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Revising the Rulebook: How Women Are Reshaping Economic Policy · Work It Like A Mum

• 0:01
  Elizabeth Willetts: Hey, I'm Elizabeth Willits and I'm obsessed with helping as many women as possible achieve their boldest dreams after kids and helping you to navigate this messy and magical season of life.
• 0:14
  Elizabeth Willetts: I'm a working mom with over 17 years of recruitment experience and I'm the founder of the Investing in Women job board and community.
• 0:22
  Elizabeth Willetts: In this show, I'm honored to be chatting with remarkable women redefining our working world across all areas of business.
• 0:29
  Elizabeth Willetts: They'll share their secrets on how they've achieved extraordinary success after children, set boundaries and balance, the challenges they faced and how they've overcome them to define their own versions of success.
• 0:43
  Elizabeth Willetts: Shy away from the real talk?
• 0:44
  Elizabeth Willetts: No way.
• 0:45
  Elizabeth Willetts: Money struggles, growth, loss, boundaries and balance.
• 0:49
  Elizabeth Willetts: We cover it all.
• 0:50
  Elizabeth Willetts: Think of this as coffee with your mates, mixed with an inspiring TED Talk sprinkled with the career advice you wish you'd really had at school.
• 0:57
  Elizabeth Willetts: So grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, make sure you're cosy and get ready to get inspired and chase your boldest dreams, or just survive Mondays.
• 1:07
  Elizabeth Willetts: This is the Work it Like A Mum podcast.
• 1:10
  Elizabeth Willetts: This episode is brought to you by Investing in Women.
• 1:17
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• 1:29
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• 1:52
  Elizabeth Willetts: Now back to the show.
• 1:54
  Elizabeth Willetts: Hello and welcome to the podcast.
• 1:57
  Elizabeth Willetts: Ermin Kahn and we're going to be chatting today all about your background and economic policy that you do within your work, the regulation and market design team, aren't you, hi, ermin?
• 2:07
  Elizabeth Willetts: Thank you so much for joining us today.
• 2:10
  Elizabeth Willetts: I'm really excited to learn more about you and your background, and also all the work you do at OXERA within the regulation and market design team, and all the fabulous work you're doing within economics and bringing, obviously, a female perspective to that as well.
• 2:25
  Elizabeth Willetts: So thank you so much for joining me today thank you so much for having me you've got such an interesting background, so I know we're going to talk a little bit about your background.
• 2:33
  Elizabeth Willetts: Then all the fascinating work you're doing as well, because you're doing a lot of work on impact or child care, on female participation in the workforce and also what happens to women's careers as well as they go through through their working life.
• 2:45
  Elizabeth Willetts: But thank you so much for joining me.
• 2:47
  Elizabeth Willetts: So you worked for a number of years within the civil service.
• 2:50
  Elizabeth Willetts: What was it that drew you initially to the civil service?
• 2:53
  Irmeen Khan: oh, this is going to sound really, uh funny, but I actually did one of those career placement tests when I was like 16 and I think maybe because I was in student government at the time it kind of said, you know, oh, you should consider a career in the civil service.
• 3:07
  Irmeen Khan: I thought, oh, that's a really good idea.
• 3:09
  Irmeen Khan: But it took me a few years to get there because I did do a few other things before joining the Canadian Civil Service.
• 3:15
  Irmeen Khan: But yeah, I think it was an amazing experience.
• 3:18
  Irmeen Khan: I think there's a lot of really interesting work that is done within the civil service.
• 3:24
  Irmeen Khan: But I did find that, I don't know, I kind of found it sometimes not exactly what I imagined for myself as an economist and I wasn't getting to do as much of the sort of like really hardcore economic policymaking that I wanted to be working on.
• 3:40
  Irmeen Khan: So that was a little disappointing, because you do end up doing a lot of paper pushing and things like that in the civil service.
• 3:46
  Irmeen Khan: For every interesting thing you get, you have to also do, you know, some more boring things unfortunately, did you always want to become an economist then I think probably around you know 16, 17, that kind of was in the back of my mind.
• 4:01
  Irmeen Khan: But yeah, it took a few years to get get that really to do that at university yes, yeah.
• 4:07
  Irmeen Khan: So I switched, I think, second year university into a political science and economics concentration, and then I did a master's in economics as well after what was it that appealed to you about economics and that?
• 4:21
  Irmeen Khan: work.
• 4:22
  Irmeen Khan: It's funny because it's a social science right.
• 4:25
  Irmeen Khan: It's trying to provide a bit of order to an otherwise chaotic kind of social questions that we're trying to answer.
• 4:31
  Irmeen Khan: So there's a bit of being able to have a right answer quote unquote to very complex problems and it brings a bit more rigor to things that otherwise other fields aren't able to capture.
• 4:46
  Irmeen Khan: I guess you know like I totally respect both theology, but it is, it's a different sort of approach to answering those questions, if you see what I mean.
• 4:55
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, and what has been the most interesting part of economics back?
• 5:00
  Irmeen Khan: to you.
• 5:00
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, that's a really good question.
• 5:02
  Irmeen Khan: I guess just you know being able to say some scale around problems we're facing in society, and I think that's really the appeal of economics.
