International Women’s Day

Baroness Brady Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brady (Con)]

My Lords and—why not, on today of all days?—my Ladies, I start by offering my congratulations to the noble Baronesses on their most excellent maiden speeches. I reassure them that we have all breathed that sigh of relief as we sit down when it is all over; I assure them it gets better. I offer them a very warm welcome; this House is definitely enriched when we have women who join it with leadership roles, with passion and with experience.

I speak today not simply to celebrate women’s achievements—though there are so many, and we have heard so many wonderful stories—but to confront honestly the unfinished business that still stands before us. When I reflect on the path that brought me here, being the youngest person to run a public company in the UK and the first woman to run a football club at 23, I was walking corridors where I was frequently the only woman. I learned early on that being capable is not the same as being accepted, and that strength and resilience must often speak louder than credentials in environments designed by and for someone very different from me.

The UN’s theme this year,

“Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls”,


is not just aspirational. It must be organised and structural. Rights are meaningless if they do not translate into justice at work, in law and in society. Justice is hollow without action that dismantles the economic, cultural and institutional barriers that women still face every day.

Let me be frank: while the UK has seen the headline gender pay gap fall over the past decade, the reality behind the number is sobering. Women still earn substantially less, on average, than men. At the current pace, some reports suggest that parity may not arrive until the middle of this century. This gap is not abstract; it means that women in effect work unpaid for many weeks of the year compared with their male counterparts. ONS data shows that women my age have the highest pay gap, at 19.7%, and work the equivalent of 72 days a year for free. From the very start of this year until next Friday, 13 March, we are in effect working for free. It also compounds over a lifetime, contributing to a dramatic gender pension gap that leave older women far more financially vulnerable than men.

Why does this persist? It is because we still operate systems that penalise women for caring—for their children, families or older family members—while rewarding uninterrupted career progression. ONS data shows that the full-time employment rate for mothers with dependent children was around 39%, compared with about 84% for fathers. It is also because culture still reverberates with assumptions about who belongs in leadership. When job titles and pay packets are decided, old biases queue up to decide who gets the corner office. I am co-chair of the Women and Work APPG—everyone is welcome to join—and our report in 2025 showed that women-led businesses with all-female founding teams received just 1.8% of all UK venture capital in early 2024. There is no justice in that.

This is not a plea born of pessimism. It is a call to accelerate action: to enforce equal pay at every level; to expand and make affordable, high-quality childcare universal; to redesign workplaces so that flexibility is not a consolidation prize but a standard practice; and, so that when a woman sits at a board table, she is not seen as a badge of diversity but as a recognised equal contributor to strategy, profit, vision, leadership, values and purpose. We have seen the transformation power of transparency. The requirement for gender pay gap reporting has forced organisations to look in the mirror. Transparency alone, however, is not change; it is a spotlight. Light without follow-through leaves too many shadows untouched.

As someone who built a career in male-dominated fields, I know what change feels like when it actually happens. Opportunity broadens, voices diversify and decisions become better. While I am proud of how far we have come, I will be deeply humbled if, in my lifetime, we can reach a point where advocating for women’s equality is unnecessary because equality has become genuinely normal. Let this day be more than reflection. Let it be a turning point for concrete action in business, in government and in every institution that we influence.