 So I'm going to talk about assessing the gender effect of austerity, and in that question there are two issues. One is analysing the effect of austerity on people's lives and people's income, on people's wellbeing, and the other is the gender effect of it. The question obviously in this session is why do gender impact assessment of austerity in particular, but of any policy more generally? And it's important for three main reasons. One obviously is to promote gender equality and indeed reduce existing gender inequalities. Part of it is being entrenched in legislation for many years on different acts of equality duties that the government has to make sure that any policy they undertake in this country, but also it has been done in other countries, doesn't unfairly disadvantage some groups, be it women or other types of disadvantaged group. In this case we look at gender, but also and perhaps more importantly, because it would include the first category, is to make sure that policy change or policy reform are actually producing the effects they are intending to produce. Therefore being made more effective in achieving any aim could be gender equality, but other such as increasing employment or increasing people's health, etc., etc., improving people's health. And then the third one is the discrepancy between the policy statement or policy aim and the actual result in practice and the resource that's been committed to make this happen. So it kind of a public accounts scrutiny of how the money is spent and whether that money should be spent in other ways that may be more effective or produce longer term benefits that are not worth pursuing. So the reason why we have to look at gender effects is because of differences in roles, behaviors and relationships between men and women as Sue has explained this morning, so I'm not going to dwell on this more, but also because of the structural differences that they are faced with and it's not to do the chance or even to do the choice, so that needs to be analyzed as well in direct effects of all the policies. And an example for that is that policies impact differently but in systematic ways, so we don't necessarily understand straightforwardly what the effect would be on different groups, but if women are responsible for example for picking up children, then if you change school hours will have effect their employment more than men's employment even though the premise could be that oh but anyone can pick the children therefore they can change the way they organize their couple for example. But that's not necessarily the case as Sue explained earlier because of gender norms and the way habits are informed through these gender norms and negotiations within the households. So the five, some of the principles of the gender impact analysis could be that as Sue said in terms of the premise of feminist economics is to focus on individuals rather than households. And in this context of policy analysis it's important because not so much the theory of economics has been mainstreamed in a way that household is the main unit of interest in a way of simplifying models or economic models. But it has become also a policy focus that households are the unit of assessment for policy and in many countries individuals within that household are left to decide however they want to react to any policy change. Rather than considering that some of these individuals because of different interests and constraints may not be faced with the same opportunities to react and therefore that has consequences. So that's very important especially in the context of austerity and social security and public services gets we come back to that. But also it's considered a long term effect of policy and therefore the lifetime perspective of how individuals behave and react to different changes that something that may be in their best interest now may not be later. And again this interacts with whether we consider the unit of analysis as the individual or the household because individuals move through different households over their lifetime. Also the effects of the unpaid and caring economy as well as the paid economy because it has interactions as we said earlier. And different responses to economic incentives due to their characteristics due to different interests but also due to the way norms have structured a set of opportunities. And it's not so much the direct effect on say an income policy of tax policy for example is not so much to do with we should therefore analyze how it will affect incomes. Even if we do so by analyzing individual income but all the other characteristics that may reflect other gender inequalities that this policy may affect by repercussion. But that requires the policy makers or policy analysts to know what they are and indeed income is a combination of a lot of other dimensions but also an instrument to achieve other aspects of life such as health or leisure or even the possibility to provide care or to receive care. Employment incentives hours of employment all to do with different aspects of gender inequality so it's not just analyzing in terms of distribution of income between different individuals or indeed between different households. The holistic approach would require all these dimensions dimensions to be analyzed sometimes you can reduce it to a few fewer dimensions knowing what the relationship would be depending on what the outcome of the analysis is. I will show in a minute a distribution and analysis that concentrates on people's income but already augmented from what people generally understand about income by including the value of using public services that are provided for free by the government. So what could be the different dimensions of a different policy? What could be the gender effect? I'm going to browse through public services, employment policies, tax policy, social security policy and indirect taxation but probably I will focus on three of that. Public services, they are more important to women because women are more likely to be users of public services. They have a longer life expectancy therefore they will require more of the services linked to old age healthcare or social care. They are more likely to live alone and therefore need others