#55 

FiLiA-meets Mary-Ann Stephenson – from the Women’s Budget Group

FiLiA: Hi everybody, welcome to this FiLiA podcast. Today I'm really excited to be talking to Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, who is the Director of the Women’s Budget Group which is an independent group that monitors the impact of government policy and government spending on women and men.

Thank you so much for talking to us today. I know it's a quite a turbulent time for anyone currently involved in policy issues in talking to Parliament. So thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to us. 

Mary-Ann: Thank you for having me on.

FiLiA:  I wanted to start with maybe a slightly annoying question, and it's a question that my dad asked me when I was talking to him about this kind of stuff a couple of months ago, and he said, you know, it's 2019, why is a gender lens on policy still needed? Are we really still in a situation where the budget affect women in a fundamentally different way to how it affects men? 

Mary-Ann: Yes. I mean, I think the reason that we need to look at the different impacts on women and men is because women and men are differently situated in the economy.

So women are more likely than men to be poor. They're more likely than men to work part-time. They work in different sectors to men. They're less likely to be in senior management positions. They have less wealth than men and a lot of this comes down to the gender division of unpaid work. 

So women are far more likely to take on caring responsibilities, both for children and for sick or elderly relatives, parents, partners, friends, and all of those things reduce the amount of time they have to do paid work, which means obviously any change to economic policy would affect women and men differently. 

For example, women are more likely to rely on social security benefits than men for a larger proportion of their income and they pay lower levels of income tax, which means that if you, for example, as governments have since 2010, cut income tax at the same time as cutting social security, you are largely benefiting men at the expense of women.  

FiLiA: Within the category of women, are there specific demographics who are more affected by that than others? 

Mary-Ann: Yes. I mean, that's the thing that's really important to remember.

Although women and men experience the economy differently, different groups of women experience the economy differently from other groups of women. So for example, we know that black and minority ethnic women and disabled women have been particularly badly hit by austerity policies in the last 10 years.

We know that certain groups of women, again, minority ethnic women, disabled women, lone parents are more likely to be poor, are more likely to depend on social security benefits and maybe more likely to use public services. Obviously, women who are mothers have different levels of caring responsibilities from those who aren't mothers, although, women who aren't mothers may also be carers as well.

FiLiA: Thank you for explaining that. So I know that the Women’s Budget Group has embarked on a new project this year which is the Commission on a Gender Equal Economy. And correct me if I'm wrong, but that's maybe a bit of a departure of some of the stuff that you've been doing before. 

Mary-Ann: Yes, it is. I mean, we've always proposed alternative policies as well as simply saying what's wrong with what the government's doing, or what opposition parties are proposing, for example. But it's mainly been responsive. So you know, we will look at the social security system, for example, or we'll look at spending on social care or housing or health and say: This is what's wrong with the system and here are some proposals for how you could improve things. 

What we haven't really done is taken that step back and come up with our own vision for the way we think the economy should be and how we think we should get there. So that's what we want to do with the Commission.

 What we want to do is really take a step back and say: What is it we want from the economy? How do we build an economy that works for women as well as men and for different groups of women? How do we make sure that that economy is sustainable socially and environmentally and really what we are looking at is an economy based around care, in particular.

Care is one of those things that, unpaid care is seen as not part of the formal economy. So when you think of classical economics, people don't really think about the informal, the hidden economy through unpaid care. But our society and our economy depend on that sort of unpaid care just as much as they depend on the formal economy.

We can't exist as a society if we don't have people doing caring work looking after the health or the education or the wellbeing of the rest of us and therefore we need an economy that has that at its heart.

So we've got a really exciting group of commissioners from a wide range of backgrounds who are helping us think through it. 

We've got three main themes, paid and unpaid work, public services and tax and social security, and then running alongside that, what we call an enabling environment, the sorts of structures that you need, macroeconomic policy, trade policy, and so on, that you would need to make sure that all those other three themes can be delivered.

FiLiA: So, and on that kind of more structural change point, cause obviously if you were to bring unpaid care into the formal economy, that would be gigantic as a change. How would you even go about implementing that? 

Mary-Ann: A lot of care will always take place outside the formal economy. You know, a lot of care takes place within the home.

