Today the TUC has published a review of the impacts that the recent downturn has had for women at work. Until now this recession has hit men’s jobs harder, with male employment and unemployment rates affected far more than women’s (although the gap between male and female unemployment levels and rates of increase has been much smaller than in previous recent downturns).
But women’s jobs are not intrinsically more secure. In many sectors, such as manufacturing (-10 per cent), finance (- 4 per cent) and hotels and restaurants (-3 per cent), proportional falls in workforce jobs have been the same for women and men. But in education, health and public administration workforce jobs have shown a small increase – and it’s in these predominantly public sector occupations where a large proportion of women work.
Our analysis shows that around 40 per cent of female employees in the UK work in public sector occupations, compared to around 15 per cent of men. Widespread public sector job cuts, and consequent job losses, would therefore have a disproportionate affect on female employees and their families.
The effects would be worse in the regions that already have high unemployment rates – the five regions with the highest male unemployment rates are also areas where over 40 per cent of female employees hold public sector funded jobs. For example, in the North East male unemployment is running at 10.9 per cent, while over 45 per cent of female employees are in public sector occupations. Similarly, male unemployment in the West Midlands is currently 11.5 per cent – with over 41 per cent of employed women in public sector employment.
The large proportions of women working in the public sector improve women’s overall levels of pension provision – which would be far worse if it was not for the superior record of the public sector has of providing decent pensions for women and lower-paid staff. Because more women than men work in the public sector, they have nearly two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of public sector defined benefit schemes (not all of which are final salary).
However despite this, women’s earnings disadvantage in the labour market (the gender pay gap currently stands at 16.4 per cent) is still exacerbated in retirement, with women’s average income just 62 per cent the level of men’s. Large-scale redundancies, as well as attempts to level down public sector pensions down to those in the private sector, would serve to further exacerbate rates of female pensioner poverty.
Government investment in tackling unemployment, and bold action by the Bank of England, have meant that both women and men have seen their employment rates fall by far less than in previous downturns – a particularly remarkable fact given that output has fallen by around 5.8 points during this recession compared to 4.8 in the 80s and 2.6 in the 90s. But better than expected employment rates have not been inevitable. Sweeping spending cuts now would leave thousands of public sector workers unemployed, a move that would only heighten the risk of a double dip recession and wider economic devastation.
Photo: HackerPhotography 2007