Women and Casualisation - Women's experiences of job insecurity

The UK labour market is changing. While the last few years have brought higher than expected levels of employment, this has been fuelled by a growth in temporary and insecure work. 

In sectors like social care, retail, catering, cleaning and hospitality hundreds of thousands of women are employed on contracts that offer little in the way of pay, guaranteed hours or job security. Yet, it is not just women in low paid sectors who are finding it difficult to get permanent contracts with regular hours, job insecurity is increasingly a feature of many skilled professions such as university lecturers.

This report does not set out to show that women are significantly more likely to find themselves employed on casual contracts but rather that casualised and precarious work pose particular problems for women, partly because of the weaker maternity rights associated with some of these types of contracts and partly due to difficulties reconciling variable hours or job insecurity with caring responsibilities.

The qualitative data in this report is drawn from in depth interviews with twelve women, all of whom have caring responsibilities and have been on or are currently employed on a casual basis.

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