In yesterday’s third part of the interview, Jo talked about a range of issues from Easter eggs to body image. Today, it’s the turn of equality issues, both in society and within the Party. The first part of the interview can be found here, and the second part here.
Perhaps, what you are best known for is your continual fight for gender equality. You were the Minister for Women through much of the Coalition. In your recent article in the Huffington Post, you paint a bleak picture of the current state of the road towards gender equality and what, as a society, we need to do at both macro and micro levels. In your heart of hearts, do you ever think equality for women will be achieved?
I challenge the premise of your question slightly. It’s not just about equality for women, but it’s also about equality for men. Gender inequality harms men as well as women. The words ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are not interchangeable. If you think about men’s role as fathers and about the pressure on males in terms of masculinity and what it means to be a man, the stats on male suicide rates and male mental health issues are really worrying.
There’s a whole range of different issues. For example, the epidemic of violence against women and girls, and the picture of women in the work place in terms of economic power, and leadership and promotion. These things are all connected. All of us play our part in making it happen, even unwittingly. We are raised in a society that embeds the stereotypical and sexist views in us. This is reinforced all around us. I believe we can challenge gender inequality, but we need to be conscious of it. We need structural changes from government and organisations, but we also need to change our own behaviours in the way we interact with each other and the messages we reinforce to our friends and families. I think we can do it, but it’s a massive challenge. There is no doubt that it was the biggest and most difficult issue that I had responsibility for in government.
You say, perhaps, I’m best known for my campaign on gender equality. The number of times I am introduced as the former Minister for Equalities is astonishing given that it was only about a fifth of my job. My portfolio was mostly as a minister in the business department, with responsibility for such issues as employment law, consumer affairs, postal services, competition and insolvency for corporate governance. That took up a lot of my time.
Alongside my role in the business department, I worked on women and equality. It tells its own story that that’s the part people remember me for. In fact, shared parental leave was not an equality issue but an employment law issue, but it was assumed I’d be doing it in my role as Minister for Women. This was because anything to do with children was seen in relation to women.
If we take something like consumers rights, for example, we needed to get the law in place. We needed to revamp the Consumer Rights Act 2015, which I worked on, introduced and made sure we got the detail right. This took account of things like the internet and digital content, which was previously a grey area in the whole consumer rights sphere. For something like this to happen, the legal framework has to be right. It had to be updated, the whole enforcement of trading standards and the Competition and Markets Authority had to be done, and we had to ensure people were aware of their rights. Although it’s not perfect, it does work because there’s not a big section of our society who believe consumers deserve to be ripped off. But when looking at gender equality from a ministerial perspective, it is such an ingrained and deep societal issue and problem that it needs not only structural and policy changes but also behavioural changes. That’s why I’m writing my book Equal Power because I feel I learned so much from that process. I want to help to give people the tools to understand what action they personally can take because it’s really easy for us to sit here at Conference and look at something like gender inequality and ask ‘how do I begin to solve that?’ It’s too huge. If we are paralysed by the feeling of our own personal inadequacy up against such a massive problem, then that doesn’t help. Whereas, if people can recognise that by taking small actions, whether confronting sexual harassment on the Tube or changing the way in which they relate to men who turn up to the nursery, we can challenge gender inequality. We can create change.
So yes, there’s still a lot to do.
In a recent speech, you said that your proudest achievement as a minister, which you just touched on, was winning the battle for Shared Parental Leave. This policy has been met with hostility. Some arguments against the policy are that if the mum took all the time, the dad would take over the role of the mum which, in turn, would have a negative effect on the child. From a business perspective, concerns arose over potential disruptions in the workplace and the complexity regarding the administration. What do you say to those with concerns and why is shared parental leave important?
Where a child has two parents, both those parents have an important role to play. This notion that somehow parenting is something which is only for mothers, and fathers are a sort of optional element that could, maybe, do a little bit at weekends but don’t really have a lot of value to add, is just insulting to fathers. Evidence is incredibly clear that children do better when both parents are involved. Developmentally, they do better and they’re happier. We know that men who are fathers are happier and healthier and even live longer if they are able to play an involved role as fathers. We know it’s good for their partners as well. Adding to that, it is one of the structural changes that would help in challenging gender inequality in society.
