More women out of work

I've been wondering, with the so-called surprise increase in unemployment*, how this was impacting on women.

Labour's Women's Affairs spokesperson Sue Moroney has some answers, and it's not pretty - 10,000 more women out of work in the last quarter of 2009, part of 27,000 extra without jobs last year.

Certainly I've heard anecdotally of women being told that they should give up their jobs for men who need to be the breadwinners for their families, which of course ignores the fact that plenty of women are the main income earners, indeed sometimes the sole income earners, and that many families need two incomes now, and that men don't have any more rights to work than women, and lots of other stuff that makes my ears red.

Other women have been pulling out of work, or not going back to work after time off to care for children, because they can't afford the childcare costs. And of course those in part time or casual work are usually more vulnerable to cuts in hours, and women are more likely to be in those jobs than men.

This recession and unemployment in general is bad for both men and women. I heard on the radio that a quarter of all young people** are unemployed, and that's a tragedy. I just wish this Government would start doing something about it.





* Come on, who was really surprised? We've been in a recession, we had thousands of people queue for a low paid supermarket job the other day (unlike Idiot/Savant, who I normally agree with, I won't be referring to it as "shitty" because it's not), and the Government has been doing two fifths of sweet nothing about job creation.
** Not sure how they defined young people.