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WES27310.1177/0950017012460314Work, Employment & SocietyRubery and Rafferty

Article

Work, employment and society

Women and recession revisited

27(3) 414­–432
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0950017012460314
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Jill Rubery
University of Manchester, UK

Anthony Rafferty
University of Manchester, UK

Abstract
In earlier work (Rubery, 1988), the extent to which women might act as a flexible reserve
over the business cycle was argued to depend on three main factors: the pattern of gender
segregation and its relationship to employment change; women’s commitment to labour market
participation; and state policy and support for women’s employment. This article revisits these
factors in the context of the 2008/9 recession and the follow-on austerity policy to explore how
gender segregation is associated with employment change by gender, how far reduced demand is
influencing women’s labour market participation, and the implications of changes in public policy
associated with austerity and reduced labour demand for women’s future employment position.

Keywords
employment, gender, gender pay gap, gender segregation, recession, welfare

Introduction
The financial crisis and subsequent austerity policy has reawakened debate on the gender
impact of the economic cycle (Rake, 2009; Swaffield, 2011; TUC, 2010) and provides a
timely opportunity to return to frameworks developed in earlier work (Rubery, 1988) to
explore the extent to which women’s employment position is vulnerable to recessionary
factors in general and to the specifics of the impacts of the most recent recession and
austerity policy. This work suggested that women’s vulnerability could be considered
from three perspectives. First from the demand side, where the immediate recessionary
effects are influenced by the pattern and form of gender segregation. Segregation reduces
direct competition between men and women for jobs (Bettio, 2002) but exposes or pro-
tects women as a consequence of differential recessionary effects on sectors and

Corresponding author:
Jill Rubery, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Booth St West, Manchester, M15 6PB, UK.
Email: Jill.Rubery@manchester.ac.uk

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Rubery and Rafferty 415

occupations. However, as the recession moves from downturn to recovery, changes in

gender segregation may occur if the recession promotes processes of gender substitution.
The second perspective concerns women’s commitment to labour market participation
and the notion that women may act as a flexible labour reserve that is more likely or more
willing than men to retreat into inactivity at times of low economic demand. The third
perspective concerns the role of state and employer policies in supporting women’s
employment and the potential impact of changes in this policy framework. Over the past
15 years or so much of the rationale for policies at national or EU level to promote gen-
der equality in employment has been centred on the business case that gender equality
enables employers to retain female staff and capitalize on their investments (Dickens,
2006), or the wider economic case that higher female employment counters the effects of
an ageing population (Lewis and Campbell, 2007). In the context of higher unemploy-
ment these rationales are likely to weaken, with potential consequences for continuity
and progress in gender equality policies.
These perspectives on women’s vulnerability to the business cycle are outlined in the
first section below. This is followed by a first empirical look at how such factors are play-
ing out in the current crisis. The focus is on identifying links between men’s and wom-
en’s relative job loss and patterns of sectoral gender segregation, on evidence for women’s
commitment to labour force participation, and on exploring women’s potential vulnera-
bility to the weakening or reversal of policies to promote gender equality. Given the short
time frame and the rapidly changing economic and policy context, these empirical find-
ings must be considered more suggestive than definitive. The final section reviews their
implications for theoretical understandings of women’s relationship to waged employ-
ment and for identifying the prospects for women in the current age of austerity.

Women’s employment and the business cycle

The rationale for returning to the issue of women and recession stems first from the
proposition that gender differences in recessionary effects are related to the different
characteristics and roles of women both in the labour market − as indicated by differ-
ences by gender in job allocation, working time and pay − and in the household economy
and welfare state. These differences may not only influence the immediate outcomes of
a downturn for women compared to men but also the pattern of changes taking place
within the business cycle and associated incentives for economic restructuring.
Furthermore, both gender relations and the associated gendered labour market character-
istics are taken to be constructed socially. Thus the gendered impact of a recession will
not be the same across time and space as differences can be expected in women’s relative
position in the labour market or welfare system linked to varying degrees of attachment
to employment and varying social norms and household arrangements. These factors
together suggest that variable outcomes can be expected, reflecting both the characteris-
tics of the particular recession but also the variable but evolving pattern of gender
differences.
Gender segregation is still a pervasive characteristic of all labour markets, including
the UK (Bettio and Verashchagina, 2009)1 even though the extent and form of segrega-
tion continues to evolve (Scott et al., 2010). Differences in men and women’s propensity

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416 Work, employment and society 27(3)