So one of the things that we are talking about is about providing a better underpinning, better social infrastructure so that there is, for example, better adult social care, better childcare, and so on, but also recognition of the importance of unpaid care and ensuring people who carry out that unpaid care don't end up in poverty in old age as a result of it. As I said at the beginning, women are more likely poor than men, and unpaid care is one of the reasons why that is. 

So if you want to tackle poverty, you actually need to take a gendered approach. You need to look at the division of unpaid care. You need to ensure that men do more of it so that we do less of it.

FiLiA: If you are a woman listening to this and sort of thinking, well, okay, but like, what would that look like for me?

Mary-Ann: Well, the Commission's not going to be reporting till next year, so we haven't got the sort of concrete policy recommendations, but we are trying to embed this in policies that are practical, that will make practical sense to women's lives.

So for example, one of the recommendations that we made some time ago, before this Commission, was for free universal childcare, and we've costed that to show that actually in large parts, any investment in free universal childcare would pay for itself in the savings in social security, in more tax receipts for more women in the workplace, in creating more jobs, not just in childcare itself, but from the people who are working in those job, spending more money in the economy and so on. And so if you're thinking, what would that look like for me? Well, free universal childcare might be one of the things that it would look like. 

One of the things I should say that we're really keen to do with this project is to test out our ideas, so we are not just having a kind of commission of experts, sitting around a table. We are going out, we're talking to women's organisations, we're talking to other equalities groups to find out their views. And when we start to develop our proposals, we'll also be taking those out again and running focus groups and discussions and so on with people who will be directly affected by these policies to kind of test out, do they actually work in the real world. You know, are there things that we haven't thought about? Are there things that might not work because of unexpected reasons? We spent a lot of time at the Women’s Budget Group talking about the need to do gender impact analysis of policy and equality impact analysis of policy. 

And that's not just about modelling, that's also about talking to people with lived experience of the policy and saying, how would this affect your life? Or how is this policy affecting your life and being prepared to make changes if necessary. 

FiLiA: That's actually really interesting because I knew about the sort of formal economic policy modelling side of the work that you do but not so much about the going out and talking to women bit. How does that work?

Mary-Ann: Well, we'll be running focus groups with women. A lot of the work that we do draws on the lived experience of women. So for example, at the moment we're involved in a project with a group of women's organisations in Coventry, Coventry Women's Partnership and that involves the Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre, Coventry Haven Women's Aid, Kairos, which works with women at risk of sexual exploitation, an organisation called Women's Training that provides health and employability support to women and the law centre. You know, all of those are frontline organisations and we've written a series of reports based on the issues that those organisations and the women they work with have identified as important to them.

 So we did a report on poverty. We've done one on funding for the women's sector, we've done one on housing. Those reports don't just come from the priorities set by those organisations. We've involved those organisations in researching reports. So they've run focus groups or we've had meetings, we've collected case studies and so on, because it's important that our research isn't just about economic models, it's also about women's lives. And you can't do that unless you're actually able to talk directly to women who are going to be affected. 

FiLiA: What’s the most kind of surprising or significant thing that's ever come out of the research that you've done in conjunction with these other groups?

Mary-Ann: So one of the examples that really stays with me because it shows how policy in one area can affect policy in another, was an organization that was supporting a woman who had been a victim of child sexual abuse. And she was getting ready to report the perpetrator to the police. And at the same time, she was also a carer for a child with special needs. And her child's care package was cut. And she said, I can't go through the reporting process, I've only got the energy in within me for one fight and the fight that I have to have the fight for my child. And so she didn't report. The perpetrator is still at large. She didn't get justice for herself. And what that shows is how a change in one area, a decision to cut care provision for a child can actually have an impact in a completely different area of policy in a way that most policy makers might not think about. 

But when you describe the story, it's completely obvious to people, because our lives don't fit neatly into policy boxes. Policy all joins up. It's a really, really heart-breaking story, but it also shows you how complicated policy is, how interconnected it.

The other things that have really stayed with me have been around the relationship between social security and financial abuse. So, we knew, for example, that the payment of universal credit to a single bank account was going to enable some perpetrators of abuse to continue or worsen their abuse because they might have more control over family finance.

