Last week, I was really priviliged to be asked to represent Labour at a historic hustings event.

Sheffield FEMs organised the first hustings event in Britain to specifically look at different parties' views on women's issues - flyer here . Candidates were given 15 minutes to speak and then answered questions for a further hour and a bit.

I'm told that Sheffield Fems are putting together a report of the event to capture all our speeches and questions - I'll put a link up here when it's published. In the meantime, look my speech is below. It's quite long so hang in there - as always, thoughts and comments are welcome.

*** CHECK AGAINST ACTUAL DELIVERY ***

I'm just going to talk very briefly – I would much rather speak with you than speak at you. However, this is not a license to other candidates that they can talk more!

Thanks for having me tonight... So you know where I’m coming from, I was raised by my mum in a single parent household, I’m the middle of four sisters – no brothers. I now have two very young daughters, so I have never been short of female influence in my life.

In fact it’s part of the reason I got in to politics. I remember coming home one day from school – I was probably about 10. Mum was crying. “What’s wrong”, I asked. She’d been watching a Tory conference on TV and was very upset by some of the appalling attacks on single mothers. I think I decided there and then that we should have a Government that was on our side and that I wanted to get rid of this lot.

So these are subjects very close to my heart. In fact, they categorise Labour’s approach to women's issues. In 1979, 83, 87 and 92 I think we had the best explicit policies for women. Yet Labour lost the woman’s vote on every occasion.

So that shaped our approach in 1997, 2001, 2005 and will this time: You can’t put womens issues in a box and label it. Solutions have got to be mainstreamed and to be pursued with the grain of other measures.

So how does this actually look? I want to discuss quite bluntly and assertively about Labour's successes, failures and then briefly touch on challenges for the future.

Successes. My proposition here is that despite the failures that I will come to, this has been the best government for Women in Britain, ever. I'm going to focus on domestic not international issues, for reason of brevity rather than focus.

There is a long list of achievements, many of which are obvious. On the economy:

In 1997, Maternity pay was £55 at today's prices. It is now £123.

In 1997, maternity leave was 18 weeks. It is now 52 weeks, with 39 weeks pay. We have legislated to raise it to 52 weeks paid – opposed by the Tories who have said that they will not raise it.

We have more than doubled child-benefit, which is so successful because it goes to mothers.

We have reduced child poverty by over 700,000 – I know there’s such a lot more to do. We have introduced free childcare for 3 and 4 year-olds. We are currently introducing free care for two year olds.

Every year, 2 million people benefit from the minimum wage. 2/3 of these people are women. We have raised it above inflation every year and have committed to doing that for the course of the next Parliament. Unsurprisingly, I'm really keen to hear if the other parties will follow suit.

We have radically reformed pensions for women: We've reduced the number of qualifying years, abolished the need for initial contributions and introduced new weekly national insurance credits. Depending on your age and circumstances, you can buy up to five years worth of contributions at half price: Clearly there is still a lot more to do here.

Parents and Carers now have the right to request flexible working.

On society:

Polly Toynbee has called SureStart the jewel in our crown. If I think about where I live near Arbourthorne, we have a fantastic SureStart centre, providing tremendous support and encouragement and advice for new mums, especially young mums, that just didn’t happen before. There is support about eating, talking and reassurance. Fundamentally, SureStart is about trying to make it easier to be a mum. There are now almost 3500 SureStarts across Britain – it really is one of our best achievements. The Tories have said that they will cut these to about 500, and that they will only exist in most deprived areas. We know why: if only the very poorest people access them, it will be very easy to cut what remains.

We have introduced a whole raft of other things too: like civil partnerships for gay women and the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) to act as a strong, independent champion to tackle discrimination and promote equality. Again, this will be one of the first cuts in a Tory government.

There are a whole range of issues within the Equality Bill. I'd just like to touch on the most. We are the first country in the world to bring in Dual Discrimination cases – so if a woman is discriminated against because she's a woman and because she's black, she now only has to bring one combined discrimination case. The Equality Bill also makes it illegal for women to be asked or told to stop breasfeeding.

The Equality Bill introduces Pay Audits for all private sector organisations if there is insufficient progress on the pay gap by 2013. It also outlaws all gagging orders which prevent people discussing how much they earn. Transparency is a tremendous weapon in this fight. Again, this was opposed by the Tories.

One success is that since 1997, we have defended a woman’s right to choose from nearly 40 attacks from Tories, in both houses, to reduce it. All bar one of the Tory front bench voted to reduce the abortion limit. Those men should be ashamed of themselves.

I will never ever vote to restrict a woman’s access to an abortion. The reality is that if a Tory government is elected, the abortion limit will almost certainly be slashed indiscriminately.

On representation:

Nationally, the UK is joint 58^th for representation in the world - joint with Cambodia.

I can only really take responsibility for Labour’s representations of candidates, and actually it's clear that we lead the way on women’s representation. Labour has more than three times as many women MPs as all the opposition parties combined.

