International Women’s Day

Baroness Shah Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shah (Lab)]

My Lords, I am proud to rise on International Women’s Day to speak on the theme “Give to gain”, especially as we will be hearing from a number of brilliant maiden speakers today, including my noble friends.

At first hearing, “Give to gain” may sound like a transaction, but I believe it speaks to something far deeper and older than that. It speaks to the truth that when we invest in women—in their rights, dignity and power—we do not give anything away; we gain everything. We gain stronger economies, healthier families, more just societies and democracy worthy of the name.

Today I do not only want to speak to the language of economic dividends or policy frameworks; I want to speak about courage. There is no better place to begin than with a woman named Jayaben Desai. In the summer of 1976, Jayaben Desai, a Gujrati Indian immigrant, like my family, barely five foot tall, walked off the production line at Grunwick Film Processing Labs in Brent, north London. Her manager gave her an ultimatum: work overtime or leave. She left. She then stood on a picket line for nearly two years, rallying postal workers, trade unionists and politicians, drawing tens of thousands to those streets, including people I still call friends. When asked how a small group of south Asian women could possibly take on the establishment, she replied with characteristic fire: “We are the lions, Mr manager. When you sleep, the lions will still be there”. Grunwick management never fully conceded, but what Jayaben Desai gave the rest of us was a monument to solidarity—proof that women who far too often were dismissed as invisible could stand up, speak out and change the conversation of a nation. She gave her fight and we gained our conscience.

Yet, 50 years on from Grunwick, we must be honest about how far we still have to travel. The gender pay gap in the United Kingdom remains stubbornly persistent. Women still make up a disproportionate share of those in poverty, of unpaid carers, and of workers in insecure employment. Globally the picture is still darker. In too many places, girls are denied schooling, women are denied the vote and, scarily, more are exploited. We have not finished giving, which means we have not finished gaining.

I have a daughter. She is 16 years old. She is bright, funny, opinionated—much like her mother—and everything you would want a young woman to be. She is growing up in a world, like the girls I taught, that in some ways is immeasurably better than the one Jayaben faced in 1976. She has legal protections, educational opportunities and role models that her generation can see and name. But she is also growing up online and what she encounters there—what all our daughters encounter there—is a form of misogyny that is not shouted from a factory floor or written in a policy document. It is algorithmic; it is ambient; it is everywhere. It is the content that tells her that her worth is in her appearance. It is the influencers and, worse still, the ideologues who have built an entire platform on the idea that women’s progress has gone too far—that feminism is the problem and the girls who speak up are asking for what they get. It is a normalisation of sexual harassment in comment sections. It is the boys in her class who have been radicalised, quietly and systematically, by voices online that trade in contempt for women. Jayaben faced her oppressors across the factory gate. My daughter and her generation face theirs through a screen.

This is not a peripheral concern for this House. It is central to the question of what it means in 2026 to invest in the next generation of women. “Give to gain” means giving women—our daughters—the digital literacy to recognise manipulation and building platforms that are safe by design. It means giving them the knowledge that what they are experiencing is not a personal failing. It means giving our sons something better too, because the answer to online misogyny is not only protection but a kind of education in the values and the example that we choose to model for all our young people. “Give to gain” is not a transaction or a trade, but the understanding that when any of us gives courage, it gives the rest of us something to gain. When any of us gives voice to the voiceless, the voiceless are no longer voiceless.

On this International Women’s Day, let us honour Jayaben Desai and the millions of women like her—seen and unseen, celebrated and forgotten—who gave so we might gain. The lions are still here. They are in every workplace that denies equal pay, every street that is unsafe after dark and every classroom where a girl is told to dream smaller. Let us ask ourselves, with urgency and humility, what are we prepared to give?