The Baroness Scotland case revealed more about exploited women at the bottom of the heap than it did about a politician at the top of it, argues Laurie Penny

In a shock move, a senior advisor to the British government was recently found to have employed a housekeeper without claiming the money back on expenses. Unfortunately for Baroness Scotland, despite being married to a British national and appearing to have all the necessary paperwork, Loloahi Tapui, 27, had no legal right to work in this country under the terms of a law which Scotland herself was instrumental in passing when she worked for the Home Office.

If every politician who the press had proven guilty of major personal hypocrisy this year alone had resigned, we would now have a very empty House of Commons. But whilst James Purnell, David Davis, Chris Grayling and many others retain their seats and their standing after barely a slap on the wrist, Baroness Patricia Scotland’s reputation has been permanently tarnished by the revelation of her domestic oversight, with calls for her immediate resignation echoing around Whitehall.

The right-wing press could hardly have appeared more delighted about all this if they’d thrown a lavish party right on top of an enormous glass ceiling. Imagine – Britain’s foremost female lawyer, the first ever woman Attorney General and the first black woman to be made a QC, unwittingly infringing a law she helped create. What seems to annoy them most about Lady Scotland, though, is her adamant refusal to apologise for anything more than what she actually did. She has admitted that she is ‘bitterly sorry’ for not photocopying documents that appeared to prove her housekeeper’s legal status, sacked Tapui as soon as she became aware of the situation, the UK Border Agency accepted that she did not knowingly employ someone without a valid visa, and she has willingly paid the substantial fine for which she is liable, proving that she is not above her own laws. But more than that she will not do, and the Mail group is still furious that this high-achieving black woman is “too proud to eat humble pie”.

The Tory party’s calls for Scotland to resign immediately may well, of course, have been more cynically motivated – any full enquiry into the legal status of the domestic staff of the upper and lower houses of parliament and associated advisers would doubtless turn up a swathe of other such cases. But the demand that Lady Scotland fall on her sword is more than simple hypocrisy. It downplays a chance to investigate a very real social problem in this country – namely, that a generation of women has risen through the ranks of power and privilege by climbing over the backs of other, more vulnerable women.

Let’s be honest: in today’s world, women who want to maintain a career often have no option but to hire domestic help, if they can afford to do so. Women are still expected to perform the lion’s share of cleaning and caring duties, with men in long-term partnerships performing no larger share of those duties than they did in the early 1980s. I interviewed over 100 British women about their domestic arrangements, and most of them expressed despair at ever getting their partners to do their bit, despite their protestations to believing in equality. Hardly anyone has asked why Baroness Scotland’s husband was unable to take time away from his job to care for their children, allowing his wife to get on with being Attorney General. But then, high-flying professional men rarely need organise their own domestic affairs, nor will they be required to do so whilst cleaning and caring remain low-status jobs done almost exclusively by women, for low pay or for no pay.

The response of contemporary feminism to this interminable standoff has been disheartening. As feminist writer Jane Story observed in her essay ‘Passing the Buck’, “Women professionals - feminist and non-feminist alike - have solved their personal housework crisis in the easiest way possible. They've simply bought their way out of the problem. Instead of being exploited themselves, they shift the exploitation to another woman. But not everyone can pass the buck in this way. Who cleans the cleaner's house?”

Whilst employing domestic staff remains something that women do in secrecy and in silence, aware of the process as a personal failing, mistakes will continue to be made – and abuses will continue to happen. Although the domestic worker in question appeared to be in this country of her own free will after the expiration of her student visa, many domestic staff are not so fortunate. Due to the nature of international operations accurate estimates are still impossible, but it is believed that fully twelve percent of the 27 million victims of human trafficking worldwide - 700,000 in the United States alone - are indentured domestic slaves.

In the midst of all this controversy, only one person has, in fact, lost her job. At the time of writing, Loloahi Tapui has left her London flat and been arrested by UK border enforcers. Whilst her former employer wriggles on the pin of media scrutiny, Tapui has been spat out, at great personal cost, of the underworld of an economy that remains inimitably unfriendly to ethnic minority women who want to earn a living, whether they are Tongan students or Baronesses.

On a good day, Baroness Patricia Scotland should be a hero to the women’s rights movement – a black woman from a poor, immigrant background who has managed to smash her way through to the highest levels of political influence. Instead, the case exposes just how far women in this country have to go before real equality is achieved, equality that allows all women, not just a few fortunate or determined ones, to live lives free from exploitation. Scotland’s refusal to back down may just help expose how much work is left undone in the struggle for justice for women worldwide.