When the CSR cuts were announced this week, my first thought was for friends and acquaintances working in health, education or other public sector jobs or the several single parents I know, reliant on a mix of benefits and part time work. Most of these, I soon realised, were women.
This personal anxiety has now been confirmed by the analysis of the CSR from groups such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Fawcett Society; both this week confirmed that families and women are going to take the main brunt of these cuts.
The impact of the cutbacks will also soon seep into so called ‘protected’ zones like education, where as Conor Ryan pointed out on a blog on this site, the news might not be as good as the government would like us to believe. Some experts are predicting up 40,000 job losses among teachers over the next few years, again disproportionately affecting women, who heavily outnumber men in the profession.
The cuts would be no more acceptable if they hurt men more. But the fear is that women are taking a greater hit because they are, politically speaking, a softer target.
At the very least, then, let’s have an open public discussion about who is losing out and why and what it means for our society given the deep and enduring connection between children’s well being and women’s economic security.
Earlier in the summer, the Fawcett Society applied for a judicial review of government policy, claiming it had failed to honour its legal duty under the Equality Act to give ‘due regard’ to the impact on women. Fawcett is still awaiting judgement on the judicial review but its legal boldness has clearly rattled the government, leading the Treasury this week to publish an Equality Impact Assessment of the CSR. This has already been criticised for its flippancy and crucial lack of detail on the impact of benefit cuts, job losses or the cutbacks in council budgets.
Too late, too little, maybe but it’s a start - and a sign of the difference political pressure can make. As so many commentators pointed out when the coalition was first formed, despite all the talk of a new politics, Cameron and co are very much business as usual, and elite male business at that. The benign intervention of Home Secretary Theresa May in persuading government to look at the effect of cuts on women indicates once again the impact that senior women in government can have in bringing a broader perspective to bear on government policy.
Labour under Ed Miliband has made a good start here, reserving a third of seats for women in the shadow cabinet. Yvette Cooper has already proved herself an astute, highly numerate critic of the coalition. Hopefully, with a foreign affairs brief, she can still contribute to the budget debate but others must now come forward. For as Cooper said at a recent Fawcett meeting ‘until now each generation of women has done progressively better than the last. For the first time I am worried that things will be harder for my daughter and that the clock is turning back.’
Melissa Benn is a writer and broadcaster. Visit her website here
