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Not all my best friends are women. I count among those whom I love and respect many young men, such as my own inspiringly energetic and creative son, whose determination to think and live differently will help to shape the future, and many older ones such as colleagues in this House, whose wisdom steadies us in these difficult times. However, despite the scepticism expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hogg, I cannot help but observe, watching the sorry parade of scapegoats held up to scorn before Select Committees, subjected
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Our thoughts and fears for the past many months have been focused on the shocking speed and profundity of the economic catastrophe that has overtaken us. We struggle to make sense not only of the implications for ourselves, our families and our communities in the short term—jobs, savings and pensions are all at risk—but also of what it tells us about the values by which we have been living our lives over the past generation and why we have allowed ourselves to be so seduced by the siren calls leading us to believe in continuous, unlimited growth and personal wealth. I quote William Wordsworth:
“The world is too much with us ...
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”.
Faced with the potentially ruinous state to which these aspirations have led us—I include in this the alarming predictions now unfolding in Copenhagen about the accelerating effects of climate change—we have surely to ask some hard questions about how we can rethink our collective ambition in less materialistic terms. Part, although only a part, of this must involve asking ourselves how we got into this mess and whether models of success based largely on the acquisition of wealth and status may have led us up the garden path and now need some serious review.
This is an issue about values, what we expect from and respect in ourselves and others, and how we embed those expectations in our communities and social and political institutions. If we take the view, as many now do, that we have an opportunity to move away from the individualism that has dominated our aspirations for the past 30 years and look for a kinder, less feverishly competitive approach to social organisation, we must support those who predominantly will be responsible for imbuing the next generation with more sustainable values. Those people, I submit, are mostly women, for it is through how we raise and educate our children that long-term change will be achieved and it is still women who take the lion’s share of responsibility both for caring and for educating.
In saying this, I do not mean in the least to downplay the importance of the contribution made by men to parenting and education, but the plain facts are that, according to figures from the DCSF, women teachers make up approaching 70 per cent of the workforce in all schools and approximately 85 per cent of those engaged in nursery and primary teaching. Nearly all childcare, whether in nurseries, via childminders or nannies, or by a parent remaining at home, is provided by women. How they influence and guide the young people in their charge will determine, as surely as any
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Is it not also vital that we begin to move away from thinking about education solely as a means to an end, whether that end be learning to read and write, passing exams or gaining employment, and come to recognise that engaging the imagination of children, especially when they are very young, is an essential part of helping them to flourish emotionally, to form solid relationships and to recognise their responsibilities to one another as well as to themselves?
To this end, the importance of the arts in education cannot be overstated. The curriculum has been dominated for too long by a narrow view of what schools should be achieving. Lately, the Government have begun to emphasise the value of, for instance, music in education; I congratulate them on doing this, as I do on taking other initiatives designed to bring some breadth and, frankly, some fun back into school life. I think of the work of my noble friend Lord Layard in this connection and of the recent Cambridge Primary Review, which points to, among other things, the necessity for science, the arts and humanities to be restored to,
and for citizenship, personal and moral education to be strengthened. The statistics tell us that most of the people who will be implementing these choices, if we are brave enough to make them, will be women. The work that they do could not be more important for our future health as a society.
Yet primary school teaching is still undervalued. The Sex and Power 2008 report does not even list a primary school head teacher as a top job, only a secondary head teacher. When talking to a young man who was about to enter the profession — rare creature that he is — one acquaintance of mine recently referred to primary school teaching, as, “not very sexy”, by which I think that he meant: not high enough status for a real man. Will my noble friend say what more the Government can do to enhance the profile and status of primary school teaching to counteract the prevailing view that, because it is women’s work, it counts less than earning big bucks in the City?
Finally, I should like to say a word about grannies. I recently joined this club and I am excessively proud to be a member. It mostly brings great joy, but it has also made me realise at first-hand how much the world of work relies on childcare provided through the good will and energy of mostly unpaid grannies and other family members. Women need other women to help them to make a living. The Government benefit from that through the Exchequer, which collects from the working mother. However, if those women helping to make this possible are family members who need to be paid, the working mother cannot claim help with that cost. Does the Minister think that this is right?
