injustice for the voiceless, the parliamentarians of today will follow. We will speak up for the right of women to women-only spaces. We will make sure that, no matter the community, ethnicity or religion involved, we will never again let a scandal like the rape gangs go unchallenged. As someone who has fought for years for women and girls and fought against sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation, I think that every Member of the House should look at how we can protect women and girls, no matter who or where they are. I believe that is something we can all agree on.

For International Women’s Day to matter, it must be more than symbolic. It must combine celebration with action. It must be a further catalyst for rights, justice and action for women and girls. It must harden our resolve to ensure safety for all women and girls. It must set in clear focus our collective determination that this will be a country in which women and girls from every race, religion and creed are able to contribute their talents, with the certainty that we will keep them safe. For rights, justice and action, our women and girls deserve nothing less.

13:31

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)]

I thank the inspirational speakers we have heard so far. International Women’s Day feels particularly poignant to me this year, and there are two reasons for that. The first is watching the women in Iran. The reason why this has particularly affected me is because of the six-year fight to bring back my constituent Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, which many Members, including you, Madam Deputy Speaker, will remember. During that time, I encountered the brutality of the Iranian regime whenever we tried to negotiate her return to our country. The way that they treated her was like she was nothing, in all honesty—they attached a worthlessness to her identity.

Now we are watching women fighting just for education and the right to dress the way they want—just for the right to live. Bombing primary schools full of little girls is something that is really hard to fathom. Every morning, no matter what happens, we can wake up feeling very lucky because we know that we can walk to work or get on the tube and we will be safe. Our thoughts today are with the people in Iran who are fighting for justice, especially the women.

The second reason that International Women’s Day feels particularly poignant to me is because of the case I am dealing with of Bright Horizons nursery in my constituency, which some Members will have heard me speak about. Vincent Chan operated for seven years undetected, preying on little girls, toddlers and babies, inflicting pain on them and conducting sexual abuse— something that he had already done in previous workplace. He went undetected and was given a job in a place where parents entrusted staff to look after their children while they were at work.

Parents only found out about the abuse because he had been reported by a brave whistleblower for acts of cruelty towards children—for bullying, not for sexual abuse. It was only when police decided to seize his devices, including nursery iPads, that he was discovered. He had filmed himself committing acts of sexual violence against little girls in the nursery itself, and he had used the iPads to airdrop the images to his own devices. This makes us realise that the fight is not over and that there is so much more work we have to do to combat violence against women and girls. I am pleased to be here today, surrounded by women who have been fighting that fight, and I hope that people like Vincent Chan get justice and end up behind bars.

I want to pay tribute to all the mothers of the children who were affected in the nursery. They have made sure that this will never happen again. They are the ones who are fighting for mandatory CCTV. They are the ones who are fighting to make sure that there is a “two person per child” rule in every room in every nursery. They are the ones who are now fighting for a flare system so that whistleblowing can be done properly and without fear and nurseries are not able to mark their own homework.

However, every time I speak about this case, I make sure that I say that for all the cases of sexual abuse in nurseries and early years settings that have happened, there are hundreds of thousands of other babysitters and nursery staff who look after children day in, day out and make sure that they are loved and protected. We must not tar everyone with the same brush, but we do need to take this seriously, and something does need to be done.

Today I want to talk mainly about my brave constituent Sanju Pal, who is in the Gallery. The focus of the UN for this International Women’s Day is, as the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Joy Morrissey) said, rights, justice and action. Across the world, women and girls have just 64% of the rights that men have. That is why I want to concentrate on Sanju’s case. Some Members will have heard me mention Sanju before. After six years of fighting a legal battle against her former employer—a management consultancy firm— for unfair dismissal, she won a landmark case at the Employment Appeal Tribunal in London. Her case sets a legal precedent for endometriosis to be considered a disability under the Equality Act 2010.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I hope you will indulge me while I talk about Sanju Pal’s case, because I feel that everyone in this Chamber, and everyone in the world, should listen to what she had to go through. In 2018 Sanju was diagnosed with severe endometriosis, and had large fluid-filled cysts on both her ovaries, requiring an immediate operation. She returned to work a month later in severe pain. She was bleeding and could hardly walk, because she had been pushing herself too much for a promotion to senior manager. She told HR in explicit detail how much pain she was in.

Three months after her phased return to work ended, and without any warning, Sanju was sacked. She was told to leave the building immediately and not to contact anyone. She was told, “Do not contact any of the colleagues you have been working with for 10 years now; just get out and leave the building quietly.” She had worked there for 10 years, and she told me that her entire life was based around her work and making sure that she looked after people she was serving at Accenture.

Sanju was sacked for not being ready for promotion within a required timeframe. This is known as the “up or out” policy, used by many corporates, where employees can be dismissed if their manager believes that they cannot be promoted. The termination letter—which, by the way, she received minutes after that meeting—did not state any actual reason for her dismissal. It also did not inform her of her right to appeal, and nor did it refer to the policy that was being followed.

As a Camden girl through and through, who went to Camden School for Girls, Sanju decided not to take this lying down. She took it to an internal tribunal, and the High Court later found that this panel had completely disregarded what she had written in her impact statement. When she then took it to tribunal, the panel ruled that she had not proved that her illness had an ongoing substantial effect on her daily life, and stated that many women with endometriosis had mild symptoms or none at all. The tribunal rejected her claim for disability discrimination and lacked any understanding of the physical impact of her health condition on her own body. She appealed that decision, and the High Court eventually ruled that she was unfairly dismissed from her job without her employer following a fair capability procedure or providing any reasonable adjustments after she was disabled because of her health condition.

I am so proud of Sanju for her tireless campaigning since her unfair dismissal in 2019. Employers must now follow this judgment on considering endometriosis as a disability and providing reasonable adjustments. More needs to be done to ensure that this does not happen to other women who are left physically disabled by endometriosis and other gynaecological conditions. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Ms Oppong-Asare) has done some brilliant work in this area for years now, but we need a collective voice. We need everyone in the Chamber to stand up and speak about this, because it has been a taboo for too long now.

It is shocking, if the Minister is listening, that not a single gynaecological condition was introduced into the disability guidance of the Equality Act. That basic change could have saved Sanju her job, as well as so much time, money and anxiety, as she spent six years fighting for this unfair dismissal. It could also have made a huge difference for countless other women whom we have not heard about and who are facing the same discrimination in the workplace across the country. One in 10 women suffer from endometriosis, and 69% of sufferers say that they face discrimination at work. Such cases are far too common, leaving one in six women with endometriosis unemployed because of their condition.

Women should not be forced to go to a tribunal just to get the rights that they deserve. That is why I believe that women with endometriosis should be given specific workplace adjustments and the right to reasonable adjustments for their condition. Alongside that, endometriosis should be listed under reoccurring and fluctuating impairments in the guidance for the Equality Act, so that employers actually understand their legal duty to provide reasonable adjustments to women who are suffering because of the condition.

[Dawn Butler]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. You may be coming to this, but it is an incredible—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I do not wish to correct any one of our fantastic female parliamentarians, but “you” means me. One more time: Dawn Butler.

[Dawn Butler]

Thank you, and you are amazing, Madam Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend may be coming to this, but my friend Elaine Banton was the lawyer in the case she refers to. I want to put that on record alongside my hon. Friend’s excellent remarks about her constituent.

[Tulip Siddiq]

I thank my hon. Friend. Elaine Banton definitely deserves a mention in the workplace as well.

There is a lot more I would like to say about this important case, but I am conscious that many women want to speak. However, I just want to mention that when I was growing up—I grew up in a Muslim Asian household—I did not hear anything about endometriosis. I never heard the word “menopause” when growing up. If I was ever on my period, I was told to quickly move away, listen and change, and make sure that my brother did not hear anything. There is a point at which we need to change that.

My mother was very forward in other ways. Growing up in a Muslim household, on Friday nights we always had dinner with our Jewish neighbours. She was very clear about the fact that in our house we could celebrate Christmas, Eid, Durga Puja and Hanukkah—we could do whatever we wanted because we were citizens of the world. But we were simply not allowed to mention our period, menopause or endometriosis. For Sanju’s case, but also for all the South-Asian mothers who are listening out there, this is the time when we need to break the taboo. We need to talk about conditions that affect women, particularly when they affect young girls as well, so that, if they are affected by those conditions in the workplace, they do not feel ashamed and like they have to hide.

[Mr Calvin Bailey (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly powerful point. However, if we are really going to change things, we need fathers to speak to their daughters. I recall making a deliberate point when my daughter started menstruating. I was standing in the supermarket trying to assess and understand what I was faced with, with the wall of things, with people coming up to me and asking, “Do you want some help?”, and me saying, “No, I need to work my way through this.” We need men to advocate and understand these things as well.

[Tulip Siddiq]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend, who is a staunch feminist—one of the reasons why he will speak in this debate.

I will finish by saying that the justice served to Sanju is a victory not just for her, but for the countless women across the country who have fought so hard to get reasonable adjustments in the workplace. I hope that the Minister will consider this case and that legislation will follow from the Labour Government to ensure that women never again have to face discrimination in the workplace.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. These are really fantastic speeches. So that I do not have to interrupt them, let me say that “you” and “your”, unless you are referring to the Chair, should not be said at all. I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

13:44

[Alex Brewer (North East Hampshire) (LD)]

This year’s theme, as we have heard, is “Give to Gain”. That prompted me to think about feminism on a global scale, and how interconnected we truly all are. Our globalised world is far from being made up of isolated countries, bounded by iron borders; we exist in the physical space and online. Our geopolitical landscape is shifting constantly, and feminism must move with it.

The experiences of women are shaped by overlapping factors of race, class, disability, migration status, sexuality, faith and geography. Feminism policy cannot be effective if it only reflects the lives of the most privileged. Some of the gravest injustices faced by women globally include physical violence, forced marriage and economic exclusion, and they fall hardest on those who are at multiple intersections of disadvantage. Progress for women is never a zero-sum game. When we lift up the most marginalised, we all rise. That is why “Give to Gain” is such an important theme. It has made me reflect that we as a country and a society must give overseas aid if we are to help build a more progressive, fair and stable world.

Today, I want to raise one of the most difficult and taboo subjects in the area of violence against women and girls, but one that we must confront: female genital mutilation, commonly known as FGM or cutting. It is a sensitive and distressing topic, but to break taboos, we must start to articulate the problem. Female genital mutilation comprises all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or injury to the female genital organs for any non-medical reasons. It is steeped in misguided ideas of a woman’s virtue—ideas that are pervasive, and that manifest in all cultures in different ways, of which FGM is, I believe, one of the most insidious and violent.

In January, I travelled to The Gambia as part of a delegation from the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. FGM was made illegal in The Gambia in 2015, yet the practice continues. In fact, to avoid detection, cutting is now carried out on increasingly younger girls, and sometimes even on babies, with devastating and sometimes fatal consequences. The practice has no health benefits and causes lifelong problems, including severe bleeding, incontinence, infections, long-term pain, menstrual problems, complications in childbirth and an increased risk of newborn deaths. Beyond that clear physical trauma, many women live with depression, flashbacks and lifelong psychological scars. It is a form of torture.

FGM is a serious violation of human rights and bodily autonomy, not a cultural inevitability, and more than 4 million girls are at risk every single year, yet in The Gambia, I also saw hope. I saw the profound impact of not-for-profit and grassroots organisations, who work creatively and sensitively in communities to remove economic and cultural barriers to change. Data gathering is difficult in a country with such severe poverty, but initial estimates suggest that the prevalence of FGM has fallen: it has gone from affecting around 76% of girls to around 51%.

Non-governmental organisations and grassroots women’s organisations are uniquely effective, because they are trusted by families and embedded in communities. Those organisations are part-funded by British overseas aid, which this Government are now reducing. Those organisations’ funding runs out this year, just as the message is starting to get through. The reduction in aid tears holes in the safety net for the world’s most vulnerable communities, and leaves young girls more exposed. The Government’s decision to reduce the United Kingdom’s official development assistance from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income will have real-world consequences. It represents the lowest United Kingdom aid contribution as a share of gross national income since 1999 and diminishes our long-standing reputation as a global leader in humanitarian assistance.

In our report on FGM, the Women and Equalities Committee was clear: the Government must protect funding for programmes that prevent FGM and set out their plans for future investment in that vital work. Instead, in their response, the Government confirmed that their flagship programme to end FGM will finish in October 2026, and that there are no plans at all for what comes next. That is not just disappointing; it is deeply irresponsible.

When Britain invests in the freedom and wellbeing of girls globally, we gain a safer, fairer and more stable world. That is why, when the Liberal Democrats were in government, we secured a commitment of 0.7% of gross national income for overseas aid. FGM is, of course, illegal here too, but in today’s global society, British girls are being taken abroad to undergo cutting in areas with fewer protections. In the last decade, more than 41,000 women and girls have had FGM identified at an NHS appointment in this country, yet in the five-year period between 2019 and 2024, there was just one conviction under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003. Protection must not stop at the border. Intervention must happen before a child boards a plane and after she lands. Frontline non-governmental organisations in source countries are often best placed to prevent FGM.

The practice of FGM is rooted in gender inequality, control of girls’ bodies and forced silence. True solidarity means recognising that their struggle is our struggle. By supporting global efforts to end FGM through aid and diplomacy, the UK helps to meet its international commitments and reduces the chance of FGM happening to people who live here. The Government must not be complicit in halting the progress on preventing such violence against girls, no matter where they are born. Understanding intersectionality is vital to feminism today, and I call on the Government to recognise that, in our interconnected world, solving violent crime against women and girls everywhere is everyone’s responsibility.

13:49

[Ms Abena Oppong-Asare (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to speak in this International Women’s Day debate. We reflect on the women who created International Women’s Day, and the women who have left a mark every day since then—women across the worlds of politics, trade unionism, business, science and the arts, who are making strides forward in the face of ignorance and misogyny, and who are taking a sledgehammer to the glass ceiling, smashing through the barriers and making space for those who have followed.

I reflect on the women who have lit the pathway to my place in Parliament. The right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), the Mother of the House, is an inspiration to so many of us. I am also thinking of Baroness Harman and Baroness Amos in the other place, and of you, Madam Deputy Speaker, as well as my hon. Friends on the Front Bench, the Minister for Equalities and the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls—you have such a long title. [Hon. Members: “She!”] She has such a long title. I also reflect on all the women I have met in my years leading the Labour Women’s Network. These are the giants on whose shoulders we stand. They lift us up, and we, in turn, must lift others in Parliament, in our communities and globally.

We have heard about the status of women globally. Across the globe, women are denied basic rights—the right to go to school, have a job, and be paid equally—equal legal rights, and basic freedoms. For example, in Afghanistan, 2.2 million girls are banned from secondary school by the Taliban. Only a quarter of women have jobs. It is particularly cruel that Afghan women are barred from entering the medical professions, but the Taliban ban women from being treated by men, so women are denied basic medical care. In Iran, women hold only 64% of the legal rights enjoyed by men. They require permission from their husband to get a passport or travel abroad. Girls as young as 13 can be married if a male judge decrees it. There are no criminal offences of rape within marriage or violence in the home. It is women who are leading the resistance to the ayatollahs in Iran, risking everything for justice and liberation.

