Are the cuts and the Gvt's spending priorities sexist?

[AWholeLottaNosy]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and although I don't know much about economics it has strict me that whilst at the same time the Gvt has proposed massive spending cuts in councils etc, they are also proposing spending millions on HS2, road expansion and flood defences ( all works that benefit men in terms of employment ). How can they justify this if they are on the one hand claiming that cuts to public spending are unavoidable. Am I stupid or do I just not understand how this is fair or makes any sense..? Any ideas??

• struck me ( stoopid autocorrect, or too many glasses of Prosecco, not sure which!)

I think it's a really valid point. Not something I've directly thought about. Women are proportionally greater affected by cuts in public spending, yet the answer is to give more money to men (in very simplistic terms). Really reinforcing the inequity of power and earnings.

Rather than it being the case that more money is given to men in real terms (as plenty of women work on HS2 and other projects that attract funding, and also benefit from their outcomes) I think this government has very much displayed the attitude that "women's work" is something that shouldn't attract any time or funding, that it can all be done for free and in those mysterious folds of time in which women are supposed to get all the shitwork done, unseen and without inconveniencing men, who are doing Real Work. The whole "Big Society" bullshit was basically playing on women's tendency to plug that gaps in services with voluntary labour. The government seemed to think they could just fire paid library staff, for example, and people (ie women, who clearly have nothing better to do) would step up and fill those jobs for free.

It all centres around society's tendency to overvalue "men's work" and undervalue or totally ignore "women's work." My DH and a male friend of mine, who have both come round to feminism in the last few years, have said that they unknowingly had the attitude that their work, ie paid work, was automatically harder, more important, more significant etc than things such as childcare, housework, voluntary work, work that is seen to be "women's work." Paradoxically they held a concurrent attitude that when they did "women's work," it was very very hard for them (and only them) and that their herculean efforts should be recognised and rewarded. They have both let go of those views and feel quite ashamed of them but admit that they held them very strongly and feel their male friends hold the same views. Hence, the number of men who think their female SAH partners are "doing nothing" all week but who also refuse to do the same "nothing" at the weekend on the basis that they "deserve a break." It's utterly nonsensical, self-serving, misogynistic thinking, and the government has it in spades.

No

Don't be ridiculous.

Could be a bit more clear on how flood defences benefit men but not women please.

She didn't say flood defences only benefit men. She said they would benefit men in terms of employment (unless of course you are arguing building/civil engineering isn't male dominated).

YY cailin, completely agree. That was what I was thinking about - the whole dichotomy between when men and women do work, the type of work and the cost of that labour. I'd also say (as we are in FWR) that the projects AWholeLottaNosy are talking about are 'heroic', 'man builds, man drags us out of recession' type stuff (or they are being pitched as that).

Yes, the Fawcett Society has said this. the government didn't follow their own laws and did not look at gender audits properly when making the cuts. They have cut mostly women's jobs and invested mostly in men's. The pay gap has increased because of the cuts.

The report is here:

www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Fawcett-Equal-Pay-Day-report-November-2014.pdf

It is short.

Oh glad it's not just me then! I don't really understand why we have money for some things and not others. There are going to be huge cuts in public services whilst at the same time huge amounts are being spent on building projects. I don't get how this is justified? Either we do have the money or we don't ?
( like I said, economics is not my strong point)

That report is pretty depressing.

These threads make me cross and I am a discrimination specialist.

Someone that doesn't understand how cuts in public sector employment adversly affects women, Buffy?

Thing is, and I'm probably swimming against the tide here, I'm not sure that the Tories, no matter how morally deficient they are, actually set out to be sexist in their spending prorities. I think they knew exactly what they were doing with the cuts in benefits though. That or they are also incorrigibly stupid. Either way, they need to be gone and soon.

Sadly I don't think Labour will have different priorities. They've already said they'll cut until the defecit is down. I do feel it's somewhat shortsighted though as it's just storing up further problems for the future...

I don't think they are sexist, but they most definitely are ageist.

The government will cut anything and everything that won't affect the baby boomer generation. They are past the whole childrearing thing, so that can go.

It's fairly natural, as the over 50s are much more likely to vote than the young, and so are a powerful voting constituency.

I don't think they will either Nosy

I agree it's shortsighted. Making the poor even more poor doesn't take a country out of recession.

IIRC, women spend more money because they do all the frigging shopping than men, and the less well off tend to spend rather than save. We need people spending to boost the economy, so making the less well off worse off seems like idiocy to me.

As does pricing people out of their homes....

Name change ahoy.

I am a civil servant who works in central government on economic growth. Creating growth out of nowhere is exceptionally, exceptionally hard - one of the hardest things you can do (apart from all the other hard things government has to do of course).

We do keep tabs on how many jobs investment is predicted to create/safeguard for men and women and what the outcomes are. Creating economic opportunity for both men and women is actually built into the regulations for the kind of growth programmes I work on. You actually can't run one of these programmes without having shown that you've thought properly about how to create economic opportunity for both men and women, and that you're going to monitor how it pans out.

Because I'm a mild mannered civil servant, I don't exactly get angry when people assume we don't think about or do this kind of thing, but I do get faintly peeved.

Ah, I was being kind by suggesting they didn't realise the impact their policies would have on women, but it seems they did.

That doesn't make it better.

I don't think people realise what a big time lag there can be on investment programmes like this. The ones I work on were all agreed before the 2010 election, so they weren't actually signed off by the current government. In fact they were agreed before the recession. The whole economic and of course political landscape have completely changed since then.

Buffy are you serious? You think we'd count male jobs as supporting women? That must be a new low for public opinion of the civil service.

I'll answer your question though. Programmes can do a mixture of capital and revenue investment. A lot of revenue investment is targeted at creating or assisting small to medium sized businesses. Some programmes provide education and training. These are the investments that probably benefit women most.

I agree that big capital investments tend (in the building phase at least) to benefit male dominated industry. Sometimes though the rules attached to the money mean you can only spend it on enormous projects, which means capital expenditure.

But you do get important knock-on effects from capital investment that benefit women too. For example: you build a building that's going to house a business incubator, a capital project. A small business owned by a woman then gets business advice targeted at her industry, maybe she rents office space in the building and makes valuable connections by being in proximity to businesses in the same industry, her business benefits and picks up more clients, etc etc. Or you give some money to a college to build a facility that's ultimately going to train women in some field, they're going to be able to use their skills to get better jobs than they would have otherwise, etc. etc.

Capital projects don't always have to be huge infrastructure projects - in fact in an awful lot of cases they are selected because their primary purpose is to assist small to medium sized businesses or individual capability in the long term, NOT to provide some short to medium term construction jobs.

I don't think it's necessarily sexist to pursue policies that have a disproportionate adverse effect on one gender or another, only if that was the intention of the policy in the first place

SirBernard, I appreciate your considered response and as I said I'm no expert when it comes to economics or economic priorities but as a layperson I'm just saying how it looks to me, especially when council services are being cut to the bone yet there is millions ( billions?) available for building projects, some of which don't seem to be essential ( HS2)

The point of the capital projects (not sure I agree with this in the case of HS2 however) is to get benefits beyond the spending. If you just wanted to employ people/pay benefit, you could get people to dig holes and others to fill them in, which is basically what you are suggesting (without making people work).
A capital project will benefit business, so the HS2 makes travel between London and the Midlands faster, meaning commuters are more productive, generating more profits.
If we had no roads, for example, then moving goods would be slower and more expensive, thus less trade and less money.