Seumas Milne
Austerity has set female voters against Cameron, but that's only part of a global change shaping the politics of the future
Frances O’Grady, the first woman leader of the Trades Union Congress: women's changing politics 'can be the foundation of a new left project, for women as well as men'. Photograph: Jason Alden / Rex Features
David Cameron has long had a problem with women. From the early days of the coalition most have balked at his government and its austerity programme that hits women hardest – along with the prime minister's patronisingly tin-ear "calm down, dear" gestures. But just as the coalition struggle over plans for yet more budget cuts is reaching fever pitch, that problem is becoming critical.
Labour's lead over the Conservatives among women has now hit 26% (51% to 25%), according to the most recent ICM/Guardian poll, compared with a 7% lead among men. No wonder Tory strategists are panicking. Some pundits have played down the ICM figure as a rogue result based on small samples.
But women have been backing Labour over the Tories by margins well into double figures since last autumn. And it's not just in party support that there's a glaring gender gap. On a wide range of issues – from cuts in pensions, benefits, health and education to tax increases on the rich – women in Britain are not only strongly opposed to coalition policies – they're often significantly more hostile to them than men.
While both men and women back a mansion tax, for example, two-thirds of women support it, compared with 57% of men. And it is not hard to see why. Women are bearing the brunt of the coalition's austerity onslaught. In the week of International Women's Day, which was set up to campaign for women's rights and freedoms, these are being undermined and reversed by Cameron's coalition.
It is women, who make up 65% of the public sector and over three-quarters of the workforce of the NHS and local government, who are taking the full force of what is now planned to be more than a million public service jobs cuts by 2018. That will also widen the gender pay gap, which is seven points bigger in the private sector.
Women are losing out disproportionately from pay caps and freezes, tax credit, maternity pay, legal aid and benefit cuts, and make up 98% of those hit by January's child benefit cut. As the Fawcett Society puts it, together these changes spell a "tipping point for women's equality". This government is making women pay above all for the bankers' crisis.
But the shift in women's attitudes goes far beyond a reaction to the assault from Cameron and George Osborne. Women in Britain are now significantly to the left of men – and more socially liberal – on most key political controversies of the day. They are not only more committed to public services, the welfare state and progressive taxation, they are alsoon average more egalitarian, less racist and homophobic, more committed to the environment, and much more hostile to British war-making. Only a quarter backed the invasion of Iraq 10 years ago, compared with a third of men, while most women also opposed British military operations in Libya and Mali – against a minority of men.
It wasn't always like this. Women have been more anti-war than men for decades. But for most of the past century they were consistently more conservative than men – and regularly helped put the Tories in power after all women finally won the vote in 1928. In the 1950s, the Conservative gender gap was 14%.
But over the past generation there has been a sea change. Women have moved to the left almost across the board and have now leap-frogged over men. The differences might seem relatively small (though on issues of war and peace they're usually around 20%); women tend to identify less with political parties; and the shift is offset by the fact that women live longer, and older people tend to be more conservative.
The direction of travel is, however, unmistakable – and it's far from restricted to Britain. The trend for women to shift leftwards has been clear longest in the United States, where a higher proportion of women than men have voted Democrat in presidential elections since 1980, and where Barack Obama was re-elected with 55% of the overall women's vote.
The same pattern was already evident across most advanced industrial economies a decade ago. As the academics Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart found, while men's politics had remained pretty stable, women's had moved left from the 1990s onwards – and they were also far less likely to vote for parties of the far right.
Crucial to the shift has been the growth of women's employment (often segregated in low-wage and public sector work), and the decline of the traditional family and churches in Europe – but also the rise of the women's movement and the influence of feminism.
The importance of paid work in changing women's politics is one reason why there hasn't been a parallel shift in much of the developing world. In Britain women now make up half the trade union movement and have played a central role in recent industrial action, from the masspensions strike of 2011 to cleaners' walkouts on the London Underground.
But the central role of women in the Arab uprisings or the protest movement against sexual violence in India demonstrates there are no western boundaries to women's political mobilisation and common causes. As the feminist writer Gloria Steinem commented recently, more American women have been killed by their husbands or boyfriends since 2001 than all US citizens killed in 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars put together.
Of course, women's move leftwards shouldn't be overstated. There has been no shortage of warmongering and reactionary women in positions of power, and class and ethnicity both cut across and shape gender attitudes. But no amount of coalition party posturing about repackaged childcare subsidies is going to win back their lost female voters.
The convulsive industrial change of recent decades cut the ground from beneath traditional male-dominated labour movements. But more than a century after International Women's Day was established by the left (and later triggered the outbreak of the Russian revolution), women's changing politics and workplace role are already laying the ground for new forms of community-based solidarity. In the words of Frances O'Grady, the first woman leader of the Trades Union Congress, this shift "can be the foundation of a new left project, for women as well as men".
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