While there are still many more women than  men who report that they do not want full time work (854,000 men as opposed to 4,287,000 women at the last count), there has been a notable decrease in the number of women who do not want full time work. This is matched by an increase in women who are working part time because they can’t find a full time job.

Increasing rates of part time work amongst women are often seen as unproblematic as there’s a presumption that all women with children want to work part time (never mind the fact that many are lone parents and have no other source of income, or are the main breadwinner or sole earner in a couple and cannot afford to work part time, or they simply like their jobs and want to work full time).

In fact, you don’t have to dig too deep in the depths of the ONS labour market data to see that increasing numbers of women are finding themselves in part time work, not through choice, but through lack of full time alternatives.

The number of under-employed women has increased by 74 per cent.

There are noticeable regional variations too with the number of women trapped in involuntary part-time work has more than doubled in Northern Ireland and London since December 2007.

The ONS data shows that while the number of women who are working part time but would like to be full time is on the rise, the number of women working part-time who don’t want a full-time job, often because of family and caring responsibilities, has been falling. I’ve tried to illustrate the changing pattern of involuntary versus voluntary part time work with a chart.

 Part time women who could not find a full time job (red line – right axis) compared to part time women who did not want a full time job (blue line – left axis)

With the threshold for receiving tax credits set to change from 16 hours to 24 hours, those stuck involuntarily in part time work are set to lose out yet again.

Furthermore, under Universal Credit, new conditions will be placed on in-work benefits which will mean that employees earning less than £212.80 per week will be obliged to work more hours or face sanctions.

Where all of this extra work is meant to be found remains a mystery. 

“On the eve of International Women’s Day, I’d like to express the UK’s support for the principles in the Council of Europe’s Convention on Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. A landmark agreement aimed at lifting the standards of protection for women across Europe. We are getting ourselves in a position to sign later this year”

This is undeniably, unequivocally good news.

I have blogged previously on our campaign to get the government to sign up to the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention on ending violence against women.  Our petition, backed by End Violence Against Women, Forward, Asylum Aid, We Will Speak Out, and Rights of Women, calls on the government to join the 18 other member states* which have committed to take a stand on violence against women and girls.

Would it be churlish to point out that it would be better news if they actually signed it, rather than just committed to signing it? Or to point out, as Baroness Scotland put it, that “I praise God they have finally signed it, but I’m shocked they didn’t sign immediately [in 2011].”? The answer is probably “yes” so I will refrain from churlishness.

I will however point out that this commitment is all the more important given the context of cuts to women’s VAWG services, cuts to legal aid, and cuts to various housing and social benefits that offer a lifeline to many women living in refuges and rebuilding their lives after escaping a violent relationship.

Sylvia Walby’s excellent report on the impact of the cuts on VAWG services makes for sobering reading. It reports that 230 women were turned away by Women’s Aid on a typical day in 2011 due to lack of space, that specialist BME services are being forced to close, the number of Independent Domestic Violence Advisers (IDVA) has been reduced, and that statutory provision, including those police and court services that involve specialised expertise, has also faced cuts.

The interim findings of Vera Baird QC’s Commission into how cuts are impacting on women’s safety were published yesterday and paint a gloomy picture of street lights being turned out, police numbers cut, refuges closing their doors, transport staff cut, legal aid cuts, housing and social benefits cut, and women fleeing domestic violence being advised to sleep on park benches or to seek a bed in A&E.

Next week will see TUC Women’s Conference which will include this year a panel discussion entitled Everywoman Safe Everywhere (the name of the Vera Baird Commission) with Vera Baird QC, Professor Sylvia Walby, Holly Dustin of End Violence Against Women, and Carolyn Jones of the Institute of Employment Rights. The panel will discuss with delegates the impact of cuts, austerity, and attacks on employment rights on women’s safety and access to justice.

The UK is seen as a world leader in tackling violence against women and girls – that was one of the ironies of the government procrastinating over the signing of the Istanbul Convention. Signing up to the Convention will be a positive step forward but the Government must commit to fund, promote, support and safeguard the VAWG sector if the act of signing is to be anything more than a symbolic gesture.

25 Nov: UN Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

Today, 25th November, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and it seems a fitting moment to ask the government to reaffirm its commitment to eradicating violence against women with a very tangible, and rather overdue, step. We’ve chosen today to start a petition urging the government to sign up to the Council of Europe convention on combating and preventing violence against women and domestic violence (the convention is known as CAHVIO).

Now, the UK has a comparatively good track record on initiatives to end violence against women and girls (VAWG) – leaving aside recent retrograde steps such as cuts to local authority funding of refuges and other VAWG services and the disastrous Legal Aid reforms which will leave women fleeing domestic violence with no access to justice unless they can afford to pay. Compared to many parts of the world where violence against women is tolerated or even sanctioned by the state, the UK has taken many steps over the years to attempt to eradicate violence against women and girls.

