Women are hardest hit by the coalition
Anna Bird
—As a result of austerity, many women are becoming poorer and less financially autonomous. That was the finding of the Fawcett Society’s report last year, The Impact of Austerity on Women, which pulled together all the available evidence on how cuts and the spending squeeze are affecting gender equality.
Three years on from the coalition government’s first austerity budget, the research is consistent: women are bearing the brunt of the public spending cuts, which affect the supply of jobs, the availability of social assistance and welfare support and the provision of public services. Taken individually, austerity measures are already making life more difficult for many women across the UK; added together they mark a tipping point for women’s equality.
Over time, the impact will not only be calculated through the money in women’s pockets and their spending power relative to men’s. It will result in a society in which women’s voice and choices are diminished, where women’s access to employment, justice and safety are undermined and where women become more, rather than less, dependent on the state or their families for support.
How do we go about repairing the damage? Fawcett is clear that the state should start with women’s jobs. Women’s unemployment is at a 25-year high. There are 2.4 million women in the UK who want to work but do not currently work, and half as many again who want to work longer hours but who have not been able to find or take up work that meets their needs. Securing jobs for women who want to work could increase economic growth by 0.5 per cent a year, or revenue to the state of £15-23bn, according to the home secretary.
The figures are compelling but the real question is how we make change happen. The coalition’s Women’s Business Council argues predominantly for cultural change and action by business, working with government, to ‘unblock the talent pipeline’. Many of its recommendations are sensible, but, mindful of the ‘need to avoid excessive burden on either business or government’, the whole package does little to address the scale of the crisis in women’s jobs.
The recent business select committee report, Women in the Workplace, a cross-party report informed by over 100 written submissions, oral evidence and comments collated by Mumsnet and Woman’s Hour, is heartening. The report is hardhitting, welcoming the government’s stated commitment to workplace equality but stating that, ‘Its actions at times […] not only fail to live up to the rhetoric, but stand in direct contradiction to it.’ Its specific recommendations including reversing some of the coalition’s backtracking around equal pay and equality legislation as well as halting the proposal to charge fees in pregnancy discrimination tribunal cases.
Yet even that report does not go far enough. As things stand, in the coming years we are likely to witness persistent and rising levels of female unemployment, particularly among single mothers; diminishing levels of female pay and a widening of the pay gap between men and women; and an increase in the proportion of women in low-paid work.
We need to see a government-wide strategy on women’s employment that reflects the scale of the problem. It should adopt the recommendations of the select committee and the Women’s Business Council and include other measures to protect women on low pay and tackle the particularly high barriers to work faced by single mothers. But if, while we are striving to create family-friendly workplaces or broaden the aspirations of school-leavers, the Treasury continues its focus on cutting public sector jobs and eroding employment protections to save money in the short term, we can never win – women will inevitably bear the brunt.
At the next election we need to see parties putting forward a coherent approach to women’s employment, which joins the dots between macroeconomic policy and the reality of women’s lives. If Labour can translate the theory of full employment into a credible programme for women’s equality at work, we might actually be getting somewhere.
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Anna Bird is deputy chief executive of the Fawcett Society
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