We should take inspiration from the women standing up for their rights around the world and here at home. I am proud that we have passed the Employment Rights Act 2025, because it is women who will benefit the most, especially low-paid women, women of colour and working-class women. Workers will have a right to guaranteed hours for the first time, which means clarity about how much they will earn, and the stability to plan childcare and family expenditure. That will be life-changing for millions of families.

None of these steps forward comes from a clear blue sky. They come from decades of struggle, argument, reversals and defeats, and steps forward and progress. They are the result of suffragettes campaigning for political rights, and the likes of Barbara Castle campaigning for economic rights. Yes, we have seen progress on social, political and economic fronts, but equality is still a distant dream. The Minister mentioned pay. According to the Office for National Statistics, median weekly earnings for female employees working full time were £710 in April 2025, compared with £815 for male full-time employees.

Equal pay remains some way off, as does healthcare. The harsh truth is that women continue to get a raw deal in the healthcare system. We do not enjoy true equality in the NHS. We have a system shaped and largely run by men—a system in which women’s health is a secondary concern. There is still a “male by default” culture in healthcare. I have been campaigning for faster treatment for endometriosis and fibroids. One in 10 women suffer from these painful and incurable conditions, yet the average time that women wait for diagnosis has gone up from eight years to nearly 10—to nine years and four months. For women of colour, who face the double whammy of racism and sexism, the time has gone up to 11 years.

Women are waiting in pain for years. Their concerns are dismissed and their pains are ignored. I have said it before, and I will say it again: no offence, but if one in 10 men suffered from a painful, incurable disease, there would be faster treatment, research into cures, time off work, and a systematic and sympathetic hearing from society. As it is, women face ignorance, discrimination and stigma when they present with crippling, blinding pain and heavy bleeding.

In this debate on International Women’s Day, I pay tribute to Georgie Wileman for creating her brilliant film “This is Endometriosis”. I was delighted to see it win best short film at the BAFTAs this year; it is truly well-deserved recognition. I also commend the work of the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), and the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on endometriosis, my hon. Friend the Member for Bathgate and Linlithgow (Kirsteen Sullivan). I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Tulip Siddiq), who has been supporting a constituent who was dismissed after working in her organisation for 10 years because of her endometriosis condition. Sanju Pal, you are an inspiration to us all. Thank you for the work you have done with your MP to make sure that this hits us nationally.

I have argued that the solutions must include enhanced training for GPs to speed up diagnosis, and improving the education of young people and women on the menstrual cycle. I look forward to the new women’s health strategy, which I hope places women front and centre in the striving for equality for women in the NHS. I welcome the shifts towards greater use of technology, local diagnosis hubs and greater awareness about women’s health conditions, but of course, we have far further to march.

I take enormous inspiration from the women and girls I meet in my constituency—fearless, driven and dedicated women who want to live out their potential. I want to take this opportunity to name a few. Chiamaka Muoneke is a dedicated wife, mother and community champion in Thamesmead who supports others through healthy cooking workshops. Jattinder Rai is the CEO of Bexley Voluntary Service Council, and she supports charities, communities and local people in my constituency and beyond. Shantel Morris, who I met in one of my constituency surgeries, shared her experience of homelessness and spoke about her aim to provide support to local people and families facing eviction or living in temporary accommodation. I was delighted to see her organisation hit the ground when I attended last October’s launch of the Morris Mission in Erith, where she now provides training and support for local people.

Jo Dunkley at Off The Ropes has done an incredible job of bringing this brilliant charity to life through her passion for boxing, shared by so many. The charity supports local adults facing mental health challenges to build confidence, resilience and lasting connections through sport. I was delighted to cut the ribbon at its new gym in Abbey Wood last November. Since then, it has gone from strength to strength, and I give huge credit to Jo for making that happen.

I also pay tribute to the staff at the Community Hospice, of which I am a patron—in particular, Aneta Saunders, who is stepping into the CEO role, having been director of income generation, and Dr Lesley Bull, the medical director, who is helping to steady the team through their leadership transition. Finally, although I have mentioned her in previous speeches on International Women’s Day, I want to mention once again the brilliant Kate Heaps. Kate has been the chief executive of Community Hospice for nearly two decades. She has grown the hospice’s work and fought hard to improve hospice care locally and nationally. I pay tribute to her and wish her the best of luck in her next steps.

In this International Women’s Day debate, I want to highlight that I am proud of what this Government have achieved so far towards a fairer, more equal society and economy. I am lifted up by my sisters in Parliament and the amazing women I meet on a day-to-day basis in politics and around this place. Even in the darkest times, amid all the uncertainty, we support each other, we uphold our convictions and our passions, and we uplift each other in representing those in our constituencies and beyond and campaigning on issues that are important to our constituents.

11:46

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

In this International Women’s Day debate, I rise to say a few words about the women and girls in Afghanistan, as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afghan women and girls. I note that the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Ms Oppong-Asare) also referred to their experiences.

I saw comments in the Telegraph at the weekend saying that the fact International Women’s Day is marked in Afghanistan shows that the day is meaningless. I beg to differ, particularly given the number of us who are here on a Thursday afternoon. Factually, it is not listed as a holiday in Afghanistan, and we are not seeing celebrations, protests, debates or marketing based on the day itself there, simply because that is not possible for women and girls in Afghanistan. Afghanistan remains a member of the UN, which marks the day, but we do not need to formally ban something to effectively do so—not when women cannot gather and cannot speak, even in their own homes if they can be heard outside them. None the less, there is value to International Women’s Day, and I believe that even in the darkest of circumstances, there is still value in this day to the women of Afghanistan.

As we are hearing in this debate, International Women’s Day is about so many struggles but also celebrations. The women of Afghanistan’s struggles and the celebration of their resilience have equal value today. When they cannot speak for themselves, those of us with voices internationally can do so. Indeed, elevating the voices of Afghan women is what the APPG was set up to do.

There is no sugarcoating it: it is bleak in Afghanistan. A new penal code was introduced in January that has effectively legalised domestic violence, including sexual assault within marriages. Husbands are explicitly authorised to discipline their wives for non-specified transgressions. The only crime on the books is a husband beating his wife with a stick, causing severe injury such as a broken bone. The burden of proof for that offence lies on the woman, and the punishment if proven is just 15 days in prison. Injuring animals carries a greater penalty in Afghanistan. I doubt we will ever see a prosecution under that law, given that gathering the proof would require the husband who has committed the assault chaperoning his wife to hospital to get the evidential X-ray required.

On the other hand, if a woman tries to leave a marriage by visiting her father or relatives and does so without her husband’s consent or refuses to return—we can imagine circumstances where somebody would look to do that, to escape domestic violence in their house—she can go to prison for three months. If a woman is found to have abandoned Islam—and I believe we are talking here about the Taliban’s interpretation of the faith, which many disagree with—she can be jailed indefinitely, with 10 lashes daily until she chooses to return to the religion.

There are severe restrictions on working, to which the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead referred. Some organisations in some areas have negotiated the right for women to keep their jobs. Women can still provide healthcare, though increasingly women are being denied the right to have healthcare training, and we can easily see what that means for the future of maternal and female care in Afghanistan. We are certainly a long way away from there being freedom to work, and financial autonomy is simply not a reality.

The future for the next generation is even bleaker. Girls are growing up without completing their education, and with women being unable to have medical training, there will come a point when there are no women left to provide healthcare. The reality is that in a country at war, at the forefront of the climate crisis, where 17 million people faced acute hunger this winter, and with millions of displaced people returning from its neighbours, including Iran, it is women who are bearing the brunt of the desolation.

I am aware that in setting out this reality, I am not elevating the experiences, feelings or voices of any one woman. There are 25 million women in Afghanistan, and each and every one of them should have the right to speak, to live freely and, indeed, to live at all. Prior to 2021, they were able to do so. On this International Women’s Day, I would like to see commitments from the Government to the women and girls of Afghanistan.

I do not agree with the Government’s decision to close the door on the safe and legal routes for refuge or to study or work. I was told on Monday in the Chamber by the Minister for Border Security and Asylum, who was responding to the urgent question on the Government’s immigration policy, that this is about ensuring that universities are not making the decisions on who gets to stay here. But if there are no other ways for people to seek safe refuge here, it is not surprising that they take that opportunity, and if they no longer have that opportunity, it will not be surprising if they revert to irregular routes, by which I mean the small boats that we all say we want to prevent.

Having made that decision, the Government must do more in Afghanistan—much more. In opening the debate, the Minister talked about the work the Government do overseas, but I beg to differ on that assessment. Afghanistan is not one of the countries the Government have ringfenced as they look to cut official development assistance spending, but Afghanistan is apparently a priority. I would like to understand what that means.

It is important that we recognise the strength of Afghan women. The APPG has had the privilege of hearing from several Afghan women in the last year, as well as NGOs and academics who have spent time on the ground. We have heard a lot, unsurprisingly, about the loss of hope, but we have also heard about the unbelievable resilience. Afghan women live in unthinkable circumstances for any of us here, but they keep on. While this is a speech setting out terrible things, I am not asking people to pity women and girls in Afghanistan; in talking about them, I am asking for action. I know that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, were previously a member of the APPG in the last Parliament and know how supportive you were and continue to be.

To end, I want to share the remarks that the APPG heard last year from a female medical practitioner on the ground. She said that she spoke to us as parliamentarians

“as a witness to the quiet suffering and untold strength of Afghan women. These stories are not just tragic, they are powerful. And they must inform policy decisions and humanitarian priorities moving forward.”

I urge the Government to heed those words.

14:09

[Samantha Niblett (South Derbyshire) (Lab)]

It is my absolute pleasure to speak in this year’s debate to mark International Women’s Day. This important day gives us an opportunity not only to reflect on how far women have come—and, disappointingly, how far we have yet to go—but to recognise the women who continue to shape and strengthen our communities every single day. I want to use my time to celebrate some of the remarkable women across South Derbyshire who make a real difference. Making people feel seen in this place is my absolute favourite thing to do.

First, Kalila Storey is my right-hand woman in the constituency. She runs my office, and I honestly do not know what I would do without her. I am sure that many of us across the House share that experience, with incredible women in their teams. I would like to give a shout-out to Lib Orme and correct a mistake I made in business questions this morning when I did not recognise her as being the founder of “I love Swad”, a Facebook page with almost 46,500 members—an incredible achievement. I also want to mention Lesley Aspey. I hope that she feels seen by me for the woman she is, both in the constituency as her MP and in this place—she will know why I have mentioned her name.

In Melbourne, Sharon Brown is the driving force behind the wonderfully vibrant Melbourne festival of arts and architecture, which last year celebrated its 20th year. She also manages the Creative Melbourne gallery. Through her work, she has brought art, culture and creativity to the heart of her community, creating opportunities for artists and inspiring residents and visitors alike. Also using creativity as a force for good is Julie Batten, director of People Express. Julie has led the organisation since 1992, and under her leadership it has used the arts as a powerful tool for engagement, working with a diverse range of people across our community and enabling them to become writers, filmmakers and artists of their own stories. Her work helps ensure that creativity is truly accessible to everyone.

Supporting local enterprise is Keelie Briggs, a marketing expert who provides networking opportunities for businesses across South Derbyshire, particularly in Swadlincote. She is a passionate champion of small businesses and organises the annual small business showcase, giving local entrepreneurs a platform to grow and succeed. Entrepreneurship is also embodied by Elaine Penhaul, the founder of Lemon and Lime Interiors, whose business has grown into a highly successful company supporting homeowners and property professionals alike. Supporting that growth with her is Katie Lavis, who started her own business and now works with Lemon and Lime as it continues to expand. Another fantastic local entrepreneur is Tracey Payne, who exemplifies the work, determination and creativity of women running small businesses in our community.

Public service is another area where women across South Derbyshire make an enormous contribution. Angela Archer, chair of South Derbyshire district council, is a passionate advocate for children with special educational needs and disabilities. As a parent of SEND children herself, she co-founded the charity Shout to support families navigating the challenges that SEND can bring. Keddie Bailey quietly supports families of SEND children, demonstrating the compassion and commitment that empower families at times of significant challenge.

In the voluntary sector, I want to recognise the work of Hollie Benton, chief executive of South Derbyshire Community Voluntary Support, and Petra Parker, who manages its food hub. Together they support local people to access food parcels and befriending services, and provide help to return home after a hospital stay, as well as a wide range of support, ensuring that no one in our community feels alone when they need help the most. Ingrid van der Weide, editor of the local publication SwadStyle, keeps residents informed about what is happening across Swadlincote and the surrounding area. She also leads the wonderful Swadlincote festival of words taking place this month, which celebrates literature, storytelling and creativity for all ages.

Our cultural heritage is also being preserved thanks to Becca King, the museum manager at Sharpe’s pottery museum, who works tirelessly to ensure that our local history is accessible, engaging and celebrated. I also recognise Peggy Moore, whose dedication to remembrance in our community is truly extraordinary. Peggy has spent countless hours knitting poppies, creating a life-size knitted Tommy soldier and collecting donations for the Royal British Legion poppy appeal. Her dedication ensures that the sacrifices of those who served are never forgotten.

I also want to recognise Maria Hanson MBE, founder of the charity Me & Dee. Since founding the charity in 2006, Maria has dedicated herself to supporting families facing life-changing and life-limiting conditions. Her vision, compassion and determination have helped thousands of families across the UK, and this remarkable work has been recognised with the charity being awarded the King’s award for voluntary service.

In my constituency, there are women whose leadership continues to inspire long after they have left public office. One such person is Edwina Currie, the first female MP for South Derbyshire. To this day, residents still speak fondly of her to me as a dedicated constituency MP who worked tirelessly on their behalf. I would like to give a special mention to Margaret Garner, an absolute gem in our community—Repton in particular. Margaret, now in her 80s, is an incredibly loyal and supportive friend, a volunteer for many activities in Repton, and swears like a trooper. She is the kind of person who lifts those around her, brings humour and honesty wherever she goes, and reminds us all of the strength and spirit that run through so many women in our communities.

Of course, none of us would be here today without the women who came before us and fought to open the doors of democracy. One such woman from my constituency is Hannah Mitchell, a suffragette who lived in Newhall in the early 1900s. She was an activist and rebel, and one of the many women who challenged inequality and fought for women’s right to take part in public life.

The women I have mentioned come from many different walks of life, from business, the arts, public service, charity work and community leadership. What unites them is their determination to make the places where they live better for others. There are, of course, so many incredible women across South Derbyshire. Giving a few shout-outs today inevitably means that I will have missed someone, but I hope this speech goes some way towards recognising the extraordinary contribution that women make across our communities every single day.

[Mr Speaker]

We now have a maiden speech. I remind everyone that there are no interventions during maiden speeches. I call Hannah Spencer.