In its report to CEDAW (the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) earlier this year, the government made much not only of its efforts to eliminate violence in the UK but also its overseas work, through DFID and FCO, to tackle issues such as female genital mutilation and “honour” based violence.

It’s also worth noting that earlier this month the UK assumed the Chair of the Council of Europe. So we have a leadership role. Presumably we should be leading by example.

So when the Council of Europe opened a new convention to combat violence against women in May this year, you’d think the government would be falling over themselves to sign up.  What could be easier than signing up to a convention that doesn’t really ask you to anything more than what you’re already doing? William Hague was at the front of the queue, biro in hand, ready to sign on the dotted line, right? Wrong. Shamefully, seventeen member states signed but the UK government has not.

The purposes of the Convention are to:

a)   protect women against all forms of violence, and prevent, prosecute and eliminate violence against women and domestic violence;

b)   contribute to the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and promote substantive equality between women and men, including by empowering women;

c)   design a comprehensive framework, policies and measures for the protection of and assistance to all victims of violence against women and domestic violence;

d)   promote international co-operation with a view to eliminating violence against women and domestic violence;

e)   provide support and assistance to organisations and law enforcement agencies to effectively co-operate in order to adopt an integrated approach to eliminating violence against women and domestic violence.

These are all things that we should be able to get behind. In fact, these are all things that we claim to be doing. We’re doing so well at them that whenever a government minister gets an awkward question about how the cuts and other government policies are affecting women, the usual defense is to point to the government’s VAWG strategy as an example of all the positive steps the government has taken to improve women’s lives.

If this is one area that the government can be truly proud of, their reluctance to sign up to CAHVIO is puzzling.

By not signing the convention (CAHVIO), the UK government is sending a signal that violence against women – nationally and internationally – is not a priority.

Please sign the petition and demand that the government acts now on violence against women and girls, both in the UK and overseas.

For more information about the Convention and other signatories, see the Council of Europe website.

Importantly, the conference aims to build alliances between the voluntary sector and trade unions. This isn’t about listing the many (and they really are many) ways in which the government’s swingeing cuts programme has disproportionately affected different equality groups. It’s about sharing knowledge, expertise, and experience and identifying campaigning and organising strategies.

As well as two plenary sessions and workshops on welfare reform, health and social care, pensions, further and higher education, contracting out of services,access to justice, and using the equality duty to challenge cuts, the conference will also see the launch of a new TUC publication on the gender impact of the cuts. The Women and Cuts Toolkit follows on from the success of the Coventry Women’s Voices report called Unravelling Equality earlier this year which compiled data on the gender impact of cuts and welfare reform in Coventry. As well as providing data and sources of further information on the national gender impact of the cuts, the toolkit acts as a step-by-step “how to” guide to compiling a report on the gender impact of cuts in any given region or sector. 

There will be a live webcast of the main plenary sessions of the Equality Deficit conference starting at 09:45.

While men’s unemployment has risen more sharply than women’s this month, it’s still worth taking a quick look at what’s happening to women’s unemployment.

(spoiler: the answer is “nothing good”)

• Women’s unemployment has risen by 44,000 in the last 3 months. That’s a 4.2% rise on the quarter.
• Women’s unemployment now stands at 1.07 million – the highest level since at least 1992 when the current data series began.
• There has been a 60,000 increase in long term unemployment with women making up more than half of that figure (35,000).
• As discussed in previous blogs, the women’s claimant count continues to rise at a steeper rate than the men’s claimant count – partly due to the changes in the Lone Parent Obligations. The women’s claimant count stands at 527,000. This represents a 22.5% increase on the previous year. While the male claimant count currently stands at over a million, it is rising less rapidly (a 3.1% increase on the year) than the female claimant count.
• The number of women being made redundant has increased by 32% over the last year, as compared a 10% decrease in the number of men being made redundant.

Listening to Radio 4’s Today programme  this morning you could be forgiven for thinking that women’s unemployment is due to a combination of women choosing to stay at home and the demand for the types of jobs women typically do simply evaporating into thin air (thank you Will Hutton for telling us that executives no longer need women as secretaries because they are able to organise their own diaries).

The facts do not bear this out. The demand for healthcare professionals, social workers, careers advisers and teachers has not diminished. It’s just that the money for public sector jobs has been axed.

