Item 4 on the agenda this afternoon is a statement by the leader of the house on the review of gender equality. I call on the leader of the house, Julie James, to make the statement.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. On International Women’s Day, the First Minister announced a rapid review of our gender and equality policies, and wanted to bring new impetus to that work. The initial phase of this review has been supported by the equalities charity Chwarae Teg, and the Wales Centre for Public Policy. I am very pleased today to be able to update Assembly Members on progress and to set out next steps.

Chwarae Teg and the Wales Centre for Public Policy have today published an important report, gathering evidence from Wales, the UK and other countries. I am extremely grateful to them for their work, and also extend my thanks to the many stakeholders who contributed to the evidence gathering, and who put forward proposals for consideration. The Chwarae Teg report identifies mechanisms to strengthen the way Welsh Government, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Welsh public sector work, and to be more ambitious about the development of our policies in ways that actively promote equality in relation to gender.

The report focuses on three key themes, the first being vision and leadership. The Welsh Government is challenged to be clearer about our vision for a Wales in which gender is at the heart of our policy making. We need to set a clear vision of equality in Wales, identifying goals and desired outcomes, and making sure that this is well understood within the Government, with our stakeholders and the general public. Wales has some world-leading legislation, and we have been challenged to do more to consistently use this to its full potential to have a greater impact. The Welsh Government also has an important role to play in leading by example, both as an employer and a policy maker, to drive lasting change.

The second theme, policy in practice, looks at the way the Welsh Government designs and implements policies and legislation. The report has identified areas of good practice, and made recommendations about how this can be delivered more consistently. It focuses on areas such as the budget-setting process, how we engage, and the importance of effective equality impact assessments.

The final theme, external scrutiny and accountability, finds that external scrutiny is welcomed, and that effective scrutiny drives behaviour change. The report identifies that there is scope to strengthen and better integrate existing accountability mechanisms across the legislative and regulatory framework.

The report also highlights the importance of putting such action in the context of equality more widely, recognising that intersectional factors, such as disability, race and poverty have a great impact on life outcomes. Conversely, a strong focus on gender equality has the potential to drive forward equality and fairness for everyone in Wales, including the most disadvantaged groups in our society.

The Wales Centre for Public Policy report, annexed to this report, examines international approaches to embedding a gender perspective in decision and policy making. Scandinavian and Nordic countries consistently score well in indices that measure how well countries are closing gender inequality gaps. The report recognises that some polices implemented by these countries cannot easily be transported to Wales, where we have a very different welfare regime, mostly determined by the UK Government. However, they are well worth considering in terms of what we can learn from their sustained efforts to promote gender equality.

The WCPP report recognises the challenges of including a gender perspective in all decision making, finding that we need the right cultural and behavioural conditions, cross-cutting Government working, equalities expertise, and the inclusion of the voices of people affected by mainstream policies that are otherwise assumed to be gender neutral. The WCPP concludes that proactive, creative and collaborative use of gender-mainstreaming principles and tools will assist with setting a vision for equality in phase 2 of the gender equality review, and recommends areas to explore in our next phase.

These reports have posed challenging questions we need to ask ourselves, and presented recommendations for action to strengthen the building blocks for achieving gender equality. These recommendations provide areas for action in phase 2 that we can move forward on immediately, and others that will need further exploration. I will publish a full response in the autumn. The second phase of the review will begin as soon as possible, and will provide the opportunity to explore these recommendations in greater depth. [Interruption.] Excuse me for that, Presiding Officer; I thought that was on silent, but it's vibrating in a very unhelpful manner. And I've completely lost my focus now. This will include clarification of the costs, issues and risks involved, and move to action. I will set up a steering group to facilitate the progress of phase 2, and the analysis of the phase 1 recommendations.

We have achieved important successes with regard to equality in recent years, including the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, and the Violence Against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015. Nevertheless, it is clear that we must make better use of the levers of Government if we are to achieve the ambition to be a gender-equal Government that truly puts gender at the centre of our policies.

We need to strengthen the current vision and leadership in Wales, and build on our existing legislative and regulatory framework, to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. The report makes it clear that this framework, and how the various pieces fit together, is not well understood by stakeholders, and is consequently perceived as not fully integrated. We can and we will do better.