14:09

[Hannah Spencer (Gorton and Denton) (Green)]

Four weeks ago today, I was in college, a plumber learning how to plaster, and today I am in Parliament as an MP. Being here is the honour of my life, but I do not want this to be unusual or exceptional. I truly believe that anyone doing a job like mine should get a seat on these Benches.

Where I am from, we are taught to look after each other, to look out for each other, to stick up for each other and to stick together—to see each other as human. I am so proud of that humanity and that people in Gorton, Denton, Burnage, Levenshulme, Longsight and Abbey Hey feel that way too. It is in our blood and in our bones—we see each other as human.

Where I am from, we give a nod to the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst. We remember the farm worker and seamstress Hannah Mitchell, the trade unionist Mary Quaile and the mill worker Annie Kenney—and, of course, Elsie Plant, who is from just down the road from me and who I named one of my beautiful greyhounds after. I think of these brilliant women a lot, and especially today as we debate International Women’s Day.

I think of many others, too, from pits, slums and factories; the women who changed the system so that I could be here; the women of colour whose names we will never know because history did not bother to recognise or remember them. But we do today, because without their struggle, their fight and their determination to stick together, none of this could be possible. It is bittersweet to recognise these brilliant people but to be reminded that we still need to try to be them.

The constituency that elected me is the 15th most deprived in the country. It has suffered decades of neglect and broken promises. We see that every day right in front of us, in the litter and fly-tipping, the state of housing, the struggle for a job you can build a life on, the filthy and polluted air, and the reduced life chances—the sheer unfairness of it all.

My constituency has been hit hard by the ongoing cost of living crisis. None of this is fair, none of it is right and none of it happens by accident. So I very much share my predecessor’s strong commitment to tackling health inequalities and putting local people and all our communities at the heart of decision making. That is how we begin to turn things around, to give people agency and a genuine chance of a better today and a better tomorrow.

To the girls I saw photos of, going to school on International Women’s Day dressed as Hannah the Plumber, with their overalls and spanners, and the trademark hair. To the 10-year-old boy at HideOut who rock-climbed an incredibly high wall with me, saw me become suddenly very terrified of how far up I was, and said, “Don’t ever give up. And if it’s scary looking down then just look at what’s in front of you.”

To the women in my life who have had my back and fought for equality alongside me. To the men I work with—especially the lads on my plastering course, who dealt very well with my new-found spotlight in the middle of our training. To those men who will suffer the effects of this unequal society through their mental health. To the veterans I know who were willing to risk everything, and came home and found that society was turning its back on them.

To the white working classes, who are always lumped into one group and never appreciated. To everyone who will have nowhere to sleep tonight, or will barely exist in a cold, damp and insecure home. To my trans siblings who get blamed for everything. To the Muslims everywhere, who are constantly, and often violently, scapegoated. To the disabled people who cannot access the world because of structural inequality that is completely fixable. To the people of colour, who have to work harder at everything.

I do not always get it, and I will not say that I always understand it, but what I do know is what it feels like to be looked down on, to be let down and left behind, to be less worthy because of something about me. Our struggles may be different, but our humanity is the same. We always stick together, we always fight for each other, and that is what I want us to take forward from International Women’s Day, and to do that every single day.

The cleaners, bus drivers, nursery workers, foster carers, home carers, unpaid carers, teaching assistants, bin collectors, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, school dinner staff, lollipop wardens, supermarket workers, posties, library staff, kitchen porters, farm workers, mechanics, ground workers, scaffolders, electricians, plasterers and plumbers—we deserve to be here; every single one of us. And I will make space for you to come and join me, to get to have your say.

From the bustle of Longsight market, the many Irish pubs in Levy, Sue’s chippy, and Tony at California Wines in Gorton, to the amazing young people at HideOut, the best hash brown butty at Cafe Plus in Denton, and the women-led social enterprise at Dahlia Café on Burnage Lane—you are the best of our brilliant communities. I want to put Gorton and Denton on the map by championing the positives about our community: the spirit, the warmth, the grit, and the way we help each other out every single day. Whether it is our neighbours where we live, or our siblings in places like Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan and Iran—wherever we are, we deserve to live freely as the human beings that we all are.

We do things differently in Manchester, and it makes me proud every single day. Now I want to make Abbey Hey, Levenshulme, Burnage, Longsight, Gorton and Denton proud of me. Thank you so much for putting your faith in this plumber and newly qualified plasterer. Together, we can make hope normal again, and we will look after each other, whoever we are, because where I am from, that is just what we do.

[Mr Speaker]

At least the hon. Lady can cross the football political divide by being a Bolton Wanderers supporter.

14:24

[Melanie Ward (Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) on her first speech, and welcome her to this place. I do not know whether she has noticed, but the Palace of Westminster is in need of some maintenance, so it is entirely possible that both her plastering and plumbing skills will come in useful in the very near future.

I rise to speak in my first International Women’s Day debate. I have followed these debates since before I was elected, so it is a true privilege to take part today. I have to say, if the composition of the Chamber were like this more often—by which I mean the number of men and women relative to each other—we might have different kinds of debates.

Today, we celebrate women in our communities, across the country and throughout our world. We celebrate extraordinary women who achieve incredible things for the good of humanity. In that context, it is a great but sad honour to sit opposite the coat of arms of my late dear friend Jo Cox, with whom I served on the board of the Labour Women’s Network. I think of her every time I come to this place and see her coat of arms. We miss her and her contributions dearly.

I have previously mentioned Jennie Lee, a proud Fifer who grew up in Cowdenbeath in my constituency and served two spells as a Labour MP. As well as having been the first ever UK Minister for the Arts, and the creator of the Open University, it is less known that Jennie served in the Ministry of Aircraft Production during world war two, keeping aircraft factories running during the blitz. She was called on to do so because of her no-nonsense attitude and ability to get things done. I take inspiration from that.

I am proud to follow Jennie as the 595th woman—among many thousands of men—elected to this Parliament, together with an unprecedented number of women MPs. Our Labour Government have important plans to advance women’s equality, from halving violence against women and girls to transforming women’s experiences of maternity care—a subject I discussed with the right hon. Baroness Amos just this week.

Beyond the women who are recognised for extraordinary achievements, we must be clear that the unseen work that women across the world do every day does not receive the recognition it deserves. According to the UN, women and girls do 16,000,000,000 hours of unpaid care work every single day. Their work is the very glue of families, communities and economies—countries could not function without it—yet it remains largely invisible, undervalued and unequally distributed.

Today, I want to sound a warning. We know that violent struggles are being fought for global power, but around the world, and increasingly at home, the struggle for power is being expressed as a struggle for control over women and our bodies. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith) and I have written about that together this week. There are many shocking examples of the battle to control women’s bodies. As my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Ms Oppong-Asare) mentioned, the oppressive regime in Iran has been desperate to prevent women from dressing in the way they want to, despite the incredibly brave protestations of amazing women there in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death.

As the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) said so eloquently, in Afghanistan, the Taliban have tested the limits of whether the world will stop them enforcing gender apartheid, by forcing women out of schools and workplaces and into the home. They looked for, and found, the answer they wanted: that the world does not care enough to stop them.

In Sudan, which is suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, rape and sexual violence is routinely used as a weapon of war. At the recent Munich security conference, which I attended, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary spoke powerfully about her visit to Sudanese refugee camps and the horrific accounts that she heard there, including of the systematic rape of girls as young as eight. I am proud to be a former chair of The Circle, the global feminist organisation founded by Annie Lennox. Only this morning it shared with me data showing that sexual violence in conflicts worldwide has increased by 25% in the last year.

In conversations about a shift in the global order, there is an increasing subtext of the need to control women’s bodies. We see that in some of the attacks on the legitimacy and funding of the United Nations. I worked with the UN in my previous work. Let us make no mistake: the UN would benefit from many reforms, but starving its institutions of funding to do work that no one else will do, for people no one else will help, is a grave error. That work includes providing contraception to women in war zones and refugee camps, so that they have some basic control over their bodies in situations where they have control over almost nothing else. In the context of domestic cuts to our own aid budget—a source of concern to many of us—we must do everything possible to preserve support for women and girls. I know that the Foreign Secretary is doing important work on that.

We must not content ourselves by believing that such misogyny only exists abroad. Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, said that women who do not have children should be taxed more, and that young women need an education in fertility—as if “The Handmaid’s Tale” was something we should aspire to. He seems to believe that women who choose not to have children, or who cannot, are somehow failing in their duties. Reform has said that, were they in government, the Equality Act—the basis for much of the progress we have made on women’s rights in the UK—would be repealed. Shame on them.

Online, British women are stripped of the agency we have over our own bodies, exemplified by Grok weaponising women’s bodies through nudification. Our Labour Government are right to crack down on such apps. My hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) had the truly awful experience of someone using that technology to make a fake video of her being chloroformed and “prepared for rape”. That makes the comments by the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), in the previous statement all the more unacceptable. The intended humiliation of women online is not simply cruel or misogynistic, although it is certainly both. It is intended to instil fear, to signal that some violent men believe that they are entitled to dominate women and to normalise such abhorrent behaviour.

Last week, ahead of International Women’s Day, I met members of the Fife violence against women partnership. We discussed the more than 5,000 incidents of domestic abuse and the more than 1,100 crimes of indecency reported to the Fife police last year. We know that many more will have gone unreported. They also shared with me their concerns about social media and the misogyny spread online by so-called male influencers. I heard shocking reports about some of the things that local schoolboys have said to female teachers—comments that they have learned online. They included female teachers being told by boys that they teach, “You’re so ugly, I wouldn’t even rape you.”

Male influencers online also seek to spread the idea that the role of the tradwife is what girls and young women should aspire to in life. This is the idea that women belong only in the home, and that we should all take our fulfilment simply from cooking meals for our husbands and rearing children. This online misogyny is spread by the likes of Andrew Tate, the late Charlie Kirk and far too many others, and it is aided by harmful algorithms. Perhaps it should not surprise us that a new global survey has found that younger men increasingly believe that a wife should obey her husband, and that men are expected to do too much to support equality. That is not an accident; transnational organisation is making that happen.

The European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights has found that $1.18 billion was pumped into European movements dedicated to rolling back women’s rights between 2019 and 2023. That funding came from 275 different actors, including church-run non-governmental organisations and far-right populist parties. Russia was the biggest source of donations, and the United States the second biggest—especially from American Christian nationalists. That American funding is now accompanied by financial help from the US Government, who have set aside $200 million to support MAGA-friendly think-tanks in Europe. Let us be clear: this is designed to spread their ideology, including here in the UK. When we, the decent majority, both in this House and outside it, confront the grassroots arm of the far-right—local groups acting in our communities—we must be clear that they are not just isolated local groupings of people; they are the grassroots arm of a well-organised international effort to reverse women’s rights.

Our Government are doing a huge amount to drive forward women’s equality on closing the pay gap on childcare, on tackling violence against women and girls, and so much more. I am proud of that work. But we face a dark threat to the fabric of our society from the organised misogyny that I have described. We must defeat it, and we have much to do.

14:34

[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

Let me start by paying huge tribute to the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) for her maiden speech. She spoke with grace, poise and purpose, and her constituents are very lucky to have her representing them here, whether they voted for her or not. Members on the Conservative Benches will know that I am not overly competitive—I just have to win everything—so I was rather devastated that she made a far better maiden speech than my own meagre offering after the 2024 general election.

The hon. Lady said she wanted to put Gorton and Denton on the map, and she certainly put it on my radar. As she was listing the distinguished people from her constituency, I wondered whether she would get around to mentioning Ethel “Sunny” Lowry, who was born in Gorton, and was the first British woman to swim the English channel in 1933. I know what hon. Members are thinking: surely I have some neat segue to other women doing water-based heroics from my own Spelthorne constituency. I would not like to disappoint them.

In 1903, at 111 White Hart Lane in Barnes, young Amy Gentry was born to a Cockney father who had worked his way up and become a publisher. They bought a camping plot on Hamhaugh island, which is the southernmost point of the River Thames, and also the southernmost point of my constituency. She went there from the age of one—her dad got a boat and they used to love messing around in it. Before she was 10 years old, the people on Hamhaugh island had gymkhanas, and she was entered into a dinghy racing contest, which I think she won, and which clearly gave her a taste for competition.

The war then intervened in Amy’s growing up, and hon. Members will be only too aware that in 1918 we passed in this place the Representation of the People Act. The tide was turning in respect of votes for women, women’s individuality and women expressing themselves. In 1920, Weybridge rowing club decided that they would form a women’s section—considerably revolutionary at the time. They got a group of young ladies together and trained them in how to row properly, and the women’s rowing movement began.

In 1925, young Amy Gentry went over to the charity regatta in the Netherlands, where she competed against France, Belgium and Holland. By 1927 the sport had developed that much further that there was an eights competition on the Oxford and Cambridge course between Putney and Mortlake. She wrote at the time that she felt like she was rowing backwards at times—obviously, literally she was rowing backwards, but she did not feel like she was going anywhere—so dreadful were the conditions.

In 1932, her father went to a boat builder and asked, “If you build my daughter a boat, will she win?” The boat builder said, “She will,” and indeed she did. She carried all before her from 1932 to 1934. She became the secretary of Weybridge rowing club, and by 1939 she was its chair. She was the driving force in women’s rowing in the country.

One of the clubs that had been useful and had adopted women’s rowing with some enthusiasm was the Vesta rowing club, which set up the first women’s regatta. At the time, a gentleman from the club said:

“While I do not approve of rowing for women, as they will do it anyway the best thing I can do will be to help them do it properly.”

We can see what the attitudes were at the time. Nevertheless, Amy was fantastic at it. She retired from the highest level of the sport in the late 1930s.

Obviously, the second world war came around, and in 1939 she became the secretary to Barnes Wallis. For hon. Members who are not familiar with the dam busters raid, Barnes Wallis was instrumental in developing the bouncing bomb. He and Amy Gentry would go to Silvermere lake, where he would fire various projectiles from a catapult across the lake—sort of a high-grade stone skimming competition—and then he and Amy would row out to collect them to see how they fared. Barnes Wallis was a pretty serious guy, but when that they were rowing out to one of the projectiles, Amy pointed out, “Wallis, you may be in charge, but I am in charge in this boat. Sit down.”

After the war, rowing went from strength to strength. We were represented in the European championships in 1952 and in 1954, carrying all before us at the national and international levels. As a slight aside, at the 1954 European games Amy Gentry handed out some prizes to one of the crews, including to a young lady called Bette Shubrook, a member of the London rowing club. She had met her soon-to-be husband at the London rowing club on regatta on Boxing day. His name was Graham Hill. She went on to be Bette Hill, and she became the only person to be married to and the mother of a Formula 1 world racing champion.

Amy was instrumental in bringing the European championships here in 1960, and she was awarded the OBE in 1969. She died in June 1976 in Stanwell in my constituency. The significance of that date is a sad irony: she did not quite live to see the moment one month later when women were allowed to compete in rowing in the Olympic games, in Montreal.

