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1.7 billion women and girls around the world are already living on less than $5.50 a day and it’s expected that this figure will rise as this next wave of austerity makes life harder for
people already struggling to meet the rising cost-of-living. Women have the most insecure employment, a problem that will inevitably increase as businesses cut costs to survive the economic
storm. In the UK, women are more likely than men to be earning their income on zero-hours contracts, with Black and Asian women twice as likely as white men to do so. Public sector workers
are mainly women, so when jobs are cut, they are hardest hit. And as budgets are cut, access to the services that women rely on - such as sexual health and domestic violence support services
- will suffer. Studies have shown that interpersonal gender-based violence (GBV) increases with austerity. This is particularly worrying when you realise that globally, more than one in
every 10 women and girls aged 15-49 were subjected to sexual and/or physical violence by an intimate partner in the previous 12 months. During lockdown, a staggering 85 percent of countries
shut their emergency services for survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). In the UK, many rape crisis centres and domestic violence organizations closed during the last round of austerity
a decade ago. These services were already underfunded and under-resourced but their closure had a catastrophic effect, demand then exceeded supply by an estimated 300 per cent. A repeat
scenario is avoidable, Oxfam’s research found that just two percent of the annual $2 trillion global military spend could finance prevention and treatment programmes to tackle GBV in 132
countries by 2030. When we look at the potential impact of austerity cuts on women in low-income countries like Nigeria, the figures are stark. In 2020, Nigeria announced a 42 percent
reduction in its health budget in response to the pandemic. The country already has some of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. The lifetime risk of a Nigerian woman dying
during pregnancy or childbirth is 1 in 22, in contrast to the lifetime risk in rich countries, estimated at 1 in 4,900. Cruelly, women are impacted by cuts to services, social protection and
infrastructure twice. First directly, through rising prices or loss of jobs, and then indirectly, because they are expected to be society’s ‘shock absorbers’ and to survive and take care of
everyone else when the state steps back. In 2020 alone, globally it is estimated that women spent an additional 512 billion unpaid hours caring for others. It’s important to understand that
austerity is a political choice – there are alternatives for an equal future. Governments can raise taxes on those who can afford it – a wealth tax on the world's millionaires and
billionaires could raise almost $1 trillion more than governments are planning to save through cuts in 2023. Governments could and should put women and girls at the heart of policy making,
giving them a platform from which to reduce this appalling gender inequality. And the International Labour Organization’s labour standards should be fully implemented worldwide and it is
crucial that they include women in the informal and care economies. The illogic of austerity has caused enough pain for women and girls. As governments draw on lessons learned from the
pandemic and previous failed rounds of austerity, it is time to end austerity measures once and for all. * Dana Abed is co-author of Oxfam research paper The Assault of Austerity.