Not having shared parental leave is both bad for women within the workplace and bad for men as fathers. To me it’s a complete no brainer.
The hostility comes from challenging some of those basic assumptions. Those who are against shared parental leave either do not like to see women being able to play a full role in the workplace or don’t like the idea of men being involved as fathers. Somehow, it’s seen as men doing women’s work.
Last year, reports from My Family Care and the Women’s Business Council claim that only one in a hundred men are using the Shared Parental Leave policy. They cite reasons such as it is financially unworkable for most couples, women refuse to share and there’s a lack of awareness around the policy. How does this make you feel?
The honest answer is furious. What they, of course, don’t cite is that the statistic of the study found that they couldn’t find the data for men who were eligible to take shared parental leave. At a macro level they found that of the men interviewed only one percent had taken the leave. They didn’t know how many of them became fathers within the last year, and this was one year on from Shared Parental Leave coming into force. Obviously, before that they wouldn’t have been eligible. Although in a very small sample of their study, in a separate part, they did know if men had had children since Shared Parental Leave came in, and the figure was more like a 30 percent take up. I feel furious because that unbelievably dodgy statistic has been cited. I didn’t take maternity leave in the last year because my son is three, but nobody would be including me in a study on how many women were taking maternity leave. It is an example of really poor journalism.
There is no official figure for shared parental leave. HMRC hold some data on the number of employers who have claimed shared parental pay. Their figures suggest a four to five percent take up, but that finding is incomplete. We know that the numbers of men who have taken shared parental leave will be more than the numbers whose employers have claimed for it, not least because about a quarter of the period of the leave that can be taken is unpaid. For example, if the woman is taking the nine month paid maternity leave and the man is taking some of the unpaid time, then no shared parental pay would be claimed. And, if they weren’t taking very much time off work, some employers may not be bothered with the bureaucracy of completing and submitting the pay form.
Given that the government impact assessment anticipated between two and eight percent take up of shared parental leave in the first year, it looks like it’s on track.
What’s so frustrating about misleading figures is that we know there is a financial barrier to men taking share parental leave in the same way that there’s a financial barrier to women taking maternity leave because, let’s face it, after the first six weeks maternity and shared parental pay is the same at statutory level. The difference is that more employers enhance maternity pay than enhance shared parental pay. Therefore, we need to encourage more employers to enhance shared parental pay. When we were in government, the civil service did it. We encouraged other businesses and companies like Deloitte, PWC and Citibank to do it. Where this has happened, a very good take up is evident. PWC, for example, has had more than 80 men take shared parental leave in the first year and a half.
Another big barrier is cultural. Men believe that other men don’t take the leave. They think they will be looked down upon if they do take it, and they believe that it is a really odd thing to do. If you have a narrative that says ‘hardly any men take shared parental leave and it’s a really odd thing to do’, then it just increases the barrier. So I would encourage anyone reading this to be very careful when looking at statistics. I wrote an article in the FT about the stats when the story broke, and we need to not fall for that.
Being a champion for gender equality, some may find it surprising that you are an opponent of positive discrimination for women in the Lib Dems. Why is this?
I’ve been on an interesting journey with this issue. In 2001, in the debate I previously mentioned, I opposed the motion for all women shortlists, which was a very nerve wracking moment as I was going up against Shirley Williams. I did this on the basis that our data and research showed very clearly that the problem was not getting women selected in seats, but getting them to be candidates. What we needed to do, therefore, was to have an intensive program to encourage more women to put themselves forward to be candidates.
I helped set up the campaign for gender balance and spent some years leading it. I did everything I could to make that approach work. As I outlined last year to the Scottish Lib Dem Conference, I spent 15 years trying to make it work, and there were dozens of people across the party who were incredibly helpful and we did achieve some excellent results, for example, in getting women selected in seats where MPs stood down. In 2010, eight Lib Dem MPs were retiring from their seats; four of the constituencies selected men and four selected women. In 2015, we also chose a 50 percent ratio in those types of seats, but the election result of that year meant many of those people weren’t elected. So we did make some progress, but it was not the party wide level of commitment, including from the leadership under successive leaders, that was necessary to make it really work.
