Women and Austerity: Your Economic Policy is Gendered
Women are more likely to have part-time jobs, work in the social sector and be single parents.
With cuts to the public sector, full-time jobs being turned into part-time work and less investment in child care, inevitably women will be affected most.
Traditionally it’s understood that when it comes to wealth, women lose. In 2012, Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute denounced the tuition hikes because studies showed they would impact women far more.
Now research groups like the Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-économique (IRIS) in Montreal are saying women have been losing out since the financial crisis in 2008—by about $7 billion.
Austerity has been creating visible backlash in Europe since 2008, where protests continue to fill streets in countries facing extreme cuts.
Eve-Lyne Couturier, author of a study on women and austerity at IRIS, compares the policy rhetoric of austerity with the Charter of Values. The charter was being sold as a gender equality issue.
“But when the time comes to reflect on how to manage our budget, there is no reflection on what will affect men and women,” she said.
When IRIS asked the government whether gender bias was being considered in its policy-making, the answer they got was “no.”
Austerity is a very gendered policy, according to Couturier. When cuts to services are made, they usually slash services that benefit women first. In Spain, for example, a ministry of equality between sexes was created in 2008 and merged with the ministry of health within a few years. There’s no room for equality in austerity.
“We’re trying to say that growth whatever-the-cost is not good growth,” she said. “The economy should be at the service of our values, and not our values at the service of our economy.”
Get Your Values Straight
One example of the gender bias in austerity measures is the vocabulary used.
Whenever a new collaboration with the private sector is announced, it’s an investment. When money is injected into the public sector, it’s an “expense.”
“Putting money in the public sector is also an investment,” Couturier said.
Hiring more teachers and teaching staff like speech therapists are long-term contributions to society, she says.
“We have to think of what kind of society we’re creating when we’re investing money,” she said.
The largest projects announced recently by the ministry have been multi-million dollar injections to Quebec infrastructure, repairing crumbling roadwork and shoddily maintained highways.
Though many agree with the fact that Quebec infrastructure is in an urgent state of disrepair, considering its history of construction and collusion—and the money being cut out of education and other services—investments like these are hard to sympathize with.
The construction sector is also a male-dominated work environment.
Comparably, women occupy more roles in the public sector, so when the public sector is trimmed, jobs held by women are being lost. Women also work primarily in the services sector—which in turn are often helpful to other women that tend to take on more tasks at home.
“If you decide to cut back services in health care and education, then you’re asking the household to do more to help the kid that has problems at school,” Couturier said. “And that person will [likely] be the mother.”
Summed up, collective responsibilities are becoming private ones.
President of the South Asian Women’s Community Centre Dolores Chew has been outspoken about the winners and losers of austerity.
Whenever austerity measures are introduced, they undermine essential services that help sections of the population already relying on some sort of social security.
“Those are the first things to be cut,” Chew said.
In the not-for-profit sector women tend to be overrepresented, working jobs that don’t offer benefits or high wages. Not-for-profits are also dependent on government funding and increases—which have been cut.
The women that use the South Asian Women’s Community Centre tend to be newer immigrants, or those applying for refugee status and seeking information for services.
Lately, Chew says community workers seem to be overwhelmed with the caseload. “I’m not quite sure why this is happening. I don’t think there are more people arriving,” she said, especially not with government has clamping down on immigration and refugee status claims.
Chew guesses that the government, like a number of underfunded institutions (including Concordia), is using attrition to cut back on government employees, offering buyouts and not replacing those positions.
With health care and education, reforms are planned and said to affect higher levels of administrative sectors without changing frontline services. Couturier says that idea is false. “We need to have better care,” she said, insisting more money needs to be injected into frontline services in addition to the restructuring of management. “We need to talk about what is happening on the ground.”
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