Op-Ed: Why We Need A Manifesto For Creative Wellbeing Not More IWD Platitudes
by Tamara Cincik
Who else is bored? Bored of the never-ending pendulum swing between riding a tide of adrenalin infused empowerment, and a continuous news cycle which highlights the endemic structural issues women and girls face. I know I am, and I know I am not alone.
Today is International Women’s Day (IWD), an annual celebration of women’s achievements - so far so good - except it seems to have become a glossy marketing tool interjected with the odd fact, as brands use IWD to promote themselves with punchy neon pink exclamation marks, images of sisterhood fists raised, combined with deals on everything from eye shadow, to flowers. This day of hyper/hyped-up caps lock positivity, is juxtaposed with a widening (not decreasing) gender pay gap, alongside news filled with stories exposing gender based violence, sex pests in leadership roles, and in parliament, the slow pace of the Online Safety Bill I want to see so much more than a day of commercialised sisterhood, I want to see a root and branch system shift from cradle to grave and here’s why.
Have a child as a woman in the UK and your earnings will decrease against those of a woman with the same qualifications and same job, who does not have a child FOR THE REST OF YOUR CAREER. Meanwhile for a man, the opposite is true. So what does this mean? That if you choose to have a family, for women but not men, there is an inbuilt gender penalty, which will impact your chances of promotion, your earnings and your pension. The act of having a child costs a woman more on every level than it does a man.
The gender divide starts when a woman falls pregnant. In the UK if applying for Statutory Paternity Leave, employees can choose to take either 1 week or 2 consecutive weeks' leave. The amount of time is the same even if they have more than one child (for example twins). Leave cannot start before the birth. Meanwhile , eligible employees can take up to 52 weeks' maternity leave. The first 26 weeks are known as 'Ordinary Maternity Leave', the last 26 weeks as 'Additional Maternity Leave'. The earliest that leave can be taken is 11 weeks before the expected week of childbirth, unless the baby is born early. The key for me is how this is financially rewarded: Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) for eligible employees can be paid for up to 39 weeks, usually as follows: the first 6 weeks: 90% of their average weekly earnings (AWE) before tax, the remaining 33 weeks: £156.66 or 90% of their AWE (whichever is lower)
Tax and National Insurance need to be deducted. If you take maternity leave, you will be paid a pittance. However, if you therefore need to place your child in childcare, so you can work, the costs according to the NCT are an average £7000 a year for a part time nursery place. In the UK, the average cost of sending a child under two to nursery is £138 per week - part time (25 hours) up to £263 per week - full time (50 hours). The average cost for families using an after-school club (which given schools close earlier than offices by several hours, is key to anyone working full-time) for five days averages at £62 per week. There is help you can get with childcare costs, for example with tax free childcare you can get up to £2,000, but this still leaves a shortfall of several thousand pounds per annum.
If you have a child who has special educational needs (SEN), according to the National Education Union (NEU), back in 2019 they stated “There are now 390,109 pupils and students with an Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP), an increase of 10% on 2019 and 62% on 2015. This is far more than anyone anticipated. Because the system cannot cope with the increased number of pupils with EHCPs, greater numbers are being educated in inappropriate settings. In the past year there has been a 15 per cent rise in the number of pupils with EHCPs attending independent schools, which are not independent special schools. There has also been a 17% rise in the number of pupils with EHCPs in Pupil Referral Units (PRUs). In the worst case, children are not receiving any provision at all - 1,260 pupils are of compulsory school age and not in education.
The Government has acknowledged the issue and has increased funding. with £350 million for 2019-20, £780 million for 2020-21 and the announcement of £730m for 2021-22. But this isn’t enough given the scale of need. The planned Comprehensive Spending Review covers the period to 2023-24 and the Government urgently needs to deliver more funding. This issue has actually worsened since the pandemic, as OFSTED has seen a further 77,000 children since the pandemic, increasing the number of pupils in the UK up to 1.3m, identified as SEN. Add to this the backlog of children waiting for an EHCP and the lack of investment into SEN supported education, has left many children excluded from education, impacting on not only the child and their attainment, but also the family and indeed wider community. A recent report by the Observer highlights that almost every state school in England is struggling to provide proper support for children with special educational needs because of insufficient support staff.
Not only therefore is there a diminishing economic return on having a family as a woman, if you have a child who is SEN this further impacts your capacity to work, your earnings and your career. Clearly this also has an impact on your mental health, with a lack of school places meaning many women are forced to stay at home.
