I think a very important point to make is that the substance of gender equity is going to take much harder work and some redistribution of who has power and who gets access to resources in these positions of leadership. To claim that you've reached gender equity when it's observable that the positions at the top of the power hierarchy are disproportionately filled by men and those at the bottom are filled by women is simply, I think, to obfuscate and to skip doing the very hard work that a substantive commitment to gender equality requires.
The data on women in leadership are stark in their representation of a significant gender gap in leadership, and that leadership gap is not simply a gap in pay. It's a gap in power, resources, who gets to shape the terms of debate, and who is involved in the key decisions in our society.
An important site for this, of course, is the House of Commons. It goes back to how many women we elect and how many female candidates parties nominate to be elected. We are not a country that leads in flat numbers of women's participation in the House of Commons. Clearly, participation in committee structures and leadership positions in those committee structures similarly echoes this same problem of an absence of women in positions of leadership.
I looked for newspaper articles on this bill. Nobody is really engaged with it, because it is piece of housekeeping. It's a little technical in how it describes the different categories of ministers that get set up in their relationship to pay scales. The point is that it is true that in the arcane details of administration we have to give effect to gender equality. It's also the case that we really have to engage with the substance of gender equality, and not simply pass off a tinkering or shifting of categories as having engaged with that substance.
It's revealing that there's no discussion of gender equality in this amendment. It would be inappropriate. This is really not about the balance of power between men and women. It's about the structuring of ministerial authority and titles. The only piece you can find in here that you could spin into a conversation about women's equality is where the Ministry for the Status of Women is placed and why it's not a more free-standing ministry. That's one conversation you could have about the profile, the responsibility, and the resources of that particular ministry. Otherwise, this is not a bill about gender equality.
I'm sorry. I'm talking into your seven minutes.