to be employed are found by sector, workplace and occupation (Bettio and Verashchagina,
2009; Dex and Forth, 2009). To the extent that these differences are based on enduring
social norms or sex-typing of jobs, the immediate impacts of recession can be expected
to arise primarily through quantity changes in female vs male sex-typed jobs rather than
by direct competition between the sexes. If women are regarded as a flexible labour sup-
ply, they may be more likely to be employed in buffer jobs − numerically flexible labour-
intensive jobs that enable employers to readily adjust labour input in line with variations
in demand (Bettio, 1988). This buffer role may apply to whole sectors, where demand
may be expected to be more volatile across the business cycle or may apply within either
sectors or individual workplaces. The share of buffer jobs in the economy may itself be
influenced by gender difference. Although early versions of segmented labour markets
attributed the existence of low skill, labour-intensive jobs to the differential impact of
technology (Doeringer and Piore, 1971), more feminist interpretations saw the crowding
of women into these roles as reducing pay and incentives to create stable high-value-
added jobs in these sectors or occupations − that is, job quality may be an outcome of the
employment of women, particularly when women are employed on differentiated con-
tracts such as part-time work that facilitate a core vs periphery human resource policy
(Bergmann, 1986). Although part-time workers may have permanent contracts
(Kalleberg, 2001), they may still be excluded from career ladders (Tomlinson, 2006) or
high involvement human resource policies (Kauhanen, 2009) designed to encourage low
turnover among the core. Women may thereby offer more flexibility and higher turnover
as a consequence of poor job quality (Felstead and Gallie, 2004). This approach empha-
sizes that women’s employment may be organized to provide flexibility to employers,
acting as a buffer to protect the male ‘core’ workforce.
However, not all forms of gender segregation are linked to business cycle flexibility,
and sex typing of occupations and sectors provides women with protected as well as
buffer jobs. Segregation may protect women against job loss by shielding them from
competition from men (Bettio, 2002; Milkman, 1976) and by placing women in pro-
tected sectors. For employers this type of segregation acts as a source of labour market
rigidity, restricting their use of women as buffers and opportunities to deploy women as
cheap labour substitutes in male-typed jobs. In testing for how far women’s employment
was more or less cyclically sensitive than men’s in earlier recessions, research found, for
both the UK and the US, that greater cyclical volatility for women was primarily con-
fined to a number of manufacturing industries and was not found either for employment
as a whole or in sectors where women’s employment share was low. These results were
interpreted as implying that women were taking on primarily buffer roles (losing more
jobs than their share of employment would suggest) in some sectors such as manufactur-
ing, but were in more protected occupations in other sectors where their share of job loss
was even lower than proportionate to their employment share (Humphries, 1988; Rubery
and Tarling, 1988). At the aggregate labour market level women’s employment rate con-
tinued to rise as overall they tended to be overrepresented in the more protected sectors.
While the pattern of segregation at the start of the recession is likely to shape the
immediate pattern of job loss, changes in segregation may subsequently be induced by or
accelerated by the business cycle. Although sex-typing is relatively enduring there are
longer-term processes of change in the actual form of segregation, induced in part by

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Rubery and Rafferty 417

women’s distinctive characteristic of working for lower wages than equivalent men and
by changes in the nature of jobs associated with organizational and technological change.
Importantly, processes of substitution or desegregation may not result in the reduction of
segregation in the longer term but in the emergence of new forms of sex-typing, with
many occupations becoming either feminized or subdivided into male- and female-
dominated segments. This approach has been most extensively developed in Reskin and
Roos’s (1990) analysis of changing occupational and gender hierarchies in the US (for
the UK see Bolton and Muzio, 2007; Crompton and Sanderson, 1990; Grimshaw and
Rubery, 2007). Processes of gender substitution have been linked to conditions of labour
shortage at the prevailing wage rate, as in Reskin and Roos’s case studies. Thus, in the
early phase of the recession where jobs are cut and few vacancies emerge, substitution
may be curtailed but may be reinvigorated when vacancies begin to emerge but employ-
ers seek to fill them at low cost.
The key conclusion of this earlier research on the links between gender segregation
and recession was that women may take on all three roles; some women may provide a
flexible reserve in buffer jobs, some may provide services that are protected from cycli-
cal volatility, and some may enter new jobs that provide direct or indirect substitutes for
higher-paid core jobs. These different roles will affect different labour force groups and
sectors and at different stages in the business cycle. The importance of these different
processes can also be expected to vary between recessions.
The notion that women may act as either a voluntary or involuntary labour reserve
(Bruegel, 1979; Rubery and Tarling, 1982) is again related to women’s presumed distinc-
tive characteristics as carers first and labour force participants second. Despite the
Marxist origins of the concept where the floating or latent reserve army acts in competi-
tion with the core labour force, the notion of women moving flexibly between work and
household now informs more of the debate in mainstream economics on labour market
flexibility, where it is presumed that all women are contingent and intermittent partici-
pants and will consequently be negatively affected by employment protection legislation
(Bertola et al., 2002; OECD, 2006). Women as outsiders, along with others such as
younger people, are argued to be vulnerable to unemployment in a recession and to long-
term exclusion if regulation reduces job vacancies. Bertola et al. (2007) even hypothe-
size that trade unions push up wages and employment protection above competitive
levels in those sectors where the labour displaced will not become openly unemployed
but will willingly take up non-wage work activities. Displaced women are assumed to
take up childcare full-time, on the presumption that women across developed countries
are always carers first and workers at best second. In contrast, feminist research has
tended to stress the path dependency of women’s relationship to the waged labour market
(Pfau-Effinger, 1998), influenced both by the pattern of employment opportunities and
the constitution of women’s roles in welfare and economic regimes as primarily wives,
mothers or workers (Sainsbury, 1996). Path dependency suggests that even if it would be
convenient for capital, the state or for unemployed men for women to be reabsorbed back
into the family economy in periods of job shortage, this is unlikely to be feasible if their
integration into wage employment has induced changes in the family economy and in
social norms related to the gender division of labour that are not readily reversible
(Humphries and Rubery, 1984; Scott et al., 2008). Domestic labour may no longer be

