A year ago at Labour party conference, Harriet Harman launched Labour’s Commission on Older Women. This responded to the emergence of a new generation of active older women in their fifties and sixties who have led very different lives from their mothers. These are women who have been ‘doing it all’ – caring for both children and their elderly relatives while also holding down a job. We wanted to find out about their needs and aspirations – so often overlooked – and put them on the public policy agenda.
This was then a new debate, seeking to extend what Labour achieved for younger women and working mothers to this generation of active older women. One year on, despite the public preoccupation with youth culture, I see this debate reflected in other parties, the media and academic research.
Last month health secretary Jeremy Hunt told the Daily Telegraph that employers need to do more to support people struggling to balance work and care commitments because of our rapidly ageing population and a looming ‘dementia time bomb’. Of course, he failed to offer any practical proposals for government help. And it’s urgently needed: Carers UK, in evidence to the commission, showed that by 2017 we will run out of family members who are able to care for older relatives in need.
This year, the Department for Work and Pensions told employers that they will have to fill 13.5 million job vacancies over the next 10 years with only seven million school and college leavers. Steve Webb, the pensions minister, told the Daily Telegraph, ‘Over time there will be a whole set of jobs where employers need experienced older workers and a firm that doesn’t change its attitude to older workers will be left behind.’ But government has failed to produce policies which would help the older women who could help to bridge this gap. Right now women over 50 are losing their jobs at a faster rate than other people and are more likely to stay unemployed for longer.
The commission has highlighted how older women are made to disappear. Harriet Harman demonstrated the dearth of older women on our TV screens and in our papers. Broadcasters have been shamed into admitting that men make up over 80 per cent of TV presenters over 50. The newspaper industry is no better – 60 per cent of women journalists over 45 believe they have been turned down for at least one job or assignment because they were too old.
Commission member Jackie Ashley wrote about her experience of caring for husband Andrew Marr and returning to work, she received a ‘cascade’ of emails, tweets and letters about the plight of Britain’s carers – who are mostly older women. Half the women in Britain who reach the age of 59 have already spent at least one substantial period of time caring for elderly parents, sick relatives or grandchildren. Nearly one in five unemployed women leave work to care and many more turn down the chance of paid employment due to caring responsibilities.
This Commission on Older Women has taken evidence from a wide range of sources about older women’s experiences in the workplace, as carers and in public life. We have learnt about the inequalities older women face in the workplace, the difficulties they face balancing their work and caring responsibilities, the greater poverty they experience as pensioners, exacerbated by the impact of fast changes to retirement age, and the absence of older women’s faces and voices in our media.
We will publish an initial report at women’s conference in September which will provide evidence for this debate about women over 50 – the women who kickstarted feminism, took the pill, successfully campaigned for equal pay laws, smashed through glass ceilings and made progress possible for their daughters and granddaughters. Despite all this, today these women are overlooked and undervalued. That’s just not right and our next task will be to show how a Labour government can change it.
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Fiona Mactaggart MP is secretary of the Commission on Older Women. She tweets @fionamacmp and is speaking at next week’s Winning With Women conference on Labour’s insecurity: How do we regain trust on crime and immigration? Sign up for your ticket here.
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