In the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, when the women’s crews go under Barnes bridge in the latter stages of the race, they pass a huge pub on the south bank of the River Thames called the White Hart, which is at the end of White Hart Lane, where Amy Gentry was born. If hon. Members happen to be watching in a month’s time and see that moment, perhaps they will join me in raising a glass to the remarkable woman, Amy Gentry.

13:29

[Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)]

I thank the Government for holding this debate in Government time. I had applied for a Backbench Business debate as a back-up, as I normally do, but now that we have a Labour Government I can probably stop doing that.

I need to apologise for my voice. I was going to blame it on a cold, but actually I was at the Trans Mission concert yesterday at Wembley arena, where I was shouting quite loudly that trans rights are human rights and singing along to Beverley Knight’s “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.” It reminded me of the saying that everything will be all right in the end; and if it is not all right, it is not the end. Right now, things are not all right for women.

As the Minister stated in her excellent opening speech, women globally are currently at our most vulnerable. It feels worse than it has been in a long time. With the influencers, the brain rot of social media, the increasing lack of legislation around bodily autonomy and, as we have heard many times, men influencing boys on what a perfect woman should be, with detailed instructions on how to abuse women and girls, we as women are in serious danger, and we need protection. International Women’s Day is the day to tell some truths.

For many of us, progress has not been made by us being welcomed in the room; progress has been made by us taking up room. Progress has been made by us taking up space. I thank all the women in my constituency in Brent who have taken up space, even when as women we have been told, “You don’t belong here,” or “They’re letting anyone in nowadays,” which was once said to me by an MP on the Terrace.

That is not the only thing that has been said to me as an MP. I have been told that I am too serious, and that I am not serious enough. I have been told that I need to dress up, and that I need to dress down. I have been told that I should smile more, or that I smile too much; that I am too confident, or I am not confident enough; that I talk about black issues too much, and that I do not talk about black issues enough; and that I talk about women’s issues all the time but do not talk about men’s issues. The reality is, I have been here for all the International Men’s Day debates, when there has been nobody on the Conservative Benches. Nobody can accuse me of not being an equal opportunity debater. The truth is this: you cannot win, and you will never win if you are trying to fit into anyone else’s expectations. Some people try to make you feel so small; they try to strip away who you are, so that you no longer recognise yourself. The hallmark of those people is that they are unhappy in their own life—they often have a small appendix—so they will try to put others down. The worst thing that we can do to ourselves is allow that to happen, because in life, we women need all the strength we can get, just to survive.

After my cancer diagnosis and while writing my book, “A Purposeful Life”, I recall deciding that I wanted to be mayor of London. There were many positive responses to that, for which I am eternally grateful—I will be tapping those people up for the campaign—but they were mixed with responses like, “Oh, there’s never been a black mayor”, “Oh, there’s never been a female mayor”, and, “What makes you think you can do it? What have you done? What have you delivered? It’s a man’s job, isn’t it?”. People said that I should stay in my lane. The truth is, my lane is wherever I say it is. I will slay in my lane, and I will achieve my ambitions.

I have learned something important on my political journey: when we give our voices, our time and our courage, we do not lose; we learn, and we gain. I have gained so much: I have gained friends, knowledge, and the power to change things for the better. I have made it my mission to pave the way for others. I do not always succeed, and sometimes people let you down—that is just life—but sometimes I do succeed. I gave two female MPs in this place their first job in Parliament: my hon. Friend, and dear friend, the Member for Stratford and Bow (Uma Kumaran), and my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes)—two women who are now doing a phenomenal job for their constituents. That is what can happen when you give; you and others gain.

I know what it feels like not to be taken seriously, and to have my experiences dismissed and my views belittled, and what it is like when people do not recognise the struggle or your greatness, so in this International Women’s Day debate it is time to tell the truth. I have been in many rooms where I have not fitted in, so I have come to accept that, and I have come to embrace standing out. I will wear my bright clothes—the outfit I am wearing today is from Dabra, Madam Deputy Speaker—I smile when I am happy, and I will act confident, even at times when I do not feel confident.

The truth is that when women rise, the system gets better. Women are failed by the system and by some men—and women—time and again, whether it is the courts system or whether it is in Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan, Sudan, the UK or America. Women and girls’ lives are in danger all over the globe. I find it strange that although misogynistic men are part of the biggest, wealthiest paedophile gang that we have ever seen, no one is in prison. Even though the evidence is there in the Epstein files, hardly anyone has been arrested, and where they have been arrested, it is not for raping little girls and teenagers. We should ask ourselves, why is that? How is it that people will protest outside hotels, but not outside the Sandringham estate?

No matter the colour of a person’s skin, or how much money they have in the bank, if they abuse and rape little girls, teenagers or young women, and are part of a grooming gang, large or small, they should be punished, and should be in prison. It is our duty in this place to speak up, and to ensure that paedophiles are punished, without fear or favour. I do not care who they are; I do not care who they are friends with; I do not care if they are royalty; and I do not care if they are influential people. It is time for people to tell the truth, rather than pretending, selectively, that they care about women and girls.

A woman is killed every three days in the UK and every 10 minutes globally. A woman is raped every eight minutes in the UK and every few seconds globally. I want women and girls to be safe, not just in the UK but all around the world. This International Women’s Day, I would love for people to give comfort to the women who are struggling everywhere, whether it is at war or in the workplace. There is no hierarchy of women —none of us is free until we are all free, and none of us is safe until we are all safe. No one knows how strong they are until that is the only thing that they have left, but they should not need to be strong—they should just be safe. It is also true that women of colour are expected to be strong all the time, and we are tired—tired of not being supported, tired of being overlooked, and tired of our pain not being recognised, whether in the UK or globally. As we pour unprecedented amounts of money into artificial intelligence systems that make women’s lives less safe, let us refocus our efforts on protecting women and girls. If our starting point is to protect the most vulnerable women, then the outcomes will be better, stronger, fairer, more equitable and safer for all.

14:49

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

It is always difficult to follow the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler)—I am genuinely in awe of her speeches, including the one she just gave. I was also in awe of the speech made by the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer). Like the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp), I wish I had delivered a maiden speech that was anywhere close to as good as hers. Her passion for and her understanding of her constituents were very clear. So many MPs in this place do not understand their constituents or their constituency when they are first elected, but it is clear that the new hon. Member for Gorton and Denton is one of her people, and she really understands how people in her patch feel. Her constituents are very lucky to have such a representative.

I thought about how best to approach this speech. Would I make a political speech, raging about all the injustices, or would I talk about all the unseen women—those who are doing all the heavy lifting, but whom we do not talk about and do not notice? I thought about how best to put across what I thought, but honestly, I have had the busiest week in Parliament that I have ever had, so I am going to try to give a speech in which I do not cry. That is my bar for today. If I do that, I will have won.

A member of my team, Alma, is one of the most wonderful humans I have ever met. She was born in Denmark and spent a lot of time there. She was telling me that in Denmark, International Women’s Day is called Kvindernes Kampdag, which I have probably pronounced wrong. That means “women’s struggle day” or “women’s fight day”. It is about recognising the fight and the struggle that women face, but it is also about fighting and struggling for women. I thought that was such a good thing for all of us to think about, because that fight and struggle is ongoing; it has not been won.

As the hon. Member for Brent East said, things are not in a good way. Things are less safe than they have been for a very long time. We need to continue to support, recognise and fight for the unseen women. We talk about unseen work sometimes, and about the fact that there are women doing jobs that nobody notices. Let me tell Members: we would notice very quickly if those women were not doing them, because things would not work.

We are all here today, able to have this debate, because of a member of the House staff who ensures that these debates happen. It is her birthday today. I am not going to say her name, because she would probably kill me, but I want to recognise that she is one of the many unseen women in this place who ensure that we can do what we do, and that we have the time and space to make speeches. She has made the time this Thursday for us to speak about the issues affecting our constituents and women around the world.

A number of people have spoken about oppressive states, and what is happening in the many countries around the world where the situation, systemically and because of how things are run by the state, is becoming worse for women. Some of that is because of various religions’ extreme interpretation of religious texts, which requires women to behave in a certain way, but some of it is not. Some of it is just because we continue to have patriarchal societies throughout the world. Men are historically bigger and stronger than us and are able to keep that patriarchy in place.

There are hugely gendered expectations on young women growing up. That is made worse by the fact that they are on the internet. We see those gendered expectations not just in classrooms and on the television shows that young women see; they are in the games that they play online, and in the online spaces that they inhabit. They are everywhere that women are expected to be subservient to men.

A number of us have spoken about women having to be better than men to get to the same position. I have spoken a lot about the phrase “hard-working families”. Sometimes, when people say “hard-working families”, they mean middle-class families; they mean people earning £40,000 or £50,000 a year. They do not mean people working as carers. They do not mean people trying to get four kids out the door in the morning, with the right shoes on the right feet. They do not mean the people doing the everyday jobs that we desperately need done. They do not mean the bus drivers, or the people working to ensure that all our lives run smoothly.

The hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) mentioned the way that we look at society, and the value that we give to rules. I have been thinking for a long time that we should really tip this issue on its head. We should think, “Which jobs do we need people to do?” We need people to be carers. We need people to look after children in nurseries. We need people to be teachers, nurses and doctors. We need people to do all the public-sector roles that we desperately need. However, we do not value those roles. We do not pay those people more than the living wage, in a lot of cases. Those are the people whose jobs we desperately need or society would fall apart, yet for some reason, we continue to think it is okay that they continue to be at the bottom of the pile. These jobs are overwhelmingly jobs that women are in, and we need to think about the gendered expectation that women will continue to do all of the hard work and we will pay them very little for doing so. Imagine if they did not—imagine if women went on strike. Imagine if every woman we know who is working in every job we know went on strike. How quickly society would fall apart if the women stopped doing all of that work that we do not see!

That is why we need to fight for all of those unseen women doing those unseen jobs. We need to fight so that we can ensure it is not just women who are filling those roles; we need equal opportunities at the top of the pile and at the bottom of the pile. We need to be able to lift women out of some of those roles, but we also need to ensure that men can take up some of those roles. Perhaps we would get more pay for carers if more men were carers—there are some, but I think that would tip things in a good direction.

I have a couple more things to say in relation to Parliament. I thought it was really interesting that the statement on the defending democracy taskforce took place just before this debate. I struggle more than I ever have to tell young women to come to Parliament and become an elected representative. It is harder than it has ever been. Part of that is because of social media and the toxic climate that there can be, particularly out in the world where there is so much polarisation and ideological position-taking, which results in the abuse that women and Members from ethnic minority backgrounds face. Standing in front of a class of young women and people from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds, it is very hard to say to them, “This is a great job—you should do it.” What I find myself saying to them is, “This is a really hard job. This is a job where you will face abuse, but it is worth it to make a difference.” I think that, across the parties, we are genuinely all working together to try to ensure that democracy is defended and that younger people—or older people—thinking about going into politics can truly consider doing so, and can take on those roles without fear that they will be abused.

Again, the hon. Member for Brent East talked about the expectations on women. I remember doing BBC TV—I think it was the Queen’s Speech. I was sitting there, and the journalist turned to me when Theresa May got out of the car and said, “What do you think of Theresa May’s outfit?” I was like, “Um, she looks very resolute?” He said, “Okay, you’re right, I shouldn’t have asked you that. I’ll ask the man on the panel instead—what do you think of Theresa May’s outfit?” That’s not the point. It is not about what Theresa May is wearing; it is about what she is doing and the importance of this moment. Whether I agreed or disagreed with the Conservative Prime Minister, she was stepping out of that car as Prime Minister. It was really important, and talking about what she was wearing was not the right thing to do in that moment.

The hon. Member for Brent East talked about those expectations—about being too smiley or not smiley enough—and the fact that we simply cannot win. No matter what abuse is thrown at me, I guarantee that I have said worse to myself. I am my own greatest critic, as are many of the women who I meet and know across Parliament. I am the SNP’s only woman MP right now, because of being wiped out by you guys, frankly. It is not that we did not stand lots of women—we did—it was just bad electoral luck on our part and losing lots of seats. As the only woman MP in the SNP, finding that fellowship and support across the House is really difficult right now, so I have been happy to support and work with people who are organising the women’s caucus and trying to get it off the ground, for the sake of people like me and women in other parties—particularly small parties—who do not have those natural relationships within our parties. We cannot find those people unless we happen to bump into each other in the Tea Room; we do not get that at group meetings. It is really important that we push forward with the women’s caucus, so that women can have that place where we get support; I commend all the Members who have worked really hard in trying to bring it forward.

The last thing I want to touch on is menopause, because Members are right: it is not talked about enough. It is not something that I ever heard discussed in my home when I was a child. It is not something that I knew existed. I am sure I knew that periods stopped at some point, but I did not know much beyond that. The more groups of women who are past their 30s I speak to, the more I learn about menopause. I just want to say, how unfair is it that itchy ears are a symptom of menopause? These women have everything else to deal with; they are dealing with so much rubbish. For anyone who did not know, itchy ears are a symptom of menopause—I think that is my public service announcement for the day—so if you hear women in your life talking about having itchy ears, be kind to them and give them a bit of support.

It is really important that we hold each other up, support one another and work on a cross-party basis to further the rights of women, and ensure that those unseen women are supported and that we pay an awful lot more money to people working in roles that, traditionally, have mostly been held by women, in order to recognise their contribution.

15:04

[Katrina Murray (Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch) (Lab)]

It gives me great pleasure and pride to contribute to the debate. I have only been here 18 months, but this is one of my favourite debates in the Chamber because it gives us the privilege of listening to experiences from across the House and recognising women who make a difference in everybody’s local communities and globally. It is always inspiring.

It also gives me great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman). In a conversation that we had earlier this week, I uttered the phrase, “In this place, we cross paths more often than we cross swords”—proverbial, verbal, swords, not physical ones; I will leave those to the Serjeant at Arms. While we are here as women, and this is the most diverse Parliament that there has ever been, we are not homogeneous. We all bring different things to this place, including different perspectives, and this Parliament is stronger for it. That is why I also feel really privileged to have heard the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer). I welcome what she brings to this place, and welcome her to her place.

As has been said, the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “Give to Gain”, but there is also the UN theme: “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women”. It reminds us that we must never accept that the work is done. We must never forget that what advances we have made can still be lost. There are still far too many women and girls across the world who do not have rights, cannot access justice and are denied education, healthcare and financial independence.

In the short time available to me, I want to highlight some of the women in my constituency of Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch who embody that theme—women who work every day for the rights, wellbeing and opportunities of others; women like Linda, Lorna, Christine and all the women at Tony’s Safe Place, an organisation that was founded four years ago today to provide support for those affected by suicide, bereavement and mental health issues. A group of women turning personal tragedy into compassion and practical help for others is an extraordinary act of strength in itself.