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418 Work, employment and society 27(3)

able, for example, to act as an effective supplement to wage income where mass-
produced commodities have become cheaper than home production. Some role may still
be played by welfare systems, particularly tax and benefit systems, in shaping work
incentives and by childcare support in shaping the feasibility of employment. However,
plans for retrenchment of welfare support may still not lead to voluntary withdrawal if
dual-earner patterns have become entrenched in social norms and household finances.
There is no doubt that public policy has had significant impacts on the long-term
development of women’s employment integration, within and between countries. There
have been relatively widespread positive developments in state supported equality poli-
cies across Europe, including the UK (Waldfogel, 2011). These have been spurred on by
the economic case that women’s employment has a positive role to play in boosting
employment rates in an ageing Europe (Lewis and Campbell, 2007), although there is
less evidence that the business case has prompted employers to offer work−life balance
options or stronger gender equality policies to retain female staff. These arguments were
always context-specific and importantly focused only on the economic benefits to the
neglect of both the social justice arguments (Noon, 2007) and on the need to combine
rights to work with rights to care (Lewis, 2006). Significant changes in priorities can be
expected in a context where businesses can afford to be less concerned about retaining
staff, welfare state expenditure is being cut back and the EU and national governments
can no longer assume that work is available for all who seek it. Reversals of public and
employer support raise issues of how far these considerations affect the quantity or the
quality of women’s employment, in addition to effects on household income and domes-
tic labour.

Methods
To explore how the recession of 2008/9 and the subsequent sustained downturn are influ-
encing and are influenced by women’s labour market and labour supply characteristics,
some preliminary analyses have been undertaken using the ONS workforce jobs, the UK
Labour Force Survey (UKLFS) published tables and micro-datasets, and the Annual
Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). The observation period starts just prior to the
recession – October–December 2007 – and extends to the July–September 2011 quarter
using the LFS micro-data, and to June 2011 using the workforce jobs data (the latest
available data). Separate analyses are undertaken for 2007–09, 2009–2010 and 2010–11
as new patterns are emerging as the crisis switches from private banking to fiscal debt
crisis. Our analyses are confined to the labour market as a whole, to change at the sector
(NACE 1) level, or differences in trends between public and private sectors. Although
the workforce job data are limited in that they do not indicate patterns of occupational
vertical or horizontal segregation within sectors, trends at the level of industrial sector
allow for an analysis of whether gender segregation based on the varying representation
of men and women in different sectors influences patterns of male and female job loss,
and whether men and women appear to be in ‘protected’ or ‘buffer’ jobs based on their
job loss within sectors being proportionate or disproportionate to level of sector repre-
sentation. As employment may continue to decline or grow slowly owing to the responses
to public sector debt and the international turmoil, and as policies and benefits systems

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Rubery and Rafferty 419

are evolving continually, these results should be considered very preliminary, with not
only the pattern of change still to be fully established but also the data being subject to
relatively frequent revisions. Furthermore, changes observed in the employment data in
the recession may have multiple origins, not only linked to the downturn but compounded
by longer-term sectoral change such as the decline or growth of employment in specific
sectors related to technological change, increased global competition or offshoring.

Segmented labour demand: Some empirical findings

To provide some indication of whether job loss in the period since 2007 reflects differences
in the sectoral distribution of men and women or differences in the propensity of men and
women to lose employment within sectors, Table 1 uses a shift-share analysis to predict
expected changes in employment by keeping the gender share of sectors stable at 2007 rates
over the period December 2007 to June 2011. If women lose more jobs than their share of
employment in December 2007 would predict, it can be inferred that they are more likely to
be employed in buffer-type jobs. Conversely, if their job loss is less than their initial share of
employment, then they can be inferred to be more likely to be in protected jobs. The data
indicate that most of the change in employment by gender is related to the pattern of job loss
and job growth by sector, with only limited changes in gender shares observed within sec-
tors. To the extent that gender shares have changed, these have been on average to the detri-
ment of women. That is, although women’s share of jobs remained similar, just increasing
marginally over this time period by 0.1 of a percentage point, from 46.5 to 46.6 per cent, if
2007 gender shares by sector had been maintained, the increase would have been 0.8 of a
percentage point.2 Sectoral employment change was most severe in male-dominated sec-
tors, with particularly unfavourable trends in construction and manufacturing, where men’s
employment may often constitute both the core and the buffer. In business services, such as
financial and insurance activities, and other business activities, women do appear to have
suffered disproportionately from the downturn. If the 2007 gender employment share had
been maintained in these sectors, women would have lost around 112,000 fewer jobs and
men 112,000 more (combining 20.1K and 92.6K in financial and insurance, and other busi-
ness activities, respectively) with women accounting for around 92 per cent of job losses in
finance and insurance. This suggests that women have acted as a buffer in both of these
sectors. In the wholesale, retail and restaurant sector women lost around 42,000 more jobs
than would be expected based on their sector share, accounting for 58.8 per cent of overall
job loss despite only representing 49.6 per cent of the sector in 2007 prior to recession. In
professional, scientific and technical activities that experienced job increases over this
period, men benefited disproportionately from job growth.
In general we find little evidence of women being protected within sectors. Indeed the
only example was energy, where the female share rose by 4.6 percentage points, possibly
because they were concentrated in administrative work. However, in general, involve-
ment in clerical work is no longer a source of protection against economic cycles or
restructuring, unlike in earlier periods where these could be considered stable segments
(Milkman, 1976). In areas such as business services, clerical work has moved to the
forefront of restructuring, involving downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring, following
the development of new information and processing technology. How far these processes
may be accelerated or slowed by recession is an area for future research investigation.

