Ribble Valley's Maya Ellis among Labour MPs push for women's economic equality in growth plans

Ribble Valley MP Maya Ellis is one of a group of influential Labour MPs who have called for women’s economic participation to sit at the heart of the government’s growth plans in a series of essays.

Maya, a campaigner for gender equality and family rights, contributed an essay to the collection ‘An Unashamedly Female Agenda: A political economy for women’, which reports that the UK misses out on £113bn a year when women are excluded from paid work on equal terms.

The collection, brought together by MPs, the Women’s Budget Group and the Good Growth Foundation, covers topics from building small businesses through to transport safety.

Maya’s essay focuses on how pushing for gender equality must also focus on parenting policy. Become a parent, she says, remains one of the single biggest drivers of inequality between men and women: “Parenting is where equality in the UK falls off a cliff… if Britain wants to become genuinely equal, it must become genuinely family friendly.”

There is more to do on achieving gender equality, she writes, but the government has taken some important steps, including expanding the funding of childcare from nine months and flexible working from day one of employment.

Steps the government needs to take to fix this and improve lives for parents include introducing six weeks of properly paid paternity leave and an urgent step-change in maternity care.

She also points out the mismatch between school and work: “Many full-time jobs continue to operate broadly around a 9-5 timetable. Add commuting and many parents are effectively unavailable from 8am until 6pm or later.”

Maya said: “I was really pleased to be asked to contribute to this important piece of work, in which I've written on ways to ensure women thrive as parents, not simply survive.

“During his Budget announcement, the Chancellor rightly spoke about providing breathing space to ordinary people. Addressing the challenge of childcare and parental leave is vital to this. We were happy to see steps on the latter and we urge government to be as ambitious as possible on this going forward.”