Anne Miller of Kilsyth Senior Citizens and the Old Library Management Group is a real force of nature in the community, working tirelessly to ensure that older people remain connected, active and supported. She has been known to chase me down when I have been doing my surgeries, and she is somebody I always love to see. Isobel Hughes and the welcome group at St Patrick’s in Kilsyth provide support, respite and friendship for people living with memory loss, and for their families. The woman’s name “GRACE” stands for the Group Recovery Aftercare Community Enterprise in East Dunbartonshire, where Lynnie and Yvette support adults who are in recovery from life trauma. The organisation provides therapy, recovery support and aftercare, and is rooted in lived experience and a fundamental belief that the need for aftercare never stops. GRACE is a powerful force for good for those rebuilding their lives.

Those women, and so many others across Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, give their time, energy and compassion to support others. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) said earlier, that work happens quietly, without recognition, but its impact is profound. Such women strengthen communities, lift people up, and remind us all of the power of kindness and solidarity. That is why International Women’s Day matters. It allows us to celebrate those contributions while remembering that progress has never been inevitable. Every right that women enjoy today has been hard won by those who came before us. As we celebrate their achievements, we must also recognise the work that is still to be done, including tackling violence against women and girls, closing the gender pay gap, and ensuring that every girl has the right and the opportunity to lead, learn and thrive.

Today I place on the record my sincere thanks to the women across Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch who give so much of themselves in service to others. Their work reminds us that progress is not just delivered by Government; it is built every day in our communities by the people who choose to care, to support and to stand up for others. If we truly want a world where women and girls gain equality, justice and opportunity, we must continue to match their commitment with our action.

15:12

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) on her maiden speech. It was an eloquent speech that made us think that she has been here for several years. I really enjoyed her description of her constituency, and of the people and organisations she now represents. I hope that the hon. Member does not get involved in fixing the plumbing and the plastering in this place. Her place is in this Chamber, and I am sure that she will make a name for herself and be a really good champion for her constituents.

This debate is an opportunity to mark the progress that we have made in improving gender equality and empowering women in all areas of life. It is important that we monitor that progress and assess where there is much work to do. The gender equality index is a helpful tool that looks at gender equality across all UK authorities. Wokingham scores in the top 10% of local authorities for women’s outcomes, meaning that women in Wokingham generally have better equality in pay, life expectancy, job progression and skills compared with women nationally. However, there is still a significant gap between women and men in pay, job progression and participation in civil society. That needs to change. It is, of course, very welcome that women are doing well in Wokingham, but that counts for little if their outcomes are still far behind those for men. That is why so much work still needs to be done to ensure that the gender balance is improved and strengthened for this generation and for many generations to come.

A very serious issue is when a lack of gender equality plays out in shocking and violent ways. Through casework, I have seen how many women in Wokingham are victims of abuse and violence, which is often linked to an imbalance in financial and physical power. It is a great shame that many women who are victims of domestic abuse feel unsupported and neglected by the police, the courts and other services, and are often left relying on charities.

The Government must ensure that survivors of violence against women and girls are properly supported in the criminal justice system, with mandatory training for police and prosecutors on the impact of trauma. The Government must also ensure sustainable funding for services that support domestic abuse survivors. On that point, I must highlight the vital work done by Vickie Robertson and her charity Kaleidoscopic UK, based in Wokingham, which helps women who have experienced domestic abuse across the Thames Valley.

I have also seen through casework that so much of homelessness stems from domestic abuse, because a financial imbalance means women often have to care for their children, and the accommodation offered is unsuitable for families. The Government must take action to ensure that victims are not forced to return to perpetrators due to inadequate temporary accommodation. It is clear that although some progress to close the gender gap has been made, there is still so much more to do to make our communities safer for women and to level the playing field.

15:16

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

It is a real privilege to speak in this debate marking International Women’s Day. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) for her maiden speech. I remember that when I made my maiden speech nearly nine years ago—time flies—in the Gallery above me were my mum, my younger brother and my son, aged just 13 at the time. I do not know who the hon. Lady has with her today, but I would like to pay tribute to our family members. We lost my mother last September. I want to say that if it was not for other women supporting women, and their brothers and sisters and children, we would not be able to stand here to do our job. I wish the hon. Lady all the very best in her career.

There have been many advances in the fight for women’s equality in recent decades, and indeed the very welcome and much-needed action on male violence against women and girls since this Labour Government came into office. There has, however, been a frustrating stasis on some issues, meaning they have worsened.

Sexual exploitation has shown a clear and sustained rise in the United Kingdom, with an increasing number of women being identified as victims. We are seeing more UK-national victims of sexual exploitation, and at a younger age, yet the women and girls exploited in the sex trade remain among the most neglected in our policy discussions and reforms. I want to talk about them today, because these women matter and the harms they experience are extreme.

Technological change has reshaped our world, but it has also created new opportunities for sexual exploitation to proliferate on a scale we have never seen before, because our legislation has not kept pace and is not capable of keeping pace. Despite it being illegal to place a prostitution advert in a phone box, the same advert can legally be published for profit on a website, and traffickers have moved quickly into that gap. Pimping websites that act as a vast online brothel drive demand and supercharge the sex trafficking trade by making it easier and quicker for pimps to advertise their victims. They make it as easy to order a woman to abuse as it is to order a takeaway. They operate freely and openly because our legislation allows it.

A report published just weeks ago by the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner shows how adult services websites do not just host exploited and trafficked women but provide the infrastructure to initiate, scale and normalise their abuse. Nearly 63,000 listings for women were recorded at one point in time across 12 of these sites, and they attracted almost 41.7 million visitors in a month. That is just a fraction of an even larger marketplace, because additional sites are available to users. Nearly 60% of the adverts analysed displayed three or more indicators of trafficking or exploitation, which include multiple ads linked to the same phone number and “new to area” language.

Behind the numbers are real and severe harms endured by the women exploited on these sites. Survivors interviewed for the report talked about how they were groomed, controlled and advertised online without their knowledge or consent. A survivor, who was exploited alongside other women, said:

“None of us had access to the emails from buyers. They came directly through him. He answered as if he was us and then he would send me a message saying, ‘Oh, this person, you know, this is where you’re going to meet them and this is what you have agreed to do.’”

The use and abuse of women is directly enabled and amplified by the sites’ very design, which, for example, enables third-party facilitation. Survivors spoke of how traffickers and abusive partners created profiles, arranged bookings and made profits, while women themselves were controlled and intimidated. Despite third-party facilitation being a known red flag for trafficking, Ofcom guidance ignores that and portrays it as a safety measure.

Profiles on the sites also give the illusion of independence to mask deeper exploitation. Another survivor said she was

“being raped on webcam essentially. And of course, the people watching aren’t aware of that...the profile is written so it sounds as if I’m independent and enjoying it...how do you go behind a webcam to make sure that the woman isn’t being coerced?”

Meanwhile, buyers on some forums openly discuss which women are controlled and the benefits this has for them. As another survivor explained:

“You will see men sharing about...‘these girls are trafficked’...‘you can get away with doing this to her’...it’s just right there on the page”.

This is the selling and abuse of women in plain sight on an industrial scale, enabled by our legislative framework. It is totally unacceptable. These women deserve so much better. The Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner is absolutely right to say that these websites are ready-made tools for abuse, and that the toughest action must be taken against them.

The all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, which I chair, has been sounding the alarm on pimping websites and their harms for quite some time. The truth is that the current legislation and regulatory guidance are not acting or preventing harm, and it is traffickers, pimps and punters operating with near total impunity who benefit. Women are abused as if they are objects and suffer acutely. We are failing them. I urge the Government to pay close attention to the report’s findings and to act urgently on its recommendations for a robust review—one that includes survivors, and it needs to be prompt. A lot of evidence is already out there and the longer we wait, the more women and girls are suffering as a result.

What is more, the scale and ease of access of the online market is not only facilitating exploitation; it is, more widely, fuelling the dangerous rise in misogyny by normalising the idea that women exist to be bought, used and discarded. In an age when prostitution is glamourised, boys and men are repeatedly exposed to platforms that present women as sexual commodities, and that inevitably shapes their attitudes. The scale of demand for pimping websites should give us serious pause for thought in that respect as well. Shutting these sites down has a fundamental role to play not just in preventing horrific exploitation, but in shifting the attitudes of men and boys to promote healthy and respectful relationships. If we are to tackle male violence against women and girls, these websites have to be shut down.

15:24

[John Grady (Glasgow East) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) for a profound speech. She used the phrase “our humanity is the same”, and there is a profound truth in that. We in this House must recognise that there are people who disagree with that and want to tear us apart. I have a diverse constituency, which covers many different races, faiths and differences of views, and I treasure that diversity, because I believe our humanity is the same. We in this House must be very careful to fight against those who want to shatter that, tear us apart and take us significantly back in time.

Our humanity is the same as that of the women and girls mentioned by my friend, the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), an office bearer on the APPG on Afghan women and girls. We must do much more to support women and girls in Afghanistan, and we must look afresh at things like international law to criminalise the mistreatment of women and girls to such evil degrees.

The Minister rightly mentioned the fight by trade unionists for equal pay. The first socialist in my family was my great auntie Nellie, who in the ’30s led equal pay strikes in the liquorice factories in Pontefract and became friends with Barbara Castle, who was, of course, responsible for the Equal Pay Act 1970. We should all be very angry about the fact that there is still considerable structural inequality of pay, and women now are paid less than men.

Our fight for equality now, which I believe is shared by us all, and which we must all share, faces new and much more dangerous threats, and we must redouble our efforts. We should not just be angry about that; we are legislators, so we must legislate and then see that legislation acted on. Otherwise, the future for women and girls—my daughter and the other children in my constituency and around the world—will become bleaker, instead of our seeing progress.

I want to speak about domestic abuse. One in 4 women in the UK will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. When I work with survivors in Glasgow East, I see how housing instability in particular is a barrier to my constituents fleeing abuse. I am dismayed at the lack of support provided by the housing sector in Scotland to survivors, who do not receive trauma-informed care and are not supported into safe, settled homes; instead, I have met women who, after suffering terrifying sexual violence, are forced into social housing in awful conditions and then face months of unknown male workmen coming into their new home. The social landlords are aware that the women in question have suffered. They should not have to ask for female workpeople to come to work in their homes—it should be a matter of course.

Women in my seat wait months for house transfers, meaning that their abusers know exactly where they live. A particular legal problem is when women are not included on the tenancy agreement for their rented home, which means they do not have legal rights to stay in their home and, when their relationship comes to an end, those women face eviction and homelessness. That is why the Scottish Parliament passed part 2 of the Domestic Abuse (Protection) (Scotland) Act 2021, giving social landlords powers to transfer tenancies from abusers to survivors.

Almost five years after that Act was passed, however, we are still waiting for it to be made legally enforceable by the Scottish Government. I have been pressing the Scottish Government on the issue. In January, I wrote to the press about this disgraceful delay, and the next day the Scottish Government announced they would finally bring the provisions into force.

Despite the five-year delay, social landlords have had no formal guidance from the Scottish Government on how the provisions will operate in practice. They do not know how the courts or police will approach this, but it is essential for social landlords, and a poorly thought-out implementation will put survivors at further risk. I have raised these concerns with the SNP Government and am still awaiting a response.

There are organisations that do fantastic work to ensure housing stability for survivors. The Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance provides the infrastructure, training and monitoring necessary for social landlords to recognise and tackle domestic abuse, and it works very well in England. Just north of here, Islington council has worked very successfully with DAHA and significantly improved the outcomes for survivors of domestic abuse. In Glasgow, social landlords need help and support to make the improvements that they must make, and social landlords do recognise the importance of this.

I am determined to see survivors of domestic abuse get much better help and support, so I have asked social landlords to meet with DAHA. I am pleased that Wheatley and Govanhill housing associations and the Scottish Housing Regulator have expressed an interest in learning more and are willing to meet with DAHA. In agreeing to do so, they are demonstrating their commitment to supporting survivors of domestic abuse. I encourage others to do the same. We must do much, much better in Scotland for the survivors of domestic abuse, and I am determined to continue to work hard on this.

I wish to speak about one other topic. I am very proud of one of my local charities, Scottish Sports Futures, which does great work with young people in my seat. In particular, it encourages young women to speak up about their experience of violence against women and girls. That means that the young men in the charity’s programmes learn how to treat women as their equals and with respect. I cannot praise Scottish Sports Futures enough for working on this and giving those young women a voice.

Several of those young women in the programmes spoke with bravery about this at the charity’s annual awards event last week. A young woman from Barrowfield, in my constituency, spoke courageously about violence against women and girls, and the issue of youth violence more generally, which has had a profound impact on girls in my constituency, particularly following the killing there two years ago of a young boy, called Kory McCrimmon—his family faced their grief, by the way, with profound dignity and courage. I am proud of all my young constituents.

Politics is a matter of morals, and this is a moral issue. My moral obligation as their Member of Parliament is to do everything within my power to tackle violence against women and girls.

15:33

[Dr Marie Tidball (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

I thank all the women in this Chamber who really have slayed in their lane in today’s debate.

Madam Deputy Speaker:

“When they amputated my leg, they amputated a part of me. I see my body and I feel disgust, repulsion. I fear that my amputation took away my femininity, my ability to be yearned for; my womanhood pauperised. Trapped in a body that does not reflect my mind or my self.”

“Anorexia, unplanned, like an addiction, crept upon me. I ate less and became thinner. My wish: that nobody would notice my disability and I would simply disappear—a physical escapism. For the first time in my life, the eating disorder gave me control over my body; the way it looked, the way it felt. My frustration about my physical form turned into obsession; the obsession fed me where food did not: it gave me power.”

“Success became feeling bones left behind under taught skin; in knowing my pelvis protruded below a small waist, cheek bones were prominent on a smile-less face.”

“Anorexia was about the relationship between a despised body and a disciplined mind. Eventually, the mind was consumed too: a warped wasteland where fear and anger roamed. There was no escape from or for my self.”

“Weight: 4 stone 10 lbs. My body was breaking down, I was losing my hair, and my periods stopped. My menstruation ending ultimately saved me and my life. Somewhere, at the back of my head, I knew I wanted to have children. Eventually, I took the pill, my periods started again, I ate more. My desire to be a mother gave me a reason to get better, signalled a future and made me know choice once again.”

I wrote those passages 20 years ago, in my early 20s, while recovering from my last major surgery to my legs. I was anorexic for four years from age 14, and although I was physically better by the time I went to university, it took me until my mid-20s to have a healthy relationship with food.

I am not alone. Over the years, I have spoken to other disabled women about their experiences of eating disorders linked to their own body image and identity. Devastatingly, 20 years later—two decades after I wrote those passages— social attitudes towards sex, relationships and disability remain an enormous taboo, which means that disabled women are still going through that anguish, damaging their mental health, causing them to self-harm and eroding their self-esteem.

Actor and disability activist Melissa Johns, who has an upper-body limb difference, has shared her story. She said:

“I have a strong history of loathing my body. That never came from me—it came from society telling me that my body was wrong.”

Too often, disabled women’s bodies do not count.

Mum, social media influencer and wheelchair user Sophie Bradbury-Cox showed me just some comments made on her social media about the fact that she is a disabled mother. They included:

“There’s something horribly unethical about having children when you’re not able to care for yourself.”

