1. Introduction 3 Understanding women’s economic and social rights 10
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3.10 Austerity and women’s rights“The bottom line is this: It is becoming clear that fiscal austerity may hold back the very growth and restructuring that is needed and at the same time, erode hard-won gains for women.” -Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director of UN Women Critical Perspectives on Financial and Economic Crises: Why Gender Matters It is also important to focus on the specific impacts of austerity on women’s economic and social rights. In the immediate aftermath of the recent economic and financial crisis, many Governments responded with increased spending (for example, increased expenditure on public infrastructure, expanding social employment services, and increased benefits to unemployed persons).392 These efforts mitigated some of the worst effects of the crisis, and were estimated to have created some 7 to 11 million jobs in 2009.393 This approach, however, was later superseded by a trend towards austerity and cuts to public sector expenditure. While European countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain and Greece perhaps come most readily to mind when discussing austerity, many countries outside of Europe also adopted austerity measures in the aftermath of the economic crisis, including Ghana, New Zealand, South Korea and Botswana.394 Many countries, both inside and outside of Europe, have been made to accept austerity measures as a condition to receive International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans needed to finance government debt, including Latvia, Romania, Ghana, Ireland, Côte d’Ivoire and Jamaica.395 In a survey of 56 developing countries, researchers found that in 2010 two-thirds of those countries were cutting budget allocations to sectors significantly affecting women’s rights and gender equality, including education, health, social protection, as well as public subsidies for food and fuel and other essential items.396 The main focus of austerity measures has been on reducing public expenditure rather than raising taxation levels.397 Austerity measures are often grounded in the argument that cut backs to public expenditure is necessary to slash deficits and revitalize economy after times of crisis.398 However, many economists contest this point, arguing that austerity policies lead countries to sink deeper into recession.399 Even the IMF’s chief economists have noted hat austerity measures have caused more economic damage than some experts had previously assumed.400 From a human rights perspective, austerity measures can often be considered retrogressive measures, and as such are subject to heightened scrutiny.401 Maria Virginia Bras Gomes, member of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has observed that “When countries claimed that they did not have adequate resources, you normally saw that it was probably not that they did not have the resources, but it was because these rights had not been considered a priority, and therefore domestic investment was not based on such a priority.”402 Austerity deserves special attention from the standpoint of women’s rights. UN-Women has underlined that fiscal contraction generated by austerity produces both cuts in female employment as well as in the provision of public goods and services. These cuts impact women both in their roles as household economic providers as well as in their roles as caregivers.403 A recent report of the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights highlights that: Structural inequalities and disparities affecting women’s enjoyment of human rights have been worsened by the cumulative effects of several austerity measures, particularly as regards the rights to decent work and an adequate standard of living.49 In 2011, women faced a higher risk of poverty than men in the EU, with rates of 25.2% and 23% respectively. Cuts in public-sector jobs, pensions and services, including childcare, parental and child benefits, health care and services to victims of violence and legal aid, affect women in particular. Cuts have also been made in gender equality programmes. Women who are primary caretakers in the family have assumed the largely unrecognised burden of care, such as for people with disabilities or children, which has grown heavier as states reduce staff and financial support and impose stricter conditions for receiving benefits. As governments recede from social protection and the uncompensated care economy grows, women’s ability to participate on an equal footing in public and economic life dwindles.404 Looking at female employment, public sector lays offs and wage cuts generated through austerity measures have had a disproportionate impact on women. Such cuts have taken place in countries like Greece, Italy and Ireland.405 In the European Union, 69.2 per cent of public sector workers are women, concentrated in health, social work and education.406 In the United Kingdom, some 710,000 public sector jobs are due to be cut by 2015 as a result of austerity measures, and in most regions, between 60 per cent and 75 per cent of jobs lost are women’s jobs.407 As a result, in the United Kingdom women’s rate of unemployment is growing faster than men’s, despite an initial surge of male layoffs in construction and manufacturing. Since 2008, the data reveals that women’s unemployment in the United Kingdom has increased at double the rate for men (by 2.3 and 1.2 percentage points respectively).408 In the United States, women held an estimated 70 per cent of the 765,000 public sector jobs which were cut between 2007 and 2011.409 Looking at cuts in goods and services, the European Women’s Lobby, the largest umbrella organization of women’s associations in the European Union, has noted that: Although cutbacks in