By Anna Ritchie Allan, Executive Director, Close the Gap
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Close the Gap was working to highlight the increasing precarity of women’s employment in Scotland. This labour market trend was then exacerbated by Covid-19 job disruption which hit women the hardest, risking a rollback of progress that had been made on women’s equality and rights. The cost of living crisis has magnified the inequalities that women face in engaging with the labour market, pushing many into further and deeper poverty. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men, more likely to experience in-work poverty, and more likely to experience persistent poverty than men. Disabled women, single parents – more than 90% of whom are women, and racially minoritised women are particularly at risk of poverty. Women’s poverty is also intrinsically linked to child poverty.
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on the need to address the gender pay gap, although where action is taken by employers this tends to focus on increasing the number of women senior roles. This is, of course, important so that women have equal access to power and decision-making roles, and higher paid jobs. However, it’s rare to see action that will improve the pay and conditions for women in the lowest paid, insecure work. The gendered dimensions of low pay and insecure work are routinely invisible in employer equality work, and in government policymaking.
Women’s disproportionate responsibility for childcare and care for adults influences whether they have a job, which job they have, and how much they get paid. Three-quarters of part-time workers are women, and most part-time work is found in low-paid, stereotypically female, undervalued jobs and sectors such as care, cleaning, admin and retail. This is a key driver of women’s and children’s poverty, and gender pay gap. What is less visible is the way that insecure work defines many women’s experiences of the labour market.
UK labour market data shows that men and women experience broadly similar rates of insecure work. However, analysis by the Work Foundation highlights that women are almost twice as likely (1.8 times) as men to be in severely insecure work, and this is worse for mothers, disabled women, and women from Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds. The Work Foundation estimates that just over a quarter (26%) of working women (3.9 million) in the UK are in severely insecure work in the UK, compared to 14% of working men. This inequality is reflected at all levels, with even women in the most senior positions twice as likely as men to experience severely insecure work (9.2% compared with 4.5%).
Research from Living Wage Foundation also finds that women are more likely than men to experience most types of insecure work. For example, women are more than twice as likely to be underemployed than men (defined as working less than 16 hours and wanting to work more); more likely to be on zero-hour contracts; and more likely to experience pay or hour volatility.
Other research shows that while equal numbers of men and women (26%) reported experiencing unexpected cancellations of shifts in the past 12 months, women were more likely than men to report receiving no payment when shifts were cancelled (29% compared to 20%). This presents particular challenges for women in planning childcare around irregular shift patterns and also gives rise to the so-called “insecurity premium” – the extra costs workers have to cover as a result of being called into work, such as last minute childcare or transport costs. The lack of reliable working hours creates issues around financial planning for women, forcing them into debt or into arrears.
The prevalence of women in severely insecure work means that they are more likely than men to be missing out on critical employment rights and protections such as sick pay, protection from dismissal, and redundancy pay. Many women are also missing out on basic rights that are essential to advancing gender equality at work such as maternity/paternity pay, the right to return to work after maternity leave, and the right to request flexible working. This insecurity has a long-term scarring effect on women’s careers, their financial security, including in retirement, and their mental wellbeing.
A lack of employment rights makes it difficult for women to request a change in hours or working pattern, or to resist an imposed change. Workers who are unable to accept shifts because of their caring role report that they’re not offered as many, or for sometimes any, shifts in future. Insecure work also creates a conducive context for sexual harassment. Young women in particular are over-represented in insecure work, and are also more likely to experience sexual harassment. Women who are reliant on shift allocation are more likely to be exploited by perpetrators and less likely to report sexual harassment.
Addressing insecure work and improving job quality for women is a necessary step in tackling women’s and children’s poverty, and closing the gender pay gap. It also makes good business sense for employers to offer quality work as it improves staff productivity, morale and retention. Becoming Living Hours accredited is one way for employers to demonstrate leadership on this, and we welcome the increasing number of organisations signing up. I’m proud that Close the Gap is one of those newly-accredited organisations. We’re clear that quality work which provides women with fair pay and conditions needs to be central to Scotland’s ambitions for a wellbeing economy.
Visit Living Hours or contact accreditation@povertyalliance.org to find out more.