Meeting of the Parliament 08 March 2023
I cannot be the only one who gets reflective on international women’s day. I have a ritual: I reread my parliamentary speeches from previous years. This will be my seventh consecutive international women’s day speech in the Parliament. My yearly ritual tells me that things are still not good enough and that they are not improving anywhere near fast enough. In fact, after I reread the speech that I delivered during the Covid pandemic, a couple of years ago, I realised that, during that period, things got worse for women. The same issues are there, stubbornly, year after year. Reports on economic gender parity back that up with data.
Yesterday, I had a look at this year’s women in work index, which is published by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Its report, entitled “Closing the Gender Pay Gap for good: A focus on the motherhood penalty”, said that, if things stay at the same rate, it will take 50 years to close the gender pay gap. Therefore, an 18-year-old woman who is at the start of her career today will not see the gender pay gap close in her working lifetime unless policies, attitudes and compulsions on employers change dramatically.
The UK position on the world women in work index has gone down five places since 2020. Some people will say that there is no silver bullet and that it is complicated and too difficult, but I disagree. At the heart of improving women’s lives and prospects is the open goal of childcare. The cost and accessibility of childcare prices women out of work; it forces mature women, as grandparents, into early retirement to help their daughters go back to work; and it leads to huge pension gaps.
I tell this story all the time. In 2011, the former Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, was interviewed by the Washington Post, and the interviewer asked him for the secret of Norway’s economic success. I am sure that the journalist was expecting a reply of “oil and gas”, but Stoltenberg simply replied that the secret was Norway’s women. He said that one Norwegian lesson was that raising female participation helps the economy, birth rates and the budget. Of course, Norway has universal free childcare.
Childcare is a national infrastructure. This Government is investing in it, with 1,140 hours provision, and that is maybe why Scotland’s gender pay gap is starting to come down and is the lowest in the UK. However, we need to get ourselves into a position to do much more to augment that groundbreaking policy. Yes—increasing the hours of free childcare is an obvious route, but the ultimate goal is to be, like Norway, in a fiscal position to provide universal free childcare, so that all the tax receipts from female participation in effect fund the infrastructure.
However, there is more. Let us look back to that index that I mentioned. Who are the current leaders? Luxembourg is first, followed by New Zealand. In Luxembourg, addressing the gender pay gap and all other forms of gender inequality has become a priority for the public policy agenda. In 2015, Luxembourg established the Ministry of Equality between Women and Men. Unlike any other ministry in the European Union, its sole focus is gender equality. That is all that it does, and that is what it concentrates on. Luxembourg has largely used employment law to get to that point where it can celebrate that position in the table. Luxembourg has made targeted interventions, particularly in high-wage private sectors.
Iceland also has a very good story to tell. Its strategy is highly subsidised and accessible childcare, as well as a high take-up by men of shared parental leave.
Of course, those are small independent countries, which are able to make all their own tax, social security and employment law decisions. Genuinely, my core reason for being in the independence movement is the impact that having all those levers at our disposal could have on the prospects of women, in particular. That is what drives me.
The gender pay gap in Scotland sits at 12.2 per cent; UK-wide, it is 14.9 per cent. The UK does have gender pay gap legislation but, as another international women’s day rolls around, I repeat my oft-heard criticism of that legislation, which is that there is no compulsion on the organisations that do the reporting to provide an action plan to reduce the gap if it is wide.
In the absence of that compulsion, I commend the organisations that analyse the yearly reports and call out the companies with the biggest and most persistent gaps. This year, I recommend the Gender Pay Gap Bot Twitter account. I do not really like Twitter bots, but I like that one. It automatically responds to any organisation or company that tweets—with a nice little graphic or picture of a woman working in that organisation—about international women’s day, and it fires its gender pay gap statistics back at it. It is illuminating and, for some of those companies, many of which operate in Scotland, I hope that it is thoroughly embarrassing.
In the current energy and engineering sector, the gap is stubbornly wide. On the cusp of massive Scottish expansion of renewables, let us change that by targeting more girls to attract them into that sector now. There has been a 70 per cent increase in students of renewables technologies in Scotland, but only 28 per cent of them are women. I am keen to meet the Minister for Higher Education and Further Education, Youth Employment and Training, Jamie Hepburn, to discuss how we can improve that.
Closing the gender pay gap could add £17 billion to Scotland’s economy and, if we closed the enterprise gap, with targeted, female-led business support, we would be looking at a £6.7 billion influx into the Scottish economy. As convener of the cross-party group on women in enterprise, I was pleased to hear the First Minister concentrating a great deal of her speech on that issue. Of course, I extend to her an invitation to join the cross-party group in four weeks’ time.
Economic gender parity is not just good for women; it is good for everyone who wants to end poverty and inequality. Serious, targeted work on economic gender parity is the key to reaching that goal. If we prioritise that, we will not have the MSP for Aberdeenshire East giving this same speech in 20 or 30 years’ time.
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