to look after them as opposed to men who can be looked after, their partner which means they also are women and they are less likely to be able to afford market alternatives because of lower incomes or other constraints. And they also rely on public services to help them in their activities that they have with others such as children or partners or parents and they are also more likely to be employed in public services and be the ones that will be relieved from unpaid activities when it is provided by public services. So any change in public services be it employment but also being the provision of it will affect women more than men and therefore has an important dimension to be analysed. In terms of public employment, indeed the working conditions in the public sector generally not always but generally are better or more favourable in terms of many dimensions that women due to gender norms need to consider such as the organisation of time, pay policies and other aspect and therefore the change in the conditions of work within the public sector usually in the context of austerity to converge downwards convergence to the conditions that we find in the private sector will also disadvantage women more. And gender pay gap is an example because pay differences are less pronounced in the public sector than in the private sector and that may if the public sector is being reduced that will have a negative impact on the overall gender pay gap. In terms of policies to do with investment and employment generation, I'll come back to that this afternoon because this is part of Plan F and I'll detail the mechanisms by which different employment policies will have different gender effects. So I'm not going to dwell on this now but just keep in mind that there are gender effects of different public investment in different sectors of the economy. Social security, so all the income transfer to safeguard from social risks such as income loss or family needs and old age income needs or care needs. Again as for public services women tend to receive more of their income in the form of social security benefits or tax credits in this country because they have lower income therefore any kind of safety net or income maintenance policies will benefit them more. They're more likely to live with children and have main responsibility for them therefore they receive child related benefits in great proportion. And as we said for public services it also applies to social security they're more dependent on the state in old age other because of lower incomes they couldn't build private pensions but also because they have a longer life expectancy and therefore the pension income that they receive needs to be adequate to account for that. That's not always the case due to indexation that needs to go longer than for men. And the form of social security payment matters again as it goes back to the division between household unit or individual unit the way the payment is being transferred that may have an effect on their employment incentives. The usual example is a means tested benefit at the household level so that the household income sometimes even the household assets that are taken into account decide the amount that is being given. And if it's at the household level obviously it has an impact on the second earner which is usually a lower earner which is usually the woman to her capacity to increase employment and earnings because it will affect the amount household receives. So two households with a household where the two partners work and receive equal earnings will be less favours as opposed to a household where there's only one partner earning and the others isn't. In terms of personal taxation again it is all to do with individuals versus household units of a tax. In this country income tax is individualised with some lingering aspects from the past of marital allowance but they've introduced recently a tax transferable tax allowance between married partners and the idea is any type of household income based taxation such as in Germany or in the US or France will favour one earner households and this disadvantage the lower earner to increase their earnings because it will be taxed at the marginal rate of the higher earner, higher earning partner as opposed to a lower rate if they just increase a little their lower income. So individual taxation is fairer in terms of taxing the value of the individual earnings and therefore recognises the contribution of unpaid labour to the household and it's increased the effectiveness of a progressive tax system. This progressive tax system is one in which the average tax rate increases with a taxpayer's income and depending on those rates of how progressive or steep the progressive curve is it will be more likely to regenerate inequalities than a family taxation. In terms of indirect taxation as well it's usually it's often ignored but there are important gender implications because men and women spend them differently. So indirect taxation is a VAT and fuel and excise duty alcohol duties that usually don't make the mainstream news in terms of budgets and any change to them are often thought as sweetness or if it's reduced but in terms of amount of money they raise it's not huge except for VAT which raises almost as much income for the state as the income tax but it's difficult to assess because it's so depending on which types of goods you buy etc. That doesn't mean there aren't no gender effects that means in particular we need more analysis to understand what the gender effects are in terms of different households with different gender composition will spend on different goods and therefore we need to know how changes in taxes on tobacco or fuel or other goods affect men and women's income. And there's been some analysis for that by an international team from different countries led by Karen Groen and Imran Valodia in 2010 which we will soon I will part of on the gender effects of direct taxation and indirect taxation to show that so there are techniques to analyse the effect on different households. So in general what policy effects are can be that higher taxes and higher public spending can reduce many gender inequalities as I just explained because women rely more on public