Why women are Hillary's key

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 12 Απριλίου 2015 - 15:01

There are few worse countries to be a woman than Saudi Arabia. Yet the kingdom's recent adoption of four weeks paid leave means Saudi women now have better maternity benefits than their US counterparts.

American women's surprisingly weak work benefits are now belatedly coming into the spotlight. Hillary Clinton's White House bid took a long time to get off the ground. But if she can stir the female vote, as her campaign aims to do, the White House is hers to lose. Women vote in higher numbers than men. They also hold the key to America's economic future.

Mrs Clinton virtually ignored her gender in her 2008 campaign. The prospect of electing America's first black president overshadowed that other big glass ceiling. Because of her familiarity, it is easy to underestimate her potential to excite women in 2016. In the US, black men received the vote more than half a century before women. Black turnout for Barack Obama was a strong factor in his 2008 landslide. Women could do the same for Mrs Clinton. The gap in turnout is already wide (63.7 per cent of US women voted in 2012, versus 59.8 per cent of men). If Mrs Clinton could extend that by a couple of points, her electoral maths would be decisive.

The women's vote is Mrs Clinton's potential gold mine. But it is also her pitfall. Any sense that she is pandering to one slice of the electorate - even if it makes up more than half of it - could backfire. Many women (and men) revile Mrs Clinton as a manipulative figure who owes her career to her husband. Women lean more Democratic than Republican, but most do not vote on a candidate's gender. Moreover, at 67, Mrs Clinton suffers from an age gap. In 2008, Mr Obama won more young women's votes in the Democratic primaries than Mrs Clinton, although she received marginally more of the female vote overall. She cannot expect to shift the gender gap simply by declaring that her election would make history. She will need to incite women's hopes without alienating men. As it happens,a majority of both belong to America's squeezed middle class.

There was a time when promising to revive US manufacturing would have done the trick. But most voters sense that "reshoring" is a chimera, at least in terms of jobs. Besides, Mrs Clinton tried that line in 2008 and lost - and most of the blue collar jobs that had vanished were male. Mrs Clinton's challenge in today's post-meltdown economy is very different. Women bear the brunt of the trend towards part-time work in casualised industries. They also have a far rawer deal than in most other advanced economies. Alone among wealthy democracies, American women have no right to paid maternity leave, no federal support for childcare facilities, and very few protections if they get pregnant. Under a bill passed in Bill Clinton's first year as president, Americans are entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave. Nothing has been added since then. Almost no men avail of it, according the Centre for American Progress, a Washington think-tank. Perhaps they would if it was worth their while.

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>But the real scandal is America's falling rate of female employment. Until 2000, the US female labour force participation rate climbed in parallel with those of other countries. Since then, it has dropped while it has continued to improve elsewhere. Only 75 per cent of US women between the ages of 25 and 54 are in work, compared to an average of 79 per cent in the other 22 advanced countries. A key reason is the weakness of women's benefits. In places like Germany and Canada, the gap between men and women's pay is far smaller than in the US. That is partly because far more men take parental leave. It is also because the US has much weaker childcare support. In almost half of US states, it costs more to put two kids in childcare than the average cost of housing. Little wonder so many women have been dropping out of work.

In this respect, Mrs Clinton's candidacy comes at precisely the right moment. America's biggest economic problem is its stagnant middle class. It will probably be the key issue in the 2016 presidential election. The most obvious remedy is to bring more women into the US workforce and keep them there. The larger the labour force, the longer the US Federal Reserve can keep interest rates low without triggering inflation. The more secure women feel in their jobs, the lower the turnover costs to business. It costs far more to find and train new employees than to retain them with decent benefits.

The economic case is a no-brainer - The US is a generation late to the party. But the political case may be tougher to sell. In recent years, Democrats, including Mrs Clinton, have focused on the Republican "war on women". Republican-controlled states have busily been making it harder to get abortions. They have also been restricting access to contraception. Mrs Clinton's temptation will be to up that rhetorical ante. It would be a mistake. Republicans will do that for themselves. Her focus should be the US economy. Women's issues are no longer just women's issues, if they ever were. Their economic wellbeing is a key to lifting America's long-term growth.

The more Mrs Clinton can make voters think about that, the likelier she is to turn the conversation her way.

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