As a child at school, I remember being in a PSHE lesson and the teacher telling us to draw a doctor, nurse, pilot and secretary.

Predictably, we all did what was expected. The doctor and pilot were men. The nurse and secretary were women.

The idea, of course, was to teach us that, despite the socially-conditioned stereotypes that had already settled themselves firmly in our developing minds, women can be and do anything.

Girls and women of my generation were told we had the whole world at our fingertips. Unlike our mothers – who might have been more confined by social expectations and structural barriers that kept women confined to domesticity, motherhood and supposedly family-friendly career options – we were told to aim high.

But now, as our economic climate reaches a tipping point and households across the country are feeling the pinch, women are facing the repercussions in our life choices and our careers. 

Choices are being removed from us as we are being increasingly pushed into decisions and futures out of necessity and survival rather than freedom.

Growing up, I may have been aware of my multifaceted disadvantages – my race, class, and religion – but I don’t think I ever saw my gender as a true barrier to a successful future. 

These days, girls in many schools benefit from initiatives designed to encourage them into male-dominated industries, like extra-curricular STEM programmes, lunchtime coding classes or opportunities for work experience in elite industries. And perhaps we are getting somewhere.

After all, women make up 68% of university applicants to medical-related degrees and just before the pandemic, the number of girls studying A-Level sciences was beginning to overtake boys.

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a webbrowser thatsupports HTML5video

Of course, it is an undeniable reality that systemic misogyny is rife. Our world still revolves around an unstoppable patriarchal core, with sexual abuse, harrassment and violence against women marring our everyday lives – making us feel unsafe in our own streets and forced to change our behaviour due to the threat we face at the hands of men.

But for a while, perhaps we were tricked into glimpsing a future in which women weren’t confined to society’s limited ideas of womanhood – that success for women could look like something different to an engagement ring and ripe ovaries waiting to reproduce.

But then the cost of living crisis hit.

While we all count the pennies and tighten our belts, cut back on non-essentials and potentially have to choose between eating and heating, women across the country are being forced into decisions that aren’t their own. 

If we thought feminism had handed us some of the rights and opportunities that women had been historically secluded from over time, then the cost of living crisis is stripping us of these free choices all over again.

Whereas the decision when – or if – to have a child was once a personal one, now it is bound up in the nation’s political outlook and the financial policies enacted by a government that doesn’t appear committed to making life any easier for those struggling. 

Careers in the public sector like teaching and healthcare are becoming increasingly unappealing as wage stagnation means it is ever more impossible to maintain a career in these sectors whilst bearing the cost of childcare too. 

Our economic climate is undoing decades – centuries, even – of work and, as always, it is those women who are already socially and financially disadvantaged who will face the brunt of this.

The careers, mental health and material stability of women up and down the country are already being impacted by the Government’s failure to step in and support the most deprived of households – and with energy bills set to soar even further as winter hits, things are only looking worse.

Take the preposterous and ever-rising cost of childcare, which can be upwards of £1,000 a month for a full-time place for a single child. This means that some families are facing the cost of a second rent or mortgage just to allow the primary carer (overwhelmingly, a woman) to return to work. 

I am faced with an impossible decision that saddles me with no options that really benefit my own wellbeing or goals

Coming towards the end of maternity leave myself, I am faced with an impossible decision that saddles me with no options that really benefit my own wellbeing or goals. I can either spend almost my entire salary on childcare, or have a career break and face the huge repercussions of being years behind my colleagues when I eventually return.

This cost is simply not one that can be absorbed by all families and so it means that ever more women are being pushed out of the workforce to instead take on the role of childcare. 

For the first time in modern history, the number of women not returning to work after having a baby has risen – as much as 13% in the last year alone among women aged 25 to 34. Our economic circumstances (and the Government’s role in it) means that the face of women’s equality in Britain is going measurably backwards for the first time in living memory. 

All the while, pressure is still being put on women to reproduce in the first place. Spurred on by last year’s census data, which found that birth rates are slowing down, demographer Paul Morland proposed the idea in The Times that there should be a childless tax placed upon those who fail to have children.

Women face all kinds of unofficial pressure in medical settings to have children.

Anecdotally, I know of friends in their late 20s who have been made to feel by their GPs that they are running out of time to have babies, women who are advised by their midwives to get pregnant with another child soon after the first ‘to get it over with’ and even women who are voluntarily childless being refused sterilisation treatments without the permission of a partner.

Yet the irony is that for many women, with the cost of childcare as high as it is, even those who want to simply cannot afford to have a child. 

For women of colour and those already living in poverty, these decisions are further compounded by being already disproportionately impacted by the cost of living crisis.

Black women are among the least likely to be top earners and with benefits like child tax credit failing to rise in line with inflation, the help available to the most deprived households will be dwarfed by the relentlessly soaring cost of energy bills.

To couple the structural discrimination that women of colour and working-class women encounter in the workplace with the financial burden of childcare, it looks increasingly like the nation’s workforce will simply lose these women who are no longer able to work with the cost of having a family. 

Choices about our bodies and futures are being stripped from women – removed from our own biology and decided by the cold calculations of the state.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing [email protected]. 

Share your views in the comments below.

Source: Read Full Article