Diolch, Llywydd. Thank you so much to Siân Gwenllian for bringing forward this extremely important debate. I am absolutely delighted to be here to witness it. I'm going to start by saying that I was, myself, elected off an all-women shortlist—something my party battled for for years, and many of the women who battled for it are here with us in the Chamber. It's something that I was immensely proud that my constituency party supported wholeheartedly, because they could see themselves the difficulty for women coming forward in the competitive world of selection, and so on. 

The very process of selection can mitigate against the strengths that women have for collaboration and so on. Every time we go through one of those selection processes in our own party, we struggle again with the problem of choosing between colleagues and friends and so on. I think collaboration and all of its spirit is something we need to drive into our political parties to get some of this agenda to go forward, as well. But I absolutely stand here as somebody elected off an all-women shortlist and I'm very proud of having been so.

Siân did a canter through a large number of the issues that we still need to take forward, and I think most of us are angry and sad in equal measure about some of the things we've discussed here today. So, I'll do a canter through them as well. Equal pay: of course we should have equal pay. It's been years since the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Equal Pay Act was a great thing, but it isn't implemented. The Equality Act 2010 was necessary in order to force the implementation of the Equal Pay Act. It's shameful, actually. The transparency thing—you have to force people to be transparent, something I've done in my own life several times when I've been negotiating my own salary in private sector legal firms and I've been told what my bonus or whatever is going to be and I've said, 'What are the men getting?' In firms where it's not a problem, they tell you instantly and where they won't tell you, it's never because they're not getting as much as you.

So, I have to say that one of the things I've also liked since I've been here is Chwarae Teg's Agile Nation project. That's teaching young women to do what I've just said. And, the average pay rise as a result of that project has been £3,000 a year for those women, because what they're doing is teaching them how to stand for their own rights, and that's a really important thing, as well. It's something we really need to do.

There's the sexual harassment agenda, all the stuff that we see on social media, the everyday sexism that I'm sure some of you follow, #ThisIsMe and so on. I've had a number of really interesting conversations around Wales about #ThisIsMe, with people saying, 'Not all women experience that' and I've never once been in a room where there has been a woman who has said, 'Well, I haven't.' Not once. That may be just me, but not once. And that's because women were taught to stay silent about such things, and now there are young women coming forward who are not taught to stay silent, and I absolutely applaud them in doing so and we need to support them every step of that way.

Llywydd, if you haven't seen it—I don't know if you have or if you ever watch such programmes—there's a programme called Have I Got News For You and watching Jo Brand, the comedian, tell Ian Hislop why his trivial remarks about sexual harassment are not acceptable is something I recommend to the entire Chamber. It's well worth a revisit. She said it very powerfully and it was simply this: a pattern of behaviour might seem trivial at first, but it can accumulate until it's really undermining of the person experiencing that behaviour. And until we understand that the series of trivial things are leading up to that point of undermining them, then we have not got any sense of what that might be to experience. Siân Gwenllian and all the women who spoke, actually, highlighted this: without women's voices to make that plain, then those things are not understood, and that's why we're important. It's important that we're here.

There is a whole pile of other agendas that are also important and that matter. There are lots of 'women's issues' in inverted commas and it has irritated me my whole life that they are 'women's issues'. My children belong to my partner as much as they belong to me. Childcare is as much his issue as it is mine. That's the same for all of those rights: they are issues for all human beings. The fact that women bear the burden of them is not right and we need to do something about it. That's why our voices are important in getting those rules in place and the legislation in place that enables people to take their rightful place in our society.

So, I am absolutely determined that, in this Assembly term, we will see every public board sponsored by the Welsh Government having 50:50 representation. My colleague Lesley, here, began the fight for that, and many other colleagues—Jane herself did it when she was in Government, and I'm sure other colleagues will as well. But I am saying that we will do that in this Assembly term. There is no reason why not. We can do it. I've got Chwarae Teg working on it right now.