We have become mildly addicted to bad news of late. Doom and gloom can be curiously seductive. Today’s debate has provided us with, among other things, an opportunity to celebrate women. I hope that we will finish the day feeling better, not worse, about the world.
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12.25 pm
Baroness Perry of Southwark: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, for initiating this debate, which will help to throw light on issues that are too often ignored by the international press and politicians when they are analysing the impact of the economic crisis. As the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, has so graphically shown, internationally the situation for many women will be very grim. The hardships of families in this country pale into insignificance when compared to the families in developing countries, many of whom already live on less than 90 pence per day. We are warned that perhaps 90 million people worldwide will be thrown out of work during this recession. Many women in the developing world will, without doubt, watch their children starve unless a massive international aid programme can be initiated. I fear the chances of that are not good when developed countries are looking to cutting their outgoings in order to shore up their banking and financial systems at home.
In this country, too, as in most other developed nations, when the burden of redundancy and unemployment falls upon the family, it is, as others have said, the woman who is still expected to manage the sudden drop in income and continue to provide adequate food and clothing for the family, perhaps on about a quarter of the money that was previously available. Today, many men share household business, but in most families and, most obviously, in the 90 per cent of lone parent families headed by women, the mother must take the role and the burden of coping with the family finances. In previous hard times we have already seen how it is she who must find ways to stretch the budget by buying less expensive groceries, cooking poorer cuts of meat or fish, shopping for bargains and making do with the clothes from previous years. She must find ways to enrich her children’s experience when holidays are no longer affordable and when out-of-school activities are a luxury she must surrender. Along with their responsibility in the home, many women will also have to cope with the loss of their own jobs and of the dignity and status that they had as workers.
As others have said, women in the workforce will bear much of the brunt of the hardships which this crisis has brought. It is shocking to hear that in some parts of the country twice as many women are being made redundant as men and it is a sad fact that in hard times, when redundancy and down-sizing are required, women are often the most vulnerable. They form the overwhelming majority of the part-time workforce— 40 per cent of women who work do so part-time—and are easily the first to be cut. Even more sadly, women and especially older women, tend to work in the low-paid and least-skilled jobs, and so are more easily dispensed with than their more skilled male colleagues.
There is a golden opportunity for the Government to provide training in these circumstances to increase the skills of such women, thus enabling them when times get better to re-enter the workforce as skilled workers with better pay and more prestige. In previous recessions, the number overall in full-time further education increased as people sought to better their
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In dwelling on the need for skills in the unskilled female workforce, we must not for a moment forget the very real issue of redundancy among the higher skilled workforce. Women professionals in banking, manufacturing and the construction industry are finding themselves unemployed along with their male colleagues and perhaps they will be unemployed for a long time. The skilled professional whose skills no longer match the labour market will need retraining just as urgently as her unskilled sister. I deeply deplore the Government’s withdrawal of funding from those pursuing equivalent or lower qualifications than those they already possess. At a time when re-skilling and flexibility in the workforce are being urged from all sides, including the Government, it seems an ultimate folly to take away the help for this category of student. The Government’s laudable initiative to provide enhanced careers advice and help to executives made redundant will be nothing but a toothless project if there is no matching support for the retraining that they will need. I hope that at least the six months’ teacher training now proposed for redundant executives will be an exception to this unfortunate rule.
In past years, many graduate engineers and scientists, lured by the financial rewards they will find there, have entered the City. Many of them will now be made redundant. Wonderful, you may say, we have now engineers and scientists available for employment. But they will need radical updating of their engineering and scientific skills if they are to re-enter the workforce in jobs that the country will need. Instead of having to find funding for their training, they should be given every help, not only for their own sake but for the sake of our future prosperity.
Last Saturday I listened to a student in Lucy Cavendish College in the University of Cambridge—here I declare an interest as a former president of that special college—telling how, despite a PhD in animal behaviour, she had found it nigh impossible to get an appropriate job. Instead, she had “begun again” as a veterinary student and was now on her way to a qualification which promised her a satisfying career. She is just one of the many mature women students who every year enter that college to study for a Cambridge degree. In future, who knows, many of them may find it impossible to get funding. It is provision of this kind, however, for both men and women, which will provide a workforce fit to lead the country out of recession and back into the prosperity we must believe will come again.
