The dark heart of our unequal economy
In the latest The Backlash Q&A, Mary-Ann Stephenson, director of the Women’s Budget Group think tank, talks about the economic roots of gender inequality.
Dear readers,
Alongside the reads I send you (almost) weekly, every once in a while I interview someone who can help make sense of this moment in the struggle for gender equality. For the latest The Backlash Q&A, I spoke with Mary-Ann Stephenson, director of the Women’s Budget Group (WBG), a British think tank focussed on feminist economics. A recent bit of research WBG did, for instance, put a figure on how much the obstacles to women doing paid work cost the British economy (£94.9bn per year, in case you were wondering). Over video call, Mary-Ann and I talked about the division of labour in the home and how violence and economic inequality are interrelated. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
P.S. On 20th April, I am in conversation with author and journalist Lucy Jones about her book Matrescence, at the Cambridge Literary Festival. Get your tickets here. Whether you can join us or not, you should read the book. It’s a vital, beautiful rumination on what happens in pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood, all situated within nature, ecology, politics, society, and feminist thought.
And now for the interview…
The Backlash: What is the biggest economic barrier to gender equality?
Mary-Ann Stephenson: The gender division of unpaid work. At the heart of women's economic inequality as women — and there's inequalities that women face because of class and race and disability and other things, and obviously those all intersect — is the division of unpaid work, particularly care work, in the UK. In other parts of the world there is other unpaid work, such as subsistence farming or collecting water. On average women in the UK do 60 per cent more unpaid work than men. That leaves less time for paid work because most of that work is caring work. It also limits the geographical range within which many women can work. If you've got to do drop off to nursery or pick up, or you've got to check in on your mum, you're not going to be working far from home. That limits the range of jobs available.
We know that the jobs that women do tend to be less well paid than the jobs that men do. Some of that is to do with the fact that those jobs are often part-time, but they also attract lower pay per hour. Some of it's to do with the fact that the skills needed mirror the skills involved in the unpaid work that we've been doing at home — so cooking, cleaning, caring for others, and so on. Because women do so much of that work unpaid it's undervalued, and the skills involved in it aren't recognised. For example, care work will be described as an unskilled job when we know that it's very highly skilled.
Women are earning less per hour, but they're also earning less overall because of working fewer hours. We pay quite a lot of attention to the gender pay gap. We pay less attention to the gender earnings gap on an annual basis. That's about 29 per cent, and that's the combination of pay per hour and hours worked, so women earn less. They're more likely to be dependent on social security. They are also less likely to be promoted by their employers, because even women who don't have care responsibilities — women, for example, who don't have children, have no intention of having children, maybe can't have children — employers will make a set of assumptions about their responsibilities and therefore be less likely to promote them. It also means that women have less time to get involved in political life, public life, and policymaking, which means that we develop all sorts of economic policies around the norm of male working patterns. We have pensions policy that still doesn't really take into account unpaid work. This means that women are far more likely than men to be poor in old age and to have an inadequate private pension. In fact, the only reason poverty in old age has fallen among women [in Britain] has been the pensions triple lock*, the affordability of which is often called into question. (For those not familiar with the triple lock, here’s an explanation).
Unpaid care is at the heart of this, and that intersects with other things, with racism, with inequalities based on class and geography, but also with male violence. That is because [women] often don't have the independence and the ability to leave, and also because violence often goes alongside coercive control and financial abuse. Part of the form that this can take is sabotaging women's independent incomes in different ways, preventing them from working, hiding phones, hiding car keys, and so on.
TB: Should we be thinking of women as a labour class?
MAS: It is one way of looking at it, but I think you have to recognise the ways in which women’s experiences can differ dramatically. There is a very, very different labour market relationship that I or you or other professional women will have, where we have a level of education and a level of marketable skills, compared to many other groups of women. Having said that, if you compare women, say in our situation, to men in our situation, there is still a gap. There is still a difference, so I think it's really useful to see women as a labour class, but then to see how that interrelates.
TB: To not make assumptions across the labour class?
MAS: To not make assumptions. I also think there's a risk that intersectionality can sometimes lead people to assume that there is no validity in looking at sex at all. I think that that's wrong. We are profoundly impacted by the kind of gendered structures that are imposed upon us as a result of our sex. It's just that there are other things going on at the same time.
TB: If you look around the world, is there anywhere that the government's economic policy is doing something right in addressing the economic gender gap?
MAS: People always look at Scandinavian countries. What you have there is a combination of, for example, different leave policies. There aren’t that many levers governments can pull to deal with the private distribution of labour within the home, but one of the key ones is leave policy. In the UK, we have leave policy that almost seems designed to massively differentiate between the role of mothers and the role of fathers. Mothers get a year's leave; fathers and second parents get two weeks. If you talk to most couples before they have children, they say that they want to have a fairly egalitarian sharing of care and unpaid work and paid work, but it doesn't happen in practice. One of the reasons for this is that, if one person is doing so much of the caring in that first year, they become the expert. The woman becomes the person who knows exactly what's required, who has had to work out how to make things fit around babies.
