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Lorna Fitzsimons: If the hon. Lady is saying that greater financial independence has given women the ability to have their own motor car, I expect her to join me in welcoming the increase in women's incomes as a result of the national minimum wage and the working families tax credit.
Mrs. Gorman: I think that both measures are extremely misguided. Once women have taken time out of work and need to get back in it, they usually need the opportunity to get back on the ladder. If we load the employment of women with extraneous costs, of which the minimum wage is sometimes one, but not always, we will encumber women and make employment much more difficult. In making that remark I quote not a rabid right-wing Conservative like myself, but Carmen Callil, who is a well-known supporter of the Labour party and an extremely successful publisher. I believe that recently she was running HarperCollins, one of our major publishers. She said that trying to employ women, as she does--many book editors are women, and it is predominantly a woman's profession--is a nightmare. If a woman is doing a job that is exclusive to that individual and she needs to take time off--there is the old cry about maternity leave--it becomes impossibly difficult to offer such opportunities to other women. I do not believe for one moment that the policy that the Labour party is pursuing on the matter will help women one little bit. It will make small firms in particular, where there is
a limited choice of staff, less likely to take a woman on. In that respect, Labour's legislation is extremely backward-looking.
Ms Moran: One of the effects of the flexible labour market which the hon. Lady so eloquently espouses has been the fact that more women work for lower pay and longer hours. For example, one in four women works more than 40 hours a week. Does she believe that that is an improvement in the quality of life for women and, more particularly, for their children?
Mrs. Gorman: The woman's individual circumstances are paramount. I do not know why an individual woman may be in a particular job. I do know, however, that as most women in their middle years, especially if they have a family, take relatively unskilled work because they do not have the time to devote to a more highly skilled job or even to a higher level of training, they tend to be in the lower-paid percentiles.
The Labour party does women no favours by constantly referring to them as victimised and badly paid. That simply is not true. In the past week I have met women bank managers, women managers of large hotels, a woman who runs one of the largest transport companies in the country, a woman who runs one of the largest Ford car dealerships in the country, women doctors and dentists, and women who work in the stock exchange.
There are many rapidly rising women in Britain. That is largely because of the education reforms that were introduced during the last period of Conservative government, which have made it much easier for women to undertake higher education. The mere fact that their families could afford to support them in that speaks highly of the legislation introduced and implemented over the past 20 years.
It is foolish for Labour to suggest that women have made no progress over that time. They have come from nowhere during my lifetime. Earlier, someone of my age and as intelligent, bright and in every way as attractive to the employment market as I am was unable to find a university place. Less than two in 10 people went to university and of those, the percentage of women was minimal. That position persisted almost until the mid-1980s, when Conservative education policies altered it.
The Labour party does no credit to women by constantly harping on the notion that we are all victims and underdogs and are being ground down by evil employers. That is silly. If a woman does not like her occupation, and if the pay is so poor, under our welfare system she almost has the option of staying at home and not bothering to go out to work at all. I deplore that, but it is a fact of life. Under welfare legislation, a great many women are assisted.
Mrs. Gorman:
No, I have given way to the hon. Lady once, and I am sure that many other hon. Members want to speak.
There is a further issue to which the Labour party should turn its mind. One the most significant developments in the progress of women in a relatively short time has been the ability to control the size of their
families. Legislation has brought that about, but we still have a serious problem of young women becoming pregnant when they are not old enough or mature enough to raise children. That is detrimental to the children, although I know that many of the young mothers do a wonderful job.
We spend most of our time condemning girls for getting themselves into that situation. We talk about giving young women more assistance in such matters and allowing them so-called emergency contraception if they face an unwanted pregnancy. I suggest to Labour women Members, as there are 101 of them, that if they insisted on that--if they went to see the Secretary of State for Health and told him that that should be made easier for women--they could achieve something, but they do not try. They sit on their hands.