Thank you very much for the statement. I'm happy, actually, to join with you in congratulating your success, as a Government, obviously supported by this Assembly, in the two Acts that you mentioned at the end of your statement there. I think there is quite a lot to be proud of there.

To turn to the rest of the statement, though, I wonder if you can deal with these for me: the first one is—I'm just wondering, is this intended to be a sort of pathfinder for the private and social enterprise sector as well? I accept that we have a very small small and medium-sized enterprise sector in Wales and there'll be lots of businesses that are too small to take a lot of what we're talking about on board here, but I'm just wondering what your plans are for perhaps rolling this out, or sharing the good practice that we'll see as a result of this, hopefully, with the private sector, and whether there might be any plans to incentivise some businesses to take these on. I mean, my argument being that there shouldn't be a need to incentivise them, but it's always worth considering, isn't it?

Just to go back to your first point, policy and practice—no, sorry, the vision and leadership part of your statement, equality and sustainability were embedded in this Assembly when it was created, so I was perhaps a little worried to hear that a clear vision of equality may not be as understood within Government as perhaps we might have expected. Do you have any internal policy on this issue? Surely, you must have, because the Assembly itself does, but if you do, can you say whether the gaps are visible in any particular directorate or particular policy area, and what it is that you will be expecting, from the vision and leadership, to fix precisely?

Turning to equality impact assessments, I’m wondering if the process for compiling these has changed significantly over the years. I remember reading budget documents and there certainly was a time when these were referred to and then routinely ignored in making decisions. So, if there have been any movements forward in what is considered during the course of making impact assessments, I think that would be quite helpful for us to all know, actually.

I haven’t seen the report itself—I’ll be honest with you there—but I was quite interested in your remarks on scrutiny and accountability, not just in the role of this Assembly—. Obviously, it’s clearly the role of this Assembly, but civil society in Wales as a whole has a huge role to play here as well, not least our media. Do you have any concerns that there may be some quarters who are nervous of criticising the outcome of Welsh Government policy, lest they be received less favourably for Welsh support in the future?

And then, looking at the mainstreaming of principles and tools, which you mentioned, I’d like to come back to a particular area of interest for me, which is the vocational choices that tend to be made by young women, post 16. One of the things I particularly wanted to mention was the lack of enthusiasm on the part of Welsh Government here for an apprenticeship route into occupational therapy, as they have in England. Now, this is an area of work that is already very attractive to women, and I think this lack of an apprenticeship route is actually a barrier for women coming into an area of work where, actually, they’ve got a massive career opportunity, with plenty of routes of progression within the profession.

Similarly, we’ve discussed peer pressure before, about the choices young women make at 16. Alongside any work that encourages them to go into the less traditional areas than health and beauty and social care and so on, how will your steering group consider how further education courses that traditionally attract young women can be geared better and promoted better to students so that they view these as the beginning of an ambitious career programme, rather than just assuming that it’s got limited expectations, which perhaps unfairly characterises some of these courses, I have to say that, so that they’re looking at it with an ambitious eye, rather than just a, ‘Well, this is what I can do, because my academic qualifications weren’t so great’? Thank you.

A very excellent set of questions. I'll try and just talk about them as we go through. Apologies—the report has been published today. I'm not at all, therefore, surprised that Suzy Davies hasn't had a chance to read it in any depth. However, there is a summary report included. It's published on the Chwarae Teg website. Also, the Welsh policy annex is also very interesting in terms of international examples, if you like. I think, Deputy Presiding Officer, it's fair to say—and I've said this to Cabinet colleagues as well—in reading that report, I experienced an almost epiphany in the way that I thought about gender. It's very interesting and I hope that Members will be able to read it.

The statement today is the beginning of a process, so we're not formally responding to the report. I can answer some of the questions from what I know now, but what we're doing is launching the report. What I very much hope we can do, Deputy Presiding Officer, is have a good conversation across this Chamber and civic society, and all society in Wales, about what on earth to do about it. The epiphany is this—that in the Scandinavian and Nordic countries, they start from an agreed place that women suffer discrimination at all levels in society. So, obviously, the suffered discrimination is in proportion to where else they are in that society, so a white, middle-class woman will suffer less discrimination than an ethnic minority or disabled woman and so on. But, nevertheless, that discrimination is there, as against the male counterpart. Therefore, they look at all of their policies, not to see that they don't discriminate, but at what they do to advance the cause of equality, which is the flip side. And as soon as you start to look at it like that, it looks very different. So, you ask yourself not 'Will this policy discriminate against women?', because that is what it describes as gender neutral. In other words, it will do nothing about the relative place of women at the moment. It won't discriminate against them, but neither will it advance them. I think that a conversation needs to be had about whether we want to flip that the other way round. So, I think that is a real difference in the way that this report presents itself to us. And then, when you view our policies through that framework, they look different.