At the end of the day, many local parties did not see it as their job to do the talent spotting. Instead, they just advertised and saw who applied, and simply fed back that no women came forward. That approach isn’t going to work. It doesn’t work in the business community, and it doesn’t work in a political party. You need to be much more proactive. Also, many of my colleagues in the parliamentary party were asked to do minimal things to help the process, such as give us the names of three women in their local constituency who would be good candidates, and we will do the rest. Less than a third responded to that request.
Despite outlining how disappointed I was, last year I supported all women shortlists not because I don’t think we can select women otherwise but because I think it’s the only way to make it an imperative that people go out there and they find women candidates. I would much rather be in a situation where we didn’t have any all women shortlists, I think it’s better if we can do it without them, but I literally don’t know how to make enough people in the party take it seriously enough to do enough about it. It has been a disappointing journey.
So outside of the Lib Dem arena, what’s your view on positive discrimination?
It’s similar. I still think it’s better if you can avoid it, but only if you can make it work without doing it. A good example would be the work that Vince Cable, myself and others did on the Women on Boards Initiative. In 2010, Vince was clear that this needed to be a priority. He appointed Mervyn Davies to lead this initiative through the Lord Davies Review. Mervyn Davies encouraged lots of chairman and CEOs to come on board. Simultaneously, we had Helena Morrissey setting up the 30% Club, which was a great campaigning organisation that kept this issue on the agenda. So we had a mixture of government and business. Also, we had some cheerleaders and activists supporting it. Interestingly, one other thing I think considerably helped was, at the same time, European Union procedures were considering whether quotas would be introduced. One of the best arguments against this was to say that we could do it without quotas, and nobody in the business community wanted quotas. That really helped to focus minds. We changed the face of British boardrooms from being around 11 percent female at the start of the parliament to, after five years of the Davies Review, 26 percent female. Obviously, that’s still nowhere near enough but it just shows that, in a very short period of time while bearing in mind the level had been plateaued for more than a decade, change can be achieved. For this to continue, we need people to be making a continuous and concerted effort, and it must stay on the agenda. When that focus slips the progress stalls, which is exactly what has happened in the last couple of years. There’s a newly appointed team, Philip Hampton and Dame Helen Alexander, who are now trying to take on the next challenge, which is particularly around the executive pipeline. I wish them well.
I think the adoption of positive discrimination is a signal that you’ve failed in the other stuff. But if you really can’t make other options work then it’s one of the things which needs to be on the table and, in particular, I think the threat of something like quotas can be an incredibly effective way of focusing minds.
As a last resort?
I suppose that would be a way of putting it, yes.
In tomorrow’s final excerpt, the discussion turns to contemporary politics and what Jo is/was up to before the snap General Election was called…
* Rob May is a Political History PhD student and Lib Dem activist.
4 Comments
“Some arguments against the policy are that if the mum took all the time, the dad would take over the role of the mum which, in turn, would have a negative effect on the child”
Hu? Not clear what the criticism was from that. If Mum took all the leave there wouldn’t be any leave left for Dad to take.
I wasn’t aware of any criticism of the policy, just it being mainly ignored. As it originated from a libertarian think tank the right seemed fine with it and the left seemed to either ignore it or be nominally supportive.
I’ve enjoyed reading the interview so far. The party’s issues with diversity are more than just about gender though so my main concern with AWS is it could lead to other disadvantaged candidates being overlooked.
@Andrew T As I understand it, the law permits AWS and all-disabled shortlists but not shortlists selected on other characteristics. See here, although that’s not the policy motion (which was F20 from Spring 2016, I believe, and can be found in that conference’s Agenda e.g. p63 onwards of the Clear Print version ).
In short, encouraging other underrepresented groups is included.
@Daniel Walker
Thank you for linking those pages which are interesting. I suppose the legal barriers are a major hurdle. I’m surprised political parties are not exempt from such legislation. We should be able to run our selections how we wish.