The Invisible Women

This year for International Women’s Day, Engender launched Marginaleyes, a short animated film about women’s unpaid work. Women still undertake the bulk of care, childcare and housework in Scotland. Yet whilst this work sustains the ‘real’ economy, it is grossly undervalued and not captured by mainstream economic models. Rather, it is largely invisible. The notion that this is women’s work is so ingrained in our culture that the core inequality often fails to register. The undervaluation of professional care in the market and unpaid care in the home and community go hand in hand. This aligns with calls that Engender has made throughout the current process of further devolution, including our recent joint statement on social security. Women are less visible across our economic and political institutions, and do not have equal access in shaping and running them. This partly explains why these structures are failing women. Any new power for the Scottish Parliament therefore has potential to redress this, or at least to avoid replicating the same entrenched mistakes that are rooted in a past where women lacked even basic rights. We have therefore consistently called for gender to be mainstreamed throughout the process of constitutional debate and change, and for the rights of women and other marginalised groups to be at the centre of discussions. However, despite a number of promising meetings between the Smith Commission and gender advocates, gender issues are all but invisible in the Smith Commission Agreement, command paper and draft legislation that have since been published.

Whilst women's unpaid work sustains the ‘real’ economy, it is grossly undervalued

Substantively, social security remains a major part of the debate and women’s relative invisibility is apparent here too. Since 2010, 85% of cuts to benefits, tax credits, pay and pensions have been taken from women’s incomes (together with the Autumn Statement 2014 this amounts to £22 billion from a total £26 billion). But this astonishing figure is not reflected in policy circles, the media or government response in Scotland. Of the more than 1000 people who responded to Engender’s survey on the Smith Commission, however, 83% ‘strongly agreed’ that social security should be devolved to the Scottish Parliament on the perceived potential benefit for women in Scotland. This has informed our ongoing work on welfare elements of the legislation. Alongside seventeen organisations from the women’s, equalities and third sector more broadly, we have called for a number of substantive and process issues to be urgently revisited by the Joint Ministerial Working Group on Welfare. Our joint statement calls on both governments to:

• Use analysis of how legislation will impact on different groups to shape the process, as opposed to post-hoc impact assessments, which will be wholly inadequate
• Remove conditions that limit the progressive scope of the power to create new benefits and employment programmes
• Halt implementation of Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment until related benefits have been devolved.
• Clarify the terms of the so-called ‘veto’ over power to vary the housing cost elements and administration of Universal Credit.

You can read more about why these issues matter for women in the full statement, or find out how to join Engender and the movement to make women’s work visible here.