Diolch, Sioned Williams. I do think it's so important that we reflect on the women we've descended from as well—our mothers and grandmothers. So often we pay attention to perhaps the men we're descended from as well, because they've had achievements, but it's the women we've descended from who are so powerful to us. And we have a responsibility to them as well as to our future generations.

It's crucially important that we tackle gender pay, and if you look at areas of concern relating to gender pay, it widened slightly in Wales this year. And women also—this point about childcare—remain four times more likely to cite childcare as the reason for being economically inactive. But also, intersectionally, representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic people and disabled people—among public appointments, we're making some changes, but it still remains low, and we need to look at the under-representation of women among business leaders, managers, directors. 

I think some questions came up about women in STEM earlier on this afternoon. If we look at current surveys, they indicate that only 11 per cent of the UK's engineering workforce is female, and we've got the lowest percentage of women engineering professionals in Europe. So, I think the Not Just for Boys work that Chwarae Teg has undertaken is crucially important as well. It's very gender segregated, we know, the labour market. I visited a day nursery in my constituency a couple of weeks ago. They've never recruited a young man to work in the day nursery, and it's an all-female workforce in childcare, and very much so in social care as well. It's great we've got the real living wage, because that's going to help address women's pay disparities as well, and we need the real living wage as a crucial route towards tackling the gender pay gap, and then progress in the labour market.

I think it is very important that we look at the most marginalised and those with protected characteristics. That's why I focused on the intersectional approach in my statement, but poverty rates have increased—cost of living, pandemic, inequalities have increased, and of course now—. And we know that, actually, single parents are still at greatest risk of living in poverty. I think the issues that we raised last year about the fact that the cut to universal credit, that £20 cut—it directly impacted on women and their families on lowest pay. I think we need to recognise that unpaid care work, harassment, abuse and violence all have to be addressed. 

I would like to just say, as we move to the local government elections, it's really important that we have more women candidates. I'm sure all political parties are seeking this for the local government elections. I'm very proud that we now have women leaders across our political parties anyway representing local government, who are absolutely at the sharp end of everything that we're doing in delivering in terms of policy. And I was very pleased to meet with all of the cabinet members who are responsible for equality recently and, of course, Rebecca Evans, the Minister for local government, has shared with me the ways in which we take forward the budget improvement plan, looking at gender budgeting as well as helping to tackle the pay gap, but also looking at ways in which we can ensure that more women are represented, and also see that as an intersectional approach and core as well. 

So, we have a long way to go, but I think I was very pleased to see the First Minister's tweet on International Women's Day today that he was very proud of the fact that he had more women in the Cabinet than men, and I think sometimes people must say, 'Oh, there are some women running Wales here', and we've got women Chairs of committees across the Senedd, our Llywydd. This is where we have to stand up together and hopefully—. I've mentioned the equal voice initiative. We really must ensure that we inspire and enable our young women to succeed us in this place. Diolch.