Media Round-up: February 2020

Refinery29
The Real Reason You Should Care About The Labour Leadership Contest
Vicky Spratt, 2nd February 2020

Even though we managed to agree a deal to end our 47-year relationship with the EU and avoid the much-threatened no-deal exit, Britain’s economy is expected to slow down as a result of Brexit. As the Women’s Budget Group has pointed out, women are generally occupying weaker positions in our economy and, as a result, this is likely to affect us more.
In 2018 the majority of part-time workers in Britain were women, according to the group’s research. More than this, they have found that women are more likely to be living in poverty than men. And as the group has recently revealed, women are disproportionately affected by the cost of living in Britain – particularly the housing crisis. They analysed women’s wages and housing costs nationwide in their report “A Home Of Her Own” and concluded that nowhere – literally nowhere – in the United Kingdom is affordable for women to buy or to rent.

OpenDemocracy
With Brexit ‘done’, it’s time to overhaul our tax system
Caroline Othim, Marie Antonelle Joubert and Roosje Saalbrink, 3rd February 2020

Susan Himmelweit from the UK Women’s Budget Group explained, ‘Brexit will be an opportunity for deregulating finance further – and once a big powerful place like the City of London does it, it’s very difficult for other places not to do it too. One UK government after another has been effectively more interested in the reproduction of financial capital than in the reproduction of people. And the social reproduction of people is exactly what women spend their time doing: we are involved in caring activities; we’re involved in all those things that keep life going on. For us, therefore, the contributions of the state make a huge difference. Brexit can probably only make that worse, definitely in one respect: in the sense that European regulations have benefited women greatly in this country. Nearly all progressive changes have come from the European Union’.

Sheffield Telegraph
Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic Women and the Double Glazed Glass Ceiling
Carol Stewart, 19th February 2020

We only have to look at data published by the Fawcett Society and the Women’s Budget Group which show there is a gender employment gap of 9 per cent fewer women than men across Sheffield, and that five in 10 BAME women are in employment compared with seven in 10 white women

New York Times
Women Will Be Hit Hard by U.K.’s New Immigration Rules, Experts Warn
Ceylan Yeginsu, 31st January 2020

Women are also four times more likely than men to leave paid work to shoulder unpaid caring responsibilities for children and older relatives. This is one cause of the gender pay gap and gender inequality, the Women’s Budget Group found.

iNews
The Government should learn from Sadiq Khan’s £50m programme to house domestic abuse survivors
Vicky Spratt, 21st February 2020

The housing crisis converges with domestic abuse in an acute way. Cuts to service funding are compounded by our social housing shortage as well as the fact that, as the Women’s Budget Group have pointed out, there is currently nowhere in Britain where it is affordable for women to rent.

Brighton Journal
Brighton International Women’s Day Celebration 2020
Nick Staunton, 27th February 2020

Economist Vicky Pryce, author of Women vs Capitalism, joins experts from the Women’s Budget Group, the Fawcett Society and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to discuss Women and Poverty, chaired by BWC Director, Lisa Dando.

openDemocracy
Why wealth inequality is a feminist issue
Robert Palmer, 27th February 2020

Addressing wealth inequality, and in particular ensuring that women have better access to resources, should be a priority if the government is to make good its commitment to “level up” the left behind areas of the country. The Women’s Budget Group want to do something about this. As a group of leading feminist economists, they’ve launched the Commission on a Gender-Equal Economy to develop an alternative economic approach, so that gender equality becomes a reality in the UK economy. I’ve submitted evidence on wealth, tax and gender.