We've done very well in eliminating discrimination. What we haven't done well at is advancing equality, and I do think that those are very important. So, in your series of questions, that's what the clear vision is. It's not that we don't have a clear vision about preventing discrimination, it's that we lack the clear vision for advancing equality. So, if you flip it like that, all the way through, you can see. So, when you look at our equality impact assessments and flip them, you get a slightly different result and slightly different policies, and that goes all the way through. If you do the scrutiny on that basis, you get a different result. So, the report is very interesting, Presiding Officer, and has the basis for us to do it differently in the way that countries that are a lot further advanced than us are still doing in numbers, because nowhere in the world, I'm sorry to say, are women actually equal to their male counterparts in the society that they live in.

I too welcome the publication of the first part of this review of gender and equality policies, but we have to acknowledge, of course, that this work is restricted in its nature and the focus is on the Government processes. They are important, of course, and issues such as equality impact assessments are vitally important, but it is limited, isn't it, with regard to promoting equality across society in Wales? That, ultimately, is what will lead to a nation where women can live their lives safely and where equality is prioritised.

I do agree with you when you say in your statement that the Welsh Government does have an important role to play in leading by example as an employer and as a policy maker to create permanent change. Recommendation 24 of the report by Chwarae Teg notes that stage 2 needs to start with a public debate in order to put practical and tangible actions in place to promote equality. For me, this is an important recommendation. Yes, we do need to have that debate, but, please, not one that goes on and on and on. What’s important is that actions are taken on key policy areas, and there is already a whole host of evidence about these issues. We know already what we need to be tackling in order to lead to improvement. What we need to do now is to make that improvement.

One of those areas, of course, is childcare, and everyone recognises that having affordable, quality childcare provision that’s available in all parts of Wales is vitally important to promote equality. So, you know what I’m going to ask next: do you believe that the current childcare offer of your Government is fit for purpose? I wonder whether we need to reconsider the Childcare Funding (Wales) Bill that’s going through committee stage at present, because it is taking us towards one specific direction, and stakeholders, the vast majority of them, argue that that direction is the incorrect one. They argue that the childcare offer needs to be active when a child is one year old and not when they’re two years of age. That’s what will make the genuine difference in order to allow more women to return to the workplace. So, the question I ask is this: do you believe that it would be worth pausing the Bill, reconsidering it and reintroducing a motion that would make the difference that we all wish to see?

Turning to a second area, whilst this review is under way and whilst Stage 2 will take place, the discussions about Brexit will also continue and will intensify, and it’s vitally important that women’s rights are maintained and developed as a result of leaving the European Union. Rights such as the right to equal pay; the right to leave from work for an antenatal appointment; rights in the workplace for pregnant women or for women who are on maternity leave; health and safety for women in the workplace; pension rights and so on—rights, as you know, that stem directly from our membership of the European Union, but also rights that are genuinely at risk of being lost, remembering this increasingly aggressive environment that we’re living in with regard to rights. We need to face the possibility that there will be an attempt to undermine some of these rights, without mentioning preventing the further development of rights. One way of safeguarding these rights would be to embed equality principles in the law in Wales: the principles of the Istanbul convention and the convention on eradicating discrimination against women and so on.

So, I’d like to know—. I know that I’m straying from the review itself here but I do think it’s important at this current time. Is the Government considering embedding those equality principles in our laws here in Wales? Experts, such as Professor Simon Hoffman from Swansea University, are of the opinion that it would be appropriate to do just that, and it’s within our competence, and perhaps to put forward a Bill to safeguard women’s rights and also workers’ rights, of course—a specific Bill in Wales.

You mentioned—

Are you winding up, please?