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 Table 1.  Change in industrial sector workforce jobs by gender share, 2007−11.
420

Female Female sector Actual change Actual change Actual minus Women’s job loss
sector share share change male jobs female jobs predicted female as % total job loss
2007 (%) 2007–11 2007–11 (000s) 2007–11 (000s) change 07–11 with 07 2007–11
female sector share
Agriculture, forestry & 26.5 −0.8 +36.6 +8.7 −3.3 (19.2)
fishing
Manufacturing 24.0 −1.1 −263.0 −119.0 −27.5 31.2
Energy & water 18.0 +4.6 +30.3 +27.5 +17.1 (47.6)
Construction 11.4 −0.1 −213.2 −28.7 −1.2 11.9
Transportation & storage 20.3 −0.2 −46.0 −15.9 −3.3 25.7
Wholesale, retail & 49.6 −0.6 −191.1 −272.9 −42.6 58.8
restaurants
Professional, scientific & 45.4 −1.5 +123.1 +36.7 −35.8 (23.0)
technical activities
Financial intermediation 51.6 −1.8 −3.6 −45.2 −20.1 92.6
Other business activities, 42.1 −2.4 −78.2 −216.9 −92.7 73.5
real estate and renting
(J,L,N)
Public admin, education 69.6 −0.3 +119.5 +201.5 +21.9 (62.8)
& health
Other services 53.8 +0.5 −30.2 −17.8 +8.1 37.1
Total 46.5 +0.1 −515.8 −442.0 −220.9 46.1

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Total private (excluding 38.8 −0.6 −635.3 −643.5 −444.5 50.3
public admin, education
& health)
Notes: ONS Workforce Jobs. SIC 2007. Figures in parentheses indicate percentage of new jobs that were female in sectors where jobs growth occurred. Change
represents aggregate change within sectors. ‘Other business activities’ includes information and communication, real estate, and administrative and support services
(SIC2007 Industry Section Codes J, L & N).
Work, employment and society 27(3)
Rubery and Rafferty 421

In addition to administrative work, the main other segment where women’s jobs have
traditionally been protected is the public sector, owing both to the type of work under-
taken and to the tendency for governments to maintain public expenditure to counteract
recessionary effects. Up until the end of 2009 this recession was no exception as public
sector jobs grew and women benefited in proportion to their 70 per cent sectoral employ-
ment share. Although women accounted for only 37.3 per cent of overall net job loss in
the 2007–09 period, this share rises to 45.8 per cent if one excludes the public sector
(using public administration, education and health and social care as a proxy) (Figure 1).
However, during 2009–10 the protective role of the public sector had already begun to
decline. Women lost jobs in both the public and private sectors, while male employment
recovered slightly before stabilizing. Although during 2011 men on aggregate lost jobs,
the female share of overall job loss remained higher than in 2007–09 (56.1% compared
to 37.3%), to a large extent due to increased public sector job loss as their share of private
sector job loss was lower (31.0% compared to 45.8% in 2007–09). Once the dramatic
2010 budget cuts in the public sector, estimated to lead to over 330,000 lost jobs by
2014–15 (OBR, 29 November 2010) begin to bite, then women’s employment can be
expected to fall further.
The significance of the projected pay freezes and job cuts in the public sector for the
quantity and quality of women’s employment can be illustrated by a consideration of
trends in the gender pay gap over the 2007–11 period. Although the full-time gender pay
gap, measured by median hourly earnings, widened slightly in 2008, by 2011 it had nar-
rowed to 9.1 per cent from 12.4 in 2007. The gender pay gap for part-timers relative to
male full-time median hourly earnings also declined but only from 39.2 to 38.2 per cent
in 2007–11 (ASHE, 2007, 2011, Table 1.6a). The narrowing of the full-time pay gap
occurred primarily because of higher pay increases for both sexes in the public compared
to the private sector (Table 2). The impact on women’s average pay is magnified by their
higher representation within the public sector and their higher premium for public com-
pared to private sector work. The outcome was an overall rate of wage increase 4.1 per-
centage points in higher for women than for men, even though women’s rate of pay
increase within each sector was at most 2 percentage points above that for men. If public
sector jobs decline in importance, this will affect women’s access to relatively high paid

Figure 1.  Female proportion of loss in workforce jobs, 2009–11 (%).

Source: ONS Workforce Jobs, own calculations.

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422 Work, employment and society 27(3)

Table 2.  Public and private sector pay by gender, 2007–11.

