Without even mentioning them, the Chancellor’s budget will have an
enormous impact on the lives of women up and down the country.
Paradoxically, some seemingly positive measures announced in the budget
are likely to have negative consequences for certain groups of women.
For instance, the Chancellor announced that the income tax threshold
will increase from April 2013 to £9,205, a rise of £1,100 from the
current rate. This will have a wider impact on low earners and will be
of specific help to women as many more of them earn lower salaries than
men. However, this will still fail to provide any help to those people,
of whom
73% are women, lacking employment or already earning under the
threshold. The change to the child benefit withdrawal will leave an
extra 75,000 families with a continuing entitlement and now, only those
households with an income of over £60,000 will have the benefit removed
entirely, whereas households with an income of £50,000 will have the
benefit withdrawn incrementally in line with rises in income. Again,
this is a welcome measure for women in the squeezed middle but will
provide little comfort to those whose income remains steadfastly lower
than £50,000 whose benefits will not change. The Chancellor also
discussed the potential need for a further £10 billion cut to the
welfare budget by 2016, a factor that is more likely to
disproportionately target women due to
the fact that benefits routinely
make up 20% of a women’s income in comparison to 10% of men’s.
These
measures announced in the budget are likely to exacerbate further the
already dire situation of many women. Over the past couple of years
women have been particularly badly hit by the coalition cuts in this
time of austerity. According to the analysis carried out by the Women’s
Budget Group,
women currently shoulder 72% of the cuts that were put
into place after the 2010 budget. Female unemployment is currently at a
staggering 25 year high of 1.12 million, rising at double the rate of
male unemployment. The public sector cuts that have been put in place
and the subsequent redundancies have affected women disproportionately
hard on the basis that 64% of the public sector is made up of women, a
higher proportion than in any other part of the economy. This has meant
that, for those women still employed by the public sector, the pay
freeze has been a further blow to the bank balance.
The effects
don’t end there. As the mother is still more likely to be the primary
care giver of any children in a family, the slashing of budgets to
programmes such as Sure Start and extended schools over recent years and
the difficulties that many have in finding affordable childcare means
that it is increasingly more cost effective for women not to return to
work after the birth of a child. There is even a suggestion that
the
impact of the wide spread cuts across various sectors are setting
women’s equality back by a decade.
What can be done? Gender
imbalances like these need to be changed by policy initiatives rather
than simply sustained by benefit handouts. However, the advancement of
gender impact analyses of current and future policies,
a measure already
proving to be successful in Sweden would be a welcome initiative, to
ensure that future budgets do not have the same unequal impact on the
female populous. In the countries that lead on gender equality such as
Sweden, social progressivism goes hand in hand with a consonant economic
policy. Women need to be more of priority in the minds of the coalition
Government insofar as their economic policy is concerned. Indeed,
perhaps the most notable factor about yesterday’s budget was the failure
of the Chancellor to discuss or implement any measures to ameliorate
the situation of rising and disproportionately high female
unemployment. The socially liberal and progressive rhetoric that has
been expounded by the Government may have been better served by
extending help with childcare to working women. This has long been a key
issue due to its increasingly prohibitive cost. Something that George
Osborne was said to be looking into last October was the possibility of
introducing fully tax deductible childcare. Making it easier for women
to re-enter the job market after having children with initiatives such
as this and job share schemes for returning mothers would boost gender
equality in real terms, help to limit the need for women to
disproportionately rely on state benefits and prevent them from
continuing to shoulder the highest proportion of the burden.