This leads me to my conclusion. It is, I profoundly believe, the women entrepreneurs of this and other countries who offer some of the best hope of economic recovery. The commercial acumen of women has been demonstrated throughout history, never more than in the past 60 or so years when changing attitudes have offered opportunities for women to flourish in their own businesses. The great names of the 20th century, such as Anita Roddick and Laura Ashley, were matched by hundreds of women who started up smaller successful businesses which flourished. I place my faith in the women of the world whose will to succeed and to
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But we do not need to rest on recent times to find a model of the role of women. I go back to the words of the ancient Book of Proverbs, more than 2,000 years ago, which described a good woman whose price is “far above rubies”. What did she do? This woman, we are told, works willingly with her hands; rises while it is still night to prepare the food for her family; buys a field and plants a vineyard; makes and sells fine linen; perceives that her merchandise is good; and stretches out her hand to the poor and needy. A few thousand years later that description still stands in relation to the clever businesswoman, loving mother and benefactor to the less fortunate on whom I place my faith for a better future.
12.33 pm
Baroness Scott of Needham Market: My Lords, about 10 days ago I took some time off and went to see the movie of the moment, “Slumdog Millionaire”. For once it was a film which matched the hype; but although it has been described as a “feel good” film, much of the depiction of life in the slums of Mumbai was quite harrowing. It reminded me of the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, that for many millions of people the current recession has little impact because they are already so desperately poor. Charities and aid organisations are suffering financially, partly because donations are dropping and, probably more significantly, their income from investment is dropping. In many countries trickle-down, as meagre as it is, will stop and I fear that we will see desperate hardship in certain parts of the world.
A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by someone with whom I have worked in the past. For a long time I have been a supporter of an organisation called the Women’s Transportation Seminar, which seeks to develop the role of women in the transport sector, and this lady is a stalwart of its London branch. She has recently become involved with the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development and she asked me to meet its executive. I know a bit about rural transport because I live in Suffolk, but when I met the international forum I discovered that it is rural with a very big “R”. Its decentralised secretariat is based in Cameroon, Peru, Kenya and Sri Lanka and, through research, information sharing and networking, it aims to influence donors, policy makers and practitioners to make the transport sector more accountable to the needs of the poorest people in developing countries.
One of the reasons I originally became involved with the Women’s Transportation Seminar in this country was that I had observed that the lack of women in the transport sector was having a direct effect on policy-making. A more male approach to transport policy-making tends to look at big projects, so the debates are about airports, high-speed rail and fast roads. Even in developing countries this is often seen as the route to prosperity. But the reality, which seems to be highlighted more by female practitioners, is that unless local and immediate transport needs are dealt with, the impact
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The relationship between gender and transport has not been widely understood, but there is now a growing body of work in this field to show how in developing countries women carry a disproportionately large transport burden in their day-to-day lives: fetching water, selling their goods, getting to the fields or workplace, collecting firewood and buying essential goods. In addition there are cultural and practical barriers which often prevent them getting access to medical care and education; for example, in some Muslim countries female seclusion is the practice, and in others there are traditional taboos against women riding donkeys, oxen or bicycles.
Case studies from across the world show how many women are working 18 hours a day, probably twice as many hours as their men folk. They walk many miles and they often carry heavy burdens. This causes illness and injury and shortens their life expectancy. Improving the transport services used by women can increase their access to markets, opportunities to participate in income generation and their exposure to information and education.
For example, I read a book about how gravity ropeways have been built in the mountainous areas of Nepal. These are not for those with vertigo but they reduce the long journey times across the isolated valleys. Local women report that they are now earning three times as much because they can get more produce to the market; the time they save in travel is used to cultivate more land; the increased income is paying for more fertiliser and so the diversity of their produce base increases.