Women want to work as much as ever. In fact, women need to work more than ever. More and more women are the main breadwinner in the family. In the last quarter, 1.3m economically inactive women reported that they wanted a job, as compared to 957,000 economically inactive men. Let’s not pretend for a minute that this crisis is simply a manifestation of women’s desire to retreat to a domestic idyll. And let’s not pretend that this trend can be halted without halting the devastating cuts to the public sector.

So far, so good. Acknowledging that government policies may not be going down well with women is a good starting point. Where the author of the leaked memo starts to go wrong though is when possible remedies are suggested.

Suggestions such as giving women “personal budgets” for maternity care to “force the pace on choice in maternity” are ill-conceived (no pun intended). With maternity units closing up and down the country and a chronic shortage of midwives, women’s choices in maternity care are dwindling. Personal budgets will do nothing to reverse this.

A personal budget is no use to a woman whose local maternity units have all closed and who has no option but to give birth at a hospital miles from home with too few midwives to ensure the level of care she needs. A personal budget will not afford any more choice to a woman who wants to give birth in a midwife led unit but, due to NHS cuts, only has access to a hospital with an understaffed maternity ward.

David Cameron made a pre-election pledge to recruit an extra 3,000 midwives. Implementing that pledge would do more for women’s “choice in maternity”, let alone maternal mortality rates, than a cash handout.

There is also a suggestion that a website for women to anonymously disclose pay would be a step forward for equal pay.  Surely what we need is for more employers to disclose and monitor progress on equal pay, rather than individual employees having to work it out for themselves based on anonymous testimonies on a website?

What is really striking amongst the blue-sky suggestions – which range from the sensible to the half-baked – is the gulf between the government’s understanding of the issues that matter to women and the reality.

If the motions to the TUC’s women’s conference and TUC Congress are any indicator of what working women want, the coalition would do well to look at some alternative strategies for winning women’s votes. How about defending abortion rights, halting the savage cuts to public sector jobs, ringfencing Sure Start funding, increasing the childcare element of tax credits, committing more funding to ending violence against women and girls, safeguarding the NHS, strengthening, rather than weakening employment rights and equality legislation?

This is the kind of “blue sky thinking” that might win a few women’s votes.

The number of unemployed women and women claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance continues to rise to the highest levels in decades. The long predicted impact of public sector job cuts on women’s employment, is now plain to see.

The number of women made redundant increased 72.3% on the previous quarter. A statistic so shocking I did a double take and had to call a colleague to check I hadn’t misread it. 

Just in case you missed some of the detail about women in today’s figures, the main points are:

• The number of unemployed women is the highest it’s been since 1988 (1.06m).
• The number of women claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance is at its highest level since 1996.
• Women now make up 33.9% of JSA claimants – the highest proportion since the data series began in 1983.
• The number of women made redundant increased 72.3% on the previous quarter.
• 295,000 women have been unemployed for over 12 months, the highest level since Sep – Nov 1994
• 120,000 women have been unemployed for over 24 months, the highest since 1996.
• 701,000 women in involuntary part-time work are the highest figures since 1992.
• There are 1,347,000 women who are economically inactive who said they wanted jobs, an increase of 49,000 – the largest increase since 1992.

Cameron’s crack team of “blue sky thinkers” who came up with the frankly puzzling recommendations for wooing women voters would do well to think about how they might reverse this tide of mass unemployment.

Women’s unemployment in particular saw a dramatic rise (21,000 on the quarter) taking the women’s ILO unemployment count to 1.05million – its highest level in 23 years.

The claimant count also saw the number of unemployed women increase by 15,600 to reach 512,700 – the highest figure since April 1996.  I’ve blogged before about the DWP’s Lone Parent Obligations as one of the causes of the steady rise in the number of women claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance and this is likely to continue pushing up the claimant count for the foreseeable future as the Lone Parent Obligations are set to become more stringent in the new year.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, the main driving force in the increase in women’s unemployment is public sector job cuts.

With women making up 65% of the public sector workforce it is perhaps unsurprising that mass job cuts in the public sector will lead to a noticeable rise in women’s unemployment. In some regions, nearly 50% of the working female population is employed in the public sector.

The redundancy figures also seem to bear out the idea that women’s unemployment is being fuelled by public sector job cuts. Whereas the number of men being made redundant is 1.5% down on the year, the number of women being made redundant is up 1.6% on the year. And while the average number of redundancies across all sectors is up 4% on the year, the number of redundancies in Public Administration is up a whopping 19% on the previous year.

So what is the government’s view on how public sector job cuts will effect women’s employment? Worryingly, when asked recently about the disproportionate effect of public sector job cuts on women, the Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone replied that “you can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs”.