But you hear a whole series of stories when you start to talk to organisations about, for example, women whose ex-partners falsely report them to the Department of Work and Pensions for benefit fraud. And what happens if you reported for benefit fraud is your benefits are frozen while the case is investigated. And you may well be completely exonerated because you weren't committing benefit fraud, but in the meantime, you’ve got heavily into debt. 

So it's realising the way in which Department of Work and Pensions policy can undermine government policy in other areas. 

So, you know, this government has said that it recognises financial abuse as a form of violence against women and it's committed to tackling it. But yet we have a social security system that actually enables perpetrators to continue to abuse and harass even after a woman has left. 

So it's joining up those dots where I think impact assessment is most important. 

FiLiA: And why does that still kind of go on? Because, I mean, I know that Women’s Budget Group have lots of consultations with policy makers.

You have kind of sessions in Westminster or in Portcullis House. But yet on some level, the government still doesn't seem to be getting the message about some of these things 

Mary-Ann: As with all of these things, people get the message that they want to hear, and it's very difficult if for example, with Universal Credit, the government has made it a kind of flagship social security policy. There's been a huge amount of time and effort, money and political commitment put into it. And it's very difficult to admit that it's not working for a lot of people. 

Now, we would argue that if they'd actually paid attention, back in 2010, 2011, when they were developing universal credit and done proper impact assessments, they might not be facing some of the problems that they're facing now.

Many of the problems with universal credit are problems that we and other organisations, plenty of other organisations warned about, but we weren't listened to.

 I think one of the things that's key with all of this is getting people to do the impact assessment and to consult at an early enough stage. Because if you've developed your policy and you've come up with a model and you know exactly what you want to do and then you consult, you can be very, very defensive when people raise problems. Which means that you don't really take on board what they're saying.

I remember once speaking to an Equality Officer in a local authority who was talking about how she'd changed the consultation policy that her authority took. Rather than do that, you know, develop the policy first and then do the impact assessment and consultation, she started with a consultation. So she said if you were doing that in a new area of policy, the first thing we need to do is to get the equality groups in a room and tell us what are the equality issues in this area of policy. What are the things we need to be thinking about? What are the problems? And start from there. And that seems a much more positive way forward really. 

FiLiA: Yeah, definitely. I don't want to kind of push you into saying anything in politics, but what's your sense of how is there a difference between, for example, this government and the coalition government or the labour government in terms of how well you get listened to?

Mary-Ann: There's been points where the Women’s Budget Group has found it a lot easier to get in and speak to ministers and officials. For example, under the previous Labour government, Gordon Brown had a very strong commitment to ending child poverty. We were able to make the case that, you know, children aren't poor by themselves, children are poor because their mothers are poor. If you want to tackle child poverty, you have to tackle women's poverty. And I think he took that on board, which meant that there was much greater openness to discussions about tackling poverty among mothers. 

The problem was then still we had the problem that it was a kind of instrumental recognition of women's poverty. So women's poverty was important in order to tackle child poverty, which doesn't do much for those women who are not mothers, for example. Where what we are saying chimes with what parties want to do, they will listen and take on board, and it can be easy to make suggestions and changes for improvements and so on.

It's much harder to change the overall direction of travel, I think of a political party.

FiLiA: I wanted to ask you about that kind of cause and effects questions. A lot of arguments around reducing women's poverty or kind of general emancipation of women, focuses on the idea that healthy society is one in which women are emancipated, and the economic participation of women, the social emancipation of women is good for society more generally.

Half of me wants to, to listen to that and say, yes, that's true, and that's absolutely like an argument we should be making. And half of me is like, why aren't you arguing for the emancipation of women on the basis it's the right thing to do. Where do you stand on that and what kind of language do you use as an organisation?

Mary-Ann: I think that one can be really difficult because I think you are absolutely right to identify that tension that often we are encouraged as campaigners to make a business case. The business case can often be for the wellbeing of the economy as a whole rather than the benefits to individual businesses and organisations.

First of all, it implies that women aren't important in their own right and it's only important to do something because it benefits wider society. 

And secondly, you do come across situations where the business place is not clear and straightforward. 

What we've always tried to do is find ways to frame what we are saying in a way that will chime with the people that we are trying to convince, while at the same time trying to kind of move the overall parameters of the debate. And the first one is a lot easier than the second, and there's sometimes a tension between those two because sometimes by accepting other people's framing, it becomes harder to challenge the frame itself, if you see what I mean.