public services and benefits affect everyone, the impact will be particularly felt by women, who use public services more than men and who rely more on social benefits. Cuts in public services and benefits have a double impact on women: on the one hand, women’s economic independence is compromised and their poverty heightened. On the other hand, women are forced to cushion the impact of cutbacks in public services as the services are transferred back to the households, i.e. women.410 In the United Kingdom, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) estimates that because of cuts to social programs and other measures which disproportionately benefit women, “women will pay for roughly 72 per cent of the changes in taxes, benefits and tax credits set out in the budget,” with single mothers hit hardest of all.411 Furthermore, the European Women’s Lobby warned that “Public gender equality institutions are being destroyed on the pretext of austerity.”412 In Spain and Romania, national gender equality institutions/bodies have been abolished altogether. In Turkey, Denmark, Ireland and the Czech Republic, they have been merged with other institutions, while in the United Kingdom and Greece they have had their funding cut drastically.413 In Ireland there have also been cuts to budgets for monitoring incidents and patterns of gender-based violence, as well as reduction in budgets of public bodies responsible for equal opportunities.414 For developing countries, austerity has been a common – although not uncontested – reality, often imposed as a condition of international financial agreements and so –called ‘structural adjustment policies’ (SAPs).415 One study on the impact of these policies on women concluded that “[w]omen constitute a disproportionate section of the losers because of the additional burdens imposed on them as a result of decline in real wages, rising unemployment, dramatic increases in prices of household goods … .”416 Feminist economists have similarly surmised that “[t]he neoliberal macroeconomic restructuring policies such as Structural Adjustment Policies implemented by the International Monetary Fund during the 1980s were criticised for being extremely gender-blind, the austerity measures that they encouraged meant that the gap in social services had to be provided elsewhere, and it was often women who took up the slack, adding to their time-burden.”417 Alternative Visions to Austerity “… the experience of the past 40 years has shown the limitations of our ability to liberate and empower women if we are forced to accept the current rules of the economic game.” -Julie Matthaei, Professor of Economics ‘Beyond Economic Man: Economic Crisis, Feminist Economics, and the Solidarity Economy’ While many States have adopted policy responses to the crisis which have deepened women’s inequality and poverty, austerity and privatization are not the sole visions, nor are they the only alternatives. Counter-cyclical approaches (as put in place in the United States,418 as well as in some Latin American countries, for example Chile419) in general have “helped to reduce the depth and duration of the impact and to leverage a more rapid recovery.”420 UN-Women has also found that maintaining public investment and social spending can help to counter the worst effects of the recession on women and fuel economic recovery: stating “There is a wealth of evidence to support this and to draw upon for a better policy response.”421 Merely refusing to engage in austerity and cut backs to social programs can be protective for women. For example, in most European Union countries, States have either kept or increased minimum wages, an issue which disproportionately affects women as they tend to be lower paid than men due to the gender wage gap.422 Likewise, in Japan and Germany work-sharing schemes include workers who don’t have regular contracts, and decrease the working hours of all the workers for a certain time, without having to lay some off.423 This has helped to ensure that women, who are often amongst the first to be laid off, are able to continue to work. However, not all countries have been in a position to deploy strong countercyclical policies. This is true for the poorest countries, where it is estimated that only a quarter have had sufficient financial resources to mitigate the impact of the economic crisis by creating social safety nets or job programs.424 In Latin America for example, the capacity to implement countercyclical tools during the crisis varied considerably between countries in the region.425 UN-Women’s report on ‘Economic Crisis and Women’s Work: Exploring Progressive Strategies in a Rapidly Changing Global Environment,’ highlights the cases of Sweden in the 1990s and Argentina as two examples where States adopted crisis response strategies that were sensitive to women’s rights.426 In Sweden, the Government provided direct public employment for women and helped reduce unpaid work in the care economy and household.427 Rather than allowing its social welfare model to deteriorate during crisis: Sweden expanded the system with a renewed emphasis on employment programmes and active labour market policies. This protected women from the worst effects of the financial crisis and economic downswing and provided a demand cushion that assisted faster recovery of the real economy. … The Swedish recovery programme also focused on avoiding labour market exclusion, particularly for women. Two cornerstones of Swedish family policy—paid parental leave and subsidies to day care for children—that were both maintained during the crisis and even expanded to some extent, have been recognized as being particularly beneficial to women workers, even by researchers who have otherwise queried the fiscal costs of such programmes …The welfare state provisions continued to provide strong social protection and