As a result, we read newspaper articles such a cutting that I have, which states that hospitals are refusing such assistance to young women who, not knowing where else to turn, go along to the hospital accident and emergency department. Perhaps hon. Members will tell me whether a delegation of Labour women Members has been to see the Secretary of State for Health, to ask what he is doing about the matter.
It is extremely important that young women should be given better information. It is still the case that a woman who decides that she cannot go through with a pregnancy, and wishes to have it terminated, must beg two doctors, and must humiliate herself and often lie, in order to get that assistance--a process that is often dragged out until the middle or even late stages of the pregnancy, when it could have been dealt with earlier. A reform of that situation would give dignity to women's lives and remove some of the carping and criticism from the subject of birth control and abortion.
What have Labour women done? They have a marvellous opportunity to make progress. Bringing into women's lives dignity and control over their fertility would advance the cause of women by giving them control over the way in which their lives progress. I have given two examples of the way in which Labour Members could have done something for women, but have not done so.
Many young women have low expectations. Like many other hon. Members, I taught. It is a great shame that so many girls come from homes where they do not see much future for themselves, even now. I challenge the women on the Labour Benches to tell us what they are doing to raise the expectations of those young women, so that they do not think that the first thing to do, as soon as they are old enough, is to have a baby and live unhappily--or rather, meanly--ever after, trying to raise that child, possibly on their own, or even sink into thinking that they may as well have two or three babies while they are at it, because at least that brings in a little more social security. What sort of ambition in life is that for a young woman?
Although standards have improved enormously, educational opportunities have been opened up by a Conservative Government, and at the top end a huge number of women have benefited from that, we still have a long way to go. In their term of office, which I naturally hope will be short, Labour women Members can start the ball rolling and show us what they are made of, so that when they leave office they can claim to have contributed to women's progress.
I shall deal briefly with the informal networks that women often set up to help themselves. The playschool movement is an excellent example. Women get together, they do not want a great deal of money out of it for themselves, they are doing something useful, and along comes the heavy hand of Government and clobbers them. The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment, the hon. Member for Barking (Ms Hodge) and I have corresponded extensively on the subject. She has given me to understand that there is a great dollop of money floating around out there on which such groups can call, but I have read the small print. That dollop of money is to be limited to areas of special need, which precludes many of the schools in my constituency.
Again, that is a challenge for Labour--not necessarily to find more money, but just to leave those women alone so that they can get on with improving their own lot. A similar case is that of women who look after their neighbour's children. Because of perhaps one or two bad cases that went national, all informal arrangements were stopped. Through the Children Act 1989, which otherwise had many good points, licensing was introduced, regulations came in, and the women's houses had to be specially adapted, with low toilets, prefabricated windows and goodness knows what else. Those initiatives were crushed, and women were denied the opportunity of relatively low-cost child care, which they could afford, which they could swap around and through which they could help each other out. We made that an illegal activity and I think that we will go down the same route with playschools, which I would deplore. I challenge the women on the Labour Benches to do something about that because they tell us that they are here to improve the lot of women.
I want to say a word on behalf of older women, who are much underrated and undervalued in this country. Many women prefer to work part-time for relatively modest pay because of their life pattern when they are raising their children, although the policies that the Labour party is introducing will probably squeeze a lot of them out of that market and they will be even worse off than they were before.
I challenge the women on the Labour Benches to think about how more mature women can be helped to become Members of the House. One method, which I have mentioned in the House on more than one occasion, is their health care. In particular, we should think seriously about doing a great deal more to make older women aware that their health can be enormously improved in many ways. I will not go on about hormone replacement, but that is a significant element. For the record, I am told that my skeleton is equivalent to that of a 15-year-old. It will last me, even if I last for a century or more.
I emphasise that there are still elements of health care that make older women less interested in going back into the workplace, even though they probably have 30 years of useful life left, and we should not forget that the average age of mortality for women is their mid-80s. The chaps have still to catch up.
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