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Championing women who want to work part time

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Julie Tomlin
WVoN co-editor

Judging by the media coverage of the recent employment figures in the UK, part time work is still considered the ‘sloppy seconds’ of the jobs market.

An increase in overall employment by 60,000 was due to an increase in part time jobs, journalists explained dismissively when the figures were released on Wednesday.

On top of this, more people than ever – 1.35 million of the 7.9 million total – would prefer full time jobs. This only served to reinforce the notion that full time jobs are what really count.

But that’s a notion Emma Stewart MBE of women’s recruitment service Women Like Us spends a lot of her time trying to dispel. What about the ‘hidden’ 78 per cent, or 5.13million people who are happy with part time work?

“The media coverage tends to focus on it being the lesser choice, but we would certainly argue that many women are proactively choosing part time work as their preferred work pattern for a variety of reasons,” says Stewart, who set up Women Like Us with business partner Karen Mattison MBE in 2005.

That’s not to say that things aren’t bad for women – they made up two thirds of the 48,000 rise in unemployment in the three months to December, and cuts in public sector jobs are likely to hit them the hardest in months to come.

On top of that, cuts in working tax credits and childcare costs are already affecting women’s ability to work:

“We are starting to see some women seriously considering walking away from work because they can’t afford to stay,” says Stewart.

But although there are a growing number of people who are working part time because they have been asked to cut back their hours or can’t find a full time post, it’s important that we don’t dismiss part time work as part of the problem, insists Stewart, who has built a business around the positives of part time work.

It’s not only too big a leap to assume that everyone doing a part time job would somehow prefer full time work, but even those who say they would prefer longer hours could actually be saying something more complex, argues Stewart:

“People need to bring in a decent household income and if they think working more hours is the only option, then of course they will opt for that,” she says.

But what if they could get a part time job that matched their skills and paid well?

This is the “quality” part time jobs market that Women Like Us is working to stimulate.

Part time jobs work for women – and men – who want to shape their working lives around child care, caring for elderly relatives, build a “portfolio” career or create a better work-life balance.

In the current climate, businesses could also benefit, particularly smaller businesses, because they can afford to recruit the talent they need.

“They can really open up their candidate pool by thinking about part time because they can get really good candidates for less budget,” says Stewart.

Women Like Us was set up to address – in London at least – the disconnect that exists between businesses that want part time staff and those who want the jobs.

Part of the problem is that recruitment agencies working on commission tend to keep away from part time jobs and Job Centre Plus tends only to deal with the lower-skilled positions.

“In the very beginning, one of the things that drove us to doing it was meeting an ex website editor who had been working for a big publishing company before she had children.

“She told us she hadn’t been able to find any work that used her skills and was seriously considering a job as a school meals supervisor because she didn’t know where else to go that she could fit around her children,” says Stewart.

“We need to give people better choice by creating a more visible and agile quality part time recruitment market that women can move around in.”

There’s no doubt that the months and years ahead could be tough for women as they bear the brunt of cuts in the home and in the workplace.

Stewart says there has been a marked increase in the number of women signing up to the agency in the last six months and there are signs too that more and more women in the lower income brackets are getting squeezed out of the market by women who are “downgrading” because they can’t find work that matches their skills.

“There’s no doubt that it’s a challenging time for everybody,” says Stewart. “But it’s a time that requires different and creative thinking. The solution is out there and part time work could be part of the solution.”

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