International Women’s Day

Dawn Butler Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[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.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.