The Commission’s efforts on childcare did have some impact on even a Conservative government. As Julia Somerville wrote ‘in the context of anxieties about labour shortages, positive support came from the CBI, a number of large employers and House of Commons Committees’: ‘government responded with a number of initiatives, including expanding under-5 places in primary schools, sponsoring voluntary sector provisions, improving regulation of child-minding, encouraging employers to provide workplace nurseries… and introducing a childcare tax allowance’.13 The number of children under five attending pre-school education in state schools grew from 646,657 in 1989 to 768,112 in 1991. But that was not the only way that families were meeting their childcare needs. Sally Holtermann highlighted an ‘impressive growth in day care facilities for young children in the last few years’, in her 1995 report. She added that ‘the growth of nursery education in the maintained sector has been relatively modest’ and that growth had been almost ‘entirely in the independent sector’.14 Apart from any help from the government, women and men were making their own arrangements, creating a new demand for private nursery places and child-minders, so that ‘the decade saw a dramatic rise in the provision of under-five childcare in Britain’.15 In fact the ‘percentage of three and four year olds in maintained nursery and primary schools in England has increased from 44 per cent in 1987 to 56 per cent in 1997’.16
The policy that was developed by the Equal Opportunities Commission, and only partly yielded to by the Conservative administration under John Major, was the basis of the Labour government’s National Family Strategy from 1998. A marked expansion of childcare places was backed with government cash. Government paid for 17.5 hours of nursery provision for three to five year-olds, and many parents paid the extra. By 2001 there were 1,053,000 places for children, with day nurseries, childminders, play-groups and pre-schools.17 By 1999 three quarters of three to four year-olds were in a formal childcare setting, rising to 94% by 2004.18 Though there were good reasons to think that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government that was elected in 2009 would cut back nursery provision, there were still in 2013 ‘273,814 childminder places and 1,023,404 nursery places’.19
From a very unpromising beginning, the case for an expansion of early-years childcare took off in the 1990s. By taking on greater responsibility for looking after children, the government was trying to lessen the domestic burden to help women into the workplace. To see how much of an impact it had, we have to look at what was happening to the way that men and women shared their time between work and housework, and between each other.
The domestic workshare overall
The BBC measured people’s time use since 1949, through questionnaires, a study which would have been abandoned if Essex University had not taken it over. The rough story is that in 1961 women did five times as much housework as men, whereas in 2005 women did two thirds of the housework. The time that men spend on housework has hardly changed, up from one and a half hours to one hour and 40 minutes; but the time that women spend on domestic work has fallen sharply from six hours and 15 minutes a day to just under three.20
The fall in women’s housework, then, is largely due to the fall in time spent on housework overall. Cutting back the time spent on housework is the condition for women to enter the workforce. The main change is due to the increase in childcare places — the responsibility that it is most pressing. Once the share of childcare shifted, so that young children spent more time in nurseries, women spent more time in paid work. For both sexes, the balance of paid employment and domestic work is directly inverse, the more you do of one the less you do of the other. Women and men do roughly the same amount of work, if you add paid and unpaid together.21
In the 1970s sociologists looked at the impact that labour-saving devices, like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and food mixer, had had on domestic chores. They were surprised to find that there was no apparent fall in the time that women spent on domestic chores. All that happened was that these gadgets soaked up more time in more activities. With hindsight we can see that the impact of labour-saving technologies on the home was limited by the sexual division of labour. Women who were largely excluded from the labour market used the gadgets to do more domestic work, not to reduce the time they spent on it. Today, the sexual division of labour has been altered, with women spending much more time in paid work. The potential impact of white goods on domestic work is realised in the fall in hours spent on it.22
Flexibility to make workplaces woman-friendly?
