(Wo)men’s housework: are we getting anywhere?

By Katrina Gajevska.

Statistics show that gender equality has not progressed across all areas of life. With considerably more women at university and in employment these days, housework and childrearing still conform to the pre-emancipation patterns. In 2004, University of Ulster research showed women did 17 hours of housework per week compared to 6 done by men, excluding childcare. In 2006, a study at the University of Oxford showed domestic work still fell disproportionately on women and in 2012, almost half of women did 13 hours of housework per week or more according to The Guardian. Men, on the other hand, were only occasionally involved.

Childcare affects a woman’s economic independence even more dramatically. Whilst fathers’ professional lives remain largely unshaken, working mothers either reduce their employment, drop it altogether or run two jobs at a time. For those who take the third option, decreased activity at work, inability to put in additional hours and less time for networking ultimately lead to loss of experience and lower income. Some women additionally face the threat of redundancy or marginalisation, as employers, fully aware of their family commitments, are reluctant to retain or promote them. This exacerbates the pay gap and few women are able to reach for top positions. According to a leading female architect Zaha Hadid, ‘‘Society has not been set up in a way that allows women to go back to work after taking time off. Many women now have to work as well as do everything at home and no one can do everything“.

The reasons for domestic inequality are often claimed to be pragmatic rather than ideological. First, given that men usually earn more, it seems rational for them to retain full-time employment. Second, it is often remarked that women simply enjoy domestic work more and are better at it. If so, why not stick with it?

The first consideration is largely self-fulfilling: women earn less in part because they are assumed to contribute less efficiently due to their family roles. However, other factors also contribute to disparities in earning power. Most industries (with a few exceptions) are still dominated by men at higher levels; women face gender prejudice and a glass ceiling and are less encouraged in their careers than men. Thus the set of factors which cause one pay gap perpetuates another.

Although the myth of male incompetence at housework was dispelled a long time ago, many still think women naturally prefer domesticity. Yet a great deal of female attitudes to housework can be well explained by gender ideology and adaptive preferences: the practice of conforming one’s beliefs and desires to social expectations as a result of conditioning. An equally important explaining factor is the natural desire to minimise cognitive dissonance, i.e. the tendency to eliminate conflicting desires (in this case, that of living in an equitable relationship) in order to accept situations which cannot be changed. Upbringing and lack of alternatives can therefore account for women’s behaviour.

Much can be done to equalise domestic arrangements, but we must be aware of two traps policy makers and campaigners commonly fall into. First, even those policies designed to help women gain more independence ultimately assume that they are primarily responsible for domestic work. Note that the ‘flexible employment’ policies work on the assumption that women should be able to combine earning some income with housework – rather than that it should be equally shared so that wives can pursue full-time employment. Second, the popular rhetoric of men helping in household chores also misses the point. To say that men should ‘help’ at home obviously implies assistance, rather than co-responsibility. It implicitly concedes that women are the primary domestic workers who need a bit of relief – and that this ‘extra’ help exhausts men’s roles at home.

What we need is to shift the target of family policies to both sexes. The state should not encourage women to take flexible working arrangements if it does not encourage men to do the same. Paternity leave should be extended to 9 months (as with women) and companies should be actively encouraged to facilitate flexible work for men. Evidently, much of the change required is cultural. However, we should not be afraid to use the state apparatus to shape people’s mentalities. We have been doing it for thousands of years already.

Katrina Gajevska is a Young Fabians Member.

Labour Women’s Conference – what women want

The Labour Women’s Conference in Liverpool today is its own justification. Numerous people over the past few weeks, within the opposition and media, and disappointingly within the Labour Party itself, have queried the need for a separate women’s event. If women want to be mainstreamed, isn’t the best way to do that to make their views heard within the framework of the mainstream party conference?

But the discussions today have amply demonstrated the need for a dedicated space for women in the Labour movement to discuss the serious issues facing us in Britain today. This is more necessary than ever during the current cuts, with women suffering disproportionately as both public service users and as public sector workers.

