The long march of men from the workplace
by Belinda Brown, The Conservative Woman:
THERE has been seemingly good news recently of increasing levels of employment. It has been largely stimulated by the growing numbers of women entering the workforce.
Men however, and by contrast, are making up an increasing proportion of those who are economically inactive. This is a trend which has been a long time in the making and should not be ignored.
[…] The result, for the last 25 years, has been the penalising of families, none more so than where one parent wants to stay at home to look after the children, while the other (usually the man) acts as chief provider. Thanks to the UK’s hyper-individualised tax system, families have been treated ever more unfairly over the years, in contrast with our OECD neighbours.
This oversight set the trajectory for a long line of ‘feminist’ policy-makers, ‘career’ women but also honorary ‘woke men’, with their quite different motivations from their mainstream female constituents, to complete their mission to get all women out of the domestic sphere and into work. The pressure from campaigners, such as Gingerbread, the Daycare Trust and the Equal Opportunities Commission – which reported early on about the ‘under-utilisation’ of women in the workforce – came in tandem. Labour’s 1997 victory, seen as a victory for women with its record number of female MPs, but in fact a victory for feminism, put radical feminists such as Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Mo Mowlam – none of whom had sympathy for the mother at home or her male provider – at the heart of government.
Tony Blair’s New Labour government created a Women’s Unit in the Cabinet Office while Gordon Brown furthered the working woman revolution with tax policy designed to encourage lone parents into work (rather than marriage) under the guise of lifting children out of poverty. Its effects were documented by Jill Kirby in her policy analysis The Price of Parenthood, which was to be a combination of minimum hours work at best to qualify for more generous levels of state support.
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