services have lower income therefore are taxed less. But also higher taxes provide revenue to the state so even if there were a flat rate proportional rate for everyone no progressivity it would still increase the margin of maneuver for the state to spend on activities that will therefore benefit women so it works in both ways as well. And tax havens that reduce the ability of other countries to raise taxes are also an adverse gender impact and that needs to be considered it's not just it's partly the amount of money that's foregone but also the way that different countries relations work. And then public sector employment because of a greater share of the employment that's covered by women is also an important aspect of policy change. So what as an application of that come back to austerity or austerity being referred to the policy that has been applied from 2010 by this government which is deficit reduction I'm sure we talked about it yesterday. But it hasn't been analyzed from a gender point of view and that's a critique that women's budget group has been doing for many years now that sometimes the response was there is no gender effect or we don't have the tools to do a gender impact analysis because it's difficult to look inside households or we can't really say that a transfer of money given to a household has any implication within the household because the household share it equally and making that assumption is already making a statement that is a gender statement but in the wrong way. So what's important to understand when we do so distributional analysis is essentially looking at if there is a policy change how it affects people's livelihoods the main income or sometimes the value of the public services they receive it's usually considered as an overnight change so there is no behavioral reaction if unemployment benefits are reduced we don't look at whether the unemployed will look more actively to find jobs or take jobs no matter what whatever is available we just look at how much income they've been cut. But as a result we need to know which income are we looking at is it the household or is it the individual or is it just the monetary income or the notional value of all the free services they receive as well which we could call standard of living which is made of disposable income plus the value of public services. And then there are rules to try to establish to break into the household and see how some of the income is transferred to one or the other partner with different assumptions. So all this needs to be considered there is no straightforward way to do it but it's not because they are not straightforward way to do it that it can't be done you could always have a range of assumptions and show the different effects depending on the assumptions you make. But the argument that it is complicated shouldn't be part of any policy maker statement because we've provided the tools and the models to show that it is feasible and I'm going to show you an illustration. So in this case the exercise was done by a micro simulation tool developed by Howard Reed at Landman Economics and it allocates the impact of cuts and changes in public services depending on which individuals use them in the context of the household. And it also look at the tax and benefits changes so indirect taxation, direct taxation and social security benefits and tax credits all put together to see what would be the impact on people's standard of living. What we can call the full income which is the disposable income after taxes plus the value of services in countries such as health, education, transport etc. and social care that they received through the usage. And because it's difficult to understand the individual dimension, not that it can't be done, you could also argue that instead of deciding if for example universal credit is given to one because the rule is that it will be given to one individual in the household which one would it be, you can make assumptions about that depending on the characteristics of the partners in the household or but then some can argue that oh well but that's completely arbitrary etc. So that's still possible to do and we will do that very soon to have a better understanding on how individual transfers or individual income are affected by change. But even if you can't you can still have a gendered analysis at the household level because of a very different gender conversations of many households. The striking example being the majority of lone parents are headed by women 90% and also single pensioners are more likely to be women. So you could have gendered households that look at the characteristics of the gender differences between those types of households. So female lone parents, male lone parents, couples with children, without children etc. and have an idea of how these cuts and changes affect. And to start I will show you a distribution that's by disposable income deciles. So this is not gendered for say but it is gendered because of the composition of these deciles. So the income range from the lowest income deciles to 10% households with the lowest disposable income to the 10% with the highest disposable income. And these are the changes in proportion of the standard of living of each of these household groups on average. Of all the tax benefits and public services cuts that have taken place since 2010 and that have been announced to be taking place to 2020. So this is the annual cut in 2020 of an average household income in each of these deciles groups. Compared to what their income would have been if all policies that have taken place or are announced to be taking place between 2010 and 2020 didn't. So in nutshell if the March 2010 budget by the then Labour government had carried out with all the announcements about indexation, about amount to be spent in public services etc. Had been carried through all the way to 2020 what would have been their income then and what it is predicted to be due to all the announcements that have been done by the coalition government and the conservative government now. And this is the difference and you can see the lowest deciles group is expected to have a cut on their living standards by 23% which is huge. The picture also shows the