  Public sector Public sector Private sector Overall Public sector pay
employment pay rise, % pay rise, % pay rise, % premium, %
share, %
2007 2011 2007–11 2007–11 2007–11 2007 2011
Male full-time 19.0 20.4 11.6 8.2 9.5 24.1 28.0
employees
Female full-time 39.4 42.4 13.6 10.2 13.6 38.3 42.5
employees
Notes: Median hourly earnings excluding overtime.  ASHE 2007, 2011 Tables, Table 13.6a, own calculations
(note approx. 2% of sample for overall pay rise not classified as either public or private).

jobs disproportionately, and this combined with the public sector pay freeze may lead to
future renewed widening of the gender pay gap.
Evidence of women acting as a cheap labour substitute is difficult to detect at an
aggregate level and over a short time period is characterized more by job destruction than
job restructuring. Substitution mainly takes place through new hires and may therefore
be more common in periods of expansion than decline. Some evidence was found for the
1990s and early 2000s that a process of feminization of some higher-level jobs was asso-
ciated with a decline in the relative pay status of these jobs, in line with the Reskin and
Roos’s (1990) earlier findings for the US (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2007). The restructur-
ing that is planned across public services in Britain including more outsourcing may lead
to some women acting as a cheap labour substitute primarily for other more highly paid
women. This process has already occurred in some public sector services such as social
care (Low Pay Commission, 2011) but may extend to others, such as the NHS, where
there are plans to open it up to ‘any qualified provider’. Men may also be affected, but
the gains for employers of moving female jobs from public services to the private sector
are likely to be greater. Dolton and Makepeace (2011) estimate that women enjoy a 6 per
cent pay premium in the public compared to the private sector, adjusted for characteris-
tics, while men have a 1 per cent negative premium. This reflects the lower pay for
women in the private sector compared to men.
The impact of public service restructuring will depend in part on what happens to
regulations covering pay in the private sector. In sectors such as social care private sector
wages have at least been partially protected by the increase in the national minimum
wage (NMW) in the 2000s. If the NMW were to decline in real or relative terms, the
substitution process could be based on even lower wages. In the 2000s, migrants from
the new EU states and elsewhere may have become a more important source of cheap
labour substitution than native born women, in part because employers were more likely
not to observe all employment regulations when hiring migrant workers (Anderson et al.,
2006).
This exploration of demand-side change has thus revealed the continuing importance
of gender segregation across sectors in explaining patterns of job loss. Nevertheless,
overall and within some sectors women are losing a disproportionate share of the jobs,

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Rubery and Rafferty 423

particularly over the 2009−10 period, suggesting a continuing buffer role in some areas.
Furthermore, women’s involvement in clerical and administrative work is no longer a
source of protection but may be adding to their exposure to restructuring, particularly in
a range of business, financial and professional services but also potentially in the public
sector. While the public sector did protect women’s jobs and helped to narrow the gender
pay gap in this initial recession period, a very different path of development in both job
quantity and job quality may be expected over the next period owing to austerity
policies.

Women as committed or contingent labour market

participants
If women are acting as a flexible labour reserve (Bruegel, 1979; Rubery and Tarling,
1982), any decrease in employment opportunities could be expected to lead to an increas-
ing share of women determining their economic status as voluntarily inactive and with-
drawing from the labour market. However, between 2007 and 2009 female unemployment
increased, albeit at a lower rate than for men, and economic inactivity actually declined
(Table 3). Female economic inactivity rose slightly in 2009−10 as female employment
continued to decline, but the net trends between 2007 and 2011 involved a decline in the
employment rate (−1.6 percentage points), a rise in the unemployed share (+2.4 percent-
age points) and a decline in inactivity (−0.8 percentage points). In contrast, male eco-
nomic inactivity and unemployment both rose strongly in the 2007−09 period but in
2009−10 employment started to rise for men and was associated with a decrease in eco-
nomic inactivity. Over the 2007−11 period the net outcome for men was a 3.7 percentage
point fall in the employment rate reflected in a 3.3 percentage point rise in unemploy-
ment and a 0.4 percentage point rise in inactivity.
Another manifestation of women acting as a voluntary flexible reserve could be evi-
dence that they were willing to move voluntarily into part-time paid work as an alterna-
tive to full-time employment, or into temporary work in the face of reduced permanent
opportunities. Table 4 shows that involuntary part-time work rose between 2007 and
2011, involving similar numbers for men and for women. For women the increase in
those who could not find a full-time job at 274,000 exceeded the overall growth in part-
time work of only 146,000. Similarly for men the overall increase in part-time employ-
ment (179,000) was less than that for involuntary part-time work (263,000). Comparable
increases in levels of involuntary temporary work between men and women further sug-
gest that women are no more likely than men to be satisfied with temporary work as a
result of declining permanent opportunities.
Overall there is currently very little evidence of women withdrawing voluntarily from
the labour market or indeed willingly moving into more flexible work in response to the
downturn in demand. This reluctance to provide a contingent labour supply may reflect
more embedded expectations of continuous participation now that the need to quit the
labour market at childbirth has been reduced by extended rights to leave and rights to
request flexible working. A further explanation for this commitment to economic activity
may be found in women’s changing relationships to the benefit system. Historically
many women in the UK have not been entitled to unemployment benefits because of

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 424
Table 3.  Change in economic activity (population estimates and percentage point change, 2007–11).