One argument that weighed on the question of women’s responsibilities outside work was that of flexibility. The idea was that conventional labour contracts, with long, fixed hours, were a barrier to women with other commitments, like dropping off and picking up children from school. More flexible work patterns might be better for women. In her book About Time, Patricia Hewitt sets out some of the main ways that the standard working day has been adapted, such as part-time work and flexible hours — and the ‘zero-hours’ contract, job sharing, ‘term-time’ jobs (running alongside the school term), flexi-time, as well as weekend work and work in unsocial hours. All of these non-standard working-hour jobs have been taken up by people, mostly women, who need to meet responsibilities at home. From 1989 the civil service agreed with unions alternative working patterns with guarantees to protect part-timers from discrimination — within two years the number of women working part-time had grown from 5 to 14 per cent. Boots and B&Q have both offered ‘term-time’ working and other non-traditional hours for many years.23
The idea that flexible working is good for women is open to a pointed objection. If it can be argued that the world of work is made more amenable to women with family commitments, are those women not also being trapped in peripheral working environments? So it was that in 1992 the Equal Opportunities Commission recalled that it ‘has repeatedly voiced its concerns that the changes we have seen in the labour market and in particular increasing casualization and fragmentation will have a disproportionate impact on women’. Their question was: ‘Flexibility has been achieved but at what price?’24
Just four years later, though, the Commission was talking up the positive side of flexible working. ‘Both businesses and employees can benefit from the introduction of family-friendly employment policies which help the recruitment and retention of staff’, they said. Now it was argued that ‘Employers need to recognise the different working patterns of women and men in order to achieve the benefits of the flexible labour market’.25
Julie Mellor, chair of the Commission in 2000, argued that ‘forward-thinking employers realise they do not have a choice — without flexible working policies they will not attract and retain the best people’. In her vision non-traditional hours were important for all parents, because ‘work/life balance’ is a ‘critical issue for fathers as well as mothers’. Social historian Hugh Cunningham is more sceptical, judging that ‘however flexible work hours become they’re unlikely to produce a situation where women (and men) feel anything other than pressed for time’.26
The argument was about whether flexibility was helping women, or helping employers push them into a ghetto. ‘Women and men have very different attitudes to working time’, argues Patricia Hewitt, ‘a difference which directly reflects women’s double responsibility in the home as well as in the workplace’.27 Employers might make the workplace more ‘woman-friendly’ by scheduling work to fit women’s availability, or moulding work to women’s other commitments, but to do so was to reconcile women working with their disadvantage in the labour market. The problem can be seen in the Commission’s treatment of the question of the most straight-forward adaptation to family responsibilities, the growth of part-time work.
Part-time work
Back in 1978 the Baroness Seear was cautiously optimistic that ‘that flexible working hours are reasonably common among male and female white collar workers, but part-time working’, which she took as a positive for women, was not widespread. See
ar said that ‘British industry can only benefit by using the full talents of the country’s workforce’. But even as she argued the case for more part-time work, the Baroness was well aware that ‘segregation of jobs into men’s and women’s work is still widespread in industry, and is one of the major obstacles to promoting real equality’.28
Lady Elspeth Howe, a former deputy chair of the Commission, gave a speech the following year at Brunel University, where she argued that:
[P]art-time work is a central issue in progress towards equality for women because it is one of the main ways in which women choose to work and because more and more people (men and women) are realising the usefulness of working hours which allow time for family or other responsibilities.29
The following year the Equal Opportunities Commission News carried a double-page spread, written up by journalist Judi Goodwin, ‘Scandal of the Low Paid Workers’. In it she argued that ‘though part-time work is often considered an easy option that suits a large number of married women, the pay and conditions of part-time workers invariably amount to slave labour!’ As Goodwin said, ‘the most striking change in the labour market has been the increase in part-time working, a trend which has been described as “The Part-Time Revolution,” and one in which women have played a major part’. Goodwin was drawing on a survey, written by Jennifer Hurstfield and published by the Low Pay Unit, The Part-Time Trap. As Goodwin explained:
With inadequate day care facilities for children, and the prevailing attitude of society that still expected a woman to take responsibility for household chores, three-and-a-half million women who want to work have little option but to take a low-paid part-time job.30
According to Goodwin, the Low Pay Unit and Dame Howe equal pay laws and other legal guarantees should bring part-timers’ hourly pay up to the level of full-timers.
The Commission was still highlighting, in 1991, that ‘4.6 million women work part-time, 2 million of whom earn less than the National Insurance lower earnings limit (£52 in December 1991)’.31 Britain’s deregulated labour markets had favoured the growth of part-time working, so that ‘in 1990, of the 13 million women in the European Community who were employed part-time, one third worked in the UK’. ‘Our economy is especially dependent on the part-timer’, explained the Commission, adding ‘83 per cent of whom in this country are female’.32
Though part-time work helped women to rejoin the labour force, it was not on equal terms. The gender pay ‘differential is even more marked for the many low-paid women who work part-time’, noted the Commission:
They are caught in the trap of doing ‘typical’ women’s work, which is traditionally seen as being of low value and gives fewer rights to the pay benefits and special allowances available to full-time workers.33
KFC job advert, 2016
The Commission again emphasised that part-time work was key for women who wanted a chance to earn in their own right. ‘Research shows that at a number of points in the life cycle, women would prefer to work part-time in order to cope with caring responsibilities, and many women and some men will continue to prefer part-time work for part of their working lives’, said the Commission:
Their dilemma is that in order to do so, many have to accept working in lower status occupations than their previous full-time jobs… Women who are employed on a part-time basis are much more likely to work in low-skilled, low status and low paid occupations than in higher status and higher paid managerial and professional jobs.34
Two years later, Commission chair Kamlesh Bahl told the Secretary of State for Employment Michael Portillo that ‘research showed that action is needed to encourage employers to adopt a high productivity, high quality strategy towards human resources and to improve the quality of part-time jobs’.35 It was a problem that was never wholly solved. The Commission continued to ask that employers should make work more woman-friendly, especially in terms of hours, while at the same time understanding that women’s greater representation amongst part-timers was a sign of their subordinate position in the labour market.