safety nets to those at the bottom of the income and wage pyramid. Government benefits supplemented the incomes of the lower- paid and non-working population. These measures prevented the emergence of poverty, reduced tendencies to enhance inequality in the wake of the crisis, and also operated as countercyclical buffers that cushioned domestic demand from further declines.428 Similarly, in Argentina, the Government instituted countercyclical macroeconomic policies in response to national economic crisis in 2001-2002. While Argentina had up until that time been marked by extreme social inequality, the Government sought to “drastically change the economic policy model in order to move away from dynamics of exclusion and marginalization in labourmarkets, which had become the norm in the economy since the mid 1970s.”429 The combined results of increased public employment opportunities (all the while protecting just and favorable conditions of work), as well as expansions in social protection benefits, finally reversed the trend of increasing income inequality.430 Argentina recovered from the 2001 crisis with an annual growth rate of 8 per cent from 2002. It also reduced its overall poverty rate from 56 per cent to 20 per cent, and its unemployment rate fell from 30 per cent to 7 per cent.431 However, there is also evidence to suggest that while women workers benefitted, they did not benefit from the recovery as much as did men workers, again underscoring the need to ensure robust gender-sensitive counter-cyclical policies.432 In terms of other good practice, UNAIDS has also noted that: Evidence from previous economic crises supports the need to invest in social protection mechanisms on a long-term basis, which can then be ramped up during times of crisis in conjunction with stimulus packages and other financial measures. Developing countries that already had social safety nets in place were best able to weather the effects of the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008 and 2009. This included several Asian countries, which had already experienced a significant economic shock in 1997–1998 and had put in place social protection mechanisms, including social insurance schemes, food subsidies, welfare programmes for children, elderly people and people with disabilities, student subsidies, and conditional cash transfers for women sending their children to school. Social health insurance schemes and exemption mechanisms for vulnerable people provide a well-recognized means of reducing the impact of rising healthcare costs on poorer households. Unconditional cash-transfer programmes, as introduced by Indonesia, that provide cash to poor households as a means of mitigating economic shock have also proven to be a viable form of protection. A combination of policies that protect the multiple dimensions of welfare, nutrition and educational status of women and girls alongside mechanisms such as cash transfers leave women and girls better able to manage crises.433 Iceland stands out as a country which has taken pioneering steps to protect women within the context of the current crisis. In the beginning of 2009, the Government of Iceland appointed a working group tasked with evaluating the impact of the economic crisis from a gender perspective, and with the objective of ensuring that gender equality principles will be reflected in State-led initiatives taken to restore the economy.434 While these approaches serve as important precedents, responses to the current crisis have tended to fall short for women. UNAIDS has highlighted that “[s]timulus packages that have been introduced to provide an economic boost in several high- and middle-income countries have not considered how they might be able to address gender inequalities.”435 Indeed, many States have directed their stimulus packages towards male-dominated industries and implemented counter-cyclical approaches in the form of large infrastructure development and construction projects (for example as in China), which have tended to create more jobs for men rather than for women. This approach “runs the risk of reaffirming gender inequalities” and research shows that supporting formal employment that benefits men while at the same time making cuts to health and social services such as child-care facilities places women in a position of economic dependency and puts an increased care burden on women, exacerbating their time poverty.436 In this regard, it is important for public sector spending to focus on social infrastructure investment, particularly in the areas of education, health care, child and dependent care, as well as other social services (water and sanitation, energy, etc.). From a women’s rights perspective the benefits are two fold: first, this kind of investing helps to support and stimulate those sectors of the labor market in which women tend to be employed, and second, investment in these areas also has the added benefit of relieving women’s disproportionate care burden.437 In addition, many countries have also implemented gender responsive budgeting which can be undertaken in the design and review of counter-cyclical stimulus packages. Morocco, for example, is taking innovative steps in relation to gender budgeting and requires reporting on the extent to which women’s rights are being realized in the implementation of public policies.438 Many other countries have taken similar steps. While gender budgeting is a good idea in terms of women’s equality generally, in the context of economic crisis gender budgeting can “enhance the chances of women equitably benefiting from counter-cyclical measures, both in public investment for job retention and creation, and expanding social protection, in particular for the poor and the most vulnerable” (for a more detailed discussion on gender budgeting, please see also Sub-Section 4.2 below)439 |