Yvette Cooper in her rousing keynote speech, and Fiona Mctaggart and others in the subsequent panels, highlighted just how badly women are doing under the Coalition government, and how the gains made through the hard work of women in the Labour movement over the past 60 years are being threatened and undone across the board.

As Angela Eagle MP put it “this government has a problem with women.” Well, we have a problem with this government.

Hard-won rights and services are being undone by a government that has just four women in its Cabinet, and that – as a recent leaked memo revealed – canvassed women’s opinions not through serious consultation and representation but by rounding up the few women in Number 10 for a brainstorm of ‘what women want’.

If we’d been asked we could have easily told the Coalition.

What women want is the ability to work and raise a family, or to do just one of these, without being vilified or disadvantaged.  What women want is the right not to be raped, stalked or harassed at work and to be able to prosecute successfully if they are. What women want is fair representation in public life.

And what we need is the support and encouragement of the Party- and the right to self-organise in women forums and yes, at Labour Women Conferences – until such a time as what we want becomes a reality.

Claire Leigh is Treasurer of the Young Fabians

Why I, for one, am glad Andy Gray spoke out against women in football

Right, bear with me. The attacking options with respect to ex-Sky Sports Presenter Andy Gray are more numerous than those confronting Wayne Rooney in a one-on-one situation.

Yes, Gray’s comments were misjudged; yes, his comments were demeaning to women; yes, his comments were boorishly puerile even by the standards of pre-schoolers. But it is not all bad: just look at how men have rallied to the cause following his comments. It is enough to make me proud of my biology.

I think Gray’s words have had a wonderfully galvanising effect on male football fans the length and breadth of the country. The maelstrom that has cost Gray and his co-presenter, Richard Keys, the dumb and dumber of sports broadcasting, their jobs has shown their pre-historic views have no place in modern football. With old, sexist attitudes previously bubbling away on a low simmer, this was the prod the game needed to make its menfolk sit up and say: you know what? It isn’t the 1950s anymore.

Sue Mott described this week in the Daily Express how twenty years ago she asked Ron Atkinson, then managing Sheffield Wednesday, for his views on women in football. This is not the kind of question Big Ron is well-equipped to answer; his reply: “a women’s place is in the kitchen, bedroom and the disco”.

Fast forward twenty years to the comments Gray and Keys made which started the train of events that led to their dismissals from their cushy £1 million-a-year jobs. Following an extremely well judged offside call in a Liverpool match, Gray said this of the lineswomen in question, Sian Massey:

“Can you believe that? A female lineman! Women don’t know the offside rule.”

Keys, rolling over and having his tummy tickled, added “Course they don’t. The game’s gone mad.”

Now that the pair have some extra time (boom, boom) on their hands, I think I’ll invite them down to watch my Sunday league team. If they think Sian Massey’s adroitly judged line call was “mad”, I would love to see what they make of the regularly egregious decisions made by our (male) referees.

Only last weekend, I played the line beautiful only to be wrongly (a view I shared alone at the time) flagged offside. I felt I had been cruelly wronged. The truth is Sian Massey, a highly trained and qualified lineswomen, made a wonderfully skilled offside call which the vast majority of the people in the stadium at the time got wrong. For Keys and Gray to denounce that as “mad” is, well, mad.

Other female sports broadcasters have reported similarly depressing tales this week. National institution, Gabby Logan, described in the Times how she was instructed to “have a baby” when she told her bosses that the shows she was being given were not stretching her.

Perhaps the lowlight was an embarrassing scene that once confronted Jacqueline Magnay. On interviewing the president of a rugby league club after a match she explained how:

“one played jumped up on a table stark naked and swung his hips to the cheers of his teammates”.

This, admittedly, was in Australia and not chilly England but one can only hope, for the player’s sake, that this incident did not happen during the winter season.

Women in sports broadcasting, as in all other forms of work, should be judged by the quality of their output and the skills they bring to the table. Sian Massey did brilliantly. She should not be subjected to such sexist nonsense; she should be fast tracked to officiate at more important games. I would love for her to call Manchester United players off-side when they next play my team, Arsenal.

