Mary Honeyball says those responsible for the financial crisis are mainly men – and women must be empowered to play a full role in leading us out of it
AS THE number of unemployed in this country hits the two million mark, the front pages are not dominated by striking women holding placards demanding a fairer distribution of pay across the sexes, flexible working in tough times and the protection of maternity rights. Instead they are filled with pictures of men at industrial plants, car yards closed down and bankers losing their bonuses.
The face of this recession is not a woman’s. It is already ingrained in my mind as a snow-whipped man waving a laminated placard. However, behind the headlines, women are being silently laid off at a rate of increase that doubles that of men last year. A 2.5 per cent increase in the female redundancy rate in 2008 is twice the rate of the male increase of 1.2 per cent, according to recently released TUC figures.
As women tend to work in smaller workplaces, redundancies go unnoticed by the media, and former bastions of working women are slipping back into the home at such a pace that it is as if the Female Eunuch had never have been written.
A few weeks ago, the Sunday Times Style magazine reported a new phenomenon: “Prommies” – professional mummies who, due to dwindling business, City cutbacks and lay-offs, now find themselves at home with a new job description: mother. Slouching about with her photo albums waiting about for the economy to kick-start, the lifestyle of this new brand of “super mum” didn’t sound too bad. However, this is not the reality for any but the super-rich. The truth is that being a Prommie will mean poverty, frustration and an increasingly daunting gap between women and the workplace.
International fiscal stimulation packages have until now shared the same fate as the banner-bearing strikers. Barack Obama’s promise of “Building roads, bridges and schools; investing in green technologies” concentrates on construction and engineering industries where very few women are employed. It does not offer help to service sectors, where more women are employed, for instance as teachers, nurses and retailers.
In Britain, Gordon Brown’s concentration on rescuing ailing car plants and banks may eventually filter down to more women-dominated industries. In the meantime, however, these industries are going bust, leaving female-shaped holes in the job market that are not being filled.
Fortunately, women’s minister Harriet Harman appears to be on the case. The other week, she addressed the women’s committee of the European Parliament, of which I am a member, with urgent pleas to make women’s voices heard in this recession. To continue with the equalities agenda as it is and at full steam has become even more important. And the impact of this recession on families, on women and on equality must be kept at the forefront of all politicians’ minds.
Harman revealed, to the audience of MEPs representing women’s interests from all over Europe, that in a recent opinion poll of public attitudes in the recession, one third of women said their lives have already been affected by the economic downturn. She added that the poll revealed more women than men report an increase in arguments in the home as a result of the recession. From this, we can conclude either that the economic downturn is affecting men’s ears or that women are bearing the brunt of financial cutbacks and renegotiating domestic finances for things such as pocket money, school trips and shopping budgets.
Fortunately, within the sea of grey suits at April’s G20, women’s issues will be given prominence with their very own section of speeches and debates between women ministers. But without the combined pressure of female politicians from across Europe pushing for this section, it could easily slip off the agenda. It is clear the fight to keep women’s toehold in the economy will be as hard as the one that secured it in the first place.
The same hard-won employment rights which made it possible for women to combine a career with a family – flexible working, increased maternity rights and part-time hours – are now the very things that are making some women vulnerable to desperate employers looking to cut costs, no matter how illegal this practice may be.
Even back when credit crunch sounded more like a cereal than a financial crisis, business mogul Alan Sugar received wide-ranging support for his opinion that current equality laws are “counter-productive for women… You’re not allowed to ask [about planned pregnancies], so it’s easy – just don’t employ them [women].” Ominously, he ended this ill-thought tirade with: “It will get harder to get a job as a woman.”
The threat of this sort of discriminatory action is not going to go away. If anything, if the economic doom-mongers are correct, it will get frighteningly worse. To counter this threat, women across Europe need new policies aimed at protecting them from unfair job losses. They need legislative and fiscal crampons of protection and more money for training in order to keep their toehold in the economic landslide. If we do this, when the rubble clears, there will still be some women holding onto their hard-won posts and we will have a once in a lifetime moment for progressive politics. It will be a chance to rebuild sectors such as the banking without the 40 per cent pay gap between men and women, and without the culture of lap dancing, strippers and chauvinism.
As our sisters in Iceland and Norway are proving with a new female Prime Minster and 40 per cent representation of women on company boards, it may have been mainly men who got us into this recession, but to get us out of it, its essential that women play a full part.
Mary Honeyball is a Labour MEP for London
