Equality and diversity news highlights: older women with caring responsibilities face unemployment, Jeremy Hunt calls on employers to offer flexible working hours to carers, male executives getting twice the bonuses as women executives, and women facing maternity discrimination in the workplace.

Carers have been in the news quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. According to new research by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), balancing work and caring responsibilities is becoming more difficult for older women from the ‘sandwich generation’. Women who are caring both for their elderly parents and grandchildren are often faced with unemployment after taking a career break to care full-time.

LSE academic Dr Linda Pickard has also recently published research on the care crisis in England, commenting that “The demand from frail, older people requiring care from their adult children is projected to increase by 60 per cent in the next two decades, yet we anticipate only a 20 per cent increase in people able to provide care for their older parents.”

Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, said that workers caring for elderly parents should be offered flexible working hours. He added that with the number of dementia sufferers expected to rise from about 800,000 now to more than a million by the end of the decade, employers must help carers stay in work.

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) recently conducted a study of 43,000 male managers which revealed that bonuses received by men are double those of women, exacerbating the gender pay gap. Labour’s shadow minister for women and equalities, Yvette Cooper, said: “Women executives already only get three-quarters of the pay of male executives in similar jobs. And now this research shows women managers are only getting half the bonuses too.”

Yvette Cooper also commented on the figures analysed by the House of Commons library which suggest that up to 50,000 women who take maternity leave each year are unable to return to the jobs they left behind because of discrimination by employers. Cooper, who became the first government minister to take maternity leave while in office, said: ““[When I had] my third child, senior civil servants treated [my] maternity leave with hostility, making it hard to keep in touch, and trying to change my job and working arrangements while I was away.”

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