Comment
By Gavin Mochan
Female employment in Scotland has never been higher, with latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing nearly 1.32 million women aged 16 to 64 holding down a job under contract between June and August of this year.
The resulting employment rate of 74.9 per cent is the highest since the ONS started keeping such records in 1992. The proportion of female employment ranged from the mid to high 60s up until the spring of 2014, after which it started regularly coming in above 70%.
Economic inactivity – those not in work, and not seeking work – among women throughout the UK has been falling since 2010 in part due to increases in the state pension age. After a slight decline in female employment in the years immediately following the banking crisis of 2008, there has been steady growth on this front since 2012.
Some of this increase in employment has come from growing numbers of women starting their own business, with those working full-time for themselves growing 7% quarter-on-quarter. This compares to 1% fewer men doing the same.
Females are also significantly more likely to work part-time: 38% of working women do so on a part-time basis, versus just 13% of men. Here it’s worth noting that part-timers tend to earn less per hour than their full-time equivalents.
Yesterday’s figures also show that across all workers in Scotland, pay increases are failing to keep pace with other parts of the UK. This in turn is driving employers to seek out cheaper talent north of the Border.
The latest estimates from the ONS indicate that median monthly remuneration for payrolled employees in Scotland was £2,125, an increase of 5.3% on the same period a year earlier. This was significantly adrift of the 6.3% increase in monthly pay for the UK as whole.
Meanwhile, hiring demand in Scotland has of late with 55,000 job openings advertised in September, 21% more than in June.
Conversely, England and Wales have been oscillating between growth and decline. They had 856,000 vacancies advertised online in September, 1% fewer than in June, perhaps indicating that businesses in the south have been more sensitive to the bewildering mini-Budget announced by a Government in chaos.
It seems Scotland has become an area of respite from rising employment costs. This argument is affirmed when you look at firms such as Barclays, which unveiled its state-of-the art campus in Glasgow in October of last year. Its Glasgow workforce has grown by 90% and is on track to hit 5,000 by 2023.
Job openings in banking and insurance grew by 29% month-on-month in September and were up 47% compared to a year earlier. IT roles which are crucial to banking growth also grew 67% month-on-month, and by 16% on an annual basis.
Against this backdrop, the demand for workers in Scotland has shown few signs of abating. The forthcoming recession could eventually put a dampener on recruitment in IT and banking but will bear far harder on lower-paid and part-time workers.
Gavin Mochan is managing director of s1jobs.
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