The furore that has greeted Gray’s comments has shown casually ignorant sexism now ‘aint kosher in football as has long been case in other sports for years. No-one tells Paula Radcliffe or Jessica Ennis to stick to doing the dishes as they rack up medals for Team GB around the world.

It also shows how much more mature the relationship between the sexes is in Britain that in Italy, where cartoon misogynist Silvio Barely-stops-getting-ani seems to have managed to regain his oily grip on power after his centre-right friends backed him up. He’s probably offered to throw them a party to celebrate.

But back home, for Gray and Keys it’s not so much “bunga, bunga” as “bunga off”. Quite right too and I’ve managed to write this without once using the ‘Gray shown the red card’ cliché. Oh, damn.

Daniel Bamford is the Young Fabian Networks Officer.

Women on Boards: The Roundtable

In the UK today, women are significantly under-represented at company board level despite making up half of the national population. On Thursday 16 December the Young Fabians hosted a “Women on Boards” roundtable discussion in conjunction with BIS to explore this issue and support the Lord Davies Review. The event was hosted at the ICAEW and was attended by around 30 people. Our panel of distinguished speakers included Helen Whitehead from BIS, Baroness Goudie, Rhonda Martin from ICAEW, Averil Leimon from White Water Strategies and Arpita Dutt from Russell, Jones & Walker who were able to share their experiences and work in this area.

The discussion was aimed at presenting the views of young, up and coming women in business and covered a range of topics from personal aspiration and perceived barriers in corporate culture to business led strategies to address under-representation of women at senior management level. 

While the efficacy of introducing quotas was disputed, there was wide agreement that in order to progress the equality agenda men should be involved in the debate and that top down engagement from Boards was necessary to recognise the disparity.  Mentor and sponsor systems that challenge and promote women were supported as well as extra support and engagement with women who have chosen to leave work to have children.

One issue that became apparent was that there seems to be a point somewhere around the age of 30 at which women begin to feel disadvantaged in comparison to male colleagues whether they have decided to have children or not. Addressing this issue will require additional effort from women themselves and the organisations that employ them to proactively address career development and aspiration.

There was no clarity from the table as to whether the women present actually wanted to be on a Board, but it became apparent that transparency and monitoring of board selection would remove barriers to lack of aspiration by providing essential information as to what senior level roles entail.  

We would like to thank our sponsors ICAEW and White Water Strategies for supporting the event.

Lord Davies’ review will be published February 2011.

It makes business sense and it’s socially just, why the City can’t get it together on gender balance in the boardroom??

On Wednesday 22 September, in the heart of the City at the London Stock Exchange, the Young Fabian Womens’ and Future of Finance Networks hosted an expert panel debate entitled “Balance in the boardroom: How to get more women leaders in the City?”.

Special video highlights of the debate… link here

Women only represent 5% of executive directors from the 600 companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange, according to recent research by recruitment firm Egon Zehnder. With the passage of landmark legislation in the US aiming to increase female membership on corporate boards and the establishment of the Lord Davies inquiry into female representation in Britain’s boardrooms, the Young Fabians Future of Finance Network brought together an expert panel for lively interactive debate.

Chaired by Rachel Reeves MP, former Bank of England Economist and member of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, panellists Clare Dobie, Immediate Past President of the Women’s City Network and witness for the Treasury Committee’s ‘Women in the City’ inquiry; Trupti Patel, Associate at Social Finance; Andrew Roscoe, London Director of Egon Zehnder International; and Cathrine Seierstad, Researcher at the Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity in Queen Mary University, all set out their views on the issues before engaging in discussion with the audience.

All the panellists agreed that female participation at the top of the financial services sector in the UK was too low, both in comparison to other sectors in the UK and in comparison to the rest of Europe. All the panellists also agreed that there were important benefits for business and the economy from having more female talent on corporate boards. Andrew Roscoe pointed to research carried out by his search firm, Egon Zehnder International, which indicated that corporate boards that are more diverse make better decisions.

