Mary is a member of the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee which has responsibility for, amongst other things, issues relating to artificial intelligence and intellectual property. She is also Vice-Chair of the Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee.

Before her election to the European Parliament, Mary had a distinguished career in the charitable and non-governmental sector. During the 1980s she ran the Council for Voluntary Service in the London Borough of Newham, before going on to work as a Senior Manager for SCOPE, the cerebral palsy charity. In the 1990s Mary became Chief Executive of the lone parent organisation Gingerbread and from there took up the position of General Secretary of the Association of Chief Officers of Probation.  

Mary is a keen writer and has completed "Women in Power", a directory of female MEPs, and more recently “Parliamentary Pioneers,” charting the history of Labour’s early women MPs. You can find her blog “The Honeyball Buzz” on her website.