International Women’s Day is a chance for everyone to celebrate the achievements of women.
In retail that contribution is significant. Over 80% of purchasing decisions are made by women. 56% of people who work in retail are women. The contribution they make is critical to the success of our world leading industry.
That contribution is even more important in the over 1.5 million part-time roles across the industry. An even larger proportion of people in these retail roles are women - two-thirds - that's around one million women.
A BRC survey of part-time workers in retail asked what they most valued in their job? The top answer was flexibility and the second was locality.
A local part-time job enables so many women to combine making a living, working in a team with building connection to people in the community in which they live day in and day out. But most significantly, it also creates the opportunity for many of those one million women to combine both working in retail with their other more important jobs.
Bringing up a family, taking kids to school, being there when they come home, caring for relatives, the list goes on. Without the flexibility to manage their working hours around these commitments, it would not be possible for them to juggle the multiple roles they play in society. It is special. It is to be celebrated. And it is something we should hold on to at all costs.
The industry thanks them for this contribution to both the businesses they are part of and our society more widely. We don't say it enough. International Women’s Day is a chance to do that.
There is always more the industry needs to do. The proportion of women in more senior roles starts to fall away, the more senior the job. One of the main reasons is the loss of that vital flexibility. The industry has a responsibility for ensuring that more senior women to have part-time or flexible jobs that they can manage around wider commitments.
And there is more the government needs to do. The Employment Rights Bill is currently going through parliament. The industry supports the objectives of the Bill; we should crack down on unscrupulous employers without question. What we should not do is put at risk the ability of retailers up and down the country to continue to offer the flexible jobs that such a huge number of women find so valuable.
The provisions around guaranteed hours risk doing just that. Flexibility should be freely offered and freely taken. A new law that specifies how many hours an employee should want based on what they've previously worked risks undermining the very thing we should value and celebrate. The industry supports a pragmatic approach to the Bill that focuses on tackling unscrupulous employers while protecting employees but calls on the government to ensure the flexibility so valued by so many working women is not undermined.
So while we celebrate the role of women in retail for International Women’s Day, we should also take a moment to consider how we can protect the flexible jobs relied upon by hundreds of thousands of women. Retailers must continue to be out there, cheerleading for the flexibility of retail jobs and calling on the Government to do more to protect them. From the impact of changes to employer national insurance, to the risk of unintended consequences of parts of the Employment Rights Bill, there is much we have reason to shout about.
