Puir women

Not now. Not in a modern Scotland. 

Surely we can do better than this. This is a picture with women at both ends. On the left it is about women and poverty, and on the right about the glass ceiling.

The graph is from the well-researched statistics of Close the Gap, the Scottish group working on the gender pay gap. Their Working Paper 14, published in April 2015, explains the challenges of calculating the gap between the wages and salaries paid to men and women in Scotland. It explains the calculation of "average" differences in pay and the relevance of calculating gaps in median pay.

In the graph the people earning the lowest wages are on the left - the 10th percentile - while the people earning the most are on the right - the 90th percentile.

Women in Scotland on higher salaries are typically earning between 10% and 15% less than the men in the same jobs. This is the glass ceiling.The graph shows that between 2013-2014 the glass got a bit thinner - women on the highest salaries were earning 17% less than men in 2013, and this gap closed to 14% in 2014. The same pattern happened across the four higher paying percentiles. This looks good. But it is still a huge gap. Why should a woman CEO earn almost a sixth less than a man? Not in modern Scotland, surely?

But it is their poor sisters who are the real concern. Because here, amongst the lowest paid women in Scotland, the gap widened. Poor working women were worse off in 2014 in relation to poor men than they were in 2013. 

Poverty is women.

Whether that is women on low wages, or as The National points out this morning, women on benefits, it is women who are hit hardest by poverty.

Poverty in women is (as poverty always is) a complex mixture of rights, of attitudes, of rules, of child and adult dependents, of education, of benefits sanctions, of poor housing... It is not easy to tackle. It requires the men and women of Scotland - from the 10th to the 90th percentile - to work together to close the gaps between women and men, rich and poor.


Surely we can do better than to leave our puir women, puir.

For Richer, for Poorer. And a Tartan Trident.

If you take a bus down Ferry Road in Edinburgh you will move from wealth to poverty as you head west. Or you can just stand in Stewart's Melville (private) College's playing fields and chuck a stone west to Pilton. You will be throwing your stone from an area ranked as amongst the least deprived into an area that is the most deprived, according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Edinburgh, deprived

This week two reports have talked about poverty.

What Do We Know about In-Work Poverty? [1] shows that most poor people (52%) in Scotland live in homes where at least one person has a job.  Worse, the proportion of poor children in homes with an adult in work has increased from 40% in 1999 to almost two thirds today.

What is going on? Doesn't a job give you an income? Well yes, and poverty is of course related to work (the rate of poverty amongst households where no-one is in paid work is of course higher.) But people in low-paid jobs - earning less than £7.40 an hour - have double the poverty risk of all workers. Low-paid women are especially vulnerable; mothers returning to work are more likely to end up in low-paid jobs, says the report, which highlights the almost 20% difference in wages paid to men versus women in the private sector.

Scotland comes off badly in the low-pay stakes compared to other countries: 19.5% of employees in Scotland were low-paid in 2011 compared to say 14% in New Zealand or 15% in Spain.

Low-wage work is a dead end - workers are less likely to be offered training, and more low-paid workers become unemployed than their better paid colleagues. So families are juggling low-pay, no-pay and benefits and it is, above all, the children who suffer.

Meanwhile, Oxfam has shown in Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More [2] - published this week in time for Davos - the link between wealth, business and tax. The richest 1% own 48% of global wealth - and the trend is upwards, for the rich. The pyramid is skewed so the richest fifth of the population own more than nine-tenths of the wealth, meaning that the rest of humanity, the 80%, scrabble over just 5.5% of global wealth.

Cleverly, Oxfam shows that the businesses that our wealthiest people invest in are the same businesses that spend the most on lobbying on budget issues, particularly lobbying to reduce taxation. Thus there is a vicious circle in which wealth is held by a very few, who ensure via their businesses that taxes…for those few rich…remain low. This explains why David Cameron and Giddy Gordon Osborne have been so reluctant to do the obvious thing - tax wealth, to reduce the poverty gap.

This is stupid economics. As the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) has shown [3], a child growing up in a poor household is likely to have a poor outcome - to become a poor adult - because of a range of issues including stress and poor health. CPAG has calculated the cost - to all of us - of allowing poverty to take hold. The cost of allowing 110,000 children in Scotland to be affected by in-work poverty could be £1.1 billion. 

£1.1 billion! We could almost afford to buy our own Tartan Trident for that…

1 What Do We Know about In-Work Poverty? A Summary of the Evidence (Social Research Series. Edinburgh: The Scottish Government, January 21, 2015. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2015/01/3233/downloads)

2 Hardoon, Deborah. Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More. Cowley, UK: Oxfam International, January 19, 2015. http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more.