Women’s employment in the private sector may not be faring as badly as in the public sector but it’s not without its problems. The continued slump in the retail sector has undoubtedly been bad news for women’s employment. As my colleagues at Usdaw will testify, the problem facing women in retail is not just redundancy, but underemployment as employers routinely use “zero hours” contracts as a means of cutting hours as and when they choose.

I don’t know whether the City analysts’ predictions will be quite so rosy next month but I’ll give you  my prediction now: the worst is yet to come.

After school clubs for kids, Christmas lunches for old people, wheelchair loan services, sexual health advisory services, meals on wheels, support services for disabled children, all axed. Welcome to the Big Society.

I was particularly taken aback by the number of women’s sector organisations and violence against women and girls (VAWG) services that have faced cuts.

I’ve blogged before on the closure of rape crisis centres  and cuts to VAWG services. Today the TUC, End Violence Against Women, and the Women’s Resource Centre released a joint statement highlighting the number of VAWG services facing funding cuts.

As Vivienne Hayes, Chief Executive of the Women’s Resource Centre, explained,

“Women’s organisations provide some of the most cost effective services across the UK for women and families in need. They have also long been grievously underfunded, and seeing these figures shows all too starkly the terrible impact these cuts are having on such vital services.”

Holly Dustin, Director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, pointed out that funding for many of these services was inadequate even before Local Authorities started cutting in earnest. She said,

“We already have very patchy provision of these essential services and by cutting funding to existing services, or withdrawing it altogether, Councils are leaving women high and dry at a time when they most need support to escape violence and rebuild their lives. Violence against women support services are not a luxury that can only be afforded in good economic times, they are core services that all women should have access to no matter where they live.”

The scale of the cuts to the VAWG sector will no doubt come as a surprise to the Equalities Minister, Lynne Featherstone, who just last week boasted that the coalition is doing more than Labour did to protect VAWG services. She said,

“If you look at rape support, under Labour two centres a year were closing. We are going to open four this year. Even in this age of austerity, we’ve ringfenced money for those sort of things.”

Sixty four of the cuts listed in the False Economy research are categorised as “Domestic Violence and sexual abuse”. However, there are others that offer VAWG services which fall into different categories. For example, the Pakistani Women’s Welfare Association in Waltham Forest offers advice and information on domestic violence but falls into the “Community” category.  Eaves, an organisation that offers VAWG services, is categorised as a “Housing” organisation.

This isn’t a criticism of the data – it’s simply a reflection of the fact that VAWG is a cross-cutting issue which has wide reaching implications for both individuals and society. Cuts to housing, policing, courts services, advice services, and Legal Aid – as well specialist VAWG services such as rape crisis centres and domestic violence refuges – will combine to create sometimes insurmountable hurdles to any woman fleeing violence.

In addition to the Rachel Reeves MP campaign mentioned in previous blogs, Age UK have also been campaigning hard on this issue and have now published a report called Not Enough Time which confirms that the proposed changes do not allow women sufficient time to plan. One of the respondents to the Age UK survey said:

“I have had my pensionable age moved twice now and the financial plans I have made to enable me to retire at 64 are now in tatters. There is simply not enough time for me to make up the shortfall.”

According to the Age UK poll, most women were aware that changes to the State Pension Age were planned but only one in ten knew when the State Pension Age would reach 65 for women. Around two thirds of women polled were concerned about the changes – often because working for longer simply isn’t an option for them due to poor health, caring responsibilities, or unemployment. Of those polled, one in three women in social class DE could not work longer because of health problems and 16% were unemployed.

The Age UK online survey found that 29 per cent already have caring responsibilities and more than 40 per cent have health problems. As one respondent explained:

“I retired early on ill health grounds and also care for my disabled husband. I now find that my retirement age which I had planned for at 60 has crept forward twice and will now be 66. There has been little notification of this change and too little time to adapt.”

This is a Coalition policy which has a growing number of opponents across all parties and, if today’s papers are to be believed, the government may well have to perform a swift U-turn. Actually, given that the policy being debated already represents a U-turn (following a Coalition commitment to not raise the State Pension Age for women to 66 until 2020), I suppose it would be a 3-point turn.

According to the Guardian’s Politics Live blog there’s a “government revolt bubbling away” on this issue and this could well turn out to be the big Westminster news story of the day. Already 177 MPs across all the main parties have signed the Early Day Motion against the speeding up of the equalisation of the SPA for women.

Email your MP to let them know what you think of the State Pension Age proposals. Age UK have done all the hard work for you. Just fill in the online form to send a template email to your MP.

