I want to say a big thank you to my colleague Georgia Carlisle for helping with the organising of the lunch today and the committee including Kate Rothwell,  Angela Ferguson and Karen Campbell-Williams for helping us put this lunch together.

So why am I sponsoring an international women’s day event in 2024?

International women’s day traces its roots back to 1908 when 15000 women marched in New York to get better pay and voting rights. The anniversary of the march became a global phenomenon and was international by 1911 and became publicly recognised by the UN in 1975.

It is actually an official holiday in 27 counties including: Afghanistan, Angola, Armenia, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Georgia, parts of Germany, the Ukraine, Nepal, Mongolia and Zambia.

Officially it is celebrated every year on March 8 and the reason we celebrate International; Women’s day is to bring attention to the ongoing fight for gender parity on a world wide basis. Gender parity means equal pay, access to education and leadership opportunities.

Women in Tax was set up in 2015 to try and get Women a seat at the table - Heather Self who founded it – wanted to get more women on technical tax panels – having attended too many lectures and events where all the speakers were male.

The representation of women in senior tax roles in the UK has changed hugely – back in 1997 there was only one female Head of Tax in a Top 20 firm (Robson Rhodes). Fast forward to 2024 and the majority of Heads of Tax in the Big 4 and Top 20 in the UK are female – look ay Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, GT, RSM, Mazars and Evelyn all have female heads of tax. Initially this looks incredibly positive but overall numbers of female  partners hover at somewhere between 20% and 30% of all partners in the Top 20 and tax is often used as a way of arbitraging the board figures to get closer to government targets of 40% of boards being female.

The UN says it will cost 360billion dollars a year to reach global gender equality. The UN also says that gender parity would also turbo charge the global economy of more than 20%.

Globally women earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man. 

In the UK in 2022 we were ranked 22nd on the global gender gap index, behind countries such as France, Ireland, Finland and Germany.

In the UK only 45% of women are employed full time vs 61% of men.

A key problem with gender equality in the world of work is that women still undertake the lion’s share of child care and household responsibilities, for example 41% of women, care for children, grandchildren and older people in comparison to 25% of men. Then 85% of women cook and do housework every day compared to 48% of men.

The biggest difference between the UK and Finland - which is number 2 on the Global parity lists is shared family leave and child-care. Both women and men are expected to take a year off after the birth of a child, child-care is affordable (most up to age 3 is free), the expectation is that women will work full time. Most importantly the overall infrastructure is in place, so 47% of MP’s are female (in comparison to 226 of 650 in the UK), all men’s toilets have baby changing facilities, all schools are mixed and there are no private schools so no Harrow, Eton or Westminster.

However, to get to true parity we have to be fair in all areas, we also need to look at the statistics of areas of everyday life that negatively impact men and they are pretty scary.

Suddenly you can see how Andrew Tate gets a toe hold in our society;

• Why are three quarters of all suicides in the UK male?
• Why do more men die of cancer than women in the UK?
• Why in 2024 do men still die earlier than women?
• Why are 70% of homeless people male?
• Why are men more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than women?
• Why do men not automatically get the right for equal paternity leave to women? In the Family Court System in the UK 95% of all custody goes to mothers.
• Why are 96% of the prison population male?

As women who are daughters of men, married to men, parenting boys and mentoring male colleagues we need to be mindful of inequalities towards men.

So here in 2024 I’d like to toast to true equal rights.