There is an urgent need to address this, argues Jodi Muter-Hamilton:
“We’re told we can have it all. Well in my experience, you can’t. Every day is a balancing act. And typically it’s my wellbeing and career that ends up at the bottom of the agenda. This is not due to lack of determination, knowledge or flexibility on my part.
“As the mother of a child with Autism who has special educational needs (SEN) I have experienced first-hand how you have to fight the very systems that we are led to believe that will support us. The current systems in place are designed to support an outdated version of success. A version that only suits one type of person.
“You only have to look at the work of Pregnant Then Screwed, The National Autistic Society and The Fawcett Society to know that my personal experience is actually endemic. I’m tired of fighting at every step, but I know it’s essential.
“I wholeheartedly welcome movements like Ruby Warrington has created - Women Without Kids and Curious Sober - because this is enabling dialogue around expectation and choice. The thing that I find particularly soul destroying is, I know we (women) have the power to create beautiful, effective solutions to climate change for example, but I feel there are huge barriers in the way of making things a reality. Sadly right now we have a lot to fight for, every day.”
If you cannot work, you cannot pay into a pension, meaning as a woman, your retirement is poorer than your male counterpart, with an average pension income gap between women and men of 38%, which is more than double the current in work gender pay gap. And let’s not forget girls are now out achieving boys at school, at university and as young women in their first job roles. The issue isn’t women, it is the system. Trade Union Congress (TUC) data from last year shows that in many industries women have workplace pensions worth less than a fifth of male colleagues New analysis of ONS figures commissioned by the TUC highlights huge differences in the average amount of pension savings built up by men and women in most industries.
In the fashion and textiles industry for instance, across manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and other service activities, women aged between 45 and 64 have less than a fifth (19%) of the pension wealth of male colleagues. While in administration and support services the average woman in this age group has built up almost no pension wealth at all and has a pension pot a hundred times smaller than the average man in this industry. TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said:
“Women face a whopping pension gap. And at current rates of progress, it could take more than fifty years to close. Too many women are paying the price in retirement for taking time out of work or cutting back their hours when their children were small. Ministers must act now, or we will consign more generations of women to poverty in retirement.
“We need to fix our pension system so that all women can benefit from a workplace pension with decent contributions from their employer, regardless of how much they earn. And we must invest in childcare. Caring responsibilities are one of the key drivers of the pensions gap – and the gender pay gap. Making childcare cheaper is a vital part of our economic recovery and essential for enabling mums to stay in work.”
Everyone is universally appalled by the murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, an acting police officer. That a woman could be killed by those paid to protect us, or that the murders of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a London park could lead to the arrest and imprisonment of two serving police officers charged with misconduct and inappropriate behaviour at the crime scene, and that all of these police officers have been charged with sharing racist, misogynistic,violent, homophobic and offensive images and messages in police Whatsapp chats, highlights the systemic issues women face from those in positions of power. The news this week that Couzens joked about sexual assault in newly released WhatsApp messages with six other police officers and was sentenced to a further 19 months for exposing himself to women in woodland and Kent fast food outlets is as shocking as it is worrying.
At the time of those attack police were given Couzens’ licence plate number, credit card details and all of these attacks were reported, but nothing was done by the police until after Everard’s murder. Society and those in positions of authority, are letting women and girls down, again and again. The lack of a response by the police to repeated indecent exposure cases by an acting police officer, which in Couzens’ case clearly escalated to the murder of Everard, leaving his previous victims with trauma and “survivor’s guilt” is utterly appalling and clearly necessitates a transparent systems change in how the police force hires and deals with gender based violence.
That women are scared to walk in the daytime, or be in the park, are at risk of gender based violence while working and could be abducted, raped and murdered by those paid to protect us, is not an issue which can be brushed away. That authority figures we are raised to trust can kill or harm us, might be a shock to some, but not sadly to others. A report released last month reveals that black people are 7 times more likely to die after police restraint in the UK. The ‘I can’t breathe’: Race, Death and British Policing report, by INQUEST highlights that not a single death of a Black person following police custody, or contact, has led to officers being disciplined for racism, at a conduct or criminal level. Despite the stark racial disproportionality evidenced in data, none of the accountability processes effectively or substantially consider the potential role of racism in deaths.
There is a deeply worrying high volume of attacks on women and girls happening on and offline. Unless we approach systems change through an intersectional and inclusive lens, we are and will continue to fail the majority of the population: women, children, people with SEN, people with disabilities, people of colour.