One answer to the question was put by Catherine Hakim, whose research first identified the segregation of women as a key factor in low pay. Hakim put the point the other way around, saying that when women choose to put their commitments to family first, it is wrong to see that as oppressive. If women choose domestic life over career, she was saying, it is wrong to dismiss that as ‘false consciousness’ on their part.36 The point was reiterated by writer Rosalind Coward in her book Our Treacherous Hearts. Coming at the subject as a feminist, with a successful career, she interviewed women about how they felt about leaving work to bring up younger children. Coward was intrigued to find that many women, well aware of the feminist argument, had chosen to withdraw, and that ‘women themselves desperately want to hang on to that central role in their children’s lives’.37 Perhaps the argument that Hakim and Coward were making was just a sign that women who were in the social position they were in preferred to see it their own choice, rather than one that was put upon them, and if they chose to make the most of it, then that is what people do. All the same, they raised a different way of looking at childcare as a responsibility in a society where, arguably, the task was not a marker of subjugation.
Maternity pay
In 1983 a breakdown of the General Household Survey, published by Equal Opportunities Commission, showed the unequal impact that children had on women’s and men’s working lives. Among couples where the woman was under 29, with no children, 72% worked full-time (a small number part-time). But if these couples had a child under four years of age, fully 63% were not working. Once the child was five, more mothers than not went back to work, though most of these worked part-time. The more children they had, the less likely women were to work full-time, and few women with children worked full-time at any age. It was a stark sign of the way that the priority of family limited women’s prospects for work. A second indicator is the gender pay gap. While there has been much more advance among younger women, those over 30 show a disadvantage in relation to men’s pay, which is greater the older they are. The evidence would seem to say that women can be on a level playing field with men, but that once children are born their careers will be derailed. It is for that reason that the women campaigners and the Equal Opportunities Commission paid special attention to the question of maternity pay and maternity rights at work.
William Beveridge’s welfare plan included a payment, ‘Maternity Benefit’, given to all mothers for 13 weeks. The plan pictured mothers as home-bound and the payment supported them there. The picture was changed with the Employment Protection Act of 1975 which brought in a statutory right to 18 weeks’ paid maternity leave (six weeks at 90% of full pay, the rest at a lower, flat rate) according to the Equal Opportunities Commission. There was also a right for women who had taken maternity leave to go back to their old job for up to 29 weeks after the day the baby was born — ‘a significant landmark in the relationship between work and the family’. In 1984 the government pushed back on maternity rights and ‘the Commission drew attention’ to an extension in the ‘qualifying period for protection against unfair dismissal from one to two years’. This would be a big problem because ‘many women cannot meet the two-year service requirement necessary to qualify for a number of maternity rights’.38
Around 1988 the Labour opposition put the government under sustained pressure over the low rate of maternity pay, in comparison to other European countries, highlighted in a European Commission report.
Though the government was embarrassed, the Equal Opportunities Commission did offer some good news about a ‘dramatic increase in the number of employed mothers’. They published a joint report with the Department of Employment and the Policy Studies Institute in 1991, titled Maternity Rights: The experience of women and employers.
‘More and more young women are combining motherhood and paid employment’, the Commission announced. The changes in the law helped, so that ‘by the end of the 1980s, 60% of w
omen in work during pregnancy met the statutory hours and length-of-service requirements for the right to reinstatement’. The report’s findings ‘demonstrate unambiguously that there has been a revolution in the position of working mothers since the beginning of the 1980s’. What is more, ‘employers seem to be largely accepting of the change’ with only a tenth reporting any problems.39 It was a very positive, and possibly overstated, view. They did acknowledge that too few employers made definite plans to take women back after their maternity leave. Still, the results were important, marking the changing status of women in the labour market. After many years with little change, the Commission was in a position to report too that the pay gap was closing again:
Over the 10-year period to 1990 the New Earnings Survey showed that the average hourly earnings of women remained around ¾ of those of men, although there was some narrowing of the gap towards the end of the decade.40
Change came with the 1993 Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Bill. That changed the way that statutory maternity pay was administered, so that now it was paid out by the employer, who could claim it back from the government. The new law met some of the problems that had been raised by the European Commission, though the EOC objected that ‘the burden of costs has been shifted to employers’ (the cost of administration, that is), raising fears that employers would evade their responsibilities. The Commission wanted ‘reform of the system of maternity rights with employers relieved of the burden of maternity pay’.41
Under the Labour government that took office in 1997 the Equal Opportunities Commission was consulted on ‘the Government’s review of maternity pay and parental leave arrangements’, which were ‘the main focus of the EOC’s work in this field’ in the year 2000-01. The major change for maternity rights was that they were to become ‘gender neutral’, parental rights, so that ‘450,000 new fathers will be eligible for paid paternity leave when it comes into effect in April 2003’.42 As it turned out, very few men took up their right to paternity pay, which is too low to make it worthwhile to leave work.43
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