So, if female talent offered so many advantages to business, why are these companies in the financial services sector missing out on the competitive advantage of having women on the board?

The panel agreed that a principal problem is that a lot of recruitment is driven by the fact that people “recruit in their own image” and British business and the financial services sector is dominated by men – and men of a particular social ilk at that.

The issues are certainly complex and intertwined. Trupti pointed to characteristics of the corporate workplace that didn’t reward typical female skills types of working. Andrew highlighted his firm’s research that showed that networking and proclaiming one’s own success were strongly associated with success, however in female focus groups these qualities were not seen as desirable. Trupti thought that women generally needed support to improve the way they sell themselves internally and earn recognition for their work, and that career networks often helped women acquire these skills and gain the necessary confidence.

Parental leave was also an important part of the picture. Businesses see maternity leave as a financial risk. The Icelandic model, where parental leave is divided between men and women and the business risk is equal, was seen as an example for the UK.

On aspiration, the panel felt that the City should do more to raise awareness of job opportunities in the city and seeking to influence the careers advice or family advice that is so influential to people’s career decisions. There should also be better case studies of positive examples of women at the top of business.

Cathrine discussed the Norwegian experience of legislation requiring corporate boards to meet minimum gender quotas of 40%. The justification for positive discrimination was based on the need for a wider distribution of power, but also on an economic argument, that companies need to use the entire wealth of talent available in society to be competitive and that diversity has a positive impact of the board and the bottom line of company performance.

The panel agreed that there has to be a change in the culture at the very top for there to be real substantive change in the long-term over the sector and in society. Panellists and attendees alike agreed that encouraging such social and cultural change – which makes economic sense as well as being socially just – was precisely what the Fabian Society was for.

This event was kindly sponsored by the London Stock Exchange and Egon Zehnder International.

The Young Fabian Future of Finance Network was launched by Lord Drayson in March 2010 with the aim of better connecting socially-minded individuals from finance and the City of London with progressive politics. The Network provides an empowering opportunity for progressives, of all shades, from the front edge of industry and research to contribute their expertise to the progressive effort to respond to global policy challenges. Network membership is not limited to Young Fabian members, but open to all individuals who identify as socially-minded progressives.

For the full event report, please visit the Young Fabian Future of Finance Network Site: http://youngfabians-networks-fof.ning.com

More in the litany of disregard for women

Christine Quigley, member of the Young Fabian Work and Families Policy Development Group, argues that the coalition government should not take support for granted from women who benefited so much under Labour.

Today’s announcement on Child Benefit cuts for higher-rate taxpayers is the most recent example in this Government’s litany of disregard for women. Osborne’s announcement today (well-timed to bury media coverage of the latest revelations on Andy Coulson) means that households where one earner takes home £44,000 a year will lose out on this valuable universal benefit. What is missing in this debate is an analysis of how the cuts will affect inter-family dynamics.

Many UK households still follow the typical male-breadwinner model, with the husband or male partner earning the main income, and women working part-time, on lower incomes, or not at all. (The full-time gender pay gap still sits at nearly 17% forty years after the introduction of the Equal Pay Act.) For those women who don’t work, either through choice or necessity, the Child Benefit payment may well be the only money directly paid to them, as Katherine Rake points out. An income of just over £20 a week may not seem like much, but it allows a measure of control and independence. A plethora of academic studies such as Lundberg, Pollak and Wales (1997) point out the common assumption that family incomes are pooled, so that the distribution of income within the family doesn’t matter. The same study finds that the move from tax credits (generally received by the father) to Child Benefit (paid directly to the mother) in the UK saw greater expenditure on children’s (and women’s) clothing.

Once again, the Con-Dem Government hasn’t taken equity between men and women into account. We already know, thanks to Yvette Cooper, that women will bear the brunt of spending cuts from this year’s Budget, but an impact assessment from the Treasury is sadly unavailable publicly.