And work is addressing the question to mothers: “Are you going to return to work? Are you going to work part-time?” Nobody even asks those questions of fathers. Did anybody ever say to them, “are you going to go back to work after the baby's born?” Of course not. We don't have those sorts of discussions. In countries where there is a significant period of leave for the father or second parent, and which isn't dependent on the mother, [that’s significant]. We have this trend called shared parental leave. It's actually transferable maternity leave. You only get it if the mother's entitled. On a “use it or lose it” basis men take more leave, and they tend to be more involved in childcare thereafter. You need that alongside things like high-quality, affordable childcare, which is also something we don't have in this country. We have quite a lot of high-quality childcare, but in various places it's very, very unaffordable.
We also have the way that work works. Part-time work tends to be paid less per hour and less overall. That means that, financially, if you look at a couple, it makes more sense for one of them to work full-time and the other to work half-time than for both of them to work three-quarters of the time, because one full-time job and one half-time job pays you more than two three-quarters jobs in many situations. So again, you tend to have a main earner and a second earner, and a main carer and a sort of bumbling assistant. We don't have many images of fatherly competence; the bar we set is quite low. I think that also feeds into this pattern. But it's not just looking after children. It's looking after elderly relatives as well. And while there are quite a large number of men who provide unpaid care for partners or parents, if you look at [the data], once you get over a certain number of hours it's much, much more likely to be done by women — daughters-in-law rather than sons, for example. And again, that has a real impact on women's economic well-being and a whole range of other things come from that, such as being more likely to be dependent on social security. This means that women are more likely to be affected by social security cuts. They are less likely to be able to afford adequate housing, and therefore more likely to be statutorily homeless. Unpaid care is at the heart of that. We need policies that can provide collective support for that care and social services that help redistribute care between men and women. We also need policies that recognise this when they are being developed. That means acknowledging that women are more likely to have caring responsibilities. A “gender-neutral” approach based on male working patterns isn’t actually gender-neutral.
TB: Is this a purely economic issue, or a cultural one, or both?
MAS: They reinforce each other. There's an endless debate about the relationship between the economic base and the cultural superstructure. But that's probably a discussion for another time. If the cultural messages are that women are the ones who stay at home, the expectation on new fathers is that you've got to earn and provide. At the same time, you have a pay gap, which means that economically, in a heterosexual couple, it makes more sense for the woman's career to take the hit because she's a lower earner. And at the same time, we have employers treating male and female employees differently because of their expectations about whether or not they're going to return to work or need time off. These things can create a negative circle, so you need multiple points of intervention. One of the things that I quite often get asked is, “what is the one thing you would do?” There is never one thing; you need to do multiple things. You need childcare and you need leave policy, and you need to look at apprenticeships and training, and you need to look at flexible working. I think that the foundational thing is that, if you are concerned about women's economic well-being in the public sphere, you need to look at the division of labour in the private sphere in the home.
TB: Is there any writing or new research about this that you would recommend?
MAS: A really, really good introduction to all of this is Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner, by Katrine Marcal. She's a journalist rather than an economist. Feminist economists like Diane Elson and Sue Himmelweit have been writing about this since the 1970s. There is a tendency often with non-feminist economists to recognise that there is “a thing” going on here, and so there is a little bit of saying “oh yes and it's worse for women, oh and yes there’s a gender gap”, but it doesn't necessarily inform thinking. The starting point isn't “how do we make this work?”, and that is a problem. If you're thinking about things like the relationship between violence and abuse and women's economic well-being, the charity Surviving Economic Abuse is doing brilliant work, really foregrounding stuff about how significant economic abuse is within abusive relationships. There was some really good work done by academics at Warwick and Nottingham universities during the pandemic about the impact of Covid on the lives of working-class women. It's not like this stuff isn't known and written about it, but getting it recognised within the mainstream is harder. I think that is partly because we are talking about intimate, personal relationships. Talking about the pay gap is relatively straightforward if you think “well, I know in my organisation we don't have a pay gap and I feel confident about that”. Once you start talking about who does the care, who cleans the toilet, who gets up in the night when the kids are sick, all of those sorts of things, it becomes personal. People find that harder to talk about. That's when it touches on the cultural.
TB: Is there anything you would like to add?
MAS: That unpaid work, care particularly, and male violence interrelate. We tend to talk more at the Women's Budget Group about unpaid care because that has a more obvious economic impact. But they interrelate, and I think those are the foundational causes of a wide range of issues that women face.
Thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed this, take a look at past editions of The Backlash Q&A with Mary Ann Sieghart on the authority gap, Tracey Bignall on racial disparities in maternal healthcare, Jill Kirby on menopause and feminist history, Jess Davies on deepfakes, and Jane Sloane on childcare and gender parity. See you next time.
Thank you for having and sharing this conversation! An important one.