Has the position of women in public life improved in the past 20 years?

Well, absolutely it has.

You've got a situation in politics, for example, where three party leaders are women.

There's an increase, sorry, four.

Properly corrected here.

One of whom is with us.

Sorry.

I was going to say the bigger parties, but I shouldn't say that either.

There are more women MLAs, I believe, than there have been in the past.

There's more people, more women MPs at Westminster. So it has all improved, but it had a lot of

improving to do, and it can still go further, of course.

And there was an interesting report put out by the Commissioner for Public Appointments

a few years back, I think it was about 2014-15.

And they actually showed by their statistics that they had

that the number of women in public life since the Good Friday Agreement

until then had actually dropped a few percent.

So we would have been sitting at about 33, 34 percent of public positions being held by women.

There was a slight decrease, so we were down to about 30 percent.

So you sort of wonder what happened in those 20 years when we know we're setting up institutions and moving

forward where were women being encouraged to come forward and so I thought that

was a really interesting report it became to see what the figures today would be and

if that's still maybe static but we're sort of sitting and it's the same as you say

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