International Women’s Day

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for bringing this debate to the Chamber. In recent years, major changes have taken place in our society. Relationships between men and women were not as they were 50 years ago. Women are more likely to be financially independent, participate in paid employment, be well educated and expect to be treated as equals. Yet we have an hour-for-hour gender pay gap of 22 per cent. The gap is more than 40 per cent if you compare the rates earned by part-time women workers. We have women corralled into a narrow range of labour market areas. We have more women qualifying as doctors and lawyers, while their numbers are not reflected in consultancies or partnerships. Many of these problems would be better addressed, and solutions identified, if decision-making bodies were more evenly balanced, enabling the voices of women as well as men to be heard. Unfortunately, we are a long way from that ideal. Women occupy only 19 per cent of seats in the UK Parliament and make up only 11 per cent of FTSE 100 directors, and only 33 per cent of non-executive directors on public boards. As long as decisions on strategy, direction, employment policies and so on are made by groups of people who are unrepresentative either of their workforce, customer base or society at large, those decisions will not contain the richness of life's diverse experiences. Our Government have taken a number of initiatives to try to remedy the diversity deficit on public sector boards. Both the Women's National Commission and the Government Equalities Office are running programmes up and down the country that bring in women with board experience to encourage and assist other women who would like to get more involved. Changing the male/female balance on private boards is trickier for government. Such decisions are rightly made by companies themselves. I do not believe that male directors make deliberate decisions to keep women away from company boards: I think that most of these people have no idea how to bring about change. They do not think about how to advertise, or how to ensure that the image of the organisation will appeal to women. They do not test out the headhunters—firms that are paid significant sums and yet time after time identify potential candidates from the same pool of people: safe, known and just like the ones we already have. A few weeks ago in this House, I proposed that the Government should address the problem by bringing together an exemplar group of companies so that issues could be considered, ways forward identified and best-practice guidelines produced. I hope that the Minister will push this proposal with her colleagues. So what of this House and the other place? The Labour Party decision on all-women shortlists, taken some years ago, has obviously made a difference, not only to Labour representation but to the thinking of the other parties. However, with only 19 per cent representation, there is clearly some way to go. The Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly both started with a blank sheet of paper, enabling better and more representative systems to be put in place. The UK Parliament does not fare well in global comparisons. It has already been mentioned that Rwanda leads the way with more than 50 per cent female representation. Sweden has 47 per cent and Argentina 40 per cent. Even Bahrain, placed in the conservative Middle East, betters the United Kingdom with 28 per cent female representation in its parliament. Change will not come about by osmosis. Saying that we want more representative systems will not make that happen: we must identify the hurdles and stumbling blocks and determine to remove them—and by "we", I mean all of us.