23 June – the EU referendum – will soon be upon us and the result could have a huge impact on women. Here, feminist campaigner and author Caroline Criado-Perez weighs up both sides of the Brexit question...
Do you know which way you’re going to vote in the EU referendum? No, wait! Don’t go! I know the debate has been dominated by men in suits who seem more concerned with scoring points off their old Etonian friends than in making the case for the country. But while they’ve managed to make it as boring as watching a boring man bore a hole in a boring EU treaty, actually the outcome of this referendum will have a huge impact on you personally. And as women, we hold the key to that outcome.
There are one million more women than men who are eligible to vote. That means we have one million more votes. Women could decide the future of this country. But despite this, neither the Remain nor the Leave campaign has bothered to address us really. Anushka Asthana, political editor at The Guardian, summed up the feelings of many when she described the campaign to date as ‘a bunch of white men shouting at each other’. Small surprise, then, that a recent Fawcett
poll showed that only 19% of women felt that either of the campaigns had helped them decide which way to vote. But it is a mistake
not to talk to women, because not only do we have more votes, we are also twice as likely as men to still be undecided on the EU. With the Remain and Leave campaigns polling neck and neck, those one million extra votes are up for grabs. The referendum is eight weeks away now. It’s time for the campaigns to start talking to us – and it’s time for us to start making up our minds.
Clearly the issues stretch beyond equality – our tax powers, our sovereignty, our borders are all at stake – but as a woman, which way should you vote on 23 June?
Nicky Morgan, Minister for Women and Equalities, is clear that the obvious choice for women is to remain in the EU: ‘One of the founding principles of the EU is gender equality and it has played
a critical role in driving this work.’
She is right. Although the UK passed the Equal Pay Act in 1970, three years before we joined what was then the EEC, it wasn’t until the EU took our Government to court in 1982 that women won the right to equal pay for work of equal value. From this point on it was no longer acceptable to pay men more for collecting rubbish in the street than women were paid for emptying bins in offices. Hundreds of thousands of women have benefited from this European Court of Justice ruling.
Similarly, although the UK made paid maternity leave statutory in 1975, it was an EU directive, in 1992, that extended statutory paid maternity leave to all women. Previously it had applied only to women who had been in their job for more than two years. And if it wasn’t for the EU, we might still be firing pregnant women with impunity, as we were until the mid-’90s, when the EU finally put a stop to it.
These examples are, of course, all in the past, but without the minimum standards enforced by the EU, there is nothing to stop these rights slipping away. Gloria De Piero, MP for Ashfield and Shadow Minister for Young People and Voter Registration, points to America as an obvious place we could end up. ‘I love America – but I wouldn’t want to work there,’ she says, pointing to their lack of statutory paid holiday entitlement and maternity leave. Only 57% of US women are legally entitled to even unpaid maternity leave – for the rest of them, there is nothing to protect them from being fired.
Not that most of them can afford to take it: one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth. For those who can afford to take it, legislation requiring that they return to the same job they left does not apply universally. This contrasts with the UK where, as a result of EU law, you have the right to return to the same job at the same salary.
Still, not all women are convinced. Gisela Stuart, MP for Birmingham Edgbaston and chair of Vote Leave, the official anti-EU campaign, calls the EU an ‘outdated middle man’. It made sense in the shadow of the Cold War, ‘when you had these big power blocs’, but that’s not how today’s world works, she argues. Stuart takes issue with the power the EU has over our domestic affairs. ‘I think women want to know who you turn to and who you hold responsible when things go wrong.’ She wants full control over our labour, tax and trade regulations to return to the UK.
She accepts that the EU forced the UK to be more progressive on women’s labour rights, but ‘that was about 30 years ago’. Since then, Stuart says, it is the Labour Party that has been driving change for women. ‘If I look at the composition of the governments that make up the EU at the moment, only about a third of them are progressive centre-left governments. So even if we wanted it to [be progressive for women] it hasn’t got the political clout to do that.’ She also points to legislation that she says has made Britain’s women worse off, such as the EU directive that means women can’t benefit from cheaper car insurance, despite being safer drivers.
But while both sides disagree over how women should vote, one thing they do agree on is that women must vote. In her speech at a debate on the referendum, Suzanne Evans of the UK Independence Party professed herself a feminist, telling us she drew her inspiration from the battle fought by the suffragettes to give women the right to vote. De Piero wants women to vote to ‘protect all those hard-won rights, all those things we take for granted’.
‘This referendum will have an enormous impact on us and generations to come,’ says Morgan. ‘We need to make sure women not only go out and vote, but that their voices are heard in the run-up to this momentous decision. I’d urge everyone to get involved, to talk to friends and family about what staying in Europe means to them.’