ast Wednesday, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, stood up in the chamber of the House of Commons and set out the 2021 Budget.
In normal years you’d have been forgiven for having glossed over it; budgets aren’t the most enthralling of political events, and the way they are covered is rarely enticing. This year, though, with our economy all but shut down, the buzz around the announcements belied the anxiety felt by workers across the board. Would those on furlough lose their jobs once the scheme was drawn to a close? Would whole industries collapse? And what about working women? According to a report published last year by McKinsey & Co, women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to this crisis than men’s jobs.
And while women make up only 39 percent of global employment, they account for 54 percent of overall job losses. So what did this budget have in store for working women in particular?
Well, there wasn’t much on us specifically; across the 107 pages of the Budget, the word “women” only appeared three times. In fact, we may as well start with what wasn’t mentioned; childcare, for example, was left out entirely, despite having become an even bigger issue over the past year.
This matters, as according to research published by Women’s Budget Group, an organisation which scrutinises government policy from a gender perspective, “58% of local authorities expect some childcare providers in their area to shut permanently, 46% of mothers being made redundant said that lack of childcare was a factor in their selection for redundancy, and 72% have worked fewer hours and cut their earnings due to lack of childcare”. Disappointingly, no equality impact assessment - which analyses the impact of policies on different demographics and groups of people - was published by the government either.
It isn’t all bad news, however, especially when it comes to business owners. Here is what you need to know about the Budget as a working woman, with help from Laura Farris. A former journalist and barrister, she became the Conservative MP for Newbury in 2019. She has been the co-chair of the All-Parliamentary Group on Women and Work, which seeks to “examine and debate the role that policy makers can play to deliver gender balance within the economy”, since last year.