Yes. You mentioned in your statement that you want to show vision and leadership in Wales on gender issues, and of course we want to do that. I think that bringing a Bill forward to safeguard our rights as women would be an excellent way of showing that vision and leadership. Thank you.

Yes. A very important set of points there. In terms of why it's limited in the way that it is, it's just that for the first phase of the review, to get it under way, we asked them to do a rapid review of the Government and its policies deliberately, as a place to start—that's all. So, obviously, what we want to do is take it out from there, and the recommendations make that plain. There are, however, some recommendations for us, as I said, as both an employer and a policy lead, to make sure that we have our own house in the very best place it can be, in order to be able to be a role model. It would be very hard to ask other parts of our society to, for example, close the gender pay gap, if we're not able to do it ourselves. So, I do think there are some important things that can be done in-house, if you like, but then, clearly, the idea is to take it out to the world. A large number of the phase 2 recommendations are around that and the steering group, and I very much welcome a role for the cross-party group on women in taking forward the review as well, because in this place, I think, we have many things that we share across the whole Senedd about how this can be taken forward, and there are some very exciting things in here that will need some drive to push them forward.

You mentioned a couple of very specific things. The Bill, at the moment, on the childcare offer, is actually just about the HMRC arrangements for proving eligibility for working parents, so I don't think that that limits us in terms of what we do on the childcare offer. So, that's a different Bill. The committee scrutiny for the actual childcare offer Bill will be very interesting to see. I'm sure we'll take into account a range of stakeholder views, and so on, and there's a conversation to be had about what the best way forward on some of the offers is. I think our offer in our manifesto is a very generous offer, but there are issues around all childcare offers that need to be fully explored.

In terms of Brexit and the embedding of rights, we are actively looking into whether we can embed parts or all of the Istanbul convention. Obviously, we're not the nation state, but what we can do to embed that in our law, and actually also the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women stuff from the European Union. We want to hold onto those rights and make sure that they are embedded in our law. So, there's an active engagement with the Counsel General about how we might achieve that in our legislation, and what the best way to do that is, whether it needs a separate Bill or whether we can do it in another way. That will be very much part of phase 2 as well, as we go forward. We will be looking to establish a steering group alongside the cross-party group on women, which I know, Siân Gwenllian, you take a very particular interest in, alongside Jane Hutt and Suzy Davies. I'm very much hoping that, together, we can get a consensus on how to take some of the very exciting parts of this review forward.

Thank you for your statement, leader of the house, and for your earlier written statement. This year we celebrated the centenary of the first women being able to vote in parliamentary elections, and 90 years since we were given the vote on equal terms. Gender equality has come a long way in those 90-or-so years, but it hasn't come far enough. There is still a huge gender pay gap, unnecessary barriers to women taking key leadership roles, and we still battle misogyny on a daily basis.

Gender is a function of biology and should have no bearing on a person's life chances. Unfortunately, in 2018, it still does. Welsh women can expect to earn over £1.80 an hour less than men. Only 6 per cent of the top 100 companies' chief executives, and fewer than 14 per cent of local government chief executives are women. Women make up 51 per cent of the Welsh population, yet only make up 42 per cent of senior officials in Welsh Government. Only 28 per cent of local councillors are women. The Welsh Government have passed a number of pieces of legislation and regulations aimed at improving gender equality, but as highlighted by the rapid review of gender equality, they are not working sufficiently well.

Legislation will not tackle misogyny. Positive discrimination will not eradicate prejudice. We have to change attitudes. We have to show the world that it is not okay to make comments on a woman's appearance rather than what she is saying. We have to show the world that men are not better than women, that girls can do anything that boys can; and we have to show the world that threatening to rape someone on Twitter will not be tolerated.

I have just one or two questions on your statement. Leader of the house, how will you ensure that action on gender equality is taken across Government? And what discussions have you had with the Cabinet Secretary for Education about the action she can take to ensure young people are educated about becoming gender blind, and encouraging young girls and boys to challenge stereotypes? There should be no such thing as a man's job or a woman's job. Young people should be free and encouraged to do whatever job they wish. Finally, leader of the house, when will you be in a position to outline the timescales for the completion of phase 2?

We all have a role to play in improving gender equality. We have to fight misogyny, stand up to domestic violence, and challenge gender stereotypes. That's not feminism, it's humanism. We will not tolerate discrimination in any form. Diolch yn fawr.

