Ceri Goddard: Strides women have made in the workplace risk being undermined

THE labour market is in the midst of enormous change. Since the recession officially “ended” in 2010, women’s unemployment has continued to rise, while men’s has decreased overall.

We know that in large part this is because of dramatic cuts to the public-sector workforce. Women make up the majority of those working in this field – around about two thirds of the local government employees, those working in schools and NHS staff are female. Some 250,000 jobs have already been lost in this sector since 2010, and this report shows we can expect almost three quarters of a million more to go by 2018. The majority of those set to lose their jobs are women.

At the same time, what growth there is within the private-sector labour market is not offering equal levels of opportunity to women.

The majority of jobs created in this sector over the last few years have gone to men. The various ways in which the government is trying to kick-start the economy are failing to adequately reach women; investing predominately in areas such as physical infrastructure and engineering means expanding fields where currently few women work. At the same time, those women who do find work in the private sector are likely to face lower wages and a wider gender pay gap – the private sector has historically paid women less.

If women continue to make up the majority of those that lose their jobs, but the minority of those being hired in new roles, the strides women have made in the workplace in the last half a century risk being undermined just when women, the families many of them support, and our economy need them more than ever.

We are urging the government to take more action. We need to see greater efforts to ensure jobs created in the private sector are accessible to women – that means more work to challenge male-dominated fields. The government should, for example, require that firms bidding for big public-sector contracts demonstrate what they are doing to encourage women workers. At the same time, more must be done to help the lowest paid – two thirds of those earning the minimum wage are women.

As the age of austerity continues, we simply cannot afford not to draw further on women’s potential. This is about more than ensuring women are able to play a full and active role in the labour market, it also makes good business sense: women should and could be at the heart of the recovery.

• Ceri Goddard is chief executive of the Fawcett Society