The upshot of failing to capture all this data is that women’s unpaid work tends to be seen as ‘a costless resource to exploit’, writes economics professor Sue Himmelweit.18 And so when countries try to rein in their spending it is often women who end up paying the price.
Following the 2008 financial crash, the UK has seen a mass cutting exercise in public services. Between 2011 and 2014 children’s centre budgets were cut by ￡82 million and between 2010 and 2014, 285 children’s centres either merged or closed.19 Between 2010 and 2015 local-authority social-care budgets fell by ￡5 billion,20 social security has been frozen below inflation and restricted to a household maximum, and eligibility for a carers’ allowance depends on an earnings threshold that has not kept up with increases in the national minimum wage.21 Lots of lovely money-saving.
The problem is, these cuts are not so much savings as a shifting of costs from the public sector onto women, because the work still needs to be done. By 2017 the Women’s Budget Group estimated22 that approximately one in ten people over the age of fifty in England (1.86 million) had unmet care needs as a result of public spending cuts. These needs have become, on the whole, the responsibility of women.
Cuts have also contributed to a rise in female unemployment: by March 2012, two years into austerity, women’s unemployment had risen by 20% to 1.13 million, the highest figure for twenty-five years.23 Meanwhile, male unemployment stood at almost exactly where it had since the end of the recession in 2009. Unison found that by 2014 there had been a 74% increase in women’s underemployment.24
In 2017 the House of Commons library published an analysis of the cumulative impact of the government’s ‘fiscal consolidation’ between 2010 and 2020. They found that 86% of cuts fell on women.25 Analysis by the Women’s Budget Group (WBG)26 found that tax and benefit changes since 2010 will have hit women’s incomes twice as hard as men’s by 2020.27 To add insult to injury, the latest changes are not only disproportionately penalising poor women (with single mothers and Asian women being the worst affected28), they are benefiting already rich men. According to WBG analysis, men in the richest 50% of households actually gained from tax and benefit changes since July 2015.29
So why is the UK government enacting policy that is so manifestly unjust? The answer is simple: they aren’t looking at the data. Not only are they not quantifying women’s unpaid contribution to GDP, the UK government (like most governments worldwide) also aren’t gender-analysing their budgets.
By repeatedly refusing (most recently in December 2017) to produce a comprehensive equality impact assessment of its budgets, the UK government has arguably been operating illegally since the public sector equality duty (PSED) came into law. Part of the 2010 Equality Act, the PSED requires that ‘a public authority, must, in the exercise of its functions, have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination [and] advance equality of opportunity’.30 In an interview with the Guardian, WBG’s director, Eva Neitzert, couldn’t see how the Treasury could fulfil its legal obligations without completing a formal assessment.31 Were Treasury ministers ‘deliberately seeking to hide inconvenient truths about the impact of its policies on women?’ she wondered.
If they were, it would be profoundly foolish, because spending cuts on public services are not just inequitable, they are counterproductive. Increasing the amount of unpaid work women have to do lowers their participation rate in the paid labour force. And women’s paid labour-force participation rate has a significant impact on GDP.
Between 1970 and 2009, almost 38 million more women joined the US labour force, increasing the female participation rate from 37% to nearly 48%. McKinsey calculates that without this increase, US GDP would be 25% smaller – ‘an amount equal to the combined GDP of Illinois, California and New York’.32 The World Economic Forum (WEF) has also found that increasing female labour participation ‘has been an important driver of European economic growth in the last decade’. By contrast, ‘Asia and the Pacific reportedly loses US$42 billion to US$47 billion annually as a region because of women’s limited access to employment opportunities’.33
There are still further gains that could be made. There is a 12% employment gap between men and women across the EU (the figure varies between 1.6% in Latvia and 27.7% in Malta);34 a 13% gap in the US;35 and a 27% gap worldwide.36 The WEF has calculated that closing this gap ‘would have massive economic implications for developed economies, boosting US GDP by as much as 9% and eurozone GDP by as much as 13%’.37 In 2015 McKinsey estimated that global GDP would grow by $12 trillion were women able to engage in the paid labour force at the same rate as men.38
But they aren’t, because they simply don’t have the time. Both the OECD39 and McKinsey40 have uncovered a ‘strong negative correlation’ between time spent in unpaid care work and women’s paid labour-force participation rates. In the EU, 25% of women cite care work as their reason for not being in the paid labour force.41 This compares to 3% of men.
In the UK, women with young children are employed for shorter hours than those without children, while for men it is the other way around.42 This matches the situation in Mexico where, in 2010, 46% of mothers of very young children were in paid employment compared to 55% of women in households without children. The figures for men were 99% and 96%, respectively. In the US, female paid employment is actually pretty high amongst younger women, but it sharply declines after motherhood, ‘which is being progressively delayed’.43
The failure to collect data on women’s unpaid workload can also stymie development efforts. Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow at the UN Foundation, points to a history of initiatives in low-income countries littered with training programmes that have failed because they ‘have been built on the mistaken assumption that women have plenty of free time, backed by limited data on women’s time-intensive work schedules’.44 Women may sign up for these programmes, but if the initiatives don’t account for women’s childcare demands, women don’t complete them. And that’s development money down the drain – and more women’s economic potential wasted. In fact, the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world.