Well, thank you very much for those remarks. There was much there that I completely agreed with. I think, Deputy Presiding Officer, it's worth indulging myself with a quote from a young woman who was with us standing outside with Val Feld's plaque, who said that she looked forward to a time when somebody complimenting her on her figures was talking about her attainment in maths and not the shape of her body. So, I think that's something well worth bearing in mind, and we are a long way from that, I fear.

But I also think it's worth quoting a little bit from the report—and I appreciate that Members won't have had a chance to read it even at all, or certainly not in depth—because I do think this epiphany that I spoke of earlier is summarised by this. So, it says:

'A gender-neutral approach defaults to treating men and women the same, which does not result in equality of outcome for men and women. This approach is often described as "gender-blind" which the UN define as "inability to perceive that there are different gender roles, need, responsibilities of men, women, boys and girls, and as a result failure to realize that policies, programmes and projects can have different impact on men, women, boys and girls"'.

I think that sums up the report. So, it's exactly as I said in response to Suzy Davies: if you flip the way you think about it and say that gender neutrality is not what we're looking for; we're looking for gender equality, which is not the same thing, because we are not equal when we start. Therefore, a policy that is gender neutral results in the same inequality at the other side of it as it did when it started. That's the drive, I think, across Government.

Obviously, we have taken this report through Cabinet before I took my oral statement. We had a robust conversation there about what can be done. In taking phase 2 forward and in developing our full response to this, which I'll bring back to the Senedd in the autumn, we will be talking about what each Cabinet Secretary and their departments can contribute to this. There are recommendations in the report, which I have yet to be able to discuss with all parts of this structure of Government, if I can call it that. Some of them are for the Commission. Some of them are around the ways that political parties promote gender equality and so on. That's why I was talking about the cross-party working group taking some of those forward. We will need to find some structures for how to advance mutual understanding of all of that, and that clearer vision, not just for the Government but across civic society—I think that Siân Gwenllian very much majored on that as well—that we accept where we start and then what we want to do to go forward. I do think that's fundamental for that.

In terms of outcomes, we're expecting to get to a point where we can agree how to take this forward by a year's time. I just want to be really clear what I mean by that. Obviously, I don't expect to have achieved gender equality in a year's time. Would that I could expect that, but obviously not. What we hope to do is have a comprehensive programme to embed in Wales in our lives in a year's time that we all agree on and that we can take forward.

Can I welcome your statement, leader of the house, on the gender review? It's particularly relevant to this year, with the centenary of women's suffrage. Last Saturday, I spoke at an adult learning event, and my theme was: 'We won the vote 100 years ago. Let's win equality for women in Wales today.'

The opera Rhondda Rips it Up, which some of us saw—the Welsh National Opera opera—told us about the life of Margaret Mackworth, or Lady Rhondda as she became, who set fire to the post box in Newport as part of her protest as a suffragette. She was sent to prison and went on hunger strike, but was released under the cat and mouse Act. The main theme on Saturday, once we'd talked a bit about suffragettes in our communities and historical figures who had made such an impact and enabled us to be there and be discussing the way forward—. The main discussion point on Saturday was on issues relating to today's Wales, in terms of gender equality, and that is where my questions will arise in relation to your review.

I look forward to reading the reports that you have published today. I've only been able to read the Chwarae Teg gender review summary. But I, particularly, have been impressed by the Women's Equality Network manifesto, and that states that it has—the manifesto and the network—a vision for Wales where every woman and girl is treated equally, lives safe from violence and fear, and is able to fully participate in the economy. So, leader of the house, do you believe the outcomes of the gender review, phase 1 and then moving on to phase 2, will help us move to fulfil—? We can only move, make steps to fulfil that vision. We acknowledge that. Will it help to address gender inequalities that are highlighted in that manifesto?

