Why we still need International Women's Day

Last Friday, 8^th March was International Women’s Day. I am often challenged when talking about International Women’s Day about why we still need it. Here is an extract from my speech to the International Women’s Day Awards ceremony last week which highlights a few statistics from the Counting Women In Report, illustrating why we still need to celebrate women’s achievements and campaign for equality.

“It (Counting Women In Report) tells us just 22.5 percent of MPs and 17.4 percent of the Cabinet are women.  In Manchester Central we - for the 1^st time ever – last year, elected a labour woman member of parliament, Lucy Powell. But really Manchester what took us so long?

Women make up a mere 13.3 percent of elected mayors and 14.6 percent of Police and Crime Commissioners.

In the league table of the representation of women in politics, the UK has since 2001 fallen from 33^rd to 60^th place.

Tonight we are joined by some fantastic female journalists from the Manchester Evening News and the BBC – in their industry only 5 per cent of Editors of national daily newspapers are women.

When it comes to finance and the economy, a job which the men seem to be making a pretty big mess of at the moment, there are no women at all on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. Not one single woman. In 2013 how can that ever be deemed acceptable?

I wondered when reading this report what Emmeline Pankhurst would have made of all this. Over 90 years since her campaign for votes for women sometimes it feels like we have made hardly any progress at all.

We all know that there are consequences to this shocking lack of diversity in public life. It is weakening democracy and the public’s confidence in it.  By not ensuring that women are represented in decision-making we are wasting an enormous amount of talent. The huge economic challenges that we currently face will not and cannot be solved men alone.”