Women and the Economy

Julie Elliott Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

Why is this debate necessary? Why, in 2015, is it relevant to be discussing women and the economy, rather than simply the economy? What is it about the interaction between women, the economy and the labour market that is worthy of exploration? This debate is necessary because of the gender pay gap, which has been widely talked about; because of the proportion of women who are in low-paid and part-time work, and the proportion who are underemployed; because of workplace discrimination; because more women are reliant on childcare; and because of the greater number of women who work in the public sector.

Issues across the economy and the labour market affect women in different ways to men, and that is why this debate is so important. If it takes 70 years to equalise the gender pay gap, as is estimated on the current rate of progress, my four-year-old granddaughters will be pensioners by the time this issue is resolved. Our aim is to resolve these issues so that debates like this no longer appear on the Order Paper.

Given that we know there are issues that affect women more than men, we must move on to the yawning gap between what must be done and what the Government are doing. The gender pay gap, which fell by one third under the last Labour Government, stubbornly remains under this Government. Last year, the UK fell out of the top 20 in the global gender gap index for the first time, with the higher gender pay gap cited as the significant reason.

We know that, for a variety of reasons, women are more affected than men by changes in taxation and changes to social security spending, yet despite that knowledge, 81% of the £82 billion of tax increases and benefit cuts since 2010 have fallen on women. We also know that women are three times more likely to be in part-time work and therefore more exposed to changes in social security. I welcome the Government’s partial U-turn on tax credits, but women will still face cuts to universal credit. Knowing that women are disproportionately affected by changes to tax credits, and knowing that 80% of the savings would have come from women, the Government still pushed ahead.

We know that women make up around two thirds of the public sector workforce, and that cuts to the public sector and pay freezes disproportionately hit women, yet there seems to have been no acknowledgement of this by the Government, and no coherent plan to support women to find new jobs in the private sector. It should be a prerequisite for any change to tax and spending to have an assessment of the impact it will have on women. It is simply not good enough for this Government to make these changes and not even consider, let alone have a strategy to combat, the disproportionate effects they have on women in the workforce.

I am proud of Labour’s record on equality, from the Equal Pay Act 1970 to the Equality Act 2010, with many great strides in between. There is no silver bullet to combat discrimination against women in the workforce, but we know that there are specific things we could do now. We need to fully implement the pay transparency rules in the 2010 Equality Act, which required employers of more than 250 people to publish details of the average pay of men and women. This Government have made that voluntary. That small change would have a big impact, and we would be joining world leaders in pay equality such as Sweden, Denmark and Finland, which all score above the UK in the global gender equality index.

We need to get more young women into the science, technology, engineering and maths—STEM—sectors, either through university education or apprenticeships. Currently, just 15% of university places for computer science and engineering degrees are filled by women, and 88% of the STEM workforce is male. Yet, according to the attainment of A* to C grades at GCSE, girls continue to outperform boys in all but three of the 16 STEM subjects. This is a cultural problem, not an academic one.

The CBI suggests that 93% of young people are not getting the careers information they need, and what advice they do get tends to be pigeonholed. We need compulsory face-to-face careers advice from the age of 11, in partnership with business, to encourage young women to consider those crucial STEM subjects and science and engineering careers. It should come as no surprise that greater gender equality in the economy is good not just for women but for the economy itself. The Royal Bank of Scotland has calculated that boosting female entrepreneurship could deliver approximately £60 billion extra to the UK economy. If the gender pay gap were abolished tomorrow, women would earn more and spend more, and the Treasury would receive more in taxation. There is a long way to go on a lot of these issues, but until this subject is consigned to the history books and no longer debated in Parliament, we need to act. The Government need to act now.