Hansard

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate and for the consensus on the Government’s motion. My life has been filled by the impact of extraordinary women and their impression on my world has been profound. I want to focus on one woman in particular in my remarks today.

In April 1940, my great-aunt 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 and manifests 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 by submarine back to Britain and 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 been sadly lost to us when her plane disappeared over the Atlantic on her return journey from the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations at the end of the war.

When I think about 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.

In the year that has passed since we last marked this occasion, it has been my great privilege to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Scottish Government and with members of all parties in support of the changes that we have delivered in advancing women’s rights and gender equality, in landmark domestic violence legislation, in the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Bill and in the widespread condemnation of the rape clause.

However, we still have frontiers to push back. I hope that, in the year to come, we can do more to challenge employers who still engage in maternity discrimination, make clothing demands in the workplace or ensure a gender pay gap of nearly 7 per cent across this country. Indeed, on that last issue, I was very glad to be involved in the University and College Union protest outside the Parliament at lunch time, in which people were talking, among other things, about pay disparity in the university and college sectors.

I want to see the advances that we are making in gender representation on public boards mirrored in the boardrooms of private companies, and I want a shift in the imbalance in which 50 per cent of graduates are female but only one fifth of UK companies are led or owned by women. Let this also be the year in which we finally see a modicum of justice for those women born in the 1950s who are victims of state pension inequality.

I am a feminist but, if I am honest, I do not think that that has always been true. My mother had been in the vanguard of the North American feminist movement of the 1960s and always brought me up with an understanding of respect and equality. However, when I think back on it, I spent so many of my formative years blissfully unaware of the privilege that I enjoyed as a boy and a young man. In the stereotypes that I conformed to and in the advantage that I accepted without question, I was often a happy beneficiary of the patriarchy.

To my shame, I was, at times, a passive witness to everyday sexism, systemic injustice and even the harassment that Gillian Martin so eloquently described a few moments ago. I am not sure when I woke up to all this, but wake up I did, and over the past 20 years, I have striven to be both a better man and a better feminist to live up to the example set for me by my mother, my aunt, my sisters and all the female role models in my life. I have mentored female candidates in my party; I have helped steward all-women shortlists through its structures; and I have worked for gender balance in my party to the point where, as director of our national campaign in the snap general election, I helped reverse an imbalance that has existed since the inception of my party when we returned to Westminster a group of Scottish MPs half of whom were female.

However, it does not stop there. In every debate such as this, I rise with a not insignificant degree of embarrassment that I speak for a group of parliamentarians who are exclusively male. As a result, I offer this commitment: I will do everything in my power to ensure that the next group of Liberal Democrat parliamentarians that we return to this place, be it big or small, will look more like the society that we seek to represent and less like the Liberal front bench of 1916.

International women's day affords us the opportunity to reaffirm our shared commitment to gender equality, to take stock of the mountains that we still have to climb in pursuit of that aim and to recognise that attitudes and complicity such as those of my younger self can be turned around.

We will hear the words of many great women in today’s debate, but I want to leave the chamber with those of a man, Indian movie star Amitabh Bachchan. Like me, he woke up to iniquities of the patriarchy that had benefited him so richly. He said:

“Because you are women, people will force their thinking on you, their boundaries on you. They will tell you how to dress, how to behave, who you can meet and where you can go. Don’t live in the shadows of people’s judgment. Make your own choices in the light of your own wisdom.”

I see in those words the spirit and strength of my aunt Joan and the many great women with whom I am proud to share this chamber.

With that, I commend the motion to the chamber.