Hansard

Where Margaret Mitchell finished off is a good place to start, because gender parity is at least 200 years away, according to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Report 2017”. Even slaves did not wait that long to have their freedom respected. Although we know that gender parity will not happen overnight—or maybe not even in three centuries—the good news is that, across the world, women are making positive gains day by day. Plus, there is a strong and growing global movement of advocacy, activism and support.

We in Scotland will not let up. Now, more than ever, there is a strong call to action to push forward and progress gender parity. It is a strong call to press for progress and motivate and unite friends, colleagues and whole communities to think, act and be gender inclusive. The press for progress campaign has five asks: maintain a gender parity mindset, challenge stereotypes and bias, forge positive visibility of women—we are doing well today, girls—influence others’ beliefs and actions, and celebrate women’s achievements. My, we have a lot to celebrate.

Every member in the chamber has a responsibility, regardless of gender, to actively support equality and fairness in all its facets. I have said before in the chamber that men of quality should never fear equality. That is a good statement for today.

We have legislation, commissions, equal rights and legal protection provided by the European convention on human rights and European law, reinforced by our own laws around fairness and equality for all people. We have had some major, hard-fought and well-won victories against employers who have underpaid their female staff for decades. That is why today is a great day for saying that, no, we will not sit quietly and accept the status quo. We will fight it all the time and we will fight it hard until the need for fighting has gone because inequality has gone.

We need to press still harder for progress, risk irritating some of the angry men and, perhaps most important of all, stop seeing ourselves as the second-rate humans that some members of society seem to feel it is appropriate to call us. Women of every age, background, ethnicity and religion—prosperous or not—are already engaged in that process. What we all want, and what Scotland is determined to win, is simple: we want to be treated equally. It is not difficult.

Let us look at some international examples of that. Take the Mzuzu Coffee Planters Co-operative Union, for instance, which grows and trades in coffee beans in Malawi. The original beans were transported via Zanzibar from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, so we have a link to that coffee that is grown in Malawi. The other night, I met Bernard Kaunda, who is the general manager of the Mzuzu Coffee Planters Co-operative Union, at the Hamilton fair trade group meeting. He informed me of the great success of a gendered aspect of the work that the co-operative does with women, which includes coffee beans that are produced by women being sold with a 20 cents premium added. That 20 cents is saved and distributed to women in a microfinancing model to build businesses and grow local economies. It has been incredibly successful and has resulted in many new women entrepreneurs and businesses developing in Malawi. That is all from a coffee bean from Edinburgh.

Let us take this to a more local level. Jigsaw Travel on Wellhall Road in Hamilton was founded in 1998 by Lesley Millar. The business is a corporate bespoke travel company specialising in complex, personalised travel bookings. It was the winner in 2016 and 2017 of the Scottish Passenger Agents Association best small business (travel agent) award and has been nominated for several Glasgow and Lanarkshire business awards. The company has clients from all over the UK, so what was a local business has grown—like that coffee bean—to have a strong national base. The Federation of Small Businesses has nominated Lesley Millar as one of the top 100 businesswomen in the UK—a super accolade for Lesley and her team. The business has grown to employ seven members of staff, all of whom are women. I am sure that you will agree, Presiding Officer, that, today of all days, it is incredibly appropriate to highlight such a thriving business in my constituency.

Those are all great successes, but we have so much more to do. Even in our Government structures, we have work to do. In Yarl’s Wood detention centre, 120 women are on hunger strike. The centre has been described by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons as

“a place of national concern”.

The organisers of a protest that is being held today in Glasgow tell us that the strike

“is a refusal to submit to institutionally racist detention conditions which are an integral part of the ‘hostile environment’ policy currently being enforced by the UK Government.”

It is a sad indictment of that policy. The Home Office wrote to the 120 hunger strikers on Saturday threatening to expedite their extradition and refusing to listen to their demands. Some of those women are experiencing horrific conditions in Yarl’s Wood, including in some cases sexual assault. I stand with those women today, and I ask my colleagues in the chamber to do the same and send a message of solidarity.

Last year, the pussy hat revolution resulted in me getting a row from the Presiding Officer for donning my fetching pink hat. I will not be doing that this year, but the message is still absolutely clear. The Presiding Officer has got her evil eye on. It is, maybe, a small push against the establishment, but every act of pressing for progress takes us closer to the more equal world that we all wish to live in.

Just like those suffragists 100 years ago with their good cause, we have many good causes, and we have heard about them today. One is press for progress, another is #MeToo and another is time’s up—a campaign that tells the misogynists that the clock has run out on sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the workplace. Time’s up for misogyny, harassment, unequal pay and inequality. Time’s up is not a slogan—it is a directive, so I ask my colleagues here today, “What will you do to press for progress?”