 I don't think there is an easy answer to that. I think it's a problem common to a lot of campaigners, and I know that when I was doing some research a while ago on gender budgeting internationally and what was happening in different countries, this came up as a problem again and again from the people that I spoke to. So I think it's a fairly common challenge. 

The actual issues, the sorts of politics they're facing will change the kind of political context, the cultural context, all of those things can be very different in different countries. But that underlying tension between: do you accept the frame of the people that you are trying to convince or do you try and change the frame, is an ongoing one. 

Most really successful social movements have a number of different organisations and individuals and campaigns working on different elements in different ways.

You have some organisations that take a more insider strategy and some organisations that take a more outsider strategy, and you need both. It's often set up as though there's an argument between which is the right way to do it. I think if you look at successful campaigns, they always involve both. The campaign for the vote for women, involved women in direct action, but it also had women involved in lobbying and meeting ministers and writing letters and trying to persuade that way. And it's that combination of approaches that is generally the most successful. 

FiLiA: Talking of successful and unsuccessful campaigns, obviously. It's a totally mad time politically at the moment. I should say that we're recording this on the evening that Boris Johnson's Prorogation of Parliament has been overturned by the Supreme Court. 

I just wondered what's your perspective of how all of this kind of political upheaval is impacting women's rights issues in Parliament and also in policy?

Mary-Ann: Well, we're in a mess politically, aren't we? We are facing a potential no deal Brexit that would have a devastating impact on the economy and have a particularly gendered impact. And we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the impact of Brexit. But one of the problems with what's happened over the past few years is that so many other issues have been lost.

We've not been focusing on growing levels of child poverty. We've not been focusing on the crisis in our public services because all the political attention and energy has been taken up with Brexit, just in practical terms. 

Hopefully now the Domestic Abuse Bill will be revived. But when Parliament was prorogued, it looked like that would be lost and everybody would have to start again. And that uncertainty is very difficult for everybody. 

We've had endless meetings at the Women’s Budget Group that we've had to cancel or postpone or move. You know, we've had meetings where we were all set to go and then there was an emergency debate and it turned out we were going to lose our entire panel and half our audience, so we had to move it to another time.

We've not made many plans for meetings in Parliament for the autumn, because we just don't know when parliament's going to be sitting or when there's going to be an election. So in that sense it's had an impact. 

But I think it's also had an impact that the public discourse around Brexit has become so polarised, and the viciousness of the attacks, particularly against women who've been involved in these debates, has been really deeply unpleasant.

If you look at the attacks on somebody like Gina Miller, for example, and that combination of racism, misogyny is clearly coming to the fore in the way people talk about her and vilify her. I think that that makes for a really, really unpleasant political atmosphere and that's really worrying.

I don't think this was entirely caused by Brexit. I think some of it, Brexit highlighted divisions that were already there or highlighted attitudes already there, and in some way, some of these debates have given a license to people to say things that they might have otherwise thought, but not said.

But I think we're in quite frightening times in the terms of the way a lot of people are doing politics and not just, you know, protesters outside the Supreme Court screaming abuse at people. But the way politicians are talking, the way the media is talking about the judiciary, for example, or elected MPs, you know, language around traitors betraying the will of the people. All of those sorts of things is a very, very dangerous route to go down. 

FiLiA: And something that Women’s Budget Group has been saying for a while now is that Brexit could have a really negative impact on women's lives. 

What can be done to mitigate that? Or is there anything that can be done?

Mary-Ann: Well, I mean, for a start, I would say if we could find a way to avoid Brexit altogether, that would be a good thing. We know that any model of Brexit is going to have a negative impact on the economy. You know, because we are now facing a no deal Brexit, the withdrawal agreement negotiated by Theresa May is almost being presented as some sort of sensible compromise, but that would have a really negative impact on the economy as well,

The reason it would have a particular impact on women is because as I said at the beginning, women are differently situated near economy, doing different jobs, taking different roles. So for example, as workers, we don't know exactly how Brexit will play out in terms of which sectors will be hit the hardest. And we can look at the sectors that are most dependent on trade with the EU for exports or inputs, for example, the health service, which is quite dependent on the EU for inputs, both medicines and medical supplies employs over 70% women. That's going to be hit very badly. The sectors like clothing and textiles employ large numbers of women. We've seen with the collapse of Thomas Cook. Now, obviously that's not just about Brexit. There was a whole load of other things going on, but I think Brexit helped push a company that was already in trouble over the edge. 