So what did he say that was wrong? In case you missed the furore today, I’ll briefly recap. Kenneth Clarke was asked about plea bargaining plans on Radio 5 Live this morning. In the course of the interview, in a discussion about sentencing and tariffs, the Justice Secretary shared his rather troubling views on rape. He said:

“[Rape] includes date rape and 17 year-olds having intercourse. Serious rape, I don’t think many judges give five years for a forcible rape, frankly, the tariff is longer for that and a serious rape where there’s violence and an unwilling woman, the tariff’s much longer than that.”

In fact, the hapless Mr Clarke has, in his attempts to extricate himself from this mess today, made many other objectionable and questionable statements on the subject of rape. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on the quote above.

Let’s start at the beginning.

1. Rape does include date rape. Women are in fact most likely to be sexually attacked by men they know in some way, most often partners or acquaintances. This in no way diminishes the seriousness of the crime or the devastating effect that it can have on the victim’s life.
2. Rape does not, as far as I know, include consensual sex between teenagers over the age of 17. I should qualify this by saying that I’m not a lawyer (worryingly, Kenneth Clarke is) but from what I can glean from the Sex Offences Act of 2003, I understand that although this might constitute an offence under the Act, it does not constitute rape unless it is non-consensual or one party is under the age of 13.
3. Rape is serious. There is no category of “serious rape” as opposed to some less “serious”, unimportant type of rape.
4. By definition rape involves “an unwilling woman”. The act itself is violent. The degree of physical violence and assault may vary but there is no such thing as rape with a willing woman. I believe that’s what’s known in common parlance as “sex“.

To hear someone in a position of power perpetuating such cliched and harmful old rape myths is worrying in itself. The fact that the person in question is the Justice Secretary is truly alarming.

Liz Kelly of End Violence Against Women summed it up nicely when she said today:

“The Justice Secretary’s comments appear to trivialise the seriousness of rape and are in conflict with the Government’s own Violence Against Women Strategy which seeks to tackle attitudes that condone sexual violence, and to improve the criminal justice system’s response to rape.

“The facts are that around 60,000 women are raped in Britain every year – the majority by partners or men they know – and only a tiny fraction, around one in ten, report it to the police. Of these few cases, less than 7% result in conviction.

“We want to see more perpetrators brought to justice and convicted and better treatment of rape survivors. However we are very concerned that the Justice Secretary’s comments reinforce common myths and stereotypes about what rape really is, he seems to be relying on an outdated understanding that only rape of strangers is ‘real rape’ and harmful.”

I was hoping that by the end of the day I would be able to blog that Kenneth Clarke has now realised the error of his ways – or has been sufficiently chastised and berated by the Prime Minister – and has apologised. Sadly he has not. He has admitted this evening that his comments were a “mistake” but when asked by the BBC whether he was apologising he said “I haven’t apologised, as far as I’m aware.”

Since then campaigns by Rachel Reeves MP, Age UK, Unions Together, and individual unions have all gathered momentum. Even some coalition partners have got in on the act with some Lib Dems expressing concern over the departure from the coalition agreement that these changes represent.

Just to recap, the Coalition Agreement said that the state pension age (SPA) would rise to 66 but this would “not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women.” Since then the Government performed a dramatic U-turn and published draft legislation to accelerate the equalisation for women by 2018, and then increase both men and women’s state pension ages to 66 by 2020.  Women aged around 56 and 57 are set to lose the most from this shift in the goalposts, with very little time to prepare or amend existing plans.

Some 2.6 million women will be affected overall by the Government’s proposals. The State Pension Age  for women born between 6th December 1953 and 5th October 1954 will increase by more than 18 months. The Government’s own impact assessment estimates that this will affect around 330,000 women. In the most extreme case, 33,000 women born between 6 March and 5 April 1954 would have an increase of two years.  So, to put that in context, if you’re a woman  and you were born in April 1953 you’ll be able to get your pension at 62 years 11 months. If you’re born just a year later in April 1954, you’ll have to wait until you’re 66 before you can draw your pension.  It doesn’t seem fair does it?

Many women of this generation are already at a disadvantage when it comes to pensions, having been denied access to private pension schemes (part-time workers were only allowed to join pension schemes relatively recently) and having taken breaks in their careers to bring up children.

As Brendan Barber said today;

“Women in the affected age group – those born between December 1953 and October 1954 – could lose up to several thousand pounds and will have to work for much longer than any of them had intended. Many quite understandably will have been planning their retirement. Now those plans will have to be put on hold. Ministers need to put a halt to this mean-spirited move to bring in the change at breakneck speed.”

Today Age UK are lobbying MPs to amend the Pensions Bill. Age UK have said:

“This Pensions Bill seeks to cut short the retirements of almost five million people by speeding up the planned rise in women’s state pension age to 65 and bringing forward the increase to 66, six years earlier than planned by the previous government. Women will be hard hit by this change of policy, seeing their state pension age rise by six years between 2010 and 2020 compared to just one year for men.”