Those damaging attitudes and a lack of awareness of the issues are leading disabled women to face barriers in public services, including accessing sexual, reproductive and maternity care.

In the last year, I have met two incredible disabled women: Carly, a Paralympian, and Sarah, an occupational therapist. Both have cerebral palsy and neither found out about their pregnancies until their second and third trimesters, respectively, because none of their clinicians considered that they might be pregnant. Carly Tait, who competed in the 2016 Paralympic games in Rio de Janeiro, soon discovered she was pregnant after retiring from professional sport. That was immediately followed by a lot of questions about whether she was capable of giving birth, in a line of conversation that she faced throughout her pregnancy.

Some people seemed to ignore Carly’s pregnancy altogether. On the last day before her maternity leave, a colleague approached her and said

“Oh my gosh! Are you pregnant?”,

showing an ableist view that someone like Carly could not possibly be pregnant. But disabled women are making babies, having babies and being brilliant mothers against the odds—odds that mean we face a 44% higher likelihood of stillbirth. That is why I have called on the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to put inclusive maternity care for disabled women at the heart of our women’s health strategy, so that our womanhood no longer remains invisible.

But we need to go further. We need to finally embed the social model of disability into women’s healthcare, and implement the recommendations for the UK Government made by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2017. That committee found that the rights of disabled women and girls have not been systematically mainstreamed into either the gender equality or disability agendas, with disabled women facing multiple barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services and professionals. I have lost count of the number of disabled people I have ended up mentoring who have self-harmed and attempted suicide because of sex, relationship and disability issues not being discussed, the lack of services and the absence of professional expertise to support them.

I am proud that our Government’s reforms will engender a high-quality and inclusive curriculum for all, but that must include the representation of disabled people in personal, social, health and economic education lessons at school. We must turn the tide of public attitudes towards disabled people, and particularly empower young disabled people to have more positive perceptions of self.

There are reasons to be hopeful. Green shoots of representation are appearing on our screens. “EastEnders” is currently covering a storyline about a pregnant woman who is a wheelchair user. This season of “Bridgerton” featured a subplot with Hazel, a maid played by Gracie McGonigal, and her love interest with dashing footman, John, without ever mentioning Hazel’s limb difference.

Instagram has become a burgeoning social media platform for brilliant disabled women who are super-charging the representation of disability and desire, and of being proud and empowered about the intrinsic beauty of our bodies and our selves. They are boldly forging the conversation about us being loved and in love. They are powering the narrative on disability and dating, elucidating new language about being in inter-abled couples, and navigating difficult conversations and acceptance. It is disability cast no longer as absence but as complete, full-bodied presence. To be loved is to be seen. It is high time our society saw disabled women’s whole selves, for only then will we create a society that treats disabled women with the dignity and respect we deserve.

15:42

[Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)]

Earlier, the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) mentioned that it can be difficult to advise people to come into the role that we all do. She would be well served just by playing people a recording of what we have heard in the House today. This debate has been of the highest quality, and I thank everybody for their contributions so far. It has been a genuine pleasure to listen and be part of it.

We have had the whole gamut. People have taken the opportunity to big up their own constituencies. My hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Samantha Niblett) and the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) did excellently. I will not mention everybody because I cannot remember everybody’s constituency, but I will do my best. People have taken the opportunity to celebrate wonderful things in the country, and the wonderful people who saw a glass ceiling and jumped higher. It has been wonderful to be part of it.

People also did not shy away from the difficult things that we must do. I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer), as well as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (John Grady), who both took the opportunity to talk about some really difficult things. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball) for her powerful testimony. She is somebody I always enjoy listening to in the Chamber, and I thank her for her contribution today.

The debate today serves many of those purposes. It gives us the opportunity to celebrate what is great, but also to talk about where our society and systems have failed women for far too long, and unfortunately, that is my role today. I want to raise a way in which the system has let down far too many people for far too long. I am talking about the crimes of Mohamed al-Fayed. I am specifically talking about his crimes, because I do not want to talk about him. Today is about the proud survivors who have done all they can to bring his crimes to light.

Al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, was a sexual predator. He trafficked and sexually abused hundreds of women over decades with near complete impunity. Well over 400 survivors have already come forward, and every day, more women take the brave decision to do so. Yesterday, the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) powerfully described al-Fayed as Britain’s Epstein. It is a characterisation that she and I have heard many times from survivors, as we co-chair the all-party parliamentary group for the survivors of Fayed and Harrods. It is good to see another of our officers here, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam).

The scale of the crimes committed by this predator—I will not call him a man, because real men respect women—is staggering, but it is a mistake to think that this is the work of one bad human. Al-Fayed was supported by a network of enablers. He died having escaped justice, but there are scores of people who can and must be held to account. They include employees who identified, groomed and trafficked women for abuse; security staff who harassed and intimidated survivors into silence; lawyers who churned out non-disclosure agreement after non-disclosure agreement, while nobody thought to do anything about it; doctors who performed invasive medical exams and reported—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. I apologise for interrupting the hon. Gentleman, but as there is one live civil case, may I encourage him to exercise caution in what he says? It is perfectly okay to say anything about Mr al-Fayed, who is dead.

[Dave Robertson]

Thank you for your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker. That is really important, because there are some ongoing cases; I will talk about the Metropolitan police in a minute.

It is clear that we must do better. For far too long, survivors have been ignored. That cannot and must not continue. I am really grateful to the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, who is set to meet survivors very soon, and I welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment yesterday to meeting survivors. It has taken far too long to get to this stage, but I am glad to see that things are finally starting to move.

I have had the privilege of meeting dozens of women who have taken the very brave step of disclosing their experiences to parliamentarians and people they have never met before. Their tenacity and strength has been fundamental to driving this agenda forward and making these recent advances. I am very grateful to all survivors, as I am sure everybody in the APPG is, but we must never take the trust that they have placed in us for granted.

The APPG ran a consultation with survivors, and we are really pleased that we have had dozens and dozens of responses to it, because we are clear that there is a huge network of people who have been wronged in so many ways by so many systems. It is astonishing how almost every time we have a meeting, there is something else. The scale of the failings cuts right across civil society and enormous parts of the state, and a huge amount needs to be done to recompense these people who have been so poorly served for so long.

I thank the Survivors Trust, which has been working with the APPG, and which provided invaluable support to ensure that we are working in a safe way, bearing in mind the trauma that survivors have suffered. In the coming months, I am eager to work with Members across this House and the other place, and anybody who wants to be involved, to make sure we build up a drumbeat of evidence about the scale of these crimes.

[Wendy Chamberlain]

The hon. Member is rightly and powerfully talking about the testimony of survivors. I join him in thanking the Survivors Trust, which has given us such invaluable support as we navigate managing a very difficult APPG. I want to mention two amazing women: our researchers, Kathryn and Jessie, who keep us right, keep us grounded, and have done a huge power of work, while we establish how we will take the APPG and the secretariat forward.

[Dave Robertson]

I am thankful to the hon. Member for mentioning Jessie and Kathryn, who act as the secretariat in a difficult space. They do that in and around other busy jobs. It is clear to me and the hon. Member that without their hard work, we would not have been able to do this. [Interruption.] They are far too good.

We are regularly reminded by survivors that for far too long, parts of their story, and often their entire story, was ignored. We are clear that things need to change and to move quickly. One of the things that comes up most regularly is the police investigation. I am glad that the Met, along with forces in Scotland and France, are investigating. The Met has now confirmed that it is interviewing suspects on suspicion of trafficking. That is vitally important, because survivors regularly bring up that the issue was not being taken seriously enough, and I am very glad that it now is. That focus is vital to maintaining what trust is left between survivors and the Met, but survivors still need reassurance that the force truly grasps the scale of the issue, and is truly working on this as fast as it can.

A frustration often raised with us is that the updates from the Met appear to be, “We will give you another update in three months.” That update ends up being, “There will be another update in three months.” Three months is not a short time, and when that statement is made a third, fourth or fifth time, it undermines people’s trust that things will ever come to a head, and that justice will happen.

I thank all Members who have spoken about al-Fayed’s crimes in this Chamber. A number of people have done so, in various ways. There are all those who joined the APPG, and all those who have spoken to me about the subject. It has been a real learning curve for me over the last year or so. It has been challenging for me; that is not to say that it is not more challenging for other people. I have appreciated people coming to me and showing trust. I want to repay that, as time goes by, and to move things forward for them.

A few Members have mentioned that the themes for this International Women’s Day have been rights, justice and action. We can see that this predator took rights away from far too many people; they deserve justice, and it is time for action to get justice delivered.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I expect to call the Front Benchers at about 4.30 pm, or maybe a little later, and I have either six or seven Members waiting to speak. Perhaps Members who are still waiting could confine their remarks to six or seven minutes, so that everyone can get in.

15:49

[Dr Lauren Sullivan (Gravesham) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to speak in this debate. I pay tribute to the women and men here, and particularly to my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball) for her powerful and moving account, and for sharing her experiences. She is a voice for so many, and there will be action because she is here. Thank you.

In Gravesham in my constituency, I have met many amazing women. I want to mention a couple before I move on to the substantive part of my speech. Nageena Hussain is a phenomenal woman. Last week, I met over 100 women, and we had a beautiful, wonderful evening together, in which we shared food at the breaking of the fast—it was phenomenal. I pay tribute to her, as well as to our business leaders, such as Sandra Hassan from Nell’s Café, who I nominated for the MP HERoes, which is Savvitas’s programme in partnership with NatWest. She is a business institution, and a business leader. I also pay tribute to Sylvia Mead, who brought people from wonderful Gravesham businesses to visit me in Parliament this week. These are women coming together to bring communities together, and there are many more such business leaders.

Women in Gravesham do great things, and I will tell the House a little about just one of them. Catherine Green grew up in Gravesend. She went to Gravesend grammar school for girls. She went on to university, to study natural sciences. She earned her PhD and completed many fellowships. She was part of the team at the Jenner Institute that developed the AstraZeneca covid vaccine. She worked with Sarah Gilbert, and we thank them for using their talents and expertise. When the world needed them, they were there, so I thank and recognise them for that.

When it comes to celebrating women and science, not all women in science have been recognised. I want to pay tribute to some who have not been recognised. Ada Lovelace is the mother, inventor and founder of computers, but that was recognised only 100 years afterwards. Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer. She was not credited or valued for her research, but it was her X-ray image that showed that DNA is a double helix. Alice Ball was an African American chemist who discovered a leprosy treatment, but it was stolen and written up as the Dean method. That term was later changed, but still. Marie Tharp is the mother of plate tectonics. Those women were absolutely credible, and their names and contributions need to be recognised.

UN research shows that only a third of the global scientific community is made up of women, and only one in 10 of those researchers are women in leadership roles. Why is that? Well, women face a set of different challenges. One of those challenges is the motherhood penalty, from pregnancy and beyond. There are structural issues. In science, PhD students receive a stipend, and they are not employed, so they do not get access to maternity rights or Government-subsidised childcare. Maternity time is not really factored into their two-year contracts, so what should they do if they need to step out for six months or a year? Put their research on pause? Have somebody else come in and finish it? It means that they produce fewer papers, have less impact, and are less likely to see progress. Many women have suffered through that system, and have delayed having families until they have tenure—a permanent position. That is possible, but it does not need to be that hard.

That is just the pregnancy part. What about when the children grow up? Half of respondents to the Carers in STEMM report said that they had to cancel travel plans because of care responsibilities—I have experienced that myself. We might spend months planning an experiment, but then the nursery rings and says, “Come and collect your child—they’re ill.” Researchers in the field say that they do not travel to international conferences, where scientists network and bring ideas together, because of caring responsibilities. It is fine; we look after our families instead—but it all means that we are one step behind.

Others take career breaks, as I did. I declare an interest: I was the recipient of a Daphne Jackson fellowship. Those fellowships are amazing, because they help women and men return to science. The fellowship was named after Daphne Jackson, an English nuclear physicist who became the first female physics professor in the UK, at the University of Surrey, at the age of 34—phenomenal. She thought that qualified women who are unemployed or under-employed following a career break because of family commitments represent an appalling waste of talent and of the initial investment in their education, and I could not agree more. Many such women are eager to return to their original careers, or to field activity in which their initial education is relevant, and Daphne Jackson fellowships provide retraining, so that they can return part time. I thank and pay tribute to the Daphne Jackson Trust, as well as to the Francis Crick Institute, for supporting many women back into research.

After my meeting with the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology—in which we discussed my career, the choice to leave science to raise a family, returning and trying to wiggle everything through to make it work—she launched yesterday a new charter to support women in research. It calls on all PhD funding bodies supported by UK Research and Innovation to step up and include 52 weeks’ maternity leave. That is about raising the bar and improving paternity leave, too; a rising tide lifts all boats. She also announced a £2.3 million increase in support for the Daphne Jackson Trust. That is over 100% extra. How many returns to science will that fund? It is incredible. The charter is a direction of travel—a marker. We are not done. This is a call for women researchers in the UK to tell us what else we can do, and how we can work together to make changes to improve science for everyone.

In my concluding remarks, I want to speak to all those young women and girls who are curious about science, and who want to help people or save the world: do not doubt yourself. The country needs you. Finally, to the men who support us and let us embrace our talents: thank you. Good men never finish last; they help us improve everybody’s quality of life. I believe that the profession of science has the ability to improve lives beyond measure. I thank the scientists who are making a difference. We see you and we thank you.

16:00

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

I thank all those who have contributed to this and other debates this week, including my hon. Friends the Members for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball) and for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols), who this week have shown true bravery and should be an inspiration to us all. I also welcome the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) to her place and thank her for her passionate speech.

I want to thank and celebrate the amazing women who have played, and still play, a part in my life, including friends, family and my fabulous staff. They are truly inspirational in the love, support and grounding that they give me, and I hope that they know that I would not be here and I could not do this job without them.

This International Women’s Day, I want to celebrate the women of Portsmouth—my city—which, this year, is celebrating a truly special milestone of 100 years as a city: 100 years of community resilience and remarkable women getting on with the job and making our city the place it is. Traditionally, Portsmouth has been a city that celebrates its people’s achievements but, dominated by its naval dockyard, its history has often been a masculine one. But the women have always been there. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) said, we would certainly notice if they were not. Teachers, doctors, nurses, city councillors, factory and shop workers, small business owners, faith leaders and volunteers are all pioneering equal rights at work and are all quietly cracking on and holding their families and their communities together. They did not, and often still do not, get the recognition that they deserved.

Members may notice that I often wear a necklace that says “Pompey Belle”. When I was teaching, a group of girlfriends in the National Union of Teachers and I began wearing them, partly in tribute to the women who, during the first and second world wars, kept my city’s heart beating while the men served abroad. But it is also a quiet reminder that we never face things alone, and that together we can achieve so much more. Whenever I put on this necklace, I feel like I am carrying the support of those women with me: women who are kind, intelligent and determined and who get things done. These necklaces are also made by Hip Hip Hooray, a brilliant woman-owned local business—local creativity celebrating our women.

