OPINION:What if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters? asks JOANNA McMINN.
THIS ARTICLE was planned long before the publication of Newton Emerson’s controversial, satirical article of February 25th claiming that “working women almost certainly caused the credit crunch”.
He topped the most read and most e-mailed article list on irishtimes.com for days. Yesterday was International Woman’s Day and so it’s worth asking: are there gender elements to this recession? The National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) believes that there are.
Articles directed at women talk about feeding your family on a budget, becoming a “fashionista recessionista” or buying the occasional lipstick to lift your mood. The mainstream media has ignored the real impact of the recession on women’s lives.
There is a view that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, run by women instead of men, the credit crunch might never have happened.
To the many thousands of female workers who have lost their jobs, the recession may well look like a case of high-paid men creating a mess, and low-paid women suffering the consequences.
Some feminist and mainstream economists have pointed out the credit crunch is a manmade disaster, a monster created in the "testosterone-drenched" environment of Wall Street and the City. Last week, Padraig O'Morain in the Irish Times HealthPLUSsupplement quoted a Cambridge University study on the relationship between testosterone levels and excessive risk-taking in male stock market traders.
There is a growing body of opinion that, if there had been more female decision-makers, the agony could have been avoided.
Could corporate Ireland be reshaped, bringing a healthier gender balance into the upper echelons? Might the Government follow the example of Iceland, where two women, Elin Sigfusdottir and Birna Einarsdottir, have been brought in to run the country’s two big nationalised banks?
While there may be some opportunities for senior women, the NWCI is hearing stories of the overall impact of this recession on women in their working lives. We have heard from women who have been asked to cut their hours; women coming back from maternity leave who have been asked to go on contract (which ensures that they won’t be entitled to maternity leave if they need it again) and women who have been asked to work part-time but on a flexible basis, giving them a pay cut but no opportunity to cut back on childcare costs.
The Government needs to ensure no cutbacks or withdrawals are made creating unacceptable burdens for women caring for children.
We are living with a legacy of poor investment in childcare and unaffordable childcare costs for parents. The cuts to childcare in Budget 2009 sent a strong message that supporting parents to pay for childcare is something of a luxury.
We applaud president Barack Obama’s investment in early childhood education during this severe crisis in the US economy and question why the Government cannot see the wisdom of a similar strategy.
Women are the largest group of consumers, and the ones who micro-manage debt. It is women who are struggling to implement the ad hoc cutbacks by the Government. Women are at the heart of the economy as well as society and deserve to have their voices heard.
The Government needs to see women as a resource by which to achieve full economic recovery. We want to see the Government investing swiftly in education and training for the unemployed. We also require much-needed and immediate reforms to our social welfare and pension systems.
Finally, Ireland could chose this time as an opportunity for all men and women to improve their quality of life, by developing robust “work-life” models enabling the equal sharing of care work and allowing Irish citizens, irrespective of gender, to have integrated personal, professional and family lives.
Joanna McMinn is director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland