Austerity push hurt women most, UN says

UNITED NATIONS — Austerity programs enacted after the 2008 global financial crisis, often featuring deep cuts in public spending, hurt women more than men and helped to reinforce rising income inequality, the United Nations said.

A report from the UN women’s empowerment division this week looked at how broad policy measures taken by governments can have unequal and often genderspecific consequences — but don’t have to.

“Macroeconomic policies can pursue a broader set of goals, including gender equality and social justice,” UN Women said in the 337-page report entitled Progress of the World’s Women 2015: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights.

Instead women, who globally earn 24 per cent less than men, struggle for access to better-quality jobs and the valuable benefits often associated with those jobs, such as pensions, UN Women said.

Women in all countries also work longer hours than men, if unpaid domestic work is added to paid work, the report said. Post-crisis macroeconomic policies attempted to stabilize markets and economies, often by enacting deep cuts to social services, but did so without also tackling existing gender divisions, according to the report.

Income inequality, already on the rise, was reinforced by the 2008 crisis to the point where the world is said to be more unequal now than at any point since the Second World War.

Cuts to social benefits in developed and developing countries done in the name of austerity has shifted more of the burden of caring for children onto the backs of women and girls, the report said.

Cuts in developing countries often affected basic services like food, fuel, electricity and transport subsidies which women are more heavily reliant on, the report said.

And while many countries continue to experience low growth and high unemployment, joblessness hits young women the hardest as gender stereotypes leave women more vulnerable to occupational segregation or limit them to unpaid domestic work, according to the report.