Where does Liz Truss stand on women’s issues?

Foreign secretary Liz Truss has won the Conservative Party leadership contest and will succeed Boris Johnson’s as UK prime minister, beating ex-chancellor Rishi Sunak into second place.

She will now meet the Queen in Balmoral on the Tuesday, where Mr Johnson will formally offer his resignation to the monarch.

Both Ms Truss and Mr Sunak were busy pitching themselves to party members thoughout August, with the eventual winner promising £30bn worth of tax cuts within weeks of taking office as a way of helping people through the cost of living crisis.

Ms Truss also pledged to reverse the National Insurance increase that came into effect in April.

“The tax cuts I’m talking about will be delivered on day one because we have an immediate issue that families are struggling with the cost of fuel, with the cost of food,” she said during a campaign visit to Devon.

“That’s why I will reverse the increase in National Insurance. I’ll also have a temporary moratorium on the green energy levy to cut fuel bills.”

Separately, she has placed her focus on reforming the education sector, including widening access to top institutions, like the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and placing less emphasis on predicted grades.

Both she and Mr Sunak also made pledges to show they are prepared to act on violence against women and girls.

Ms Truss said she would work to create a National Domestic Abuse Register to tackle repeat offending by abusive men.

But now that she has won, where does our new PM really stand on women’s issues?

Here’s what we have learned over the course of the contest.

On abortion rights

Ms Truss cast her vote to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland in April 2021 but also sat out votes on the introduction of “buffer zones” outside of clinics across the UK.

As minister for women and equalities, she has been criticised by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) for ignoring its demands to publicly denounce the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in June.

Additionally, in 2019, she took an audience with Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that campaigns against abortion.

The BPAS said both Ms Truss and Mr Sunak demonstrated a “pattern of abstention when it comes to the issue of abortion”.

“In 2022, in the wake of the US decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the UK needs a leader who will openly and vocally support a woman’s right to access abortion,” it said in a statement to The Independent.

“Warms words from these leadership candidates about supporting women and girls amount to very little when they have both repeatedly failed to take part in a number of key votes to further reproductive choice and help protect women and girls.”

On violence against women

As mentioned, Ms Truss has vowed to introduce a National Domestic Abuse Register, which she said would help break a cycle of repeat offending by abusive men and a stand-alone offence for street harassment.

The register would cover all forms of domestic abuse, including coercive control and financial abuse.

“Over the last two years, our nation has been shocked by a number of high-profile murders of women,” Ms Truss said.

“Violence against women and girls doesn’t have to be inevitable. Women should be able to walk the streets without fear of harm and perpetrators must expect to be punished.

“Through increased police training, new offences, faster processes for rape victims and our Domestic Abuse Register we will ensure victims are protected, and crimes are prevented in the first place.”

But the End Violence Against Women Coalition said meaningful change will require investment in long-term, specialist prevention work.

This includes “public campaigns that aim to shift the attitudes that drive and underpin harmful behaviours and delivering holistic prevention work in schools and education settings,” Deniz Ugur, deputy director of the coalition said.

Ms Truss has not outlined plans for public campaigns of this kind.

“Currently, we know that the government has invested less than 10 per cent of the budget it has calculated is needed to deliver a new relationships and sex curriculum. This is just not good enough,” Ms Ugur said.

Ms Truss has not pledged to increase funding for specialist frontline services for victims and survivors of abuse, even especially for those helping people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds.

“These services are a lifeline, but without adequate resourcing many survivors face waits of over a year for life-saving support,” Ms Ugur said.

“Recovery and healing are an essential part of justice, and the government must recognise and resource specialist services so no survivor is left without the support she needs.”

On economic policy

Ms Truss has not recognised how women are negatively impacted by economic policies or pledged to make improvements in this area, although nor did Mr Sunak.

Research has shown that women are the “shock absorbers” of poverty, the UK Women’s Budget Group (WBG) said.

As inflation continues to rise into double-digits, the WBG says the cost of living crisis will “disproportionately impact” women, who are “more likely to be in debt and spend a higher proportion of their expenditure on essential goods”.

Additionally, a 2020 report by McKinsey & Co found that women’s jobs were 1.8 times more vulnerable during the pandemic.

Women also make up most of the public sector employees and workers in this sector have seen their wages frozen for most of the last decade.

Additionally, women’s role in providing unpaid care for children makes it harder for them to do more paid hours of work.

“All of that means that women are ill-equipped to cope with the current cost of living crisis. We need to see recognition of this from both candidates,” the WBG said.

“Both Sunak and Truss voted in 2015 against carrying out an assessment of the impact of government policies on women, which would have helped to mitigate any disproportionate burden on women.

“Childcare fees have increased at twice the rate of wages in the last 10 years keeping many women out of work. Promises of ‘doing more for women’ or nods towards deregulating childcare as a way of increasing affordability are not addressing the root cause of much of women’s economic inequality.

“That will only happen when policy makers begin to recognise and value the role of care and those who provide it. If the leadership candidates really want to support women, it needs to start there.”