Yet the claimant count measure of unemployment paints a less rosy picture. According to the government’s figures, the number of women claiming Jobseekers Allowance increased by 9,300 to reach 474,400 – the highest it’s been for 15 years. Worryingly, this appears to be a trend: this is the tenth consecutive rise in the number of women claimants.

I blogged about the possible causes of this trend last month here.

In addition to job cuts in the public sector and a sluggish retail sector limiting jobs growth - this month saw a small quarterly fall of 5,000 in retail vacancies, compared to a 15,000 increase in available jobs in manufacturing - changes to Lone Parent Obligations are also leading to increasing numbers of women joining the claimant count. At present single parents whose youngest child is seven or older are required to seek work and are therefore moved off Income Support either into work or onto JSA (or ESA in cases of disability). Later this year the age of the youngest child will fall to five which is likely to lead to more single mothers will be moving onto the claimant count.

According to the government’s own Equalities Impact Assessment of the Lone Parent Obligations,

“Given that 96 per cent of lone parents on Income Support with a child aged 5 – 6 are female, these measures will clearly impact on more women than men”[1]

At the risk of sounding like a naysayer whose glass is perpetually half empty, in spite of the good news overall for women’s employment, let’s not take our eye off the stubbornly rising female claimant count.

As Richard explains, the rise in employment and the drop in unemployment seem to be genuinely good news and not masking a boom in “atypical” work such as temporary or self-employed jobs.

So, good news all round then? Alas, not for women.

The only losers in this week’s employment figures are women. While the number of male JSA claimants fell by 4,400 on the month to reach 988,200 in March 2011, the number of women claimants increased by 5,100 to reach 462,300. That’s the highest figure for 15 years.

The government’s figures also show that this isn’t a blip, it’s a trend. The number of male claimants has been falling for over a year while the number of female claimants has been steadily rising for nine months.

The most obvious explanation for this is that more women than men work in the public sector so mass redundancies and recruitment freezes in the public sector will inevitably have a disproportionate effect on women and lead to more women signing on. I’ve blogged about this before in the context of the gender pay gap

Another factor is likely to be more single mothers finding themselves pushed from Income Support onto JSA. Since November 2008 single parents with children over a certain age have been required to seek work. The age of the youngest child has been steadily decreasing year on year – from twelve in 2008, to seven in 2010, and to five later this year.

According to the government this has led to 250,000 single parents moving from Income Support to job seeking requirements since 2008.

As public sector job cuts continue apace, the retail sector – an important source of jobs for women in the private sector – faces a bleak future, and more single mothers are pushed into seeking work which simply isn’t there, I’m sorry to say the future doesn’t look rosy for female employment.

Nicola Smith has explained how single mothers are caught between a rock and a hard place with increased childcare costs.

We also know from modelling by Howard Reed for the Women’s Budget Group that the 2010 CSR would leave lone mothers 18.5% worse off, making them the biggest losers of the government’s cuts.

Now the government is introducing charges to lone parents seeking maintenance payments from non-resident parents through the Child Support Agency (CSA).

Before I go on, I should point out that the title of this blog refers to single mothers and I have referred to mothers as the “resident parent” a few times. It’s worth explaining that, although the CSA charges will apply to single fathers too, the fact remains that 90% of single parents are women and 97% of single parents who are eligible for child maintenance are women. So, overwhelmingly, we are talking about single mothers.

If new government proposals come into force, the CSA will be closed and replaced with the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC) in 2012. Unlike the CSA, the CMEC will charge for its services. So, a single mother simply seeking help calculating what maintenance payments she is entitled to will have to pay £25 for the CMEC to make this calculation for her.

If she then needs the CMEC to enforce a maintenance payment, she will have to pay an application fee of £100, paid in advance (£50 if she’s on benefits, with £20 due in advance) and then between 7% and 12% of any child maintenance paid.

What is more, if a resident parent does successfully use the CMEC to seek child maintenance payments,  and the non-resident parent then makes one or two payments and then stops again, the resident parent will find herself back at square one, paying the full fee again in order to get any further maintenance payments from the non-resident parent.

It seems that there are two glaring problems with the government’s latest wheeze. The first is the problem of affordability. A single mother who is not receiving any financial support from the father of her children, who may well be out of work and dependent on benefits, is unlikely to be able to afford the upfront charges. Fifty pounds may seem like a meagre sum to a government minister but it is a sufficiently large sum to put it out of the reach of many single parents living below the poverty line in this country.