difference between the two periods. So in orange and yellow is the changes announced by the coalition government having taken place between 2010 and 2015 or still going on until 2020. And in blue are the changes announced since 2015 so since the July budget in 2015. What you can see here is the coalitions changed they were already decried for being regressive. Indeed the first decile loses about 13% compared to others but you can see this is quite not a very steep curve. So the regressivity of the cuts is not as huge as it is when you add the more recent announcement. In the nutshell the incoming of the conservative government made the changes even more regressive so that the lowest income households are bearing more of the brunt of the austerity. And why it is gendered because in the bottom half of the distribution of income you can find more women, essentially single pensioners and lone parents. So even looking at a decile which doesn't look gendered per se is a gendered analysis once you know the composition of these decile groups in terms of men and women. And then the other picture is to show a gendered household analysis which decompose the type of households across all income groups into depending on the characteristics of a group of childless households of working age, households with children, independent children and then pensioners, couples or more. And you have single women, single men, male lone parents and female single pensioners and then couples. And you can see that again that's more of a striking picture that single couples headed by women are worse affected than other types of couples. Sorry single households where headed by women. So female lone parents lose about 21-22% of their standard of living mainly due to changes in tax benefits announced in July and that's the introduction of universal credit at a lower rate of replacement if you like than the current system of tax credit. Due to the change in, announced in July 2015 about cutting it for more than two children and reducing the allowances that households would receive. Jerome, these are percentages of the 2010 income? No, 2020. Apprated with inflation in 2020. So it's under the standard of living in 2020? If all the change, if no change had been made from the announcement by the labor government in March 2010 and the income would have followed general inflation, well until 2015 is earnings inflation and from 2015 to 2020 it's price inflation. That's the income of reference plus the value of the services they would have got from the policy in place in 2010. And then you subtract the actual predicted income based on the same operating policies except if they had been changed. And also like for single pensioners the effect is considerable in terms of cuts to public services that they receive. Even though public pensioners have been protected in a way through an increase in their state pension that was far more generous than what happened to other types of benefits. Because they rely, they receive other benefits than just pension. But also because they rely on social care services much more than other parts of the population. The cuts to social care budget which basically the government decided to reduce the grants to local authorities who are responsible for social care and allow them to increase by 2% that points the rate of council tax in order to fund it. All of this is factored in despite that it doesn't compensate for the reduction in social care funding. And that's a huge, it's a huge gap that doesn't seem to have been in the mainstream headlines because they've tried to compensate the announcement of cuts to the grant by saying that the councils could raise 2%. But even if you factor in that 2% which is a maximum assumption, not all councils would be able to do that. And also more importantly the councils who could be needing more social care provisioning will not want to raise council tax because they might have a lower income population which relies more on social care being provided freely by the public sector. So the solidarity between councils has been dismantled by the withdrawal of government subsidy. This now shows up on our council tax field. It says, as in social care, as a specific lane. And you see everything that's solidarity across more reach and less switch, in regions or councils. So this is important to show as well. You just said about universal benefit, explaining the difference between female and young parents. Can you just explain that a bit further? Why specifically is there more of a hit on female and young parents? The universal credit. So I don't know if you're familiar with the universal credit. Basically it's a transfer, it's a new system that's being implemented. It's not yet implemented fully and it's projected to be implemented in 2020-21. It's been postponed every year by a few years because it's really difficult. It's supposed to simplify the current system of tax credits and in-work and out-of-work benefits, such as housing benefits, income support, child tax credit working tax rates, to combine it to one single payment that will be awarded to one individual, with lots of changes in the way, in the level of allowance, in the rate by which it is reduced as income increases, the way it's paid online, monthly rather than weekly, etc. And it's basically the elements of it. That female and single, female and young parents rely most on the child-related elements that have been cut drastically in the July budget. It was cut for the tax credit systems, the child tax credits, so the amounts, the level of the reduction, the amount, the threshold after which the generosity is being brought back, and also the number of children that were come. And it has been reversed. I don't know if you remember the announcement, you know, OTAN was a big announcement, but tax credits cuts have been reversed due to buoyant pressure. But it didn't apply to universal credit. And by 2020, because universal credit will have replaced the tax credit system, these cuts go through and that's what shows it. It's more for female and parent and male parents, it's essentially because female and parents have lower income and because it's in proportion of their income, it appears as a larger proportion for the same amount