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Securing Scottish women’s futures

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social security, Scottish women, Scottish government, women's incomes, reportUsing Scotland’s new social security powers to close the gender equality gap.

Engender, Close the Gap, Scottish Women’s Aid, the Scottish Refugee Council and Carers Scotland work across a broad range of issues towards women’s equality.

They work on women’s political, social and economic equality, on enabling women to speak to government, on violence against women, on unpaid care, and with refugee and asylum-seeking women.

Across all of these contexts, social security policy has a significant impact on women.

The UK government’s ‘welfare reform’ programme and wider agenda of cuts to public spending is having an egregious impact on gender equality.

And as women’s organisations they have now, in a new report, called ‘Securing Women’s Futures: using Scotland’s new social security powers to close the gender equality gap’  set out how and why welfare reform is affecting women, why this demands a gendered response from policymakers and made some recommendations regarding how this can be attained.

The Scottish Government’s programme of welfare mitigation is extremely welcome. Unfortunately, however, the approach has not taken account of the gender inequalities at the heart of our social security system or the complexities of women’s lives.

Nor has work to mitigate welfare reform been concretely linked to devolved strategies over related areas such as women’s employment, social care, childcare and violence against women.

The Scotland Act 2016 devolves a number of powers over social security that overlap with devolved policy and services that are crucial for women’s equality.

This provides an opportunity for the Scottish Government to make progress against commitments on gender equality, by pausing to take stock of ways in which social security, and specific welfare reform measures in particular, have not delivered for women.

Scotland can avoid replicating ungendered policies which are entrenching women’s inequality across the UK and create a divergent approach.

Without such an approach, policy and programmes undertaken by other Scottish Government departments and public bodies will be less effective, and high-level targets and commitments will be undermined.

This joint report summarises why and how women are affected by social security policy and sets out ways in which new powers can be engaged to increase women’s equality in Scotland.

The recommendations are presented in terms of systemic gender inequalities that dictate the impact of social security policy on women – paid work, unpaid work, domestic abuse and multiple discrimination.

They also highlight experiences of women with whom they work.

It is this documenting of daily realities and of growing anger, fear and stress that remains the basis of the call to action on women’s social security.

Welfare reform and the UK government’s wider austerity agenda are having a grotesquely disproportionate impact on women’s access to resources, security and safety.

Over the decade of austerity, from 2010 to 2020, 86 per cent of net ‘savings’ raised through cuts to social security and tax credits will come from women’s incomes.

The explanation for this enormous imbalance lies in women’s pre-existing inequality:

Women are twice as dependent on social security as men, with 20 per cent of women’s income coming from the benefits and tax credit system, compared with 10 per cent of men’s.

Women have fewer financial assets and less access to occupational pensions than men, and women are 66 per cent of the paid workforce living in poverty in Scotland.

92 per cent of lone parents are women, and women make up 95 per cent of lone parents in receipt of Income Support.

Women provide around 70 per cent of unpaid care and 74 per cent of Carer’s Allowance claimants are women. Women are twice as likely to give up paid work in order to care.

The gender pay gap in Scotland is 14.8 per cent. Women working part-time earn 33.5 per cent less than men working full-time, and women are 75 per cent of the part-time workforce. On average women earn £175.30 less per week than men.

The gender inequality of welfare reform will have far-reaching impacts for many different women.

Women have been placed at greater risk of deeper and sustained poverty.

In addition to meeting basic needs, economic inequality affects access to social and cultural participation.

Welfare reform measures have created and will continue to create further barriers to women’s full participation in society, including within their communities and in political spaces.

By 2020, women who are lone parents will experience an estimated loss of £4,000 per year, a 20 per cent drop in living standards and a 17 per cent drop in disposable income.

Where women’s disposable income is reduced, spending on children decreases and links between women’s and child poverty are widely recognised.

Child poverty shapes life chances, development and wellbeing, and subjects children to extreme stigmatisation.

This is the backdrop against which the Scottish Government gains new powers over social security.

The report sets out details of women’s diminishing social security in the UK, and ways in which the Scottish Government could engage these new powers to help alleviate the harm caused.

To read the rest of the joint report from Engender, the Scottish Refugee Council, Scottish Women’s Aid, Close the Gap, and Carers Scotland, click here.

To read the summary of the recommendations, click here.

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