Rishi Sunak gets a report on why women are still hugely disadvantaged in decision making across the world

Here is a video taken yesterday when Jocelynne Scutt, a former Australian judge and anti discrimination commissioner and now an academic in the UK, handed in a report to the Prime minister detailing how women are still at a huge disadvantage to men in taking key political decisions in the UK and the rest of the world. She says the position of women is ” lamentable” in the UK

The report by the UK based Cedaw in Law, the organisation which is working with the Geneva based UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and Girls (CEDAW). to put pressure on the government to implement in full the convention ratified by Margaret Thatcher in 1986.

The campaign covers everything from the 1950s born women battle for full restitution of their delayed pensions when the age went up form 60 to 66 to the dearth of women MPs and peers in Parliament.

At the moment we seem to be going backwards with Labour having an all white male prospective Parliamentary candidate list for five pending by-elections and former premiers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss putting forward an overwhelming number of men to be new peers in their resignation honours lists Even the Supreme Court which took on a big role under its former woman president, Brenda Hale now has 11 male judges and just a token woman judge.

As the report says : “…overlooking women’s right to equal participation in decision-making leads to an ignoring of, and ignorance about, women’s economic rights, health and wellbeing. Worse, it shows how the failure to ensure women’s participation in decision-making can lead to a wilful failure of government to consider the impact of policy decisions and law-making on women and women’s rights generally.“

We also discovered that the rules governing the delivery of petitions and reports to Downing Street had changed. Previously when Backto60 and trade unionists had delivered petitions to Downing Street it was allowed for people to make a short speech. Now under Rishi Sunak speeches that criticise the PM cannot be made from the steps of Downing Street. We did not discover this until both me and Jocelynne Scutt had made them.

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