It's worth again looking at those inequalities. Fifty-five per cent of girls aged seven to 21 say that gender stereotypes affect their ability to say what they think. Fifty-two per cent of women report being sexually harassed in the workplace. We know we have a responsibility, not just the Welsh Government but here in this Assembly, to address the Me Too issues that have come out this year. One in three women in Wales will experience physical or sexual violence at some point in their lives. And the one that is so hard for us to tackle, and we cannot tackle it on our own in terms of the Welsh Government: there is a 15 per cent gender pay gap in Wales. Average hourly pay for women in Wales is £10.57, compared with £12.75 for men. Do you believe your review will help us to move forward in terms of securing commitment to halve the gender pay gap, as proposed by the Women's Equality Network in their manifesto? Can you update the Assembly on the gender pay gap in the Welsh Government—indeed, the Commission has a responsibility here—and how we can directly address that?

Now, you have said, and I'm grateful for it, that Siân Gwenllian and I are co-chairing, and Suzy Davies as well—the new cross-party group on women. On Thursday we welcomed Laura McAllister to speak on her expert panel on 'A Parliament that Works for Wales'. I'm pleased to note the recommendation in the Chwarae Teg phase 1 summary report, which says Welsh Government should legislate for implementation of the expert panel for Assembly reform. Well, we know this is, again, up to the Assembly to take forward. I hope that the gender review will enable us to take this forward in terms of some of the gender-focused recommendations, and I would talk about regaining the 50/50 representation of men and women in this Assembly. We gained it in 2003. We have to regain that, and, if that includes looking at those recommendations regarding gender quotas, job sharing, then so be it. We need to move forward.

Just finally on this area, we have made strides to tackle the scourge of violence against women in Wales, but the reality of violence against women is stark. I'm patron of both Atal y Fro, my local Women's Aid group and Bawso. Can you assure me that the recommendations in the gender review will be taken forward? I think this does relate to your point in your statement about making better use of the levers of government. We can have legislation, we can have funding, we can have policy that we approve, but it's about how we use those levers of government to ensure that we put gender at the centre of our policies. Can we see a step change in Welsh Government to achieve this? Of course, that does include the recommendations that say Welsh Government should review and, where necessary, strengthen existing legislation and duties, including the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act (2015).

So, just finally—sorry, thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer—there's a lot more we can take forward, but I would be very pleased for what I hope will be agreed in our cross-party group, that we can help you to take this forward in terms of the gender review.

Thank you for that series of questions and comments. I entirely agree with what you said. There's a lot to digest in the report. I wanted to bring it forward to Members for them to see the report as it is. We have not yet formally responded. We'll be doing that in the autumn. I would very much welcome that cross-party group involvement in that, because I think this is an agenda, Deputy Presiding Officer, that self-evidently the Government cannot achieve alone. We absolutely have to agree cross-party here a set of things to go forward in order to take civic society, society at large, with us. Because otherwise we're just not going to even get off the mark.

We've got groundbreaking legislation, of which we're rightly very proud. It's played its role, it makes the statements, it sets in train some of the actions, but you need more than that. You need a groundswell of opinion. You need what's in the Scandinavian countries: an absolute acceptance across the piece that this is something that the country wants to tackle.

So, just to take some of the specifics that Jane Hutt mentioned, these are a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies, really. Women make choices based on their gender because they expect to be primary carers in their home. One of the recommendations in the report that I'm looking forward to exploring is that we should take account of the unpaid care that goes on in the Welsh economy in terms of our GVA. That's a very interesting thing, because we know that the young women stakeholders who were interviewed as part of this process know that their aspirations will be tempered by their need to be the primary carer, because we have not shifted that agenda one bit. We also know that economic disadvantage plays a role—it's not the only cause, but it plays a role—in gender violence. We know that gender aspirations do affect people's choices. We know these things are happening. We need a big push to accept as a society that we want to do something about that, to develop the role models that allow that to happen.

Deputy Presiding Officer, I know that you share with me the frustration that this is a conversation we are still having. We had it ourselves as young women and we ought to be advancing this. So, I'm not ashamed to stand here and say I do not have all the answers to this. But, between us, together, we can move this agenda forward.

Thank you. We have had a major speaker from each of the parties. Can I now—? For the rest of the speakers—we've still got quite a few—it will be a short introduction and one question so that we can get through all of you. Bethan Sayed.

I'll try and be brief. [Laughter.] In your 2011 manifesto, there was a section where Labour outlined what they were going to do to make gender equality a reality and lead to significant changes of culture, not just within the Government, but also in the private sector. I don't feel that this has been done to a significant enough level. I appreciate your personal commitment, but it does sound to me as if you've never been in Government for the last how many years by the way that you're speaking here today.