being cut. I'm sure it's also a larger proportion of female and parents than any other group would be on universal credit. Yeah, as well, than male and parent. So this is an illustration of how this gender analysis can be done from a distributional point of view and that hasn't been done by the government. And indeed the government changed the way it's even the previous analysis, which was more or less produced, not with public services, but at least with some tax benefits. There used to be an analysis after each budget about how it affects lowest income households compared to highest income households. And they've changed since July, now they're no longer looking at the proportion of income that's being cut per household, but the proportion of the cuts that's been borne by the highest household versus the lowest paid household, which is a completely different way of analysing. Obviously, if you are rich, you get more income and therefore you pay more tax. As a total share of the tax, you will have a great proportion, but that's not the same as saying this is now becoming a progressive system because the richer household pay more taxes than the poorer household. That's obviously the case even if the system was just a flat rate tax. But by changing the way they are publishing their analysis, they are actually blurring the picture of how the public, because that's a public document, where you can understand the way cuts affect the distribution of income differently from a gender point of view as well as from different income levels. So that's a huge thing that needs to be changed in order to fulfil the equality duty of analysing gender effects of policies. And this is the way to do it. Obviously, there are limitations because it only looks at, as I just showed, the impact between different households. There is a way to do it within households. For example, personal taxes individual. So you can analyse if you increase taxation on income tax. On income, you can analyse who affects individually. But it also doesn't look at any behavioural change and long-term impact. So this is a strong assumption to say that these 10 years period impact will have an effect overnight into 2020 of that amount. Things have changed as Simon said. How do you get the benchmark income as the comparison basis? Do you operate it with average earnings? Do you operate it with the price index? But also, average earnings have increased over these 10 years as a result of the policy changes as well in different ways. So there are limitations. But that doesn't mean you can't make a strong statement because within all these mistakes about changes, you can still compare individuals or households between themselves. They will all be affected, well, to some extent by the same rate of inflation. And therefore, even if the benchmark income is different, there is still a comparison to be made. It's not true that they're all affected by the same rate of inflation because they don't spend the same on the same goods. But broadly speaking, the comparison between households still holds and it's still the case that even if you change your assumptions, the lowest income households are most affected. But also, what's important and perhaps needs further analysis is how these changes and cuts to benefits or public services changes the incentives between men and women and change them differently. And it can reinforce the gender income even more than what the picture showed or sometimes reduced, but it's unlikely given the shape of the cuts. So this is it. This is just to show who the youth women's budget group is. It's a network of about 200 academics, members of NGOs, activists of trade unions, some men, mainly women, and all volunteering except for one part, time coordinator. And the main aim, as Sue said earlier, is to analyze gender dimension dimensions of government but she's been doing that since 1989, publicizing results, sharing results with politicians, policymakers try to make change happen. It's not a political organization. It's an independent think tank. Obviously with strong ideas about gender equality, but the results are available for any policymaker to be changed and we can be critical of any type of government because in the last 30 years or more, there are many things that need to be changed to achieve better gender equality. But it's true that since 2010, the level of critique increased sharply because of the policies that have been implemented and as we can see have affected women much more. But it's not just in the UK, there are other countries applying austerity with gender effects, pronounced gender effects. So the same reason because women rely more on public services and social security. And that's the European Gender Budgeting Network which also analyzes economic policy from a gender point of view and fiscal policies of the gender, the way of creating gender budgets to make policy more effective. And that's it. If you want some of the websites to have further information. Thank you. Any questions? You were talking about making your work available to various politicians. What is the reaction that you get protected from the Labour Party? Would you like to single out the Labour Party? Is it when Gordon Brown used to be in Finland, Britain's finance minister, he was keen on talking about getting women and human birth back to work. I mean that implicitly said, you know, unless you're getting paid work, you're back in the margin case, it doesn't count for anything. And I think it's upset quite a lot of people. Yeah, I mean... This is somewhere on the Labour Party, it doesn't count for anything at all. We've got to get them back into work. That's astonishing, isn't it, from a Labour Party that's conservative, we would have understood it. But I'm wondering what the situation is now today with any of those people, if you managed to contact them and even if you managed to get a response, what the response is that you're getting that you and so-and-others are doing? Well, I don't know whether it's a... a surprise from the Labour Party to have that kind of reaction, because you could argue that the conservatives are indeed valuing a home, a home, a full-time homemaker. So I think both sides of the political spectrum haven't gotten