An Unashamedly Female Agenda

A Political Economy for Women

Essays by the Women’s Budget Group, Good Growth Foundation, and Members of Parliament

This pamphlet contains a collection of ambitious essays, authored by MPs, think tanks and campaigners, exploring how we come together to build a women's political economy - and why.

It is published on the premise that gender equality is not a downstream benefit of growth -  but one of its conditions, and that the £113 billion the UK forgoes each year through women's exclusion from paid work on equal terms is evidence of a design failure rather than an accident.

The contributions range across the labour market and care, parenting and maternity services, collective bargaining, reindustrialisation, artificial intelligence, transport, domestic abuse and national resilience. They differ in emphasis and occasionally in prescription. What unites them is a refusal to treat any of these as women's issues to be handled at the margins of economic policy, and a shared conviction that barriers built by political decisions can be dismantled by different ones. It brings together diagnoses and ideas in the hope of building an agenda that can benefit all of us.

With thanks to Polly Billington MP for mobilising the collection.