Double Barriers

The reality of the gender pay gap in Britain – 12% for fulltime employees – is widely known. What’s far less well known is the far greater gender-and-race gap: on average, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women earn only 56% of the average hourly wage of white men (and Pakistani women earn 26% less than white women).
And while, on an even clearer measure of the financial state of women’s lives, reflecting all sources of financial support, about 20% of white women live in poverty, the figure is double – 40% – for ethnic minority women.

A joint report by the Fawcett Society and Oxfam last year looked at how government anti-poverty strategies failed to even consider the problem, let alone how it might be tackled, particularly in light of the recession, which it is known has hit the poorest hardest.
It notes particularly how the government’s anti-poverty strategies focus on paid employment as a route out of poverty, which suggests that prioritising childcare over paid work is a wrong or pathological choice, and ignores the discrimination and practical problems ethnic minority women may have in finding appropriate work. Two thirds of ethnic minority women in employment are parents with dependent children, compared with half of white women in paid work.

A true understanding of the poverty traps requires nuanced consideration of the position of individual groups. For example, black women are the most likely group to be single parents, yet research shows they are also least likely to have access to flexible working. Research by the Child Poverty Action Group found that they have the least access to free childcare, use childminders more than other groups, and pay for all or part of this minding at twice the rate of the next highest paying group.

Barriers to paid work can operate in different ways. Ethnic minority women are four times as likely as white women to have taken a job for which they are over-qualified. They are significantly more likely to be working in temporary or part-time jobs. And they make up a high proportion of the 85% of homeworkers who are female – with often extremely low pay and poor working conditions. This is not because of real free choice, but because, Oxfam research found, it fits with childcare responsibilities, or because they can’t find any other employment.

The report concludes that the government also fails to acknowledge the particular points of vulnerability at which all women, but particularly ethnic minority women, are most likely to fall into poverty: at the point of a relationship breakup, when they give birth, and when they retire. (In the jargon this requires “lifecycle” analysis.)

It is clear then that a simple “paid work gets you out of poverty model” is utterly inappropriate for ethnic minority women (as it is for most of the other groups to which the New Labour government’s so-called “welfare reforms” are applying it to).
Over the next two years progressively fewer lone parents – a group in which black mothers are hugely over-represented compared to their numbers in the general population – will lose access to income support. Yet they’ll be facing a workplace that discriminates against them and fails to provide the flexible conditions they need to combine paid work and childcare.

And money problems aren’t simply confined to lack of income. Debt, and access to credit, are particularly critical issues for ethnic minority women. The Fawcett/Oxfam report notes that three-quarters of black women have less than £1,500 in savings, compared to half of all white women. Moreover, nearly a quarter of black women are in arrears of debt payments – and with many having access to only informal forms of credit, they can find this hugely expensive.

One reason why the government may be so poor at understanding these issues is the severe under-representation of ethnic minority women in parliament – there are currently just two. And studies by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that while ethnic minority women had formed many groups for self-help and support (it is estimated that 28% of London women’s groups represent ethnic minorities), they are, compared even to poorly supported women groups in general, significantly under-resourced.