Women drive jobs boom as employment leaps to 32.1m

WOMEN are behind a British jobs boom, official figures showed yesterday.

In yet another boost for the economy since the Brexit vote, the Office for National Statistics said employment rose by 94,000 between June and August to 32.1million.

Unemployment held firm at a 42-year low of 4.3 per cent but pay growth disappointed as the squeeze on family finances continued. Female unemployment, at 4.2 per cent, has never been lower, the ONS said.

Stephen Clarke, economic analyst at the Resolution Foundation, said the figures ‘confirm the big picture trend that the UK labour market is great at creating jobs but terrible at raising people’s pay’.

Women accounted for 78,000 of the increase in employment over the summer – or 83 per cent – amid signs that the number of stay-at-home mothers was dwindling. It is thought that pressure on household budgets is forcing more mothers to look for work.

The ONS also put the surge in female employment down to changes in the state pension age, which mean fewer women are retiring between the ages of 60 and 65.

Over the past year, the biggest increases in female employment have been among 25 to 34-year- olds and 50 to 64-year-olds.

Total employment has risen by 317,000 in the past year, with women accounting for 246,000 or 78 per cent of the increase. There are now 15.1million women in work in Britain as well as 17million men. There were 1.8million women not looking for work because they were looking after the family or home, according to the ONS.

That amounted to 9 per cent of women aged between 16 and 64 – or one in 11 – and was down by 109,000 in the past year and 383,000 in the past decade. In 1997, 2.5million mothers stayed at home, or 13.5 per cent of the female working-age population.

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: ‘Mothers aged between 16 and 49 are still less likely to be in employment than women without dependent children of the same age.

‘One area of focus for the Government is therefore getting more women into work, and in the process boosting their pay income.’ The ONS report also showed total unemployment fell by 52,000 over the summer to 1.4million and was down 215,000 on a year earlier.

The figures undermine prereferendum warnings by former chancellor George Osborne that a vote to leave the EU would drive as many as 820,000 people out of work.

However, the ONS said pay growth remained subdued, with average weekly earnings just 2.2 per cent higher than a year earlier.

Once inflation was taken into account, average earnings were 0.3 per cent lower than they were last summer.