2007 2011 Change 07–09 Change 09–10 Change 10–11 Change 07–11
Men  
Employee 12,901,236 12,465,907 −487,157 150,234 −98,406 −435,329
  65.8 62.3 −3.3 0.4 −0.7 −3.5
Self-employed 2,629,432 2,640,008 −57,391 16,679 51,288 10,576
  13.4 13.2 −0.4 0.0 0.2 −0.2
Unemployed 878,350 1,561,088 561,035 −28,817 150,520 682,738
  4.5 7.8 2.8 −0.2 0.7 3.3
(% of unemployed claiming benefits) (36.4) (45.9) (11.5) (1.2) (−3.2) (9.5)
Economically Inactive 3,198,423 3,341,058 224,302 −35,055 −46,612 142,635
  16.3 16.7 0.9 −0.3 −0.3 0.4
Total 19,607,441 20,008,061 240,789 103,041 56,790 400,620
Unweighted base 37,154 30,594  
Women  
Employee 11,772,935 11,535,635 −159,110 −70,153 −8,037 −237,300
  65.3 63.1 −1.3 −0.6 −0.2 −2.2
Self-employed 912,144 1,024,848 60,919 13,214 38,571 112,704
  5.1 5.6 0.3 0.0 0.2 0.6
Unemployed 666,110 1,117,454 253,630 70,186 127,528 451,344
  3.7 6.1 1.4 0.4 0.7 2.4

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(% unemployed claiming benefits) (16.0) (29.2) (10.2) (1.7) (1.3) (13.2)
Economically Inactive 4,671,486 4,592,962 −35,206 60,141 −103,459 −78,524
  25.9 25.1 −0.4 0.2 −0.6 −0.8
Total 18,022,675 18,270,899 120,233 73,388 54,603 248,224
Unweighted base 36,197 29,845  
Notes: UKLFS Micro-data Oct–December quarters 2007–2010, Jul–Sep quarter 2011; Women 16–59yrs, Men 16–64yrs; seasonally unadjusted, weighted.
Work, employment and society 27(3)
Rubery and Rafferty 425

Table 4.  Involuntary part-time and temporary work.

Total part- Could not % that could Total Could not find % that could
time (000s) find full-time not find full- temporary permanent not find
job (000s) time job (000s) job (000s) permanent job
Men  
2007 1716 290 16.9 699.1 201.2 28.7
2011 1895 553 29.2 734.6 306.2 41.6
Change +179 +263 +12.3 +35.5 +105 +12.9
2007–11
Women  
2007 5608 435 7.8 791.4 178.6 22.6
2010 5754 709 12.3 775.7 276.2 35.6
Change +146 +274 +4.5 −15.7 +97.6 +13.0
2007–11
Source: ONS Published tables, November 2011 release.

earning below National Insurance contributions thresholds or working intermittently

(Grimshaw and Rubery, 1997) and thus had limited incentives to register as unemployed.
However, between 2007 and 2011, UKLFS data reveal a decline of 9.5 and 13.2 percentage
points, respectively, in the shares of men and of women who are unemployed, based on
the ILO3 standardized definition of who are not claiming benefits on grounds of unem-
ployment, although the share of women not claiming benefits still exceeds that of men at
around 71 per cent compared to 54 per cent (Table 3). These trends suggest more of those
flowing into unemployment as a consequence of redundancy have eligibility for benefits
than among the stock of ILO unemployed, probably owing to more continuous employ-
ment at higher wages. Nevertheless, if unemployment spells last beyond six months
when contributions-based Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA) expires, some of these with
employed partners may withdraw into economic inactivity status.
The UK benefit system has not only limited women’s access to benefits but has also
historically encouraged women to withdraw from the labour market, particularly those
on a low income, if their partner became unemployed (Davies et al., 1992; Gregg and
Wadsworth, 1996). Another reason why women’s relationship to benefits has changed is
because the benefit system has changed towards a much greater emphasis on in-work or
so-called ‘active’ benefits instead of ‘passive’ benefits. These changes reflect the ‘make
work pay’ philosophy based on a policy package that included a guaranteed minimum
wage, greater childcare provision and wage subsidy through the tax credit system. More
recently, benefit reform and an intensified focus on labour market ‘activation’ through
the replacement of Incapacity Benefit with Employment Support Allowance (ESA) and
withdrawal of Income Support on grounds of being a lone parent for those with younger
dependent children have increased mandated job search activity, placing further upward
pressure on JSA claimant counts (Rafferty and Wiggan, 2011).
In-work benefits are aimed at encouraging breadwinners − whether in couple house-
holds or lone parents − to leave out-of-work benefits and enter employment where the
jobs on offer are too low paid to make work pay or create sufficient financial incentives

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426 Work, employment and society 27(3)

without subsidies. At the same time, these in-work benefits tend to create strong disincen-
tives for second-income earners. Data on recipients of Working Tax Credit (WTC) largely
confirm these expectations (Table 5). For example, in 2008, before the main force of the
recession, 58 per cent of coupled households claiming any form of tax credit had a sole
male breadwinner − more than the combined total of couples with either only a female
breadwinner in employment or with both partners employed. Recent trends, however,
show that by 2011 there was a 31.5 per cent increase in coupled household claimants with
a sole female earner, and a 25.3 per cent increase in dual-earner coupled household claim-
ants compared to a 19.3 per cent increase in male single-earner coupled households. This
indicates a slight increase in the use of women’s participation as a means of keeping the
household afloat in a period of recession rather than both partners withdrawing from work
if the man loses employment or receives a cut in hours of available work. In contrast, the
41.3 per cent increase in male single households receiving WTC potentially indicates
stagnation in male earnings and/or reductions in working hours available.

