Professor Stephen Lee from CentreForum introduced the meeting, explaining how women were now seen as a key swing vote and appealing to this section of the electorate was now crucial to winning the general election.
He added that whilst there was always discussion and debate about women in business, there was also controversy about the lack of women at the highest levels of UK politics. “The needs and the important voice of women is becoming more prescient”.
Chief executive of Carers UK Heléna Herklots said that 6.5 million people in the UK are carers with roughly two million new carers each year as others naturally find their caring responsibilities come to an end each year.
She cited a new report from the Care Quality Commission and one from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) which reported an increasing rate of absenteeism in the workplace due to caring responsibilities. This had to be reviewed, she said, and the value of care currently given had to be recognised.
“Caring is one of the most important things we do in life” she stated.
She went on to say that one in four women between 50 and 64 years old were carers, and that “caring can be tough but we want to do it well.”
Caroline Abrahams, charity director at
Age UK, explained that women were often very busy juggling family and work commitments and said women were rarely sitting around without things to do.
“In the longer term women want to know everything will be ok for them, their friends and family”.
She added that financially women were often in a weaker position than men:
“Very many women don’t have a great pension and receive lower pay during their working life.”
Abrahams said there was a genuine need for more flexible jobs for women and not necessarily manual jobs. She described how many women in their 50s and 60s had been losing their jobs in recent years due to cuts within the public sector and it was often harder for them to get back into work. It could be difficult for these women to have to rely on savings or on help and financial support from their partners
Anand Shulka, chief executive of the Family and Childcare Trust explained that childcare costs in the UK had risen by 27%, and the Trust’s own research had found that even part time childcare costs for two children was £7,000 per year.
There was a chronic shortage of quality childcare provided by local authorities with three quarters not having sufficient provision for childcare for disabled children, he said.
“Many mothers are trading down for lower paid jobs and grandparents can also play an important role here” he said, but stressed problems existed for families without grandparents.
He said it was ten years since the government had developed a strategy for childcare and called for it to be updated urgently after the general election.
Ian Peters, managing director of residential energy at
British Gassaid he was delighted to speak on what responsible carers could do for women.
“Only one in six employers have any carer’s policy at all” he said, but was glad British Gas were leading the way in this area. “This makes good business sense; it is not just corporate philanthropy.”
He said there would be a detrimental cost to businesses for not starting a carer’s policy and
British Gaswas proud to support an active network of over 800 carers.
The company had recently reviewed all shift patterns with carers in mind, he noted, saying the cost/benefits of this were “immense”.
Employment, Women and Equalities Minister Jo Swinson MP, said she hoped women would be prominent during the general election campaign and hoped for exciting policies in the Lib Dem manifesto that would be of interest to women.
She pointed to the ground-breaking ‘Girls Matter’ report from Girlguiding UK and said she was particularly concerned about a shortage of women coming into some careers. It was important to get the message out that women should still consider studying the STEM subjects at an advanced level, she said. Women needed to be in the “I can be an engineer” mind-set.
Swinson noted how a 20% pay gap between men and women still existed, even though it was now 40 years after parliament passed the Equal Pay Act. This, she said, was “not good enough”.
The introduction of shared parental leave was a crucial breakthrough, she argued, but the UK now needed to achieve “parity of esteem” for parents so they could split the leave up and share it in an equal way. “We need equality in the home before we can get it in the work place” she added.
She said new technology offered a huge opportunity for people to work flexibly, and tax free childcare would be introduced next autumn. The government wanted to go further, she argued, but was constrained by the economic context.
She welcomed the recent appointment of Dr Ros Altmann as the Government’s champion for older workers, holding the government to account in this area.