Cllr Georgia Gould is the leader of Camden Council

I AM a proud feminist. I attended Camden School For Girls school founded by the suffragist Frances Mary Buss to open up access to education for women and girls.

I remember marching up Camden Road every day with my friends, feeling hopeful and powerful, and that as young women we were standing on the shoulders of generations before us.

We were confident that a lot of the battles had been won – and that the right to equality and safety for women and girls was something agreed on in our society.

But every year I see how naïve that was – and how big the hurdles still are.

For pupils now at our schools they see how far we have to go daily – online, on social media and in our communities. They deal with the impact of pornography, misogyny and violence, and the pressure social media can create around body image.

This week I was at an International Women’s Day event in Barking and Dagenham reflecting on the brave women sewing-machinists at the Dagenham Ford factory that refused to be paid less than men for the same work. It was their example that led to the 1970s Equal Pay Act.

Women today all benefit from the stand these brave and proud women took.

So we have to pick up their baton and carry on fighting – old battles and new ones. Following the pandemic, the national gender pay gap rose in 2021 from 14.9 per cent to 15.4 per cent (ONS), meaning for every one pound a man earns a woman earns 84p.

This gap goes up to 26 per cent for Black African women and 28 per cent for Bangladeshi women when compared to the average male worker. The extortionate price of child care is pushing women out of the labour market. We are losing the skills, talent and ideas of too many women at a time when our economy needs them most.

As the powerful report from Camden’s Women’s forum shows women are bearing the brunt of the cost of living crisis. I hear stories every day of women skipping meals so their children can eat, being forced to water down formula milk as the prices grow and even having to reuse nappies. 70 per cent of those applying for Camden’s cost of living emergency fund are women.

Women’s aid research shows that 66 per cent of survivors reported that abusers are now using the cost of living increase and concerns about financial hardship as a tool for coercive control.

This is why in Camden we passed a cost of living budget committing another £2million pound to our cost of living fund, making permanent Mayor Sadiq Khan’s one year investment in universal free school meals for all primary pupils and investing £1.3 million into a family fund to help with school uniforms and secondary school hunger. But we can never normalise what is happening.

Councils should not need to be handing out blankets or supporting food banks with food that doesn’t need cooking so people don’t have to turn on the electricity.

These are political choices. Uplifting the housing benefit, ending the total benefit cap and two child limit, universalising childcare could lift millions our of hardship tomorrow. We urgently need reform our welfare system so it works for families, for children, for parents and for workers. 2023 is the year to raise our voices.

We can take inspiration from those that came before us – like Frances Mary Buss and the women of the Dagenham Ford factory.

We can pick up the baton from leaders like Jacinda Arden in New Zealand who have shown that you don’t have to choose between compassion and strength. We can amplify the voices of all the women bravely speaking up today and all our male allies campaigning for change.

But most of all we need to stand in solidarity and pledge our support to all women working to live equal lives, to succeed in their careers, to change our communities and our world, to do the best for their families and communities.

Cllr Georgia Gould is the leader of Camden Council