It seems to be rather topical at the moment…the subject of women. I sometimes feel I’m not even part of the debate, with everyone from the Prime Minister to the left wing opposition to the business community all saying what we want.
The problem is everybody has their own agenda, and thinks they they know what’s best for us. The other problem is women aren’t a homogeneous group, we are individuals and all have very different aspirations, wants and needs. What’s important to one woman can be irrelevant to another. That’s what makes us the wonderful individuals we are.
One of the hot topics at the moment is to increase the number of females on the boards of companies, which I personally whole heartily support. In support of this yesterday, and to try and enable women to progress to top jobs in the workplace David Cameron announced he was to examine plans under which working mothers would be given tax breaks for employing cleaners, babysitters or gardeners. All this is from a scheme being used in Sweden that has halved the cost of employing domestic help and has the added bonus of stopping domestic help from working in the cash-in-hand black market.
This resulted in a dressing down from a female Labour MP who rather obviously said how dreadful and out of touch the PM was for suggesting help for well off mothers who could afford domestic help. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t! You can see where I’m coming from here can’t you.
It was also suggested that this would be to the detriment of tax credits going to low paid mothers. I had a quick look on HMRC’s website and it seems if you have children then you are entitled to child tax credits at varying levels on earnings up to £40,000. On earnings of £25,000 and below these are in my view significant amounts of money. Considering the average wage in the Britain is around £26,000 then this all seems quite fair. I have to say that if a person earns £40,000 pa then I’m not sure I want my taxes being used to give them child tax credits. So this all begs the question why is the Prime Minister’s potential (and it is a huge potential!) offer of help to working mothers on domestic help harming lower paid mothers.
Surely all working mothers need help at different levels and if we are to up the number at board level, schemes such as these should be considered, and I do mean just considered.
I would like us to look at how we can help all women reach their full potential and have the same opportunities as men. This could take any number of forms not all monetary. Can we not just work together sensibly on this and stop making it a battle between who’s paid what, and who is better than who?




