Women: Contribution to Economic Life

Baroness Afshar Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Afshar (CB)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for putting this debate on the agenda. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for taking a slightly different view from him over both garment workers and the education of women, which has been widely discussed.

In this country, the gender pay gap remains wide and has shown very little sign of shrinking. In the labour market, the gender pay gap is about £5,000 between women and men with the same education, from the same universities and doing very similar jobs. I therefore think putting the burden merely on women and their need to train and to participate is perhaps slightly misguided. I suggest to noble Lords that the difficulty that women face is that the labour market is gendered. That is to say, in this market women come as inferior bearers of labour: it is not what they do but the fact that they are women that undermines their ability to compete equally. The reasons for that are multitudinous, but include the reality that most women provide the work that they are offering to the labour market free of charge at home for men who subsequently are often in charge of appointing other women.

Women’s skills become invisible. We are the cooks, the cleaners and the carers. We are the ones who raise the children because we know how to do it. We are the educators and we train our children in all kinds of ways, but this work is completely invisible because it is assumed that we are somehow naturally cooks and carers. As someone who had to learn to cook from cookery books, I can tell you that it ain’t easy and I am still struggling.

The important thing is to begin to understand the gendered nature of the labour market and to try not to change women but actually to celebrate the notion of difference. So long as women participate in the labour market as quasi-men—manning the desks and being part of the manpower—they are simply attempting to become like men. However, they are not men because they always bear the burden of domesticity. That is the case even for women who are not married and those who do not have children. They are always seen as potential wives, and particularly as potential mothers. There is nothing so deskilling as motherhood. It is assumed that the moment women look after children, they themselves become childlike and lose any qualifications they have. If they return to the labour market, it is always assumed that at any point they are about to pop off to look after their children. They are therefore viewed as being not as good as the men. We are only ever going to be quasi-men.

Much has been said about providing employment for women. I would like to talk about minority women, particularly in west Yorkshire, where I have been working with many home-based producers. The double burden borne by minority women is increased by the moral economy of kin: the reality that minorities rely on one another, particularly woman who were first-generation migrants to this country. They relied extensively on men to be the gatekeepers and those who opened the way and helped them. Often, those women became home-workers in the garment industry. They worked all hours of the day producing goods for men—men against whom they could not strike, from whom they could not ask for any kind of wages, and against whom they could in no way defend their rights, not even their historic Koranic rights, which give them independence of income. Many men I talked to told me that the duty of Muslim women was to obey their men. They completely forgot all the other discussions in the Koran which demand, for example, wages for housework and for suckling babies. All of that is forgotten. The moral economy of kin demands that women should work all hours for virtually no wages. Once the garment industry began to relocate to where women’s labour was even cheaper, the women began to work in restaurants and in shops producing trinkets and jewellery. They did whatever they could, but that did not improve their experience or living conditions.

My hope is that the younger generation of women—those who have been born, raised and educated in this country and who are able to fend for themselves and speak the language—will do better. However, the problem for minority women is that they have different names and religions, and they face a very unequal labour market. When you go to work as a Muslim woman, you carry the whole burden not only of inferiority but, for younger women now, of Islamophobia. They cannot compete as equals. I know of women who have changed their names. I know of women who go to job interviews having discarded their hijab. They do that because Muslim women are desperate to work and are qualified to do so. In fact, many more Muslim women are doing engineering and the sciences than are other women, so there is a real need and demand among minority women to work.

The difficulty is that not only do these women face a gendered labour market, it is also a highly racialised and Islamophobic one. It seems to me that the only way forward may be through the use of quotas, to use that evil word. The only way we will get Muslim women into work at all stages is by setting quotas so that those with the same qualifications—they could even be asked for better qualifications because they often have them—are provided with the possibility to progress. Otherwise, the majority of Muslim women in this country, and perhaps, as has been mentioned, many other minority women, will stay on the sticky floor without the opportunity to move.