We do a little better than that now, but perhaps not all that much better. Perhaps the image that politics is an inherently sexist arena—recent events may have reinforced that image—is also not welcoming to women.
We have also heard that it is hard to give up power. Power largely resides in the hands of men, who understandably want to retain it. Inadequate childcare is certainly a factor. A recent survey shows that two out of three local authorities are failing to fulfil their statutory obligation to provide childcare, despite the progress that the Minister mentioned. If the lack of support in the childcare area is a factor, how much more this is true of women who have caring responsibilities for older or disabled relatives.
It is in all our interests to enable those women, many of them over 50, to remain in the workforce. We need them to provide care but also to be able to continue to combine caring with paid employment. Their contribution to the economy is vital in both roles but we must also ensure that the caring role does not of itself lead them to live in poverty or build up poverty for the future because of a lack of pension contributions or savings. I am pleased to say that, yesterday, Carers UK launched an inquiry into caring and family finances, examining the costs of caring and the impact that caring has on the ability to work, with the aim of influencing policy in this area.
So far as public service goes, we must ask: what can we do about it? We can get better leadership from the top. We can stop rubbishing the idea of public service. Too often we hear that civil servants are interested only in bureaucracy. We must talk up public service.
We must have parity on interview panels, because we tend to appoint or choose people in our own image. Having appointed dozens, probably hundreds, of people in my time, I know that men tend to oversell themselves while women go the other way and undersell themselves. In that regard, increasing the self-confidence of women is all-important. Those of us who have been reasonably successful in public life owe a duty to our daughters and granddaughters to build that confidence so that the whole of society can benefit.
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