Conventional political-science wisdom holds that women are inherently more likely to vote for conservative parties. It may well be that the UK’s Conservatives are banking on our support – but selling women down the river won’t win our votes. Let’s not forget Labour’s achievements for women; from the Equal Pay Act and national minimum wage, to better maternity pay, Sure Start, free breast cancer screening, support for victims of domestic violence and increased political representation for women. Today’s cuts are symptomatic of what the Con-Dem Government really thinks of women – we must stand for progressive policies.

Women still earn 20% less than men

An OECD study, published today to mark International Women’s Day, reveals that, globally, women are paid almost a fifth less than men, with the gender pay gap varying greatly, from a 30 per cent gap in Japan and Korea to a a 10 per cent gap in Belgium and New Zealand; in Britain, the figure is closer to the 20 per cent average.

Today’s OECD report also reveals 62 per cent of women in paid work, with a quarter of all women working part time compared to just 6 per cent for men. Women spend more time doing unpaid work and “spend at least twice as much time on caring than men”, adds the report, with the number of children in a household one of the biggest determining factors.

Another point of note was that public spending on childcare and pre-school services in OECD countries was on average only 0.6% of GDP, the amounts again varying sharply, from 0.1% in Greece to 1.3% in Denmark, with Britain once more in line with the average.

Earlier today, the prime minister described the absence of women from the boards of some of Britain’s top companies as “completely unacceptable”, saying it was “wrong” that only a tenth of directors in the UK’s top 100 companies are women.

His remarks come in the wake of recent evidence from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) showing the movement of women into positions of power and influence had reversed or stalled, reports today’s Guardian:

“It [the EHRC] likened women’s progress to a snail’s pace and said it would take a snail 73 years to crawl from Land’s End to John O’Groats and halfway back again before the numbers of women becoming directors of FTSE 100 companies was the same as men.

“The snail would have to cross the length of the Great Wall of China in 212 years before women would be equally represented in parliament.”

This article was originally published on Left Foot Forward

Make sure you leave on time …

Today marks WYPHD – not an obvious abbreviation is it? But it’s one that effects much of the population and many Young Fabian members. Work Your Proper Hours Day is the day when the average person who does unpaid overtime would start to get paid if they did all their unpaid overtime at the start of the year. A whole two months into the year – pretty shocking, eh?

And that is just the average. The TUC report today that there has been a further increase in the number of Britons doing ‘extreme’ unpaid overtime – that’s more than ten hours a week above contracted hours. Their WYPHD will be not until at least 26th April.

There’s 3 interesting aspects to this.

Firstly, speaking from my own experience and that of friends and colleagues, I suspect this affects a large proportion of young people – perhaps trying to impress in their first job after leaving education – and even more so Young Fabian members, a number of whom have jobs that will be stretched to fit the anti-social hours of parliament.

Secondly, the context of the recession. Whilst more people are working more hours than they are being paid for, unemployment is rising. Could the sum of a team’s additional hours put in actually be enough to create new jobs? Are young school leavers or university graduates struggling in the jobs market suffering more than they need to? It seems that during the recession there have been more temporary contracts being offered where once there may have been permanent jobs – is the nature of such work pressuring young workers to stay in the office longer to secure the prize of permanent employment, foregoing short-term health for long-term security?

Thirdly, and very importantly, there is a gender divide. The group with highest proportion of people working unpaid overtime, and the highest proportion undertaking extreme overtime, is single women. Level pegging in numbers doing unpaid overtime with single men is the group containing married or cohabiting couples without children. A majority of Young Fabian members who are working will fit into these categories. We can but speculate why it is that women are working more for free. Is it a greater work ethic? Or is it a way to show one’s value in a country still blighted by unfair gender pay gaps?

The TUC website has some other interesting stats. And the WYPHD site contains an unpaid overtime calculator and some games and novelties worth a quick look (during your lunch break?).

Plus, eagle-eyed news followers may notice that the long hours advice clinic has been put together by a Professor who has found fame elsewhere this week.