There were promises, for example, to ensure public appointments were at least 40 per cent women. This was back in 2011. How well is this going? There were commitments on specific equality duties to ensure employers identified areas of weakness in gender equality and to take steps to address it. Maternity discrimination in this county is rising. Flexible working is still seen as a fringe issue. I think the quote from the report we have in front of us is clear where it says that there is a clear lack of ambition from the Welsh Government and it makes broad aspirational statements but we don't see delivery following on from that. So, for the First Minister now, at the end of his tenure, to tell me that he wants to have a feminist Government is something that, quite frankly, I take with a pinch of salt, because we should have seen this happening sooner. Women should not be in this position now. If his feminist Government was in action when he was allocated his role as First Minister, then we wouldn't be having this very debate here today.

I'd like to also ask why this review wasn't put out to tender in the first place. I've written to you about this and I know it's not within your purview to have to do that, but, in terms of ensuring openness in Government, I think it's something that should have been considered and I would urge you to do this for phase 2. Having two meetings—one in south Wales and one in north Wales—for £44,000 of Welsh Government money is not something that I believe is a good use of public money, and, in particular, we don't seem to know how many people are involved, the diversity of the people involved, how they made their recommendations, and these are recommendations that we probably knew about anyway.

So, I'd finish on saying—. Well, Siân Gwenllian said we need to have action now. I'd prefer to have more action than more reviews, because we know what the issues are and we have to put them into practice.

Well, absolutely, I agree that we need to have more action. I'm sorry that Bethan Sayed feels the way she does about it. I think we've addressed, in correspondence, the issues around the procurement. The whole point about this, Deputy Presiding Officer, was that we wanted a rapid review. I could have gone out to a six-month procurement and we would have got a lot longer timescale. We wanted to do something quickly to make sure that we could pull the actions that she speaks of together.

We've gone a long way since 2011 in this Assembly and in this Government. We've done a very considerable amount in terms of legislation and in terms of attitude. What this report is saying is that we could do more. And, as I said earlier in my introduction, it's quite clear that we've not achieved gender equality, but what's also clear is that there is not a nation on the planet that has achieved gender equality. We have a lot to learn from those other nations and I am not ashamed to say that we will redouble our efforts in that regard.

I've read through the Chwarae Teg rapid review and I'm pleased to see that the leader of the house is praised for her leadership and passion for equality, and I wanted to raise a few quick points.

First of all, there's a recommendation that there should be an Assembly women and equalities committee, which seemed to me a good way of moving forward, and I wondered what she thought about that. There's quite a bit about shared parental leave and the very low take-up of it throughout the UK. And it is a universal problem. But I wondered whether the leader of the house had had the opportunity to read about Sweden's practice and how they're trying to move to five months leave for men. And I wondered if she had any comment on that.

And then equality impact assessments—which are absolutely crucial, but the evidence that seems to be coming through in these documents is that it is, perhaps, seen as a tick-box exercise. And we've had quite difficult changes to the grants, for example, for the Traveller education service, which I've raised a few times, and it's difficult to find out what was the quality of the equality impact assessments there if, indeed, anything did take place. So, will the leader of the house be looking at equality impact assessments to see that they are used in a meaningful way?

And, finally, I welcome the strategic approach that is being used.

In terms of shared parental leave, there are some good recommendations in here, which we clearly need to discuss with the civil service in the Welsh Government and with the Commission as the two major employers in this building, which I'm very much looking forward to. In my formal response to this in the autumn, we will be coming forward with the result of some of those discussions. I've not yet had them, Deputy Presiding Officer, so I'm not in a position to say; we've got this report to the Assembly as soon as we possibly could. But there are some very interesting case studies and so on in here, which I'm very much hoping to explore.

In terms of the impact assessments, we are moving to a different form of equality impact assessment, and in fact a combined impact assessment across the Government to the number of pieces. But, as I said in my response to Suzy Davies right at the beginning, I do think there's a difference between asking whether the policy impacts on women in any way or whether it advances the equality of women, and I don't think we've done that second thing at all, actually. But it's something that I'm very much looking forward to making sure gets embedded into our combined equalities assessments in future.