yet all the dimensions that they need to have to understand what the gender issues are. Work could be improved, or you could imagine policies that favor employment for all of them, as long as there is enough provision of all the things that need to be done to provide care, such as accessible free childcare, et cetera. But you could imagine also reducing working time for all so that more men can share into a better environment. And you could have a combination of both. None of the parties, at the moment, are making either strongest goals in either way. But what we're trying to do in showing whatever priority you have, be it everybody at work or everybody at home or specialized spheres, depending on gender or other criteria, you need to understand what the consequences are for all of them. You need to understand what the consequences are for the other policies, policy goals you have. And that's our main work. It's not so much to prescribe the world that they should be pursuing, even though we have our own idea of what that could be. But in the context of their main policy objectives, for example, deficit reduction is really one main overarching policy we may disagree on. But even within that context, the policies that they implement in order to achieve that might not be effective because they've ignored the terms of diamonds. I'm going to come back later on that with the plan F. And that's essentially the angle we take. The Labour Party, at the moment, has completely changed from before 2010 to 2015. So the reception is mixed, but I think they are listening more to the proposals or the analysis we provide, actually. Okay? Oh, sorry. Sorry. I wanted to ask you about how you include the macro factors. So, coming back to that point, more corporate environment, leading us to the work space, there's an issue with rhetoric about valuing home-place work. But then there's information entirely about enabling me, after I've had my children, to not be kicked out of the workforce and we need policies in place so that they'll have to have to. So I'm all for everything going around to enable women to get back into the work space after having children. Now, macro effects. So when you had a look at some of the arguments that were behind the austerity policies, the idea of expansionary fiscal contraction, the causal process that they were going to was about cutting the welfare bill, cutting jobs in the public sector, and cutting wages in the public sector so you could reduce wages overall in the private sector. And in theory, you'd get higher profit share, higher investment growth. That was there. That was there. So if you look at wages in the private sector, they haven't even come down. So I'm wondering if you incorporate that at all in your effects because they are all so gendered. So I was looking at, you know, a report from the London Assembly about how now one in four women in London are earning less than the London living wage and they in particular have had extremely anemic wage growth. This was an attack on forests. So it was about the eight years since forests got elected and it was saying women are worse off in real terms than they were when you were elected as men. So I wonder if you incorporate any of that, the actual wages you're earning outside the benefit and tax system specifically organised by the state because these are a repercussion of the state policies. I mean, yes, there is some of it being built but obviously the comparison is about the direct policy effect of a change in transfers. We don't incorporate the employment, the indirect effects of policy change on employment behaviour and therefore on earnings. But earnings policies are implemented such as the increase in the national living wage, well, the minimum wage for over 25 is included. Assumptions on the inflation of earnings being flat indeed at that, but it's not a gendered earning assumption, it's a national number. But that definitely is part of what gender analysis should be about. It's also looking at the gross income and how they evolve as a result of policy changes which might require a bit more behavioural model to be built in to be able to do that such as wage equations. What I'm showing you there is only one aspect of what we do and we do also comment on the types of things that you're talking about, the back-to-back effects on the gender wage gap. It's just so what your own institution is there that showed you there was the specific distribution. There will be more on this afternoon when I talk about social infrastructure and the employment policies to develop better jobs. Definitely it's important to have those dimensions. I can ask this question, but it's more political because I think we see much in there about the contribution of the EU and the EU policy on women in this country. Just also some questions that you might have said before, the referendum you've got coming up and whether Britain stays in or leaves, whether that would have any impact on women's lives in relation to work and care or even the facts that you know. Again, this is a particular set of gender impact. It's an example of what a distribution or gender impact analysis could be to isolate the effect of particular policies, be it the budget changes and the spending changes. We could do the same for legislation changes at the European level and how it has given women more rights in terms of parents to leave, in terms of working hours. There are lots of EU regulation that has been implemented in order to foster gender equality. At the same time, there are other aspects of the EU social model that has been weaker in promoting gender equality because they wanted to keep national sovereignty on some social issues, such as taxation or social security settings. Definitely, I don't have an answer to what Brexit would have. What I could hinge is that because the UK has opposed many of the EU legislation or tried to water down many of the EU legislation in terms of working time, in terms of protection for maternity rights, it may or may not mean that if the UK was to leave, they would revise those legislation and there would be more damaging to women, but we don't know, because it depends on the government also at the time. Yeah, one last maybe we should move on.