International Women’s Day

Baroness Davies of Devonport Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Davies of Devonport (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to be here today to celebrate International Women’s Day and to hear the speeches of so many noble Lords, including such interesting maiden speeches, on which I add my congratulations.

I cannot start any other way than by recognising the struggles of women around the world who are not being treated as equals, and most especially to express solidarity with the women of Afghanistan and Iran, who are fighting so bravely for their education, freedom to wear what they want, and even the right to have a voice in public. These are things that we take for granted here in the West. The world is watching as we try to enable half of the world to have the same rights as the other half. It was inspiring to watch the brave Iranian women’s football team abstain from singing the national anthem in protest last Monday at the Asian Cup.

As everyone knows, my area of expertise is sport and physical activity. For 10 years now, I have been working for equal rights for females to have their own space in sport, based simply on safety and fairness in competition. All my life, I have worked to get more people to be able to do sport; that means sport for everybody. I am passionate about the positivity, resilience and confidence that being active brings, both physically and mentally, which is massively underacknowledged and underappreciated. Exercise releases nature’s anti-depressants.

Women, however, get just 5% of all the money that is in the world of sport, and less than 4% of prime-time media coverage. I spent a year writing Unfair Play, a book all about inequalities and injustices in the world of sports. In our research, we found that, on an average day, there were 20 men’s sports stories to every one story on women.

Right now, here in the UK, boys get 280 million more hours of sport each year than girls, and they get access to a wider range of sports. Some 340,000 more girls than boys are excluded from sport due to costs. Over half of girls say that seeing role models encourages them to play sport, but where are those role models?

Noble Lords would be forgiven if they thought women’s sport was getting more exposure, because in some sports, of course, it is. Football, rugby and cricket have been getting better coverage, and that is brilliant to see, but it has been at the expense of other sports and a diversity of sport, and it has been regular coverage rather than blanket coverage during major tournaments, which is what we see the most. If I asked noble Lords to name just five present-day competing female athletes in five different sports, I think they would probably really struggle. The BBC has even lost the television rights to this year’s home Commonwealth Games—a multisport event. You will have to watch it on pay-per-view. This is the first time that has happened in my lifetime.

Females are often relegated to unsuitable equipment, inconvenient time slots, less investment into research, and the use of leftover sports facilities after men have had first dibs. I recently spoke to a group of elite female rugby players who cannot use the club’s state-of-the-art main training facility because it does not have floodlights—the women have to work during the day when, of course, the men do not. Stadiums in this country are not even built with automatic male and female changing rooms. We require a UK version of the great American Title IX. That is on my to-do list.

At my first Olympics, when I was just 13 years old—just yesterday—I was outnumbered four to one. This is an area where we have made great improvement at elite level, but it does not work its way down. We now lose girls from sport at 11 and 12 when it used to be 15 and 16. We need to think outside the box on how we engage young girls to stay involved in physical activity. If that means putting hairdryers in school changing rooms and bringing in Zumba classes, we need to do that. Presently, 2 million hours are lost to girls who skip PE every year.

What is so often overlooked is the confidence that participating in sport brings. Fabulous research in the USA shows us that over 50% of all female CEOs have come from a background where sport played a big part in their life. It gave them confidence and ambition. If we deter girls from sport, we lose that resilience, that achievement and the desire to go on.

That is why it is so important that we give girls and women their own sports category at all levels, not just elite, because all women and girls are worthy, not just the best ones. Female sport is not a consolation prize or a support structure; it is there for women and girls. Peer-reviewed science shows us that we cannot remove all male physical advantage—the difference remains huge and consistent. When presented with unfairness, females just exclude themselves.

The same applies to privacy in changing rooms. Some 83% of girls and young women aged between 16 and 24 have reported sexual assault or harassment in sports facilities. Changing villages, although cheaper for councils, are a haven for voyeurism. We must deal in facts and statistics, not feelings, because the feelings of women and girls are being utterly ignored at the moment.

I know it was a long time ago, but my own sport, swimming—one of the biggest participation sports and a life-saving skill—used to be on screens four or five times per year. Today, we are lucky if we get it on the television once a year. Remember, not every little girl wants to be a footballer—although football is a great sport, of course. We need role models across lots of different sports. We have to start telling our young athletes that they are important.

When advantages affect men’s sport, they are dealt with extremely quickly—take, for example, carbon shoes or sharkskin swimsuits—and are either removed in weeks or made available to everybody. But when unfairness affects women’s sports, it is treated differently. So far, it has taken me 10 years and counting, and we are not there yet.

In 1998, the IOC asked its female athletes whether they wanted sex screening to remain. Well over 80% said yes, but the IOC still removed it. Why ask women the question if we are just going to be ignored? It is very likely that we will see its reinstatement across all sport this year, but it has taken us 26 years to get it back. In the meantime, women and girls have walked away from something that has a huge positive effect on their lives and, of course, helps their mental health, which at the moment is probably at its lowest ebb ever.

I have never wanted anyone excluded from sport, but it is not beyond our skills to find ways to include everyone without ruining the experience and opportunities of 51% of our population. They are worthy of a level playing field too. I can honestly say, after 50 years of being involved in sport, that it has given me resilience and confidence, which I have definitely needed over the past few years. At the moment, we are taking that away from our young children. We need to make sure that we can find more space for them.