International Women’s Day

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, in this welcome celebration of International Women’s Day, we should take note of women’s contribution to society as well as the economy, particularly the large amount of unpaid care work that women still contribute, which underpins the economy and should be counted as such, as already stated by my noble friends Lady Pitkeathley and Lady Kinnock. Nevertheless, following the theme of the debate, I will focus on the obstacles that women and mothers face in contributing to economic growth through paid work.

The significance of women’s paid work to economic prosperity was brought out in a recent Resolution Foundation report, which has already been mentioned by my noble friend Lady Healy of Primrose Hill. However, it also points out that, compared to the better and best-performing countries, around 1 million women could be considered missing from the UK workplace. I want briefly to discuss three policy areas.

The first is the gendered division of labour. In my academic work on feminist perspectives on citizenship, I identify who does what in the private sphere of the home as critical to women’s opportunities for citizenship in the public sphere of the labour market and politics. As women still take the main responsibility for care and housework in the domestic economy, many make their contribution to the wider economy with one hand tied behind them, as the suffragette Hannah Mitchell put it so well many years ago. The Resolution Foundation argues that couples in the UK continue to adopt unusually unequal caring and working roles within the household, and would prefer to adopt more equal roles. It says that there is an opportunity for public policy to raise female employment by freeing couples to share roles in the home.

I suggest that public policy can help through the regulation of working time. A long-hours culture for men is harmful to gender equality for those with family responsibilities. A shorter full-time working week, combined with a range of flexible working opportunities and better pay and conditions for part-time workers would help. So, too, would a reformed parental leave system that followed the Nordic model—which appears so fashionable at present—of earmarking a period of parental leave for fathers on a “use it or lose it” basis without penalising mothers. This, which is often called the “daddy quota”, is typically leave of one or two months. Cross-national analysis suggests that Nordic fathers typically spend more time on childcare than other fathers. While we cannot be sure that that is attributable to parental leave, there is Nordic research that indicates that male use of parental leave has a positive effect on the gendered division of labour and the father’s subsequent involvement in childcare. This also relates to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, about men’s involvement in primary schools. Therefore, I very much welcome the Government’s support for the idea of a daddy quota in their consultation on modern workplaces. I hope they will not be discouraged from pursuing it by those who argue that it would somehow be detrimental to business.

The second related obstacle is childcare, already discussed by my noble friends Lady Healy and Lord Davies of Abersoch. The OECD has highlighted the extent to which unusually high childcare costs represent a barrier to dual-earner families in the UK and, of course, to lone parents. Unfortunately, the cut in help with childcare costs through the tax credit system, at a time when the Daycare Trust shows that these costs are spiralling, raises the barrier further, despite the welcome planned extension to those doing mini-jobs.

Thirdly and finally, the cutback in support for childcare contributes to a deterioration in work incentives for second earners, the majority of whom are women. In low-income households, second earners’ work incentives will also be badly hit by the introduction of universal credit. It is supposed to improve work incentives, yet the policy briefing of the Department for Work and Pensions shows how, even without taking account of childcare costs, most second earners on universal credit will face a reduced incentive to take or stay in paid work, and about three-quarters will face a reduced incentive to improve their earnings once in work. We raised this issue in the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill, pointing out that universal credit could mean a shift back to a more traditional male-breadwinner model and weaken the labour market position of women. As the Women’s Budget Group has pointed out, even a fairly short period out of the labour market can mean the depreciation of women’s human capital and future earning power. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, acknowledged the importance of the issue but said that it was not a priority. Therefore, I hope that the Minister might talk to him about how the impact of universal credit on second earners might be monitored.

To conclude, I suggest that there is no point in your Lordships’ House taking note of women’s contribution to economic growth if we do not also identify the obstacles to that contribution and how they might be overcome. This has implications for a number of government departments and I hope that the Minister will pass on the message as well as the many powerful messages that have come from noble sisters and brothers today.