The economic, structural and systemic barriers to success are so embedded that when class, race, gender act as impediments to such an extent as revealed by ONS data collated for Labour, released to coincide with Black History Month last year, highlights that you cannot ignore the repeated failure to fix the issue. This data shows Equal Pay Day for Black African women falls on 27 September (a 26% pay gap compared with the average male worker), and 19 September for Bangladeshi women (a 28% gap). Pakistani women had the worst gender pay gap, with Equal Pay Day falling on 8 September (a 31% gap), while for white women it is the 20th November,. Surely we cannot any longer accept glossy platitudes and flash sale 24 hour shopping discounts as a pay off. Unless we revise and reboot, not only are we failing ourselves, clearly we are failing society and the planet.
In the fashion sector, the challenge I keep flagging is how does the shift to circularity from linear business models fix a broken system? The danger is the circle gets larger, consumption and inequalities increase, and more of us are adversely impacted. Across the supply chain garment workers report repeated cases of gender based violence in factories across the globe; while the shift from bricks and mortar to digital retail, is leading to a decimation of shop work, which many women have made careers in, supporting not only a local community cohesion, but also allowing for wrap around caring responsibilities, which as I have already highlighted is necessarily embedded into women’s working lives. Unless we address these issues with meaningful solutions, my concern is the circle of missed opportunities, gender based violence, waste of people and resources gets larger and we do not fix the system, we could in fact make it worse.
At the heart of this is a need to rewind, retune and refocus. Mary Portas in her latest book Rebuild, on what she calls the Kindness Economy writes: “In any lifetime, in any business, challenges and changes will come. There will always be crises to weather. They may not be as global and radical as this one, sure, but you will still need the same tools to navigate them. The principles of the Kindness Economy are there to steer you through whatever comes, because they are there to create a better, more humane society for us all, one in which we can all be at our strongest.” While we address the barriers holding so many of us back from achieving our potential, it is also worth re-embedding what we hold dear, our values, community, compassion.
Fashion Roundtable call this the Creative Wellbeing Economy, placing the act of making and creating with as much value as the current STEM education focus, as seen only last week in the government’s admittedly welcome commitment to reinstate the European Horizon Programme for R&D as a result of the Windsor Framework. But where is the Erasmus Programme, which has supported so many UK creatives to learn and travel in Europe, including designer Phoebe English, who found it invaluable to her education?
So what does the creative wellbeing economy look like? One version extolled by Joss Whipple, a founding member of Fashion Revolution, partner in the Right Project and co-founder of the Mend Assembly, a local sewing and community hub in Totnes, sounds both nurturing and exciting:
“As mothers and as professionals, creating places where we can contribute to our local communities, use our hard earned skills and expertise, and continue with a balance around mothering, is really exciting and interesting and satisfying. We are providing much needed after school classes and if we are not all mothers, as women we are often the primary carers.
“For instance two of our community members recently lost their fathers, so in the Mend Assembly as a community of practitioners with a focus on localism, we are looking at how we support each other through these life stages. It is a feminine, unconventional approach to how we do business, and how we organise our work.
“It feels really empowering, nurturing and it feels right, providing new job roles for ourselves and other women. In Totnes alone we have generated 7 jobs for women that are flexible, meaningful, and work around their other commitments. We need to centre women’s work around the value in her life, not just the gender pay gap, but in all the other aspects of her life and work as well.”
Reevaluating how we live, the value in what we are paid, and how much it supports creativity, connection and community, are going to be core to redressing the balance of a system out of whack, embedded with discrimination and clearly not working. These are not as simple as marketing an empowerment coated eye shadow, but I hope they will offer regenerative and long-lasting opportunities, which restore respect and revalue resources, time, labour and talent for everyone and everything in this complex cycle.
From the sheep farmer producing wool in Wales, to the garment worker in unsafe factories in Bangladesh, from the kayayei (female porter) overburdened by carrying your textile waste in Ghana, to the woman in an office near you being repeatedly overlooked for promotion, as she has gone part time to look after her children as childcare costs more than her wages, or the brilliantly effervescent retail manager in Bath with 30 years’ retail experience, who I met last month, and does not know what job she will do next, as both Topshop and now Paperchase have been sold off to online retailers,. We clearly need a new vision and a new series of solutions. I believe the creative wellbeing economy is one of these and I believe it is more empowering than a day of fist pumps and flash sales.