Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 04 March 2021
I am not sure how I can follow that, but I thank Gail Ross and Elaine Smith. Both of whom, in their different ways, have played important parts in my parliamentary life—Gail, recently, as the deputy convener of the Public Petitions Committee. She is the good cop, most of the time, and is an excellent parliamentarian. How can I beat that? Her speech, as a backdrop, was fantastic.
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate to mark international women’s day. As I near the end of my time in Parliament, I am mindful of the privilege that I have had, as an MSP, to speak up and speak out for women. I celebrate the women across our communities who do that day in and day out.
Today is an opportunity to reflect on women’s lives and the challenges that women here and globally face because of our sex. That does not happen because of how we look or how we dress, but because of who we are. Across the world, girls face forced marriage, child marriage, female genital mutilation, sex selection and rape in war. They are denied education and independence of action because of their sex.
I am here as a Labour elected member. Labour is a party that has understood, from the beginning of this Parliament, that women have been underrepresented in politics and that that underrepresentation is a consequence of sex discrimination. Therefore, I did not, and do not, take my job lightly.
I am proud that since the Parliament’s inception women have taken their work seriously—none more so than the persistent and focused Elaine Smith, who spoke up so eloquently for women and those who are disadvantaged earlier, as she always has.
We need to understand fully how being a woman impacts on our health. Mesh has been mentioned, but mesh highlights other issues in which the experience of women has simply not been believed. It is a feature of women’s health that the health system has not understood their experiences.
We need to understand how being a woman impacts on our life chances—how segregation in jobs, education and training have lifetime consequences for women. We need to understand women’s vulnerability to male violence, and that fear of male violence is an ever-present companion from our youth. We are anxious while walking home, alert while running in the park and aware, too, of what behaviour must be “managed” in the workplace.
We also need to understand that the realities of domestic abuse, sexual violence, coercive control and femicide dominate the lives of all too many women across the country. They frame the capacity of women to escape, and they underline the need for single-sex spaces where women might heal and learn.
Women’s lives tell us why we need to invest in public services that see women’s needs, as well as the many goals that women have in holding families and communities together. There are women who are carers, either paid or unpaid, and women who manage care for elderly parents and for their children. Now, in the teeth of a pandemic, and given what is to come, we must test all our budgets in order that we understand how women are disadvantaged and how women’s inequality must be addressed in the coming period.
There has been progress, but there is a long way to go. We all have a responsibility to choose to challenge. My generation chose to challenge the notions that women were absent from positions of power because they were just not good enough; that if a woman just tried hard enough, she would get on; that women were uniquely suited to caring and to women’s work; and that somehow women deserved what happened to them when they were the victims of male violence.
My generation also chose to challenge a definition of politics that excluded the experience of women’s lives. It did not talk about childcare issues, it really did not talk about low pay, and it certainly did not talk about abuse and neglect and the systemic denial of women’s rights. Those issues are now seen as mainstream in political life and as necessary to consider in anything that addresses inequality.
I will finish with two things. When I got involved in politics; when in this Parliament we spoke of women’s rights; when my dear, departed sister Trish Godman spoke up about abuse of women through prostitution and trafficking—a system that is driven by the needs of men and that benefits men, by exploiting and not liberating the most vulnerable of women; when my dear friend Maria Fyfe spoke up about women’s right to choose and about the need for, and importance of, women controlling their fertility; and when women have spoken up about women’s inequality, it was because we wanted to change women’s lives. I never imagined that I would be fighting at this stage in my life, in Parliament, not just to change women’s lives but to change what the very word “woman” means.
I choose to challenge. Women across the world know what sex discrimination is, and what it is to be a woman. The men who discriminate against and abuse women know what it is, too. There is a new generation of young women who know that. They feel silenced, perhaps not by arguments about what women’s traditional roles were—against which we railed—but by men who not only tell them that they are wrong about their own lived experience, but that they, as men, know better. However, I am confident that there is a generation of young women who will choose to challenge the shifting sands on which all too many women, and particularly young women, now stand.
On international women’s day, I and many of my sisters will support them every step of the way, as they challenge and demand their rights as young women, as we have done in the past. On international women’s day, we celebrate all that women have done, and we celebrate the optimism about what is yet to happen for women.
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