International Women’s Day 2016

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is gender parity, and I want to focus on the plight of low-paid women. We like to think that we live in an enlightened age of women’s rights, but, shockingly, the World Economic Forum has calculated that the gender gap in health, education, politics and the economy will not close until 2133. It will therefore take another five generations before women are on an equal footing with men.

Turning to women’s economic parity with men in the UK, a quarter of women now earn below the real living wage, which is £9.40 an hour in London. Our so-called economic recovery and increasing employment are being achieved off the backs of low-paid women. A staggering 60% of new jobs for women created since 2010 have been in the lowest-paid industries. Women make up three quarters of those in part-time work, earning on average 25% less an hour than their full-time colleagues. They dominate the lowest-paid sectors, where 62% of workers paid below the living wage are women. Some 90% of nurses are women and 84% of carers are women. Over 70% of hospitality waiting staff are women. In all those professions, women perform important work, but they are hugely undervalued.

Even in higher-paid jobs, women earn significantly less. The figure for median gross earnings for men is almost £30,000, but it is just over £24,000 for women—a 25% gap. While women make up half of all apprentices, they are being short-changed because of implicit gendered occupational segregation. Women dominate the lowest-paid apprenticeships, making up 83% of health and social care apprentices and 91% of childcare apprentices. Meanwhile, men dominate the highest-paid apprenticeships, where only 3% of engineering apprentices, 2% of construction apprentices and 10% of IT apprentices are women. The outcome is a gender pay gap in apprenticeships that is now at 21%. That means that a woman apprentice will earn just £4.82 an hour on average, which compares with £5.85 an hour for her male colleague. There are, however, a few promising developments for future generations, and I would like to take the opportunity to celebrate Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s sponsorship of TechFuture Girls, which I welcomed to Parliament last week. This is a remarkable network of clubs inspiring young girls into tech, where they are currently hugely under-represented, and it is available free to all schools in the UK.

We also know that the Government’s gendered policies have seen benefits cuts that have hit women disproportionately, in favour of tax cuts for high earners, disproportionately benefiting men. Since 2010, £26 billion-worth of cuts have been made in benefits, tax credits, pay and pensions, and a staggering 85% of that total has been taken solely from women. At the same time, the Government have watered down the Treasury’s gender impact assessments, meaning that the true extent of these changes and their real impact on women is being disguised.

We might think that the introduction of the so-called “national living wage” would make the situation a lot better for women. I ask every woman in the House, when she listens to the Budget next week, just to consider that many women will take home less next month because of the national living wage, as a result of the stripping out of benefits, London weighting and double time on a Sunday. Let us then, as women, all stand together and say that those women deserve more, not less.