To mark our city’s century, I am proud to be joining forces with others, including my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), to launch the “100 Pompey Belles”—a campaign to truly recognise the unsung, amazing heroines of our city. The “100 Pompey Belles” are the women who show up every single day; the women who do not seek the spotlight but, without whom, Portsmouth simply would not function. These women are in all parts of my city and of all ages and of all backgrounds, and I am privileged to meet so many of them in this role as the Portsmouth North Member of Parliament. I am so often very humbled, and many times reduced to tears, by all the pride, strength, openness, trust and resilience that they demonstrate day after day, night after night, week after week.

With this year’s theme of “Give to Gain” I want to recognise the absolute queens in my city, because my city really does gain from them. Nominations will open soon, and I would love to see as many local women as possible get involved. I would love their friends, families, colleagues and neighbours to put their names forward, because we know that, too often, they will not do it themselves. We want to celebrate them and all that they do, from breaking barriers in science to running food banks, teaching and coaching our children, caring for our most vulnerable, running our small and large businesses and simply holding our communities together. Portsmouth women have always been extraordinary, and they have always been proud. To every Pompey Belle in this House and beyond: thank you for being you, and for all you do for others and for our city.

16:04

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

We have had an excellent debate, with so many brilliant contributions, but I would like to single out three in particular. The hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) made a brilliant maiden speech. I am sure she will continue to make many colourful and inspiring contributions in her years ahead in this place, and it is always a joy to welcome another northern woman to the Chamber.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) should pick whatever lane she would like—I will gladly follow. The important thing is that she keeps driving ahead.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) reminded us that whatever our differences, we always have more in common than that which divides us. Madam Deputy Speaker, you were not in the Chair for her remarks, when she talked about strike action by women, but I caution the three Deputy Speakers not to go on strike, as I really dread to think what would happen to this place—with the greatest respect to Mr Speaker.

I put on record my thanks to my senior caseworker Megan Redhead who week in, week out strives to deliver great results and improve the lives of the people of Carlisle. In the last couple of weeks, she has achieved the most remarkable outcome for one woman in Carlisle in particular.

It is my privilege in this International Women’s Day debate to speak about another remarkable woman: Angela Burdett-Coutts, an overlooked figure from the Victorian era whose compassion, generosity and determination helped shape modern philanthropy. She was a woman who embodied “Give to Gain”. She was born on 21 April 1814 in Piccadilly, the youngest daughter of Sir Francis Burdett and Sophia Coutts. She inherited not only her family’s name but, in 1837, her grandfather Thomas Coutts’s immense banking fortune, making her one of the wealthiest women in England.

Burdett-Coutts, deeply influenced by leading social reformers including Charles Dickens, with whom she collaborated for many years, dedicated her fortune to education and tackling poverty and social injustice, earning her the name “Queen of the Poor”. Her philanthropy was extraordinary in its breadth: she helped to fund ragged schools, built model housing in the east end and developed the Columbia Market to bring wholesome but affordable food to the poor. She co-founded innovative projects such as the Urania Cottage, a home for vulnerable and homeless women seeking a new start in life.

In 1884, Burdett-Coutts co-founded the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which later became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She championed the protection of animals, becoming president of the ladies’ committee of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and commissioned the fountain and commemorative statue of Greyfriars Bobby. Her humanitarianism reached far beyond Britain, endowing bishoprics in Cape Town, Adelaide and British Columbia. Back home, she funded drinking fountains and animal troughs right across London. She also financed Charles Babbage’s early computing efforts and contributed significantly to hospitals and churches.

I first came across Angela Burdett-Coutts when I discovered that she had funded the building of St Stephen’s church in Carlisle in 1864. Having learned that she had financed the new St Stephen’s church in Westminster—just a stone’s throw from this place—the then Bishop of Carlisle wrote to her to inquire whether she would fund the building of a new church in one of Carlisle’s poorest areas, Wapping. Not only did she agree, and personally select the stained glass for the church, but she gifted a peal of eight bells, which on the church’s demolition in the 1960s were installed in the new St Elisabeth’s church in Harraby, where they remain to this day. In 1871, Queen Victoria recognised Angela Burdett-Coutts’s immense contributions by granting her a peerage, making Baroness Burdett-Coutts one of the few women of her era to receive such an honour in her own right.

Like all female pioneers, Angela Burdett-Coutts was unafraid to challenge convention. Possessing considerable wealth, she was beset by suitors. Many men proposed marriage to Miss Coutts, and she declined all of them. She did, however, propose marriage to her friend and adviser the Duke of Wellington when he was 79 and she was 33; he gently declined her. But that was nothing to the scandal her eventual marriage caused. When she was 66, she married a 29-year-old American, William Lehman Ashmead Bartlett. In doing so, she not only caused an outrage in Victorian society, but she triggered a clause in the will of her grandfather’s second wife, which stipulated that she must marry an Englishman, and in doing so lost much of her multimillion pound fortune.

Since discovering Angela Burdett-Coutts, I have mused not just on how stories such as hers deserve to be more widely known, but on how we should celebrate the female philanthropists and changemakers who did so much for people and wider society. So in closing, I invite you, Madam Deputy Speaker, the Minister and all colleagues from across House to support not simply a statue or a plaque to female changemakers, but to support an audible celebration, featuring the Coutts bell from St Stephen’s church Carlisle, in a new national monument to the social change that women like Angela Burdett-Coutts and so many who we have heard about today have made possible.

16:10

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in today’s phenomenal debate marking International Women’s Day, alongside so many remarkable women from across this House, including the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer), who gave an inspiring maiden speech. Although she is no longer in her place, I particularly thank her for her words of solidarity for our trans community, including trans women, who should never be forgotten in this discussion. It is appalling that the hon. Lady has already experienced intimidation just for standing shoulder to shoulder with our trans siblings, but I hope she knows that many of us, on both sides of the House, will have her back on that.

As a man, I approached this debate with a little hesitance, because I am acutely aware that the experiences being discussed today are not my own, but I also remembered how many women from across the House contributed so thoughtfully to the debate on International Men’s Day, and that reminded me that progress on equality has never come from working at cross purposes to one another, but from working together. The women who shaped my life, particularly my mum and my sister, raised me not only to respect women, but to champion them—to raise women up, to challenge barriers whenever we see them and to take that responsibility seriously in the work that we do in this place.

Since becoming a father to my daughter, these issues have taken on an even deeper meaning for me. When you look at the world through the eyes of your child, you start to notice things that you might once have taken for granted. My daughter is only six years old, and yet I have already heard her say things like, “I can’t do that, that’s a boy’s job,” or describe certain roles as ones that require you to be “brave”—an attribute that she associates with men.

I can assure the House that my husband and I made sure that she knows that she can do any job that she wants to do, and that she is exceptionally brave herself, but hearing that from a six-year-old reminded me that, despite the progress we celebrate on International Women’s Day, the messages that children absorb about what women and girls can or cannot do can still shape their ambitions from a very early age. As a parent, and as a Member of this House, that is something that I feel a responsibility to challenge. Every girl, in this country and beyond, should grow up believing that her ambition is limited only by her talents and her determination.

One issue that I want to touch on, which has been mentioned by other hon. Members, is the perception of masculinity, and how that shapes the experiences of both men and women. For a long time, I have spoken about the challenges facing young men and boys, but doing that should never be seen as being in opposition to championing women and girls. In fact, the two go hand in hand. If we want a healthier society, we have to address both sides of that equation.

[Wendy Chamberlain]

The hon. Gentleman has made me remember something very important. When Sarah Everard was murdered, a number of us were lighting candles, and I remember having a conversation with my son and my daughter, during which my daughter, who was 15, told her brother about all the times that she had been cat-called and harassed on the street. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is important that the issue is not just about educating girls or educating boys—it is about educating the human beings that we are raising. Does he agree?

[Josh Newbury]

I completely agree with the hon. Lady. Allyship across many different characteristics is essential, but I have always felt that anything that men can do to echo and raise up the voices of women is incredibly powerful. We should take that seriously and not shy away from it in debates such as this one, where we may perhaps feel that our voice is not as important, as it absolutely can be.

Too many men and boys today feel disillusioned with politics, with opportunities and with what positive masculinity can look like in modern Britain. That is a real issue that deserves serious attention, but the answer to the challenge is not to exploit those frustrations by turning men against women, or to seek votes by weakening women’s rights, yet that is exactly the direction that some would take us in. For example, as we have heard, the Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election suggested that people without children should be taxed for that, placing pressure on women to have children. That misogynistic view of women’s role in society should be rejected in the strongest terms.

I am proud of everything that this Labour Government are championing for women, including closing the gender pay gap. British women still earn 13% less than men, but the pay gap is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet. Large employers are required to publish gender pay gap data, but that alone will not close the gap. This is not just fiscal; it is cultural. Thanks to the Employment Rights Act, employers will have to publish clear action plans showing how they will close the gap and support women to progress.

Before they even go into work girls can feel, as my daughter has shown me, like there are things that are not for them—certain ambitions that are out of reach. When we look at the history of opportunity in this country, we are reminded of how much can change when assumptions and prejudices are challenged. One of the most powerful examples of that is the work of Jennie Lee. As well as being a true Fifer, as noted by my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward), Jennie was also one of my predecessors as an adopted sister of Cannock.

As the Minister for the Arts in the 1960s, Jennie championed the creation of the Open University, which was built on the belief that talent should not be limited by background, age or sex. The idea that someone could study for a university degree from their own home was dismissed by many as unrealistic, but Jennie believed that education should be open to anyone with the determination to learn. The result has been extraordinary: the Open University has educated millions of people across this country and beyond, many of whom might never have had the opportunity otherwise to access higher education.

That legacy reminds us that expanding opportunity is not simply about access to education; it is also about expanding the horizons of what people believe is possible for themselves. But equality also depends on recognising the barriers that women still face in other areas of life. Women’s health has been overlooked far too often, with conditions such as endometriosis taking years to diagnose and many women leaving the workforce because of untreated menopause symptoms. I am proud that this Government are taking steps to tackle medical misogyny, from strengthening rights at work to improving support for conditions that largely affect women and expanding opportunity through education and childcare.

According to a report published by UN Women in 2022, it could take close to three centuries before we achieve full gender equality. That statistic should give us pause, but it should also strengthen our determination, because progress does not happen by itself; it happens when we smash outdated assumptions and refuse to accept that inequality is inevitable. If my daughter and millions of girls growing up across this country are to inherit a fairer society, it will need all of us in this House to continue that effort.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order. The previous occupant of the Chair reminded Members that we need to start Front-Bench speeches at around half-past 4. If the remaining Members could keep their comments to around five minutes, that would be very helpful.

16:14

[Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I will do my very best, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I congratulate Members on their contributions to the debate so far. In particular, I congratulate the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) on a very impassioned first speech about the rich traditions in her constituency of standing in unity and for humanity against attempts to divide. It has been six years since I delivered my first speech in Parliament during a similar debate on International Women’s Day, in which I paid tribute to our local history of women’s struggles for social justice, which continue to be daily sources of inspiration.

Today’s debate comes as the cost of living crisis continues to foster a sense of injustice, uncertainty and anxiety across the UK, set against a brutal backdrop of more than a decade of Conservative austerity and chronic under-investment in public services, which were left hollowed out and, in many instances, privatised by the last Government. The cost of living crisis has meant that women are more likely than men to lose their jobs or reduce their paid work, given that they are more frequently employed in sectors that have been directly disrupted by austerity measures and impacted by cuts and under-investment in public services.

Women, particularly black, Asian and minority ethnic women, continue to account for around two thirds of low earners, and they are more likely to be working on zero-hours contracts or part-time contracts. Ahead of the UN International Day to Combat Islamophobia this weekend, I am all too aware of how Muslim women are among the most economically disadvantaged faith groups in the UK, impacted by the prevalence of negative stereotypes, harassment and hate crimes.

The increased overlap of working and caring responsibilities has added to the ongoing reality that caring continues to be a major factor in women’s ability to participate on equal terms. Put simply, women still face structural economic inequality throughout their lives, which intersects with other structures of inequality, including race and disability. We also know that violence against women, including trans women, continues to blight our society.

I know personally that the impact of domestic abuse on the physical and mental health of survivors can be devastating. Four years ago, I faced a reselection process in which numerous complaints were made about rule-breaking and misogynistic intimidation, a process marred by the involvement of my ex-husband and his associates. As many Members will be aware, I was subsequently signed off sick from work. Although activists and organisations in the domestic abuse sector expressed alarm at my treatment, and my independent domestic violence advocate made representations on my behalf, the matter remains unresolved. The post-separation harassment and the institutional gaslighting and silencing goes on and on.

What I am reminded of by my lived experience is that domestic abuse can impact people from all walks of life and in all forms of employment, including those of us in public life. To this day, I still have women from across the country reaching out in support, and I continue to work with Members from across the House to call on all political parties to ensure that political representatives who are survivors of domestic abuse are not exposed to further harassment in their roles. I also continue to call and campaign for better protections in the workplace more widely, from paid leave for domestic abuse to mandatory policies on domestic abuse in every workplace, to eliminate domestic abuse in our society, because that requires a whole-society approach.

I am intrigued by today’s announcement of a new unit to look into intimidation experienced during elections, given that my ex-husband stood against me at the last general election with the stated aim of trying to “set the record straight”, after everything I had already endured. I will look at ways to contribute constructively to the Government’s work in this regard, because this is not just about me. No survivor of domestic abuse should be prevented from standing for office or staying in public life, having fled abuse or because they experience post-separation harassment.

We need to ensure that this place sends the right message to our country. In the light of the Mandelson scandal, we need an independent statutory inquiry into all of Jeffrey Epstein’s links to British institutions and figures, which I—along with over 70 Members of this House—continue to call for. I also believe we need an independent investigation into the activities of Labour Together.

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on domestic violence and abuse, I am delighted to be working with Women’s Aid to ensure that no survivor is left behind. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the landmark Domestic Abuse Act 2021 next month, this could not be more important, because we in the VAWG sector know that the weaponisation of violence against women and girls by far-right groups and political parties such as Reform harms survivors and ultimately impedes the real work of tackling the root causes of society-wide violence, to the detriment of women and girls. It has resulted in women fleeing persecution abroad facing even more danger here, including being targeting at hotels over the past year.

The Government have an ambitious commitment to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, and our APPG welcomes measures in the VAWG strategy to try to achieve that, including the overarching, cross-departmental approach and the focus on prevention. The Minister for Safeguarding has positively engaged with us in that regard, and is also delivering on other commitments. However, I am concerned about the Government’s wider programme of austerity; the real-terms cuts to benefits, including the retention of the overall benefit cap and the freezing of the local housing allowance; and the continued injustice of the WASPI women’s lack of compensation.

I am also concerned about the ongoing assaults on civil liberties, which target those who are most at risk: minoritised and migrant women, including those from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. I hope that, going forward, the Government can address the areas in which migrant and minoritised women need our support.

