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Valerie Bryson
© Valerie Bryson 2008
There are many routes into poverty in the UK. A particularly effective one
is to spend time looking after other people, a route that is most often taken
by women, who are twice as likely as men to be poor (TUC 2008a). Conversely,
most wealthy individuals delegate care to others. We all need to be cared
for at some stage in our lives, and we have a collective interest in living
in a society in which the next generation of citizens will be well brought
up. Any discussion of class and inequality therefore needs to address the
ways in which care is distributed and rewarded, as a matter of enlightened
self-interest as well as justice.
The problems
When we talk about child poverty in Britain, we are disproportionately talking
about poverty in lone, female headed families. When we talk about pensioner
poverty, we are talking mainly about women. And when we talk about low pay,
we are including many forms of paid care work, mainly done by women. These
aspects of poverty are interconnected, and reflect the values of a society
that prioritises individual rather than collective needs and responsibilities,
reifies paid employment as the primary way that citizens contribute to society,
and forgets about the necessary caring and domestic work that has traditionally
been done by women.
Despite some positive changes since 1997, levels of affordable childcare and
conditions of employment in the UK still make it difficult to combine caring
responsibilities with reasonably paid work. Many women drop out of paid employment
or work part-time when they become mothers, while even full-time workers face
a clear ‘motherhood penalty’ in terms of pay, as their careers
are often held back by discrimination in a long-hours culture that sidelines
those who take parental leave or seek flexible working arrangements (EOC,
2007; TUC 2008a; Fawcett, 2008). For lone mothers the result is often the
kind of poverty that is recognised in official statistics, while many other
mothers experience a personal poverty that is hidden within the family.
When parents are in paid work, someone else has to look after their children.
Rather than being valued and rewarded as a skilled profession, childcare is
often badly paid and seen as an occupation for low-aspiring girls who lack
the skills or motivation to follow a career. The undervaluing of childcare
is dramatically clear in apprenticeship pay rates: while the average weekly
pay of apprentices in 2005 was £137, nearly half of childcare apprentices
(nearly all of whom were female) received less than £80 (EOC 2006; TUC,
2008b). Many equal opportunities commentators argue that girls need to be
encouraged to choose better paying careers, and the Education and Skills Bill
promises that careers advice will challenge gender stereotypes for both boys
and girls. However, it is unlikely that boys will be attracted to care work
while it is so badly paid, and the key problem is surely not that some girls
persist in wanting to look after children but that this crucially important
work should be badly rewarded and seen as a negative choice.
The ‘motherhood penalty’ persists into old age. Today, many elderly
women who left paid employment to look after their family (often thereby enabling
their husband to earn a family wage) have no independent pension. Although
caring for a child or another family member can now count towards a state
pension, women remain much less likely than men to build up pension provision.
Many also find it difficult to combine full-time work with supporting or caring
for elderly parents and are therefore unable to compensate for earlier interruptions
to employment by working into their sixties. The overall result is that many
women face poverty at various stages in their lives, not because they have
failed to contribute to society, but because their important contributions
have not been valued.
Like childcare, adult care is poorly paid, and it is often an entry-level
job for migrant workers, displacing the UK’s ‘care deficit’
onto their country of origin as they leave their own children and parents
behind (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Datta et al, 2006). Despite being
badly paid, it is clear that many care workers are deeply committed to their
work, but that it is difficult for them to provide the kind of nurturing care
they would like as provision is increasingly rationed and subject to rigid
expectations of cost efficiency. As the population ages, pressures on care
workers are likely to increase and the needs of frail and elderly people are
increasingly unlikely to be met.
Potential solutions
We need a greater sense of shared responsibility for care provision if women
are not to be penalised. Some important, although far too small, steps in
this direction have been taken since 1997, particularly the introduction of
a national childcare strategy, parental and paternity leave and the right
to request flexible working; paid carers have also disproportionately benefited
from the introduction of the minimum wage. What we need now is a robust package
of measures building on these gains, including much more generous parental
and family leave provision, positive steps to encourage men to take on family
responsibilities and a minimum wage that is also a living wage. We also need
to reject market-driven reforms that fail to understand that good quality
care provided by well-paid professional workers can never be both profitable
and affordable, and that the imposition of profit-driven rationality destroys
the nurturing relationships that good care involves. In brief, we can only
break the link between poverty, gender and care in the context of a much more
equal and collectively oriented society oriented to meeting human needs rather
than simply maximising profit and growth. Conversely, a more equal society
will only be possible if gender and care are treated as central issues rather
than as optional extras.
References
Equal Opportunities Commission (2006) Free to Choose. Tackling Gender
Barriers to Better Jobs
Equal Opportunities Commission (2007) Completing the Revolution
Fawcett Society (2008) Sexism and the City
TUC (2008a) Closing the Gender Gap
TUC (2008b) Still More (Better Paid) Jobs for the Boys. Apprenticeships
and Gender Segregation
Valerie Bryson is Professor of Politics at the University
of Huddersfield. She expands on the ideas in this article in Gender and
the Politics of Time. Feminist theory and contemporary debates (The Policy
Press, 2007).
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