Before 1997, only 9% of MPs were women. After 1997, the figure rose to 20%, mainly because of our use of All Women Shortlists.

But, since women won the vote, there have been 4650 MPs of these, 291 have been women... This absolutely beggers belief. Of these 291 women MPs, 60% have been Labour. We are only party to use All Women Shortlists, which arestill opposed by the Tories, despite Cameron saying he’d “think about it”. Clearly he is still thinking. Other parties are worse still: there are 7 Lib Dem MPs standing down, only 2 women chosen.

Let's look locally in Sheffield: 29% of Lib Dem councillors are women. For the Greens, it's the same, 1 out of 3... The Greens have two target seats locally, and in both of these they have picked white middle age, middle class men, which I find very disappointing.

But 42% of Sheffield Labour councillors are women. This is the highest percentage of all mcc's in country.

Labour is the only party to put our money where our mouth is and use All Women Shortlists either locally or nationally. Words and commitments are all very good but other parties’ need to show some positive action and leadership if they mean it. And sometimes that’s tough and it stops “good” men getting on, but frankly that’s the price we men pay for the discrimination women still face. Currently that is a price no other party is even contemplating paying.

We need more women in Parliament. Labour have made that a priority for the last 15 years. We now have more women candidates in strong seats than ever before – this didn't happen by accident and it's not something that we should throw away.

Failures:

Domestic violence still accounts for 18% of all violent crime. Our Six Acts have increased the successful prosecution rate for domestic violence from 46% in 2003 to 73% by December 2008. This is still far too low, but the biggest failure has been in having a court system that encourages and supports women to come forward and press charges. More needed here.

There has been a big failure in rape conviction. There are 100,000 rapes per year, yet there is conviction rate of just 6%. Survivors are blamed and far too often, perpetrators escape justice. I’m really not convinced that adversarial trials with all their innuendo and smearing are the way to go here. We desperately need new thinking on this: I would like to see the contempt of court rules changed, so that any defence solicitor or barrister who insinuated anything about a rape survivor was held in contempt of court.

The Pay Gap is still too wide. We have narrowed the gap between men and women’s pay from 32.5% in 1997 to 22.0% today. Whoop-de-doo. About 30% of the drop is a result of the minimum wage. This has actually fallen by more most recently because of the recession.

We have introduced much tougher penalties for rogue employers. If we win the election, we will expect employers in the private sector with over 250 employees to report on their gender pay gap. We will require them to do this if there is not sufficient progress by 2013. We are introducing compulsory pay audits for the public sector now.

Within the NHS, the Agenda for Change has required about £3bn investment to redress historic pay gaps.

There has been a big failure concerning the Image of Women: There is currently an Epidemic of body hatred in Britain: 1.5m people have an eating disorder and 90% of them are women. The BechDale Test highlights the problems we still have with women. 92% of films don’t have a single occasion.

The sex industry has never been more profitable or acceptable than it is today. Men in control, women are biddable commodoties. This has huge impact on women across the piece. We also haven’t addressed our very macho style of politics.

Challenges for the future:

These are just a few quick things to think about to kick off the conversation we're going to have:

Half the women in part-time work are working below their skill levels. We need to address the quality of part-time work. After the division of labour and blatant discrimination, the quality of part-time work is probably the biggest single contributing factor in the gender pay gap.

If you look at where the UK has skills gaps, they are exactly the same places where women are under-represented in the work place. E.g. 70% of women with Science, Engineering and Technology qualifications aren’t working in those areas, yet this is exactly the area we need to enhance.

Public spending: The Tories like to talk about the bloated public sector and the jobs people do on left-wing pet causes, like teaching people to read and curing disease.

There are now 1m more people delivering vital services than in 1997. 2/3 of these extra million people are women. So in terms of public spending, the “savage” cuts that Nick Clegg wants and the “immediate and drastic” cuts the Tories want will harm women far more than they harm men. Women also use Public Services more than men. Public spending is a gender issue in a way it has never been before.

There is a particular issue concerning carers and what I call the “Double Bubble Trouble”. Because we are all living longer and having children later, we are seeing an explosion in the number of people who care for their children and their parents at the same time. Almost 85% of these people are women, so there is a tremendous challenge in properly recognising the case of carers and the value they represent to the economy.

I think it's worth reflecting for a moment:

In only 1977 became illegal for women to be sacked for being pregnant! Labour did that. Every single piece of equality legislation in this country was passed by a Labour Government and opposed by a Tory opposition. So I am totally up for this election: “Game On”.

Just one final thing to think about: My mum doesn’t get upset when Government ministers talk about family and single mothers anymore...

Because actually, this flawed but progressive Labour government is moving in the right direction. Improvements are achingly slow and far too many women are still unaffected by change. But I would hate, for the frustrations we all feel to obscure and endanger some of the tremendous successes we have achieved together.

Thanks a lot.