Meeting of the Parliament 08 March 2018
Throughout my life, I have been inspired by a number of influential women, who have each helped to change the world in their own way. As I looked back at some of those women in the run-up to today’s debate, it became clear that women have been defying the odds successfully and unapologetically for centuries. Today in Scotland, we women no longer face the barriers that women faced even 50 years ago, and undoubtedly the odds are not so much stacked against us. Of course, there are still challenges and barriers here and around the world, and there are ways in which women are objectified, abused or oppressed, some of which members have highlighted. However, in this country, we now have a generation of young girls who can see strong, independent and successful women as normal.
The Pulitzer prize-winning author, poet and teacher Gwendolyn Brooks taught me that we sometimes have to tell people things that they do not want to hear. As she put it,
“Truth tellers are not always palatable.”
We have spent the last century successfully working to redress the gender balance in this country, which I welcome, but we must be careful that we do not press too far. An article in The Times this week raised a very pertinent issue that resonated strongly with me: it asked whether we should really be worried that more boys go into engineering and more girls become nurses. I believe that the answer is yes only if there are barriers that are preventing them from doing something different. It is the barriers that we must address.
I have a son who is a tree surgeon, a son who is a soldier, a son who is an engineer and a son who is an economist. I have a daughter who is a primary school teacher and a young daughter who tells me that she wants to get married and have children. Did I fail as a parent for not pushing them to break gender stereotypes? I do not believe so. Eleanor Roosevelt declared:
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
By all means, we should encourage young girls to find their passion, and we should ensure that whatever the girl’s ambition may be, she can achieve it. However, we must be careful not to push too far. If a young girl wants to keep house and be a mum, we should respect and applaud that choice, too.
Girls in Scotland are now 56 per cent more likely to apply for university than their male counterparts. Perhaps the cabinet secretary will join me in congratulating the University of Glasgow’s school of medicine, which tweeted today that 16 per cent of its graduates in 1933 were female and that, in 2017, 71 per cent of its graduates were female. That, by any standards, is a phenomenal change and phenomenal progress for women.
I welcome, of course, the drive for girls to achieve academically, but I worry sometimes that we are no longer pursuing gender parity in this country and promotion of women’s rights is in danger of coming to mean demotion of men. We have a responsibility to all our children and young people to be strong role models, male or female, and to encourage them to strive to achieve all that they can, irrespective of their gender. Women in Scotland have more freedom than ever to determine their own futures, and we should celebrate that.