Women’s Contribution to the Economy

Debate between Stephen Metcalfe and Fiona Mactaggart

Thursday 6th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The hon. Lady is right that the motherhood penalty goes through a woman’s career, which is one of the reasons why, although women outnumber men in the earlier levels of management, they fall off the career ladder as they go up. She is also right to highlight that, if we were to make work more flexible—I will make some specific proposals on ways to do that—it would be easier for women to thrive in the workplace. As is traditional in all sorts of areas of life, a male model is the standard model and women, of course, are a diversion from that standard model. I remember that when I was first elected in 1997—I was one of the 101 women we flapped on about in the Labour party—one of the difficulties that women such as me faced was that every single thing we did, and every single step we took, represented women in politics. Every time a woman did something that was perhaps unreliable or unusual, it was because that is what women do. We were strange and unusual, and we were a diversion from the norm. Interestingly, I no longer carry on my back that requirement to represent women in politics. Although we are still a small minority of Parliament, we have become more normal.

That is good, but we still have a workplace environment in which the norm is nine-to-five. The norm is a man with a wife at home who looks after the children, ensures that they get to school and deals with their doctor’s appointments, and so on. The recent figures from the Office for National Statistics are interesting because they suggest that women take more sick days than men. There were arguments that women know how to use doctors better, but everyone who has really been there knows that it is not because women are sicker than men or are better at using doctors; it is because women take time off pretending to be sick when their children are sick. When I was a teacher, no teacher ever took time off because they were sick, but they did take time off when their kids were sick. We have failed to recognise the different experiences of women and men in how work is structured, so we think it is very modern to make work more flexible by moving from a very male model to something that is more normal for all men and women, but we need to go further.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

The hon. Lady is making some powerful and important points. Does she accept that, although there is plenty that both sides of the House can do to make work more flexible and to make it easier to achieve balance, we also have to address the deep-seated cultural differences between men and women that still seem to be perpetuated? How do we break some of those down across the economic spectrum, not just across those parts of the economy that have seen the light and are working towards equality?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I heard the hon. Gentleman’s earlier intervention on women having to be role models for other women, and I do not see why men should not be role models, too. Men should take some responsibility.

On the deep-seated cultural messages, embedded in our culture is a belief that we can pay much less for work that people are willing to do unpaid than we pay for work that people would never do unpaid. I do not think anyone would be a banker unpaid, so bankers are paid squillions of times more than care workers—I really do mean squillions. The big cultural shift that we need to make is to think about value. We severely undervalue the skills involved in caring for and looking after people. If we made that shift, perhaps organisational shifts in the workplace would follow. That is an enormous cultural leap, and we will not achieve it in five minutes, but it should be our aim. If we do not aim at it, we will continue with the situation in which, as I said, women across the world do two thirds of the world’s work—they do the child care, other caring for the family, subsistence farming and so on—and the men, who do less work, get 90% of the pay. That is not a sensible way to run a world, let alone a country.

Older women have faced the biggest jump in unemployment since 2010. Although women’s employment, generally, has increased because there has been a trend towards women entering the paid work force, there has been a huge leap in unemployment among older women. Unemployment in that group has gone up by 45% since the general election, although it has eased off slightly in the last quarter, but that compares with a 1% increase in unemployment for the rest of the population. There is a serious problem in how we deal with older women. That is partly because older women tend to be concentrated in the public sector, where there have been huge job losses, but it is also because older women are easier to squeeze out of the work force. We need to address the way in which older women are pushed out of work. When I held a discussion group for older women in my constituency, one woman said, “We are always first in line for redundancy and last in line for interviews.”

I have talked to various professional groups about what is happening in different professions. The National Union of Teachers, for example, recently conducted a survey on the misuse of capability among teachers. The survey found that more than three quarters of the union’s representatives report that women teachers over the age of 50 are disproportionately represented in their casework. Older women doctors and those in professions allied to medicine, such as physiotherapy, have reported pressure to exit their careers as hospital doctors and specialists. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales reports that, of the women members who have declared themselves to be unemployed, 60% are over 45 and 43% are aged between 45 and 54.

The Commission on Older Women, which I helped to set up, has received extensive evidence that older women are leaving work because they cannot balance work and care responsibilities. We have a perfect storm of women being squeezed out while they are trying to juggle their responsibilities. Members will have seen the commission’s work with broadcasters following evidence that older women no longer appear on our television screens. The figures on broadcasting that we received on the commission showed that 82% of TV presenters over 50 were men. While TV presenters in general are broadly reflective of the age of the general population, that is not the case with older TV presenters. Some 48% of TV presenters under the age of 50 are women—compared with 49.7% of the general population under 50—yet that percentage falls like a stone with older presenters.

There is a problem with women being squeezed out and women moving out because of their caring responsibilities. As a Parliament and a Government, we first have to do what we are doing today, which is to celebrate the contribution that women can make. We have to ensure that women are more resistant to the squeezing out efforts and more confident in their role in employment. We also need to do much more to help women to balance work and their family responsibilities.

The problem is not just about child care. We have made some progress on child care, and we need to make more, but we also need to recognise that women care at all points of their life. For example, older women might find that their spouse or a parent has a sudden crisis illness. They would not know, at that point, whether to leave work, because they would not know whether the illness was serious and long term. They would not know whether they would have to become a full-time carer, and they would not know what the caring would be like. They would not know whether they needed to get some flexibility or whatever. The least we should do is back the request made in the TUC’s “Age Immaterial” campaign to allow what it calls “adjustment leave”, which is a period of leave at a moment of crisis that people can have to adjust their lives. Some of us will have read Jackie Ashley’s account of having to care for Andrew Marr when he had his stroke. She had a tolerant employer, but she did not know how disabled he would be. It is great to see him back on our screens, but she needed to take time off to look after him and enable him to get back to work. She did not know what the future would be. We should legislate for the right to adjustment leave, which would give someone in those circumstances a short-term period of leave to find out the right thing to do, such as whether to apply for more flexible hours.

We need to ensure that there are more well-paid part-time jobs. One of the problems about part-time employment is that it tends to be at the bottom of the pay scale. As parliamentarians, we could lead a campaign to get well-paid part-time jobs. Unfortunately, too many women in part-time work at present are not paid anything like the living wage; they are on the minimum wage. As I have said, older women are often well represented in public sector jobs. They have been affected by the public sector pay freeze for a long time, and their incomes are therefore being seriously hit. We need a better system of carer’s leave. If we had that, we could keep the talent of older women workers. We are missing out on their experience, talent and capacity to lead in the work force.

One multinational company reports that it has bigger profits in its outlets where an older woman is on the serving counter. The company does not employ many older workers. We have to make much more progress on tackling the needs of older women. The consequence of older women being squeezed out of work is that too often they try and do not succeed in becoming entrepreneurs and making little bits of work here and there. We do not give enough support to women trying to become entrepreneurs, although it would be better that someone who wants to be an entrepreneur starts that at the beginning of their career, rather than seeing it as a consolation prize when they have been stuffed in a longer term career.

I make a particular plea that we get it right for older women. If we do that, and stop wasting their talent, stop excluding them from training opportunities and stop squeezing them out of jobs, and use their experience more intelligently, I have no doubt that they would contribute massively to the success of our economy and to the happiness of our families. If we do that, we will have a better society that all of us can celebrate.