I read a study about a new approach to road maintenance, pioneered in Peru, which has helped to develop community micro businesses, many headed by women, to repair the roads. This brings in valuable income for women and, in some cases, pays for children to receive a basic education they previously had not had. By investing money in rural areas, one job is created for every 2.5 kilometres of road maintained, which is much more than is achieved by conventional investment in large projects closer to capital cities. In Ghana, South Africa and India there are projects to promote bicycle ownership amongst women. In Cameroon, these are locally made wooden bicycles. It is a primitive technology but it is highly effective in improving mobility.
These innovations are known in the jargon as “intermediate technologies”. Donkeys, oxen, bicycles, wheelbarrows and carts can make an enormous difference to the economic health of poor rural communities and, particularly, of women. The work of NGOs in providing these innovations or assisting with micro-loans to help women buy them is absolutely essential and should be a focus for international development. I hope that the Government will resist any temptation to cut back on this kind of work and will encourage this gender-based thinking. I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving me the opportunity to use this debate to hang my comments on.
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12.39 pm
Baroness Rendell of Babergh: My Lords, my noble friend Lady Gould is renowned in your Lordships’ House for her original debates. I also congratulate her on initiating this one at this most appropriate time. In so doing, I declare an interest as a woman writer of fiction.
I want to speak about women as writers of fiction, and, to some extent, of non-fiction, and of the place their work has in the worldwide economy. While I refer to women in the United Kingdom, what I have to say mostly applies to women writers all over the world.
Writing is a calling that women have always been allowed to follow. I use the word “allowed” advisedly, because for centuries women were able to pursue a profession only with men’s permission. Why that should have been so and why writing was exempted from such strictures while the other arts were largely closed to women is explained, I believe, by the privacy, modesty and secrecy of writing and the few and inexpensive materials required for its pursuit. To turn out works of genius or of immense popularity the writer of talent needs only a pen and paper. Jane Austen, writing secretly, hid her work when her brother came into the room. Marian Evans called herself George Eliot in order to be published and the Bront? sisters, for the same reason, also wrote under male pseudonyms.
If any profession is ideal in an economic downturn, writing is. For the vast majority of writers of fiction their calling is far from lucrative, but they are self-employed—they cannot lose their jobs or get the sack. It is said that people read more in a recession, perhaps because they need distraction from their money troubles; committed readers know that there is no escape to compare with that provided by books. Research has shown that women writers appear to be inspired in an economic downturn. The recession years of the 1930s saw a surge in fiction writing by women, notably the four great crime writers—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham—whose works are still bestsellers today.
A writer who enjoys any measure of popularity will benefit from the public lending right, calculated on the number of an author’s books borrowed from specific public libraries. It will be interesting to see if the sums of money derived from PLR by individual authors increase during the economic downturn rather than diminish, because the book-purchasing public have tended to borrow rather than buy.
Literary festivals are going ahead during the recession. The famous ones, including the Hay festival, the Oxford festival and the Cheltenham festival, will take place as usual along with numerous county and city festivals. The Daphne du Maurier festival will be in May in Cornwall, and is distinguished by taking its name from that of a contemporary woman writer of fiction. At the 2008 Walking and Book Festival in Richmond, in North Yorkshire, Kate Adie, Hannah Hauxwell, Catherine King and Caroline Brannigan were among the women who took part, and there will be a similar catalogue of women writers this year.
On the down side, some smaller publishers are closing down. Others are making redundancies. The cost of paper has gone up 20 per cent due to the fall in
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Samuel Johnson said that anyone who writes, and not for money, is a fool. Authors—rather more women than men, I think—are in the habit of saying that they write because they must or they love to, and that the money is incidental. But the writers I have known who have had one work published and nothing subsequent to that, not for the want of trying, have sooner or later given up writing. The woman who would write if alone on a desert island is such a rarity as to be non-existent. Those of us who can make our living by writing watch the downturn with as little pessimism as we can muster, but with a certain amount of fear for the future of the book.
Some types of book sell better in a recession than in times of prosperity. People need their egos and their hopes boosted, and self-help books increase enormously in popularity. Sales of cookbooks go up as the public eat out less and cook more, as do craft and dressmaking manuals. A great proportion of these are written by women.
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