Austerity has always been a feminist issue. From the start of the recession and right through the hard years of government cuts, women have tended to pay a higher price for the economic crisis than men, with fewer job opportunities, lower pay, poorer conditions and disproportionately deeper cuts to their welfare. What's worse, there are precious few signs of improvement, with new analysis from the TUC suggesting that the number of women seeking work is understated by official government statistics.
The problem, according to the TUC, is that the headline unemployment figure counts only people who have very recently applied for a new job and are immediately available to start work. It specifically does not include those who say they want work, but who have not recently applied for a job, or whose day-to-day circumstances mean they cannot start a job immediately – and this latter category includes a disproportionate number of women.
The precise figures highlighted by the TUC are striking. The official UK unemployment rate for men is 990,000 and for women it is 815,000. But looking at those who say they want work but who have not recently applied for a job – the so-called economically inactive – the position is reversed - there are 1,379,000 economically inactive women seeking work, compared to 920,000 men – a gap getting on for half a million.
One obvious explanation for this is that women cannot find work that fits around their caring commitments – a profound problem in our workplace economy that has persisted for years. Employment – for men and women – has been rising in recent years, which is good news of course, but the problems faced by women in finding good, well-paid jobs will not be solved unless there is an attempt to address the frequent lack of good childcare arrangements.
It is not the only factor that is perpetuating gender inequality in employment and pay. In announcing the analysis of the job figures, the TUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady said government should be concerned about the lack of progress for women with caring responsibilities who want to work, but she also drew attention to the fact that many more women than men work in the public sector. This means they have suffered disproportionately from the cuts to public services that have already happened, and will do so again from the cuts that are still to come.
There are many other factors which stack the odds against women who work and women who want to work: they are overly represented in jobs that are temporary, low-paid and low security; they are much less likely to occupy the senior positions where decisions about pay are made; and the gap between male and female earnings remains wide at around 17 per cent. Research published last week by The Equality and Human Rights Commission also suggested 54,000 women are losing their jobs every year in Britain because of discrimination against new mothers.
A rise in employment alone will not fix these problems, or attract the so-called economically inactive women back into the workplace. Instead, there has to be a concerted effort to tackle the systemic inequalities in the workplace. There is still a lack of good, full-time work suitable for women. There is still a shortage of good childcare. There are still profound inequalities in pay and conditions. And there is still a lack of women in senior positions.
All of these problems have to be addressed if the imbalances highlighted by the TUC and others are to be finally consigned to the past. Recession and austerity is not strictly a female problem, but women have suffered its effects proportionately more than men and deserve permanent, sustainable, promising jobs on the same pay rate as men. It is only those kind of jobs that will convert thousands of women from "economically inactive" into well-paid workers making a much-needed contribution to the wider economy.
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