16:23

[Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)]

All of us in this House—women and men—will have been inspired by individual women, both in and outside our own lives. I have certainly been inspired by many of the contributions made by women Members today, and I have been proud to be part of the minority who are listening and also contributing.

I am proud to say that I have become who I am today because of many women in my own life. There are three I want to single out and pay tribute to: my mum, who brought me up, despite many personal challenges in our family; Sister Bernadette of the St Joseph convent school in Malta, who gave me the self-discipline that I hope I still have today; and Patricia Hennessy, who was an inspiring primary school teacher who helped me and so many others to believe in ourselves. I am sure that is why I am here today.

I am proud to represent a constituency that has produced so many great women who have not just inspired those around them but made the weather that has brought greater equality for women across the country. Every year, I visit the grave of Lady Constance Lytton in Knebworth Park. She was a suffragette who came from a privileged background but took another name so that her privilege would not give her advantages. She was imprisoned and force-fed. She carved “V” with a hairpin on her chest: V for “Votes for women”. Women got those votes, but she soon lost her life, and every year we pay tribute to her and all the women who gave up so much to get to where we are today. We have so much further to go.

We have other great women in Stevenage who are still with us today, including Barbara Follett, one of my predecessors. We are very proud of our Barbara, who helped to found the Labour Women’s Network. I stand next to my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Ms Oppong-Asare), who has been a stalwart there herself, because Barbara helped to lead the way. Much of the composition of the House is down to her hard work. Not only that, but she has improved the appearance of many of us in this House; I myself have been Folletted by Barbara, so I give her special thanks for that.

Baroness Sharon Taylor in the other place was the leader of Stevenage council for 16 years, and is now doing great things as a Minister in this Government, improving housing for so many people. Housing is what gives women a much better quality of life.

Those women are trailblazers, but in my town we have other great women. Our deputy council leader, Jeannette Thomas, is leading the housing revolution in Stevenage. We have a mayor of Asian background, Councillor Nazmin Chowdhury, who with grace and understanding exemplifies the best of women in Stevenage. Finally, our youth mayor, Charlotte Gregory, has been shadowing me in this place this week. She also helped to put together my notes for this speech, not all of which I can use, unfortunately. I thank Charlotte for being an exemplar of the future of women in our town and our country. May there be many more like her to come.

I will not talk about the great things the Government are doing—I will let the Minister set some of that out—but I fully support our mission to halve violence against women and girls in the coming years. It is a lot of hard work. We have to keep pushing at it, and I will support that all the way. Trying to get equality for women is not a zero-sum game; it is good for us all. It is good for men too. We all benefit from equality for women. I am proud to have taken part in this debate, and will fight for equality with every breath, inside and outside this place.

[Dr Lauren Sullivan]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I want to make it clear that, as per my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, I am a visiting research scientist—an unpaid position—at the Francis Crick Institute. I forgot to mention that in my speech.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I thank the hon. Member for her point of order. Her interests are now on the record. I now call, to make a very quick speech, Calvin Bailey.

15:05

[Mr Calvin Bailey (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

“A very quick speech from Calvin Bailey,” said no one ever. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—this will show your influence over me.

In 2021, the Defence Committee published a landmark report on women in the armed forces. One of the most consistent things that came out of it about women who serve is their feeling that they fail to be recognised by the public. Our veterans do not feel that society acknowledges them, so the Committee recommended that we use occasions like International Women’s Day to make sure that those voices and experiences are heard.

Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of serving alongside some exceptional women. When I led humanitarian aid operations in the Philippines, I did so alongside Master Sergeant Aircrew Samantha Green. When I delivered aid to the Yazidi women stranded on Mount Sinjar, it was Flight Lieutenant Abbie Anderson who generated our beloved C-130J aircraft, and it was my very close friend Jen Bracewell who managed both me—as you have done, Madam Deputy Speaker—and the missions. When I commanded a frontline squadron, I learned from the venerable Wing Commander Caz Viles, who had commanded the Royal Squadron. I did so under the exceptional leadership of Air Marshal Suraya Marshall, who is without doubt one of the most outstanding military leaders of her generation.

Despite the landmark Sex Discrimination Act 1975, women continued to be excluded from frontline combat roles in the British armed forces until 2016. In fact, it was only when I entered the Ministry of Defence in 2018 that all the restrictions were finally removed. Over the past couple of days, we have all seen that a female F-15 pilot was shot down over Kuwait. We should all reflect on the fact that, although women are putting themselves in the line of fire, the people who deploy them are questioning whether their gender makes them suitable to do their job. In the extra five minutes that I would have taken, I would have discussed how these things are being challenged at this very moment. I call on all of us to ensure that we challenge them when we are given the opportunity to speak.

Although the armed forces are recovering and the number of women in service is improving, it is important that we point to the disparities in treatment that persist. There are good stories, but there remain challenges and inequities. I urge anyone who sees my very truncated speech to go and listen to the wonderful speeches that we have heard today, including the maiden speech from the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer), which will all be very ably summarised in a moment.

I started my speech by saying that a landmark piece of work was done by the Defence Committee. It is therefore important that I recognise Lucy, Eleanor, Ines, Toni and Corrin, who sit in the background and tolerate the likes of me, and who helped us produce that incredible work. I thank them. I look forward to hearing the summing up.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the shadow Minister.

16:31

[Joy Morrissey]

This has been an excellent debate, with some outstanding contributions. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) on making her maiden speech, which was significantly better than mine. Her empathy, honesty and generosity of spirit will serve her well in this place, and her genuine pride in Manchester puts even Andy Burnham to shame.

I thank the hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer) for her excellent speech on FGM, and for raising this important issue. We also heard from the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Samantha Niblett), who raised the excellent idea of praising her staff. I shall shamelessly copy that by praising my office manager, Aleksandra Turner, and my senior case worker, Mary Shaw. Without these women, I would be truly lost. I thank the hon. Member for her idea, and all the women who serve as parliamentary staffers across the House. Honestly, we would be lost without them.

I shall keep my comments to a minimum, as I know that the Minister would like to speak. I just want to thank everybody for these incredible debates, and for the incredible time and honesty that all Members put into their speeches. I thank the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler), and I am sure that her campaign to be the Mayor of London will be a smashing success. I was the first female to make it to the final three for the mayoralty for the Conservatives, and I would be absolutely terrified to stand against her. I have no doubt that she would do a fantastic job for London.

I thank the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) for her contribution, and for standing up for young women and girls on online harms. She has continued to champion this issue, not just in this debate but throughout her time in Parliament.

I want to talk about everyone—for example, the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) really championed the issue of child sexual exploitation, which is so important —and I feel as if I am doing them all an injustice by cutting short my comments, of which I have a plethora. Please know, however, that it was an incredible debate to watch, and we do have more in common than we think.

With that—everyone will be happy to hear that I am bringing my speech to a close—it seems fitting to return to Nancy Astor, and I want to end with one of her greatest quotes. She once said:

“Women are young at politics, but they are old at suffering; soon they will learn that through politics they can prevent some kinds of suffering.”

We in this House have that chance for our women and girls. Let us take it.

16:35

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)]

First, I thank the Minister for Equalities for securing this debate in Government time. In the time I have been in the House, I think this is only the second time that has happened. I am incredibly proud to stand alongside her. I also thank the Opposition spokeswoman, the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Joy Morrissey), for setting the tone for this debate, and everybody else for following that tone.

I have to say that I have felt tearful at lots of points—I do not know what is wrong with me, but it is almost certainly something that the mother of my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Tulip Siddiq) would not be pleased for me to say. It is either hope or anger, or just the fact that I have my period, that makes me feel tired, hopeful and angry in equal measure. I say to the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) that if I get through this without crying, it will be a miracle. I just want to say a massive thank you.

As others have done, I had assumed—because sometimes I do not pay much attention—that this debate had been secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler), who does us that service so well every year, through the Backbench Business Committee, but it was in fact the Government’s doing. I thank the hon. Member for Beaconsfield for her comments, and I agree that she would be—and I hope she is—a challenge to whoever she stands opposite.

I thank the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer), who made her maiden speech. When I made my maiden speech, I commented on how sexist it is for it to be called a maiden speech, and I said I was not a maiden because my children were in the Gallery. True to form, I am talking about my period and my lack of virginity, but I shall continue. It was an absolute pleasure to listen to her. I shall put aside my Birmingham versus Manchester rivalry, and say that she is very welcome here and across this House. I am definitely not going to repeat what I said when I first introduced myself to her, but to paraphrase it without being sweary, I said there are lots of lovely people here regardless of which political parties they come from, and when we work together we are always strongest.

I wish that I could go through everybody’s speeches, but I just want to highlight my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball), a woman who I work very closely with. Campaigns we have worked on together gave me cause to cry earlier in the week. I would only say that she has ruined “Bridgerton” for me, because I have seen only the first episode, so I am irritated. However, she always speaks with such passion, and who does not deserve love? That rang out through the Chamber.

I would like to pay tribute to the towering figures of the past that everybody has mentioned who advanced the causes of women’s rights, but we have also all paid tribute to the women who, without fanfare and acclaim, support families and contribute to their communities every single day. I personally could not cope without the women in my life propping me up, making me laugh and just noticing the stuff that needs noticing. People do not notice how important that little act of love actually is.

We have spoken of progress and celebration, but we know we have far to go. I could highlight the women of many countries in the world whom many Members have highlighted. The women of Afghanistan and Iran have featured very heavily in this debate. I am the sister-in-law of a beautiful and now departed Iranian woman who died of breast cancer. She made her home in our country, because her country was not safe for her. The bravery of the women who stand up to be counted in Afghanistan and Iran should move every single one of us.

When we do not want to come here on a Monday morning, imagine the privilege to be able to stand and speak out in this place. The reason I stood to be elected to Parliament in the first place is that, while we are gathered here at the heart of our democracy to discuss these issues in comfort and safety, beyond these walls in every part of our country women and girls are suffering. They are being attacked, abused, harassed and stalked. At home, in public places and online, the scale of violence against women and girls shames our society.

Today’s debate is not the moment for detailed policy talk, so I will not do that. But I will say that I am proud to be part of a Government who are tackling this issue as the national emergency it is. That has been underscored by many people who have spoken about our commitment to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. But we know that words are not enough. Plenty has been promised and pledged in the past without results. That is why our violence against women and girls strategy, published in December, had to be different. It must deploy the full power of the state to deliver the change that is desperately needed. It is just a piece of paper; it is just a document. I have always said that when it needs to be stretched and ambition needs to be stretched, then that is absolutely what it should be. Brilliant women and campaigners—and credit to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner—campaigned for what I am about to say, which was not in the VAWG strategy.

Before I take on the grim task of reading out the names of all the women who have been killed in the past year, I want to take this opportunity to commit the Home Office to funding and delivering the oversight mechanism for the recommendations made in domestic homicide reviews. We will put in place a system that strengthens accountability and ensures that learning is consistently embedded across both local and national agencies.

This is about turning lessons into action, not just letting documents sit on a shelf in some local authority. By doing so, we will drive the meaningful change that is so desperately needed, because those women’s names—they used to just be numbers, but now they are names—must enable us to change to prevent future horrific deaths. It has been a long and arduous struggle, but I do believe that, with drive and leadership, change will come. Tragically, though, it will be too late for the victims, whose lives have been ended by this scourge, and their shattered families.

That brings me on to the task at hand. I will now read the names of the women who have allegedly been killed by men in the past year, collated arduously every year for over a decade by the Femicide Census. They are: Anjela Chetty; Joanne Penney; Michelle Egge-Bailey; Maleta Rosevear; Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo; Rachel Dixon; Claire Anderson; Paramjit Kaur; Clare Burns; Sarah Reynolds; Hien Thi Vu; Rebekah Campbell; Paria Veisi; Tracey Davies; Pamela Munro; Aimee Pike; Elizabeth Tamilore Odunsi; Nnenna Chima; Kathryn Perkins; Margaret McGowan; Ellen Cook; Rachael Vaughan; Marjama Osman; Yajaira Castro Mendez; Miriam MacDonald; Mary Green; Mandy Riley; Samantha Murphy; Isobella Knight; Christina Alexander; Annabel Rook; Reanne Coulson; Nilani Nimalarajah; Irene Mbugua; Nila Patel; Sarah Montgomery; Angela Botham; Fortune Gomo; Phylis Daly; Gwyneth Carter; Stephanie Blundell; Brenda Breed; Vanessa Whyte, and her children, James and Sara; Courtney Angus; Nkiru Chima; Kimberley Thompson; Shara Miller; Paris Kendall; Sufia Khatun; Zahwa Salah Mukhtar; Niwunhellage Dona Nirodha Kalapni Niwunhella; Sheryl Wilkins; Halyna Hoisan; Tia Langdon; Ndata Bobb; Linner Sang; June Bunyan; Michelle Thomson; Ann Green; Shelley Davies; Anjanee Sandhir; Catalina Birlea; Chereiss Bailey; Sonia Exelby; Agnės Druskienės; Michele Kennedy; Angela Shellis; Stephanie Irons; Dickiesa Nurse; Natalie Egan; Colleen Westerman; Katie Fox; Lainie Williams; Lili Stojanova; Xiaoqing Ke; Julie Wilson; Maria Saceanu; Lisa Smith; Janet Bowen; Samantha Lee; Lisa-Marie Hopkins; Gilly Livie; Tania Williams; Gloria De Lazzari; Victoria Hart; Lisa Denton; Vanessa Pountney-Chadha; Helen Rundle; Anam Rafay; Rita Rowley; Amaal Raytaan; Carla-Maria Georgescu; Helen Bird; Angela Clayton; Naomi MacIvor; Carolann Barraclough; Jennifer Symonds; Ellie Flanagan; and two women in their 40s whose names have not yet been confirmed. Every single year, there is always a name that has to be written on at the end because it comes in as I am walking in—I say that to give the House an idea of how regularly this happens. That final name on this year’s list is Karlie Sone.

The following are women whose names have not been read out in previous years: Lat Parks; Delia McInerney; Lucy Harrison; Laleh Zarejouneghani; Judith Law; Jane Riddell; Dawn Kerr; Victoria Adams; Simone Smith; and Brigitta Rasuli. I am grateful to the women of the Femicide Census for completing the list—it was incomplete because the information was not known—so that those women can be remembered. I also want to take a moment to remember those who have died by suicide or in unexplained circumstances as a result of abuse. We commit to doing more, so that their names are not forgotten. The number of those women outstrips the number in the list that I have just read out by some margin.

We refuse to forget these women, who all deserved so much more. I want to once again thank the Femicide Census for the tireless work that goes into collating these names every year. We find it difficult to listen to them, but the Femicide Census look through every single story. I express my profound gratitude for the work that it does to raise awareness of women and girls who have been so tragically killed by men. There is so much more that I could say, but the list continues to speak for itself. I will finish by saying only this: may these women get the justice that they deserved, and may we honour them by preventing others from suffering the same fate.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered International Women’s Day.