How the recession will affect the economic and business case for
gender equality
Considerable scepticism has been expressed over the reliance on the economic or busi-
ness case to support equal opportunities (Dickens, 2006; Noon, 2007). Not only does this
approach leave the door open for policy reversal in recession but the policies imple-
mented at the workplace tend to be reserved for relatively advantaged workers. At the
societal level the focus is on raising women’s employment rate rather than on improving
job quality or facilitating care. Nevertheless, this rhetoric opened up opportunities for

Table 5. Tax credit receipt (Dec 2008–Apr 2011).

2008 Change 2008–11:

  Total 2008 Receiving Without children Total (a + b) % of 2008 value

WTC and receiving
CTC (a) WTC (b)
Coupled households 
Female sole 135.5 31.0 11.7 42.7 31.5
worker
Male sole 534.8 85.3 18.0 103.3 19.3
worker
Both adults 254.0 50.9 13.4 64.3 25.3
in work
Single households 
Female 1075.6 67.3 48.0 115.3 10.7
Male 189.2 4.1 74.0 78.1 41.3
Total 2189.1 238.6 165.1 403.7 18.4
Notes: Dec 2008– April 2011. WTC– Working Tax Credit; CTC–Child Tax Credit.
Source: HMRC.

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Rubery and Rafferty 427

new policy initiatives that could generate positive and potentially permanent gains for
women. In the UK the policies enacted by New Labour provided much to criticize for,
although significant in range, their content stopped well short of the level of state support
for dual-income households found in some countries such as Sweden. For example,
leave was extended but only provided low flat-rate benefits, some childcare support was
available but costs remained very high, and the right to flexible working was only a right
to request flexible working (Lewis and Campbell, 2007). Furthermore, even though
employers did introduce more work−life balance policies, some have argued that these
are a form of compensation for and a means of legitimating the widespread diffusion of
employer-oriented flexible working (Fleetwood, 2007). Despite such problems one posi-
tive effect may be the apparent growth in opportunities to combine part-time hours with
higher skilled (Gallie and Zhou, 2009) and higher paid work. Table 6 indicates that the
public sector has more and increasing numbers of quality part-time jobs, as evidenced by
the high level of pay and faster increase for the upper quartile of public sector part-
timers, both compared to the private sector and those at the lower quartile. This develop-
ment may be due to the opportunities for continuity of employment offered by the right
to request flexible working (Neuburger et al., 2010), which may be implemented more as
an employee right in the public sector, which has taken the lead in developing work−life
balance policies over recent decades (Dex and Forth, 2009; Hooker et al., 2007). These
opportunities may shrink if public sector jobs decline or are transferred to the private
sector, where employers appear less likely to offer quality part-time working.
The extent to which there will be a reversal of employer policies aimed at retaining
female staff is not yet clear. However, the line of policy direction from the state is more
evident even if it differs by the income and family situation of women. The general approach
of the coalition government is to withdraw state support for mothers in work, through pro-
posed or implemented reductions in child benefits, child tax credits, share of childcare costs
that can be claimed and failure to ring-fence expenditure on nurseries, after-school or holi-
day clubs. Fertility, childcare and work choices are presented increasingly as a private mat-
ter, with facilitating the employment of mothers no longer a policy priority to be promoted
by government. Furthermore, the plan to convert tax credits into a Universal Credit currently
involve treating the household as one unit for assessment and payment, which if imple-
mented can be expected both to transfer resources from purse to wallet and increase negative
incentives for second-income earners. The briefing note (DWP, 2011) states that

Table 6.  Evolution of part-time pay by public/private sector, 2001–11.

Lower quartile Median Upper quartile

  public private public/ public private public/ public private public/

private private private
PT hourly pay 7.77 6.06 1.28 9.94 6.98 1.42 15.98 9.14 1.75
2011 (£)
Change 57 43 10 57 38 14 69 35 24
2001–2011 (%)
Source: ASHE 2011 (March 2012 release), 2001 Tables, Table 13.6a, own calculations.

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428 Work, employment and society 27(3)

maintaining incentives for second-income earners is not a priority for government. However,
for lone parents the state is withdrawing the stay-at-home, domestic labour option and is
imposing ever more draconian requirements for them to seek work even when responsible
for young children. The only concession is the maintenance of some childcare support for
these families to facilitate this work first programme.
This policy stance will not necessarily have the expected impact on women’s work
patterns. Those on benefits may not find jobs to go to and those who are being encour-
aged to provide domestic labour for childrearing will not necessarily leave the labour
market, either because of their own work orientations or because of the squeeze on
household earnings. Another reaction to the withdrawal of state support may be a reduc-
tion in fertility, as has happened in other recessions internationally (Santow and Bracher,
2001). Thus the power of policy change to reverse or halt long-term secular changes in
family formation patterns and gender relations must not be exaggerated. Nevertheless
the withdrawal of state support from the costs and the care of children will have an
impact on both material outcomes and the short-term behaviour of at least some women.