The second problem is one of morality. Or maybe it’s a problem of logic. If one parent leaves and the other is left quite literally holding the baby and the non-resident parent refuses to offer financial support to help with put a roof over their heads, food on the table, electricity in the meter, school uniforms on the children’s backs, and shoes on their feet, what logic is there in levying charges from the resident parent to seek financial assistance from the non-resident parent? The resident parent is seeking financial assistance because – how can I put this simply? – they need financial assistance. Not because they have cash to burn and they want to fritter away their money pursuing the non-resident parent out of malice.

The intention is supposedly to steer single parents away from the costly and historically problematic CSA system and encourage private agreements, yet all of the pressure to settle for a private agreement is placed on the resident parent, and none on the non-resident parent.

In a letter to Theresa May published in the Guardian yesterday, several charities including Gingerbread, the Fawcett Society, the Women’s Budget Group, and End Violence Against Women, also raised concerns about the proposal’s vague reference to an exemption from the new fee scheme for victims of domestic violence. As the letter explains:

“[the proposals] make no mention of automatically allowing them to use the collection service to avoid direct contact with the perpetrator. This could mean that the perpetrator could insist on making direct payments, thus explsing the parent with care to a risk of further abuse … A quarter of parents with care using the Child Support Agency (24%) say their break up was due to the other parent being violent towards them and in 4% of cases they said the separation was due to the ex-partner being violent to a child or children.”

The government’s consultation closes today. Gingerbread, the support and campaign group for single parents, has a campaign page which lists various actions such as writing to your MP, emailing Maria Millar, the MP responsible for these proposals, and signing a petition. Find out more at the Gingerbread website.

As Sarah Jackson, CEO of Working Families says:
“Any parent who needs flexible working for a teenager of 17 is likely to be dealing with a real crisis. Any employer who refuses even to discuss flexible working in such circumstances is not a good one. Parents in such circumstances may have to choose between supporting their child and staying in employment. Fairness for all employees is more important than ever during a recession: employee commitment and performance is critical to every business.”

While unions, the CIPD and organisations like Working Families have all questioned the logic of Cable’s announcement, the CBI, IoD and FSB have all proclaimed that the proposals don’t go far enough.
The CBI has put out a paper called – appropriately – “Think Small First”. In this manifesto for “thinking small”, the CBI suggests that maternity and flexible working regulations should be relaxed for SMEs. Amongst other worrying proposals, the CBI suggests that women should have to specify when they will return from maternity leave before they go on maternity leave and they could only change their return date if their employer agrees.
So how will this work? As it currently stands, maternity leave is calculated on the assumption that a woman will take her full entitlement (52 weeks). The woman must give 8 weeks’ notice of her intention to return to work earlier than a year and 8 weeks’ notice of any change of her intended return date.
The reality is that most women who have a good relationship with their employer will speak to their line manager or HR department in advance of their maternity leave about whether or not they intend to take the full year.
But the other reality that is ignored by the CBI’s proposals is that it is very difficult for a woman to be absolutely certain about when she will be able to or will want to return to work until after she has given birth. A wide range of circumstances and factors come into play when making decisions about returning to work. Maternal health, the child’s health, availability of childcare, affordability of childcare, changes to household income, amongst other things may all affect a woman’s decision to return to work earlier or later than originally planned.
No one can predict whether a woman will suffer pregnancy or post-partum related illness such as post natal depression. At least one in ten mothers suffers from post natal depression and it can occur at any point within the year after childbirth.
Few new mothers have any idea how difficult it can be to organise affordable childcare before they go on maternity leave and are often shocked to find 12 month waiting lists for local nurseries. With Sure Start centres shutting and scaling back their services up and down the country, affordable childcare for working families is becoming increasingly scarce. With changes to tax credits, including a reduction in the childcare element, many families will not yet know how much help they will be able to get with childcare costs.
With  more than 130,000 jobs lost from the public sector in the last year alone, it’s not unreasonable to imagine a scenario where a woman plans to take a year’s maternity leave but either her partner loses their job or she fears for her own job security and is forced to curtail her maternity leave and return to work early in order to support her family.
The CBI may well be right that “the enemy of progress in this [increasing participation of returning mothers in the labour market] is uncertainty” but the fact is that having children is fraught with uncertainty and forcing women to commit to a return date before they’ve even left to go on maternity leave will not remove uncertainty and it may even result in women leaving the labour market altogether if they are pressured to return earlier than they are ready or able to.

So much for growth.

It may be just the fact that it’s a centenary celebration that has generated the extra interest in International Women’s Day this year. Or maybe it’s because this is not panning out to be a very good year for women, at home or overseas, and today seems like an opportune moment to do something about it and make our voices heard.

