Women badly affected by spending cuts
Women are the hardest hit by the coalition government’s austerity measures, say critics.
Data published by the Local Government Association shows that the number of women working in local government has fallen by 253,600 to 1.43 million since the coalition came into power in May 2010.
The number of men in local government has only decreased by 104,700 to 452,300.
Back in March, the Fawcett Society, an organisation that campaigns for women’s equality and rights, warned that cuts to the public sector would disproportionately impact women.
‘Women make up around two thirds of the public sector workforce, so cuts to this sector are hitting them hard.
‘What’s more, there is evidence that women are not sufficiently benefitting from government action to create jobs in the private sector,’ Fawcett, one of the UK’s leading campaigning organisations, explained.
And added: ‘We would like to see government think carefully about how it might reduce the [budget] deficit in ways that do not hit women so much harder – such as through increasing the amount of money raised through taxes or investing more heavily in measures for growth.’
The data emerged after Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott requested information about the number of men and women employed within the public sector and was denied a clear answer.
He told the Guardian: “Public sector job cuts hammer women hardest.
“Rebalancing the economy on the back of sacked women in the public sector is utterly unacceptable to most Liberal Democrats as it should be to our government as a whole.
“I’m also shocked that the government don’t know how many women they employ or so they claim in a misleading written answer I have received.”
Oakeshott’s criticism of the government comes after the Office for National Statistics released disappointing statistics about women’s current position in the labour market on 12 June.
While the proportion of unemployed men in the UK has fallen by 0.5 per cent to 8.2 per cent since the coalition came into power, female unemployment has risen by 0.4 per cent to 7.3 per cent.
As Oakeshott pointed out to the Guardian, the increase in female unemployment is worrying.
“Since May 2010, women’s longstanding advantage in unemployment rates has halved from 1.8 percentage points to 0.9 percentage points and it’s getting worse,” he said.
Oakeshott also told the newspaper that he is pushing for information about the impact of Chancellor George Osbourne’s spending review on women’s careers and for “transparent, regular reporting on how many women we employ in central and local government, the NHS and the police”.
The Trades Union Congress, commonly known as the TUC, agreed with Oakeshott’s belief that women are unfairly suffering from the government’s austerity measures.
Frances O’Grady, General Secretary for TUC, said: “Women are bearing the brunt of the cuts through reduced pay, job losses and cutbacks in the services they run and use.
“In local government, where workers have felt the greatest pain of redundancies, three in four staff are female.”
With 144,000 jobs to be cut from the public sector as a result of the Chancellor’s 2013 spending review, which he delivered to parliament on 27 June, women are set to suffer further.
“The Chancellor has tried to gloss over public job losses… by playing divide and rule with public and private sector workers.
“But with three in ten working families having at least one parent in the public sector, the Chancellor will pay a heavy political price for ignoring the affects of austerity on women,” O’Grady warned.
Great article. It’s shocking to see the impact of the cuts on women. In addition to this, there’s the increasing ‘double whammy’ effect on women’s services in the voluntary sector, which are also being cut, resulting in further job losses. Then when you factor in the awarding of public service contracts to corporate giants like G4S, Serco etc, rather than to grassroots women’s sector organisations (the recent decision to award SARC centres to G4S over organisations like Rape Crisis springs to mind, as does the contract to house asylum seekers that has seen allegations of G4S sexually harassing female asylum seekers by housing social enterprise Kazuri), it becomes more alarming still. Taken en masse this looks and feels like a backlash against women and the women’s sector as a result of at best, indifference to gender equality and at worst, a concerted effort to place commercial interests before human interest.