The Cabinet Secretary for Finance and I have a meeting next week of our equality budget group—badge or bage or something, I can't remember; it's BAGE, isn't it—which I'm very much hoping to discuss some of those issues with as well, and, as I said, as part of the cross-party working group going forward, because I do think it will be important for us to have a consensus on what excellent looks like, taking this agenda forward.

Well, ninety years after all women got the vote, we haven't used it that well in getting the changes we needed in promoting women's economic equality. That's particularly around women's primary role in looking after children, because women and men are paid roughly the same until they have children. It's after they have children—for most women, it is descending into living in poverty. The level of discrimination that we've revealed in our maternity work inquiry, which we'll be debating after recess, indicates that even employment lawyers are discriminating against women, incredibly.

So, we clearly have to do something, and I very much like the vision that's in the Chwarae Teg statement, the phase 1 statement, that Wales must be a world leader for all women and girls. Absolutely, we must, but we've got an awful lot of work to do. Clearly, women tend to be in the low-paid zero-hours jobs, and men are in the much better paid jobs. I'd like to applaud the work of Sarah Jones, who's chair of the Institution of Civil Engineers, because only 12 per cent of engineering and technology students are girls and there's a huge amount of work to be done with girls in school to ensure that they think this is a career that they can do, because being an engineer isn't about brawn; this is about precision skills.

So, we clearly have a huge amount of work to do. We've got excellent legislation; we're just not so great at implementing it. So, I really hope that we will take forward this phase 1 review and really tackle the mote in our own eye before we start tackling the beam in other people's.

Yes, I think that's an excellent point. As I said, there's a lot we can do to put our own house in order. The report is huge food for thought. When you have the chance to read it through thoroughly, the discussion around maternity and paternity leave, shared parental leave and so on, is one that really resonated with me. Because, absolutely, we have to ensure that women who want to take parental leave can do so, but until we move to a position where men take an equal share of that women will always be disadvantaged, because, as soon as you assume that the woman is the carer, then that young woman will assume that as they make their choices going forward. We know from our stakeholder meetings that that is what's happening, and so they're already ruling themselves out of careers that might involve difficulty with that, because they know inevitably they won't be able to do that. And it's very hard to tell them otherwise when all of the stats show them that. So, there are some concerted things we need to do here, and this is a whole society attitude. As I say, even in Scandinavian countries, who have been a lot more progressive in looking at this for many years, they've reported sobering reading about some of the places they still have to go.

But I absolutely agree that we need to put our own house in order and be the shining exemplar that we ought to be and I'm looking forward to those discussions with the Permanent Secretary and others over the summer so that we can respond in that regard in the autumn.

Thank you. And, finally, Mark Isherwood.

Diolch. After meeting you last night, Jan Logie, the parliamentary under-secretary in the New Zealand Government's Ministry of Justice, was hosted by me as co-chair of the cross-party group on violence against women and children at a round-table meeting to discuss gender-based violence and prevention. Clearly, there's not just a national but an international element to this, and we can each learn and progress together by engaging with each other. But at a domestic level—and I think you've heard me mention this before—during the last local government term, my wife, then a county councillor, was subjected to a campaign of misogynist bullying, some of it online, by the deputy leader of Flintshire County Council. The ombudsman advised local mediation and that agreed certain actions, but when the deputy leader reneged on his promise to make a public apology in the chamber, my wife was told the only action she could take would be to make a formal complaint to the ombudsman. By this stage, she was suffering from serious consequent anxiety and depression, from which she's still not fully recovered. And, of course, that individual is still deputy leader of the council. What action can we take to ensure that bodies such as local authorities keep their own houses in order, and do not require the victim to seek remedy?

Without commenting on the specific circumstances, there clearly is an issue around impact and enforceability. I'm very proud of the public sector equality duty in Wales and the particular Welsh aspects to that, but there are issues around what we do if they aren't upheld. Some of the reporting could be better. These are things we learn as we go along. So, very, very important to us will be to take the lessons of—. You know, the legislation is all very well, but what do you do if it's breached, or what impact is it having, what do you do about—? You know, we have exemplar public services in Wales, but we have some trailers. What can we do about that will be very much part of this review, and I'd very much welcome your input into that, Mark Isherwood.

Thank you very much, leader of the house.