It’s women who stand to lose most from cuts – we’re not going to let politicians off the hook

By Ceri Goddard

For all the little detour issues that this election has thrown up – Airbrushgate, Biscuitgate, Non-dom Donorgate – poll after poll gives new life to Bill Clinton’s line “it’s the economy, stupid”. The economy, the recession, the recovery are the issues of this election.

But it worries me that we seem to have jumped straight to a position where we’re blindly accepting cuts will happen and buying into a simplistic debate about timing. Where was the debate or explanation about whether and what to cut? Did I blink?

Whether and what to cut are crucial. Politicians must be challenged to tell us, because it’s these questions that tell us who stands to lose? And at the moment the answer is overwhelmingly women.

Here’s one stark example of what women stand to lose: 65% of public sector employees are female, so any job cuts have an automatic gender bias. Ask yourself whether politicians will find it easier to cut a refuse crew or a few back office staff, and see how the issue gets compounded. Men and women still take different types of job.

Women are heavier users of public services too – partly down to living longer and bearing children, but for other more complex reasons as well.

Many more single parents are women than men and male single parents earn on average nearly double that of female single parents. This means that women and their children are more dependent on both benefits and state-provided services. Cuts will harm both the women and the children they’re trying to raise.

It doesn’t get much better after your kids have left home. Women are more likely to care for dependent adults than men and when they reach old age themselves are likely to need state care and/or pensions for longer.

Thanks in no small part to the Labour government, there are benefits and services and tax breaks associated with being a carer or a pensioner, from the Freedom Pass to the Carers Allowance and more. And you are more likely to be entitled if you’re a woman because this is still the way our lives work out.

The focus of the debate on when to cut lets us all down. We’re letting politicians off the hook and we’re denying ourselves an informed choice about who to vote for.

Fawcett polling shows the vast majority of voters simply don’t know that public spending cuts are more likely to have a detrimental impact on women than men. But when they find out, both men and women think that these detrimental impacts need to be shared between the genders.

The trouble is that, at Fawcett, we’re simply not convinced politicians are properly considering this. And if they are they certainly aren’t explaining it to voters. This means it’s up to us to challenge them and make them account for those whom cuts will affect. If we don’t, cuts will have a regressive effect on the pursuit of women’s equality and will also likely push thousands of children and pensioners back into poverty – undoing some of the major successes of the Labour years.

This challenge is why Fawcett, this week, is launching our election campaign to try and get politicians to account for their choices in cuts, and account for their policies in other key election debates as well.

Our campaign isn’t only about so-called traditional “women’s issues”, it’s also about all the big policy areas and how the choices of politicians can affect women very differently than men, and too often disproportionately negatively.

We’ve built a coalition of over 40 organisations from Unlock Democracy, to Gingerbread, to Women in Prison and we’re going to be asking the political parties What About Women?

If we don’t, we might just find that 50% of the population misses another opportunity to challenge all politicians to take us more seriously.