3  Farthing, Rys. Local Authorities and Child Poverty: Balancing Threats and Opportunities. London: Child Poverty Action Group, July 2013. http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/cpag-publishes-cost-child-poverty-every-local-authority-and-constituency.

The Quine's Speech

Nicola Sturgeon, first of the quines of Scotland, has drafted her government's programme for 2014-5. The detail is interesting.

The programme has two axes - business, and equality. On equality, the Government is planning to do battle with poverty and to emulate by 2020 what the First Minister has done in her Cabinet - require 50:50 representation by women in the leadership of organisations across the nation.

The economic strategy is written for the long term - productivity, increasing labour market participation, and a focus on making Scotland a good place to do business.  The steps include good practical stuff, so parents in the workforce (and without) will get more and better childcare: that will help businesses directly.

The government is promising more Modern Apprenticeships too. For many young people an apprenticeship is a great way to get a solid start in work, and much better to get hands-on work than spending years in a classroom.

The equality programme is wide and varied. From cradle to grave it includes continuing protection for the NHS, more free child care for 1-3 year olds, help for people caring for others, payment of the Living Wage in public-sector contracts, and a thoughtful proposal to analyse how best to legislate specifically against domestic violence. There is to be a fund to recompense people for the idiotic Westminster "Bedroom Tax" -  a bizarre example of one government digging a hole and the other filling it in.

The Government purposes legislation on human trafficking, a horrible source of exploitation that especially affects women. Human trafficking is the dark underside of the sex work trade and legislation will have the beneficial effect of shining a light on the (mainly) men who traffic their sisters.

The Government proposes the end, finally, of Mrs Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' scheme under which our best social housing was sold off to private landlords. This might protect the tail end of social housing in Scotland.

Land reform - the subject of much of Leslie Riddoch's Blossom (and today's front page at The National)- will also be tackled. This is going to be a land war, but one worth winning. Scotland, as Riddoch argued, has millions of acres of unproductive land held by unaccountable land owners. The reform proposed will include transparency so that we can see who's who, and a shift in business rates (tax) so that 'game' estates - those that occupy thousands if acres just so that folk can shoot grouse or deer - will pay their proper share of tax. Expect loud bangs when the gun lobby reads about that.

Land reform with power sharing with local communities is the environmental part of this programme. There is more - legislation on landfill and work on fisheries, as well as support for renewables through the "Offshore Wind Accelerator" programme (a pun of a name.)

So what's missing? There is stuff that this Government can't do. It uses the phrase "short of the power to legislate, the Scottish Government is committed to…", or "...within the limits of our current powers…"  to signal those places where it cannot overcome those of Westminster. Amongst the most horrible of the things they can't do: they can't get rid of Trident.

There is little on the non-profit sector apart from support for culture and reforms in the way that universities are governed. But the huge focus on inequality will please many in the sector.

The first quine's speech is a series of promises to do her best to shepherd all this good stuff through the Scottish Parliament. This is how she would like the future to be - but it's a plan, not an audit report.  Some of it might not make the final cut. Today's report by the Smith Commission and next year's Westminster election might open new doors, or close others. 

But as a manifesto for building better lives for people who have little, or nothing, it gets my vote.

XY Scots

I inherit my Scottish nationalism from my mother.

Dangerwoman

One of my sisters has the condition but the other three siblings don't. I seem to have passed it on to both of my children. (Via my mum's X chromosome, I thought, until my daughter smuggled me into her second year Zoology lecture this week at the University of Glasgow by Professor Edward Tobias. Autosomal recessive inheritance, Professor?)

My clan name - Clan Kerr - comes via my grandmother. I know I'm a member because the clan motto - Sero sed serio, Late but in Earnest - is genetically embedded in me: I am forever late but always in earnest.

My mother and my grandmother are two of the most influential people in my life. These Scottish women have made me, loved me, fed me and wiped the blood of falls and cuts from me. They taught me to see life at its best every day and to keep on keeping on when life gets rough. And both women showed me that you carry on learning all of your life - my grandmother's lifetime of studying nature, and my mother's flowering as a writer.

A lifetime in pictures

And now another woman, a 44 year old "working-class girl from Ayrshire", is leading this country of women. She has promised to keep on keeping on for women in Scotland. She will do a great job for Scotland.

XY dominant, Professor?