The ‘winning women’ document leaked from Number 10 today identifies household worries as part of the Conservative / Coalition difficulty with women voters, but offers no solutions in that direction.
Commenting on the leak, Michael Trend, Executive Director of the Relationships Foundation, said:
“It is good to know that the government are embarrassed by their failure to make the UK more family friendly, and are worried about women voters. But it is disappointing that they do not look to policies to support families as a solution.”
“Our Pressure Gauge shows that the biggest pressures on households are financial and work related: high housing costs, high levels of debt, unsocial working hours, and high childcare costs.”
“If they want to win women, the government must put family policy at the heart of Government and must start to take the pressure off family life. That means lowering the cost of housing, getting household debt under control, better working hours and more affordable childcare.”
The policy document notes:
• ‘a general sense that families who had been struggling to get by even in the ‘good times’ resented being told to tighten their belts’.
• ‘Rising cost of living’ is one of the policies seen to have hit women.
• ‘There are also areas where we have made bold statements or promises but haven’t delivered enough including, for example, our overarching claim that we would be ‘the most family friendly Government ever’;
But the only family / home based solutions proposed are ‘Parenting education vouchers’, a policy that has not yet been announced, and some thinking on childcare.
It is clear that the biggest problem area for the government is amongst women in the C2 group, and in the age 18-34 bracket. These women are likely to be young mothers, aspiring career women, or most probably, both.
Women are worried about household finances
Ipsos Mori and Policy Exchange in 2008 found that ‘the current context has had different effects on women compared to men: in general women experience more anxiety about family finances’. This was echoed in the Yougov polling in July this year.
Anthony Wells of YouGov wrote on 22/06/11 “Pensions are frequently mentioned when people are asked the most important issues facing them and their families; at 38% it is second only to the economy on 65%. It is followed by health on 36% and taxation on 30%. Tax is seen as a much more important issue when people are asked about their own families than when asked about the country as a whole.”
Women are worried about parenting and relationships
When asked by Yougov whether relationships with spouses and children would be better or worse for their daughters, a third of women said they would be worse (a third said they would be better).
Both men and women thought that ‘poor parenting’ was the main cause of the UK rioting over the summer, according to Yougov.
Women are worried about their own careers
Balancing family and work is seen as the biggest challenge facing women in Britain today (according to this IPSOS MORI poll), and 67% of women think the pressure to ‘do it all’ will be worse for their daughters (Yougov poll, Autumn 2010).
A significant minority of women are unsatisfied with the way women are treated in society (45% of women, compared with 23% men), with a strong sense that women do not have equal job opportunities with men (YouGov).
For further information, please contact:
j.ashcroft@relationshipsfoundation-org.stackstaging.com or call 01223 341 290
Notes to Editors
• The document is available here, with the Guardian article here.
• Ipsos Mori’s May 2010 poll How Britain Voted poll showed the biggest gender divergence for voting Conservative was 25-34 (42% men, 27% women) (with a 3 point divergence in the 35-54 group). Other polling by Ipsos Mori, for the Resolution Foundation, and reported in the Guardian, concludes that support for the coalition among female voters in the C2 socioeconomic group (mostly low-skilled workers) has fallen away, and that the proportion of women aged 18-24 who support the Tories has declined from 30% at the general election to just 18% in 2011.
• Speaking on the BBC about the YouGov poll which showed women were twice as likely to think Labour understands them than the Conservatives, Peter Kelner of YouGov said “Women are more nervous about the economy, about their family incomes, about jobs than are men, so as the recession [progresses] these people are feeling insecure, and it is more strongly felt among women rather than men.”
o Yougov Poll: (Anthony Wells) 26% think Labour is closest to women and better understands their views compared to 13% for the Conservatives… but 26% say none of the parties do and 23% don’t know (it is even more pronounced amongst women voters, 32% of whom say none of the parties understand and reflect women’s views). (commentary here).
o The clip of Kelner on the BBC.
• The Relationships Foundation’s Pressure Gauge, found British families are the third most pressured in Europe, with only those in Romania and Bulgaria being worse off. This is despite the fact that in 2009 the UK’s GDP per capita was $35,165 (World Bank figures). Romania’s was $7,500, Bulgaria’s $6,423.
• The greatest pressures in the UK are financial, with household debt (excluding mortgages), childcare costs and living costs pushing us to the top of the table.
o UK households with dependent children experiencing ‘difficulty’ or ‘great difficulty’ in making ends meet make up 20.9% of the total population.
o 14 % of UK and German households with dependent children experience ‘highly critical’ debt burdens compared to 1% of Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian households.
o For UK families childcare costs represent 23.5% of family income, twice the percentage for French families, three times that for German families and four times the percentage for families in Sweden.
o 15.4% of Britons live in households that experience housing cost overburden. By contrast, only 1.8% of the French population experience housing cost overburden.
o Britons work some of the longest average weekly hours in Europe (43). The Scandinavians work some of the fewest hours: Norway (39.2), Denmark (40.2), Finland (40.3) and Sweden (40.9). 25% of men in the UK work over 50 hours a week compared to 8% of Norwegian men.
o The Dutch work the most unsocial hours with about a fifth of the Dutch workforce (20.9%) usually working in the evening and/or at night. However, the UK comes third with 17.7%. Norway is among the least pressured at 10.2%.
• Relationships Foundations’ pamphlet All work and no play, drawing on joint work with NatCen on the 2000 time-use survey (Working Atypical Hours, What Happens to Family Life), and the 2006 Labour Force Survey, shows how working hours impact family life. One result is ‘shift-parenting’: 42% of working couple families have one or both parents working regularly at weekends, but only 4% have both working on the same day. 28% of lone parents work at weekends. Working unsocial hours or at weekends can mean 8-10 fewer hours with children in the week.
o It is clear that good parenting is one part of ensuring social mobility. As Frank Field has said “It is family background, parental education, good parenting and the opportunities for learning and development in those crucial years that together matter more to children than money.”
o Professor James Heckman recently told the Young Foundation “Healthy families promote successful schools and create productive workers…To foster the skills of British children, society must supplement the parenting resources of troubled families…What secures good life outcomes is not cognitive skills but character skills. And many of them are formed in the family – so one of the most cost-effective interventions is in supporting or supplementing parenting.”
o Yet those who are working antisocial hours are more likely to be those in the lower socio-economic groupings. 15% of those with a degree work weekends, compared with 38% with no qualifications.