Discussion and conclusions

This exploration of the immediate trends in women’s employment position during the reces-
sion and continuing government debt crisis in the three years from the end of 2007 provides
support for the key propositions that gender segregation across sectors is the prime factor
shaping outcomes, that within sectors women are still often bearing a disproportionate share
of job loss and that women are becoming more permanently attached to the labour market.
The analysis also suggested that the characteristics of the specific recession matter. Thus
sectors protected in one period may become vulnerable or flexible sectors in another. This is
particularly evident in the current recession, where first of all the crash was concentrated in
the banking sector − in the past an area of stability and growth − and now the public sector.
Although normally a source of protection, the public sector is poised to be a source of
women’s vulnerability to both job loss and employment downgrading. The ‘savings’ on
women’s jobs that can be obtained by outsourcing arguably provides a motivation for the
policy of promoting the use of any qualified provider for the delivery of public services.
The data also suggest that to date women are resisting taking on the role of a flexible
and contingent labour supply, reflecting changes in women’s aspirations and attachment
to the labour market, in the family economy4 and in state support for working parents and
in women’s rights under tax and benefit systems (Scott et al., 2008). Some of these
changes are now under pressure but even if the retrenchment in support for working
parents is aimed at re-establishing women as a flexible and family-dependent labour sup-
ply, women are declaring themselves as unemployed rather than inactive and are begin-
ning to use the in-work benefit system to facilitate becoming the sole or the joint
breadwinner in recession-hit families. Part-time and temporary work is increasing but
the share of women who would prefer a full-time or permanent job is increasing even
faster. These are tentative trends and may still be reversed by policy changes and by
demand-side restrictions on women’s employment opportunities. Nevertheless they are
indicative of a strengthened rather than reduced commitment to wage employment in the
face of recession and pressure on family budgets.

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Rubery and Rafferty 429

This review has also brought to light the benefits but also the costs (Noon, 2007) of
the promotion of the business and economic case for equal opportunities over recent
years. Recession itself undermines the key assumption in the EU employment strategy
and the business case that there is work for whoever needs it, and shortage of labour or
talent is a key motivator of business practice. Clearly there are strong economic argu-
ments to provide women with opportunities to use their skills and talents but these oppor-
tunities need supporting by rights based on social justice now that it is clear that the
problems of boom and bust are still present. Even in the boom the private sector was not
so persuaded of the business case as to change its employment practices. The public sec-
tor’s greater provision of quality part-time jobs suggests that its policies were more
informed by social justice or that it was more agile in adjusting its business practices to
meet the new social conditions. Whatever the case, any dismantling of the public sector
as a major employer will have negative consequences for women.
Furthermore, now that the coalition government’s policy is to reduce active support
for working mothers in couple households, what remains of the economic case for pro-
moting higher employment among women is a focus on reducing welfare expenditure by
increasing pressure on all lone parents with a child over 5 years old to seek work. This
exemplifies the one-sided nature of the approach, where the right to work has become a
requirement to work without a complementary right to care. These examples also indi-
cate that the recession and its aftermath are having differential but still damaging effects
on different groups of women, from more advantaged public sector professionals to lone
parents forced to seek often low-paid work. However, perhaps the legacy of the eco-
nomic case for equal opportunities may be its impact in raising women’s aspirations for
employment, which may ensure that women remain permanent participants and competi-
tors in the wage labour market. This may scupper any government hopes that women
might voluntarily return to the home to reduce the high open unemployment that may be
a persistent outcome of the combined financial and sovereign debt crises.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Office for National Statistics and Economic and Social Data
Services for making the UKLFS micro data available.

Funding
The authors are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number RES-000-22-
4304) for funding this research.

Notes
1 The UK has a relatively low level of segregation at both occupational and sectoral levels (24th
lowest and 20th lowest, respectively, out of 29 countries) but nevertheless the UK’s occu-
pational segregation index of 25.3 represents over half the maximum value of 50 at which
the same number of men and women work in the labour market but in entirely segregated
occupations. Sectoral segregation is lower but significant at 18.7. Occupational segregation
has declined more than sectoral segregation in the UK over the 1997−2007 decade, and this
decline is the net outcome of structural changes in the type of jobs that has been increasing
segregation coupled with a significant decline in segregation within occupational categories
(Bettio and Verashchagina, 2009).

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430 Work, employment and society 27(3)

2 This figure is calculated from the same ONS Workforce Jobs data used to construct Table 1.
3 International Labour Organization.
4 A recent study found that for low- to middle-income households in the UK between 1968 and
2008−09, 78 per cent of all the growth in gross employment income could be attributed to
increases in women’s employment and earnings (Brewer and Wren-Lewis, 2011).

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Jill Rubery is Professor of Comparative Employment Systems at Manchester Business

School and founder and Co-Director of EWERC (the European Work and Employment
Research Centre). She has published widely in the areas of comparative employment
systems, gender equality and labour market segmentation. In 1988 she published an
edited book Women and Recession, which was republished in its original form by
Routledge in 2010. She is joint editor (with Gerhard Bosch and Steffen Lehndorf) of
European Employment Models in Flux (Palgrave, 2009) and joint editor (with Dominique
Anxo and Gerhard Bosch) of Welfare States and Life Transitions (Edward Elgar, 2010).
In 2006 she was elected a fellow of the British Academy.
Anthony Rafferty is a Lecturer in Employment Studies attached to the European Work and
Employment Research Centre (EWERC) and the Fairness at Work (FaW) research group at
Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Dr Rafferty has undertaken research
consultancy and advisory work for a variety of organizations, including the UN International
Labour Organization (ILO), UK Commission for Skills and Employment (UKCES), UK
Research Council and Department of Health (Centre for Workforce Intelligence).
Date submitted June 2011
Date accepted January 2012

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