“To say women have been overlooked for the past fourteen years would be a complete and utter understatement. It makes it sound as though women weren’t trying to be heard, but we have been shouting louder than ever.”
By Kate Osborne MP
To say women have been overlooked for the past fourteen years would be a complete and utter understatement.
It would fail to represent the countless times that Tories ignored warnings from charities and organisations on the rise of domestic violence against women and girls.
It wouldn’t account for the thousands of young girls across the country who have been left out of sports because schools don’t think it is worth funding.
To say that women were overlooked makes it sound as though women weren’t trying to be heard, but we have been shouting louder than ever.
Now, for the first time in fourteen years, we have a Government that will listen to women
I am proud to be a woman MP during an era of politics in which we are seeing a continuous rise in the number of women elected to the House of Commons.
It wasn’t until 1997 that over 10% of seats were held by women, in 2019 34% of elected MPs were women.
In the recent election we have seen the highest number of women MPs, with 40% of seats held by women, a number that will dramatically change the way women’s rights are dealt with in this country.
We now have a Government with the first ever woman to serve as the Chancellor of the Exchequer and this new cabinet is the most gender-balanced in history, with 46% of posts held by women.
This is an immense achievement, and has been a long time coming.
Women will no longer be ignored, sidelined and erased.
It was great to be in a room full of women MPs the other day, working to establish an all-party official Caucus of Women MPs. This was long overdue and marks an exciting and much needed shift in the right direction with regard to tackling issues of concern to women.
I was pleased to also see that one of the first actions this Government took was to ensure violence against women and girls is now seen as a national threat and must be treated by the police on the same level as terrorism.
But, of course, there is so much more to do.
Earlier this year I co-hosted an event on revenge porn with Georgia Harrison – an area that urgently needs looking at to ensure the online safety bill adequately protects women and girls.
It’s a good step to enforce harsher sentences for violence against women, but, as I spoke to Georgia about, one of the key issues in sentencing is that women simply aren’t being believed.
We need a huge cultural shift, and this is something that will take a significant level of commitment.
Women and Equalities must now be at the heart of our new Government’s plans, too often we are left as an afterthought without thinking of how proposals, legislation and decisions impact on women.
The use of polygraph testing on sex offenders in England and Wales, which has almost tripled in the last three years, is a clear example of this.
The use of lie detector tests in these instances is incredibly worrying, as they are completely unreliable and this junk science ultimately puts women and victims at risk, a situation they have been in again and again.
There are very strong concerns being raised regarding the opaque and unregulated use of polygraph testing within policing, which poses the risk of misdirected police and criminal justice actions that put the public – particularly women and children – at risk.
The Government’s announcement that violence against women and girls will be treated on the same scale as terrorism does show that some crucial changes are being made, but this same level of commitment to protecting women, children, and victims must be shown now.
And, of course, we cannot even begin to address the ingrained sexism within our society without acknowledging how other factors such as race, age, and abilities impact access to equality.
There is a clear gender health gap in the UK and it was over three years ago now that research found that the UK had the largest female health gap in the G20 and the 12th largest globally.
The Tory Governments did nothing but stand by.
These health inequalities disproportionately impact women of colour, with black women in the UK four times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth. Therefore, it is more important than ever that when we are talking about women’s rights we are raising awareness about barriers to all women across every class, race, ethnicity and sexuality.
As a LGBTQ+ woman with a disability I know how crucial this point is.
This new Government will be the change women have needed – and demanded – to see for decades now, and we will all work together to deliver it.
- Kate Osborne is the MP for Jarrow and a regular contributor to Labour Outlook. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram.
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