The government must wake up to the fact the Covid recession has hurt Australian women more
One of the things you never want to do in battle is to fight the last war, but right now, in the battle against the Covid recession, the Morrison government is guilty of doing just that. Rather than acknowledging our changed economy, and the growing importance of women, the government seems to view the labour market as unchanged since the 1990s recession.
In the past 30 years who works and in what industries has shifted so quickly as to render the 1990s a different era.
Consider that before the recession hit in 1990 around 90% of men were employed from the ages of 25 through to 49; by contrast, women’s employment peaked when they were in their early 20s and fell significantly during the “nappy valley” years of the last 20s through to mid-30s:
Graph not appearing? View here There was also a significant gap between the makeup of the labour force – men accounted for just under 60% of all workers.
Now they make up around 53%, and women’s employment no longer drastically falls during the years they are most likely having children:
Graph not appearing? View here Also crucially, since 1990, the peak working age for women has shifted from their early 20s to their late 40s.
In 1990 just 63% of women in their late 40s worked; now it is 79%.
There has also been a stunning increase in the number of women working into their 50s and 60s. A mere 15% of women in their early 60s were working in 1990; now it is half.
That is a massive shift in how the economy operates.
Another way to look at it is to compare the two biggest employment industries for men and women. For men is it manufacturing and construction; while for women it is health care and education.
Thirty years ago there were around 550,000 more men working in construction and manufacturing than there were women working in health and education; now there is around 500,000 fewer.
Graph not appearing? View here
You can’t only think about construction and infrastructure to get out of a recession now. You can’t put your main focus on men. This is even more crucial when you consider how changed the makeup of those on unemployment benefits has become in the past 20 years.
Back in 2001, the biggest segment of people on Newstart was men in their early and late 20s, followed my men in their early and late 30s, then followed by men in their early and late 40s:
Graph not appearing? View here By last year however, the biggest segment of people on jobseeker (which replaced Newstart) was women over 60, followed by women in the early 40s. Women had gone from making up just one of the top 10 gender and age segments, to now accounting for five of the top seven.
And that is before we even consider just how different this recession is to the last.
Back then men lost jobs across the board in greater numbers than women:
Graph not appearing? View here As ever younger workers got it in the neck first and hardest, but the big horror of the 1990s recession was the loss of work for men in their late 50s and early 60s.
For them it was not just a case of losing work; it was a case of losing work forever.
Only 43% of men in their late 50s during the 1990s recession were working when there were in their early 60s in 1998. By contrast 56% of men ten years younger were still working when they reached their early 60s in 2008:
It was a male recession, and so it made sense to target construction and manufacturing – because they were the industries that lost the most jobs and they mostly employed men:
Graph not appearing? View here But this time round the three hardest hit industries employ a majority of women.
And when we compare the fall in employment rates across ages and gender we see that unlike the 1990s recession, the Covid recession has hurt women more:
Graph not appearing? View here And crucially were the concern in the 1990s was for older male workers, this time round women in their 40s have seen much bigger falls than their male counterparts and also women in their 30s.
Such a situation requires putting women front and centre of any recovery. Women in their 40s are going to be more dependent upon child care, and most likely be professionals in health care and education or work in clerical jobs.
The Treasurer told David Speers on Insiders on Sunday that “there are women across the trades, too ... there are women who work on infrastructure projects ... there are women who work in research and development.”
Machinery operators and construction and mining labourers make up less than one and a half percent of all women workers aged 45-54, by contrast they account for 14% of all men that age.
So yes, trumpeting infrastructure is all well and good, but it is a strategy more suited to defeating the 1990s recession than the one we face now.
And unless the government wakes up to that fact, where the 1990s saw a generation of men out of the workforce forever, this time round older women will be the ones to suffer that disaster.