Kezia Dugdale MSP, in a speech to Labour’s National Women’s Conference, said:

I want to talk today about woman’s leadership and what we need to do when we win power for women.

Over a century ago a woman named Margaret Travers Symons, a secretary for a Member of Parliament, became the first women to speak from the dispatch box in the House of Commons. She wasn’t invited in.

Outside the House of Commons that evening, she watched as crowds of Suffragettes were struggling with the police. Protesters were hospitalised and Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested and sent to prison for three months.

Margaret decided to take action. She asked a male escort to take her to the door of the commons where there was a small window where women could peak inside, and when his back was turned, she ran into the chamber, reached the dispatch box and shouted “address the woman’s issue!”

Today we’re not peaking in from outside.

We aren’t there just as secretaries anymore.

I stand in my Parliament leading my party.

Today, like a century ago, we can’t wait for permission to take our place at the dispatch box, we won’t be invited in, we have to take it for ourselves.

And our strategy has to realise that, for all our organisation, there will never be equality until all our men are committed feminists too.

The MP that Margaret Travers Symons was secretary to was Keir Hardie who died a hundred years ago this weekend.

In failing health, he dedicated his last years to the woman’s cause, standing side by side with the Pankhursts who recruited him and inspired him.

Let’s challenge the male leaders in our party at every level to show the same commitment to feminism today.

But as we challenge our leaders, let’s never give an inch to our opponents because every great leap forward for women in our country has been delivered by a united, and a radical Labour movement.

We have transformed the political culture of our country and we have transformed the lives of countless women across the UK.

Introducing the minimum wage; creating tax credits; increased maternity and paternity leave and pay; pension credit; expanded childcare; the Equality Act.

These things have all made a massive difference to women in this country and it was a Labour government that achieved them.

It wasn’t the Tories and it certainly wasn’t the SNP.

I stand here today proud not just to be a woman leading the Scottish Labour Party but to be the third woman to have led the Scottish Labour Party.

Much has been made of the fact that in Scotland we have all three main parties led by women.

But as we struggle for equality we should remember that while we want equal representation for its own sake, it is also a means to an end. It must be used to deliver equality for all women, not just politicians.

I get frustrated when I hear people say that having a woman in power is an inspiration, as if that by itself is enough to transform the lives of young women in Scotland.

Young women are told ‘if you are good enough and work hard enough, you can achieve anything.’

We hear it each time a woman is elected to high office and we hear it again in Scotland today.

It just isn’t true.

It ignores the barriers that a young woman faces when she tries to succeed in our society.

It ignores the fact that there are young women who, no matter how hard they work, will never achieve what they want because of the institutional discrimination they will come up against.

Whether it is access to science and technology skills.

Tackling the gendered violence that one in four women will face

The culture of low-paid, low-skilled, part-time work.

Or the motherhood penalty, where women lose positions or promotions for going on maternity leave.

Having female leaders talking about these issues is a start, but it is only a start.

We don’t just need women in positions of influence, but feminists in positions of power.

Because for all that female leadership, women in Scotland are falling behind.

Childcare policy is still written to fit on a leaflet rather than around women’s lives.

The focus is on increasing number of hours, rather than quality, accessibility and affordability for working families.

In England it is considered a childcare crisis when 57 per cent of councils report that they don’t have enough childcare provision for parents working full time. In Scotland 77 per cent used to report not enough childcare, today it is 85 per cent.

Childcare isn’t just social policy, it is hard-nosed economic policy now too

For years it was talked about in terms of care for children and as a tool of equality. We have put it to the top of the political agenda by making it an economic policy, and we need to keep it there.

Getting this wrong isn’t just holding back women, it is holding back our future prosperity.

In Scotland, poorer children starting primary school are already a year behind kids from richer families in terms of the number of words they know.

Half of those poorer children won’t be able to read properly by the time they leave that primary school.

For all our women leaders, in Scotland we have seen huge cuts to colleges. Cutting off that chance at learning so many women need. 140,000 fewer students, 93,000 of whom would have been women.

For all that we have women in positions of power in politics, our position in the economy remains fundamentally unequal.

Lower paid roles in the public sector are often almost exclusively female, meanwhile the better paid private sector jobs are often almost exclusively male.

We need 147,000 new engineers in Scotland by 2022 but just a fraction of those studying engineering, science and technology, preparing for the jobs of the future, are women.

Just four per cent of engineering apprenticeships are taken by women. For every for every £1 a man earns, a women receives just 89 pence.

Women find themselves locked in low paid jobs and locked out of high paid professions.

And even as we congratulate ourselves for having women leadership in public life, we see the number of women in the Scottish Parliament fall from nearly 40 per cent when the last Labour Scottish Government was elected to less than 35 per cent today.

Only three of our 32 local authorities across are led by women – and it’s no coincidence that all of them are Labour.

Labour moved amendments to the Scotland Bill which would have introduced gender balance in the Scottish Parliament and for members of boards in the public sector. Labour supported, the Tories opposed and the SNP, led by a woman, abstained.

We haven’t given up and we will challenge them again to stand with us for equality.

It would be a travesty if female leadership, rather than shining a light on the discrimination women face, became a reason for people to believe that discrimination doesn’t exist.

If we just told them that they needed to work harder.

We shouldn’t be satisfied in Scotland. We should be angry. There is a hunger for change in our country.

After the referendum I sought to harness the democratic energy that exists by co- founding the women 50/50 campaign - building on decades of trade union movement activism for equality.

The people who govern us, in our parliament and our council chambers, should reflect the society they represent, not a closed shop.

That is why women from across the political divide have come together to campaign for legal quotas in the Scottish Parliament, our council chambers and in our public bodies.

Voluntary action by parties isn’t enough. We’ve started the argument in Scotland, I challenge the rest of our movement to take the argument across the UK.

I will be there, beside you.      

Friends,

Our job isn’t just to challenge men, to challenge discrimination; we have to challenge ourselves, to ensure that every woman, in every positions of power anywhere is truly representing women.

I feel such a sense of responsibility to those principles that have brought us together and to the millions of women who can’t just be told to work harder.

In me you have a Labour leader who is proud to stand as a feminist.

And sisters, I know that stand with me

Thank you.

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