Around Made in Dagenham

Useful vocabulary

Claim social benefitsA thresholdDeprivationPoor reliefChildcare Unemployment rateThe wage gap

Women in the UK are more likely to suffer poverty than men and are more vulnerable to poverty, unemployment and deprivation.

Women are over-represented in statistics on poverty.

Poverty is not gender-neutral. Women have less opportunity than men to work.

Responsibility for childcare and domestic labour reduces women’s availibility for paid jobs.

Between 1971 and 1990, the number of single parents increased by 60% to over a million families. Most of these families were headed by women. 65% of them were poor enough to claim social security benefits.

2.58 million women in full-time employment earned less than the European Decency Threshold.

Over 50% of full-time working women were low-paid. At the start of the 20th century, 61% of adults on poor

relief were women. In 1987, 60% of adult to whom such benefits were paid were women.

Yet, dependency on relatives has dropped over the 20th century: women have grown more independent financially.

« The sexual division of labour and the different tasks and roles adopted by men and women are at the root of female poverty » Moya Jones, « The Feminisation of Poverty » in Pauvreté et Inégalités en Grande Bretagne de 1942 à 1990, Danièle Frison (dir.), Paris, Ellipses, p.121.

Because of gender-segregated role at home, women are often employed in the public sector and in caring roles. They have little access to responsibility jobs.

After the war, the unemployment rate was extremely low but it started rising after 1967, reaching one million in 1975, two million in 1981.

Over the same period, the workers and manual labourers were at a greater risk of being unemployed; the north of the country is more severely hit by unemployment.

From 1968 to 1990, official figures indicate that women are less likely than men to be unemployed. This gap is due to the fact that women are less often employed in the industry but more often employed in the public sector as civil servants. There are more part-time workers among women than among men so that they are less likely to lose their jobs.

Equal Pay Act, 1970

1970: Equal Pay Act: the first legislation in the UK aimed at ending pay discrimination between men and women.

1975: The Sex Discrimination Act; The Employment Protection Act (granting Maternity Leave)

Dagenham• The Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968 was a landmark labour-

relations dispute. The strike began on 7 June, 1968, when women manufacturing car seat covers in Dagenham plant in Essex decided to stop working. They argued that they were regarded as unskilled and wrongly ranked in Category B instead of Category C and that they were less paid than unskilled man.

• Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in Harold Wilson's government responded to the situation and the strike ended after three weeks of conflict: the women’s pay was increased by to 8% below that of men, rising to the full category B rate the following year.