Meeting of the Parliament 03 March 2020
I rise with no small degree of relief, given that it has been my privilege to address the chamber during the debates on the previous three international women’s days. I did so as a representative of an all-male party in the Scottish Parliament but, thanks to the Shetland by-election last summer, that is no longer the case. It is also true that when I was first elected to the Scottish Parliament, our Westminster group was entirely male, too, but now it is majority female. Times change, and in a good way.
Rachael Hamilton mentioned Malala Yousafzai, and it is her words—
“We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back”—
that underpin the theme for this year’s international women’s day: each for equal.
International women’s day is marked the world over and celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also calls on us to address the need for action to accelerate gender parity. Many Scottish organisations are working to that global end, and I will talk about one such organisation.
Scottish Love in Action is a charity that has supported work with marginalised children in developing countries over the past 20 years. It supports the work of VOICE 4 Girls in Hyderabad, in India, which is the country that the UN calls the most dangerous place in the world to be born a girl.
VOICE 4 Girls educates marginalised adolescent girls about their bodies, their health and their rights. The organisation empowers girls to stay in education, empowers them to not get married under age and teaches them that they have the right to a life that is free from violence and abuse. That, in turn, gives them the voice to speak up for their rights, and they usually go on to speak up not just for themselves, but for their sisters, their friends and their mothers.
Although Scottish Love in Action and VOICE 4 Girls support girls, they also support boys. It is critical to acknowledge that in order to improve the position of girls and women, it is necessary to educate the boys around them to stop the perpetuation of gender inequality in our schools and to address its existence in our society at large. Initiatives to promote gender equality in and through schools are imperative not just in India, but here, too, because gender disparity is not limited to other countries or to other cultures.
I often quote Coretta Scott King, because I think that her words are apposite. She said that the struggle for equality is never ending and that you have to win it with every generation. There is such truth in those words. Members do not need to look very far to see the measure of the struggle for equality that falls to our generation in this country and at this time: women still make up only 36 per cent of the members in this chamber, 23 per cent of council leaders, 13 per cent of senior police officers and 6 per cent of national newspaper editors.
The distance that we still have to travel in pursuit of gender equality in Scotland in 2020 can be seen in those numbers, and in the actions of those men in positions of power who still use that influence as a means to molest the women beneath them. It can be seen in the gender pay gap and in maternity discrimination, which has clung stubbornly to our workplaces; it can also be seen in the reality that Holyrood has taken full 20 years to discuss, let alone grapple with, period poverty.
My life has been filled with the impact of extraordinary women. I have mentioned my great-aunt Joan previously, and I will do so again now. In April 1940, Joan worked in Foreign Office intelligence as part of the British legation to Oslo. She stood side by side with the celebrated spy chief Frank Foley, burning intercepts as Wehrmacht divisions overran the city. As a key member of the Foley group, she helped to rescue the Norwegian Government and King, escaping overland by car and foot through the snow, through Lillehammer and on to the coast. From there, after providing vital communications support to the Norwegian resistance, she was evacuated, eventually, by submarine back to Britain.
Great-aunt Joan was awarded an MBE in the 1941 new year’s honours list for her service. She was only 23 years old. I wish that I had known her. In her short career, she was present at some of the most defining moments of global history. She was part of the delegation to Yalta, and I can only imagine the diplomat that she would have become if she had not sadly been lost to us when her plane disappeared over the Atlantic on her return journey from the San Francisco conference that established the UN at the end of the war.
When I think about my great-aunt Joan, I am reminded of the frontiers that she had to push back as a young woman in a man’s world. That she was decorated and mentioned in dispatches several times in the male-dominated landscape of military intelligence is testimony to the strength of her character and her resilience. I see that strength in the women in my life today, and I honour them for it.
There are more statues to animals in Edinburgh than there are to women, and the exploits of powerful and inventive men are much more readily memorialised and mythologised on bank notes and in school text books than those of women. The greatness of women in our nation’s history is seldom brought to the fore, which is why we need international women’s day.
There is a letter in my attic from Anthony Eden who, as Foreign Secretary, wrote to my great-grandparents expressing concern over my great-aunt Joan’s disappearance. Although it is quite something to have a letter in my possession that was signed by someone who would later become Prime Minister, I keep and treasure it in her memory and all that she achieved. I will use it to inspire my daughter when she is old enough to understand that the greatness of women is nothing new.