The ETUC issued a press release today with a summary of the findings of a recent survey. In short, the survey found that women in Europe are bearing the brunt of economic crisis. Both the quality and quantity of women’s work is dwindling by the day. Women are increasingly facing redundancy and unemployment. Those who are in work are more likely to be in precarious, vulnerable, and agency work.

John Monks, ETUC General Secretary, said of the survey findings,

“There is an urgent need to look at the gender dimension of the economic crisis and to adopt measures that will strengthen the position of women in the labour market. Female employment has been an important element of Europe’s growth in the last years and policy measures to contrast the damages generated by the economic crisis should aim at reinforcing equality between women and men and not
exacerbate gender segmentation of the labour market”

The ETUC press release echoes a report from the ITUC this week which shows that, although the initial impact of the global economic crisis hit men and women equally hard, the balance is now shifting as increasing numbers of women are either losing their jobs or being forced into more precarious, temporary, and informal work.

The ITUC report points to the swelling ranks of the “working poor” – those, mainly women, who are in work but whose jobs don’t provide enough to meet their basic needs.

And let’s not kid ourselves that these reports are just about women in some far flung corner of the globe Both the ETUC survey and the ITUC report paint an accurate picture of the situation faced by women in the UK.

Unemployment, underemployment, and precarious, poor quality, low paid work are increasingly characteristic of women’s work here too. As the public sector loses more (predominantly women’s) jobs with every day that goes by, the chances are that women’s unemployment – in particular, young women’s unemployment – is only going to get worse.

There will be more from the TUC this week on women and unemployment so watch this space.

We’ve come a long way in 100 years but there’s a long way still to go.

To put this in perspective, the public funding received by Liverpool Rape Crisis in 2010 was less than the cost to the state of just one single rape. According to the Women’s Resource Centre, the estimated cost to the state of one rape is £73,487 – £13,487 more than the annual funding for the Liverpool Rape Crisis centre.

The news from Liverpool sits squarely at odds with the Home Secretary, Theresa May’s announcement just last month that the government would be safeguarding £10m funding for Rape Crisis services.  According to Theresa May, Rape Crisis centres are “a key element of the government’s wider strategy to tackle violence against women and girls. We are absolutely committed to ensuring every victim of rape has access to the support that they need to rebuild their lives.”

She has successfully drawn the media’s attention to the fact that, in spite of much vaunted government pledges to invest £10m in Rape Crisis centres, the charity sector, and the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector is facing a very bleak future as funding – central, local, and grant based – evaporates into thin air.

Denise Marshalls explained

“It [the OBE] has been keeping me awake at night. I feel like it would be dishonourable and wrong to keep it. I’m facing a future where I can’t give women who come to my organisation the services they deserve – I won’t be able to provide the services for which I got the OBE.We will see situations where women are in danger as a result of the cuts. There are disasters waiting to happen.”

And some of those disasters are already happening. Just last week Women’s Aid produced a survey with Channel 4 news which found that More than half of domestic violence services across the country do not know if they will be able to remain fully open after March due to funding cuts. Only a quarter of refuges have had their contracts extended beyond March. A quarter of respondents said they would have to close one or more services if they lose funding, with 40 per cent warning they would have to cut staff numbers. Devon County Council recently proposed a 100% cut to domestic abuse services.

While the funding landscape for this vital sector is still so unclear, Denise Marshall is absolutely right to be making her voice heard now.

It seemed too good to be true when the Coalition Government promised that Sure Start services would be protected in cash terms. It was. We already knew “cash terms” meant a 9% cut in real terms. We also knew that the ringfencing of Sure Start budgets was to end. In a context of Local Authorities facing budget cuts of 28%, it didn’t take a great leap of the imagination to envisage Sure Start budgets being raided as soon as the ringfencing was removed.

So now the money once earmarked for early years care and family services is up for grabs as Town Halls up and down the country desperately try to plug the gaping holes in their budgets. Not only are 250 Sure Start centres facing closure, but a further 2000 are cutting back on the services they offer and 1000 have issued “at risk of redundancy” notices to their staff.

For anyone in any doubt about the value of Sure Start, it is well worth having a look at the Shout out for Sure Start campaign  for testimonies from parents who rely on the services provided. It’s not all baby yoga for middle class mums as some would have you believe. From toddler groups, to childcare, to breastfeeding support, to counselling, to nutrition advice, to help with benefits and job seeking, Sure Start centres offer a wide range of invaluable services to families who could not afford to pay for them privately.

As Anand Shukla of the Daycare Trust says:

“Behind every Children’s Centre facing closure is a community of families devastated at losing one of their most valued local services. The tragedy of these cuts is that the full extent of Sure Start’s impact on children’s development will only be achieved in the long term – and the impending closure of so many Centres means this investment will not now be fully realised.”