The majority of people who've lost their jobs as a result of the collapse of Thomas Cook have been women. We are likely to see an impact on the High Street with increased prices of EU imports, and that's going to have a big impact on women's jobs.

We are also losing the underpinning that EU law provided to UK law, so it's not that laws will disappear overnight. We still have employment rights, equality rights in UK law. But future government could get rid of those fairly easily, whereas when we're a member of the EU, they couldn't have done that.

It's going to have an impact on women as consumers. Women are more likely to manage household budgets and particularly in poorer households. Generally speaking, if managing a household budget means deciding on investments and shares, it tends to be seen as a man's job, and if it means deciding whether to pay the electricity bill or buy your kids new shoes, then it tends to be seen as the women's job.

So if you're looking at poor families who are going to be faced with rising costs of food, possible squeeze on wages or unemployment, it's going to be women who are managing those family budgets. And we know that women are, what are called the shock absorbers of poverty, so they're more likely to go without food or warmth themselves in order to make sure that their families' needs are met.

Brexit is also going to impact women as users of public services. If the economy is hit in the way that most economists predict it will be, that will mean lower GDP than we expected, and potentially less money for public services. Now what governments do in response to that is, is a political choice.

So they could decide to borrow more money to invest in public services. They don't need to cut public spending further. But if you look at what happened after the financial crisis and if they follow those sorts of policies, then we're going to see more austerity and more cuts. And we know that impacts women harder than men and black and minority ethnic women and disabled women, hardest of all.

 It is a pretty grim picture. 

FiLiA: Is there a silver lining anywhere? Is there kind of an area in which women are financially better off or socially better off than they were say five years ago? 

Mary-Ann: Well, it depends on which women you are talking about, doesn't it? So if you look at women who are on social security benefits, for example, they are certainly not better off than they were five years ago. They're worse off than they were five years ago because their benefits have been frozen while the cost of living has gone up. 

The link between levels of housing benefit, for example, and actual rent has largely been broken. So there's a huge gap, a shortfall that people are having to make up from elsewhere.

 Other groups of women are maybe better off.

We've seen things like the impact of the pay gap reporting, which is starting conversations in companies and industries about equal pay and is highlighting the continued problem of unequal pay and also the related problem, the lack of women in senior management positions. And so you start to see some action on those areas.

But overall, after 10 years of austerity, which has hit women harder than men, I think it would be quite hard to argue that women are better off. 

I don’t know if you saw last year the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty came to the UK and he said, when he was releasing his final report, that if you'd put a bunch of misogynists in a room, they couldn't have come up with anything worse in the austerity policies of the last 10 years, which is fairly damning, really coming from a UN expert.

FiLiA:  I was aware of the UN Special Rapporteur but I didn't realise that he'd actually said that. 

I just have one last question for you. 

What are your plans for the rest of this year and next year, and how can people get involved or stay in touch with what the Women’s Budget Group are doing?

Mary-Ann: Okay, so we've got our Commission on the Gender Equal Economy and that's going to be a major focus for our work. We're working on plans at the moment for a project that will help local women's organisations get better access to local data so they can do some of their own analysis at a local level.

That's going to start next year. So it's at a very early stage. We're also working with a group of women's organisations around preparing for the election and trying to pull together some joint work as we're expecting an election sometime this autumn. 

In terms of how people get in touch with us, our website is wbg.org.uk where you can join the Women’s Budget Group. It's free to join. We send out regular newsletters. We're also on Twitter and you can follow us on Twitter. You can find us on Facebook. And we have lots of information about meetings and events. We launched last year an early career network, which is for women at the beginning of their careers in research and social policy around women in the economy. So that's mainly involving kind of students and others. 

We have conferences, we have calls for papers, we organise events with the ECN and so on. All of our events are free, and you can find out about them on our website and get in touch that way.

FiLiA: Thank you so much for what has been well for me, a fascinating conversation. I feel like I've learned a lot. Thank you very much.

Mary-Ann: Thank you very, very much.