Debate contribution: International Women’s Day 2024

Debate contribution by Mr Mike Nesbitt on 11 March 2024.

MLA

Mr Mike Nesbitt

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

11 March 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

International Women’s Day 2024

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4270122

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I am happy to say a few words on the motion. I begin by thanking the deputy First Minister for mentioning the Ulster Women's Unionist Council, which produced some fine parliamentarians, not least Dame Dehra Parker, who became the longest-serving female in the Northern Ireland Parliament and who, like Robin Swann, spent time as Minister of Health. At the end of last week, as International Women's Day was coming up, I got nostalgic thinking about my first job and my first boss. The job was as a sports reporter with BBC Northern Ireland, and the boss was the formidable Joy Williams. A woman becoming head of a sports department in the 1970s always seemed a remarkable feat, but, given what we now know about some of the attitudes and behaviours in the BBC at that time — I think about people like Stuart Hall, Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris — her achievement, as a woman, of reaching that position in such a testosterone-filled environment was all the more remarkable. She liked nothing more than encouraging and mentoring young talent: you might think of George Hamilton, who had a stellar career with the BBC in London and then with RTÉ in Dublin; of Alan Green, who, for a long time, was one of BBC radio's top two football commentators; of Mark Robson, who no doubt commentated on the semi-tragic events at Twickenham over the weekend; and of Jim Neilly, who has been going on for ever. Members will have noted that those were four men. Once again, it was a women — an outlier — who brought them on. I would like to talk about a concept that, I think, will eventually come to apply to how we do government in this place. That concept is gender budgeting. It is a way of promoting equality through fiscal policy by analysing and disaggregating data so that we understand the impact of our spend separately on men and women and can therefore take corrective action against imbalance. There will be an update on this on the 21st of the month from the Northern Ireland Women's Budget Group, but, just to illustrate, I have some figures that are maybe four or five years old. For example, If the UK Government invested 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) in construction, they would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Of those, 180,000 of those would be for women, but men would get 560,000 new jobs. If, on the other hand, you put that 2% of GDP into care — either social care or childcare — men would get 48,000 new jobs but the number of new jobs for women would be 1,070,000. That is a swing of nearly 900,000 depending on where you make your investment. I hope to bring a debate to the Chamber in this mandate to start the process of gender budgeting, and by "start" I mean let us start disaggregating the data. For example, a couple of years ago, the all-party group on sport took an interest in gender budgeting after a horrendous occasion when the Connacht senior women’s rugby team had to get changed for an interprovincial match in a car park, surrounded by rubbish and rats, because there were no changing facilities for them. We started asking governing bodies about disaggregating their spending, and they were not able to tell us. They were able to say that they spent money specifically promoting our code — Gaelic football, association football or rugby union football — in schools for women, but, with regard to where the money goes into clubs, what percentage goes to the men's game and what to the women's game, they were not able to tell us. The first step has to be to encourage Departments to start disaggregating the spend so that we understand the impact that we have, differentially, on men and women. As I said, I hope to get the support of the House before the end of the mandate to start that process.

669 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not qualifying

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:52 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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