Business of the House

The motherhood pay penalty means that mothers with two children take home 26% less income than women without children. A report by the Fawcett Society shows that the pay penalty hits black and minoritised women the hardest, with the intersection of sexism and racism compounding disadvantage. There is more than enough evidence of the need to take serious action to deal with these inequalities—for instance, by making flexible work the default, specifically by means of an advertising duty, and by making ethnicity pay gap reporting mandatory for employers with more than 100 employees. Can we have a debate in Government time on the implications for women of the UK Government’s refusal to do those things?