• 5:31
  Elizabeth Willetts: Did you enjoy maths when you were younger then?
• 5:33
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, I think I did.
• 5:35
  Irmeen Khan: I wasn't actually always very good at it.
• 5:37
  Irmeen Khan: It was one of those things that I think I had to like.
• 5:40
  Irmeen Khan: I would always go in for extra tutoring and you know I really put a lot of effort into it, but it was more just because I couldn't believe that it wasn't coming to me easily and I had to really make sure I put the time in.
• 5:55
  Irmeen Khan: So for some people it comes really easily, but for others, I think it's one of those things where there are payoffs if you really, you know, put the time and energy into it there are payoffs if you really, you know, put the time and energy into it.
• 6:08
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, it's interesting because obviously, if you're just looking, I guess now quite big pictures and there's a lot of financial modelling and a lot of Excel.
• 6:12
  Elizabeth Willetts: You know, for somebody that doesn't really know economics, is that how it sort of looks.
• 6:16
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, so the sort of economic policy impact stuff.
• 6:19
  Irmeen Khan: A lot of that we do using just Excel models.
• 6:22
  Irmeen Khan: There are other things that we do, like more regulation and efficiency impacts we look at using econometric models.
• 6:29
  Irmeen Khan: So that is regression analysis and using very, very large data sets to look at whether something is simply correlated or causal.
• 6:39
  Irmeen Khan: Impact controlling for all these other variables.
• 6:42
  Irmeen Khan: So we do a mix of things.
• 6:44
  Irmeen Khan: Impact controlling for all these other variables.
• 6:46
  Irmeen Khan: So we do a mix of things.
• 6:46
  Irmeen Khan: But then we also have which is sort of more I wouldn't say qualitative, but it is a little bit more how do we design this market?
• 6:55
  Irmeen Khan: What are the sort of economic features we want to have in a particular marketplace to make it work effectively, and what are the key kind of you know design features that you want to put in place, I guess?
• 7:04
  Irmeen Khan: So there's really heavily quantitative stuff we do and we are data science team as well.
• 7:10
  Irmeen Khan: They do stuff that I don't even understand, but we also do, yeah, just Excel modeling, using you know green book analysis methods, and then more of the conceptual, qualitative kind of market design analysis.
• 7:23
  Irmeen Khan: Those are the kind of key things that I do.
• 7:26
  Elizabeth Willetts: So you were obviously in the civil service.
• 7:27
  Elizabeth Willetts: And then what made?
• 7:29
  Elizabeth Willetts: So you said you were not feeling you were getting enough meaty projects.
• 7:33
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, it ends up being quite political, unfortunately, you know.
• 7:39
  Irmeen Khan: So you can come up with something very solid, robust, robust, rigorous, but your job as a civil servant is fearless advice and loyal implementation, or something that's the old saying within the civil service.
• 7:53
  Irmeen Khan: So you kind of fundamentally have to respond to the elected representatives while still providing them the best advice that you can, based on evidence.
• 8:02
  Irmeen Khan: But you know, oftentimes it ends up being a way more qualitative stuff, way more strategic kind of you know who are the stakeholders and what are the considerations that are important to them, as opposed to here's what the data says and that.
• 8:17
  Irmeen Khan: I think that, for me, was what I really felt was missing sometimes.
• 8:21
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, I guess it probably can't be completely biased if it's a new government entity.
• 8:25
  Elizabeth Willetts: Because it is, yeah, I wouldn't say it's biased, but it's just, they're different.
• 8:29
  Irmeen Khan: Your stakeholder is everybody when you're in the government, so you have so many different considerations when you're trying to come up with the right policy advice.
• 8:38
  Irmeen Khan: And uh, it's.
• 8:40
  Irmeen Khan: You know, it's not always just crunching numbers and trying to get to the bottom of something, if you see what I mean.
• 8:46
  Elizabeth Willetts: Were you in the civil service in Canada?
• 8:48
  Elizabeth Willetts: Were you ever in the civil service in the UK?
• 8:50
  Irmeen Khan: I wasn't, no, but I all my colleagues.
• 8:52
  Irmeen Khan: There's a bunch of us former civil servants and most of them are from the UK government.
• 8:58
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, so you were in Canada.
• 8:59
  Elizabeth Willetts: And then what prompted the relocation to the UK?
• 9:02
  Irmeen Khan: Well, the pandemic and we got pregnant and then I was on mat leave and my husband was working.
• 9:10
  Irmeen Khan: His business was domiciled in the UK and he had been sort of trying to work remotely from Canada for a few years while I was in the civil service and it just became really untenable and since I was not working at the time, we decided let's relocate back, at least his brothers are in London and we'll have family close by In Ottawa.
• 9:25
  Irmeen Khan: We decided let's relocate back, at least his brothers are in London and you know, we'll have family close by In Ottawa.
• 9:28
  Irmeen Khan: We didn't really have any family and it was very lonely during the lockdown, as you can imagine.
• 9:33
  Irmeen Khan: But yeah, I was expecting to return to my government job, albeit remotely, but the pandemic, they just were faced with this flurry of requests to work remotely from different parts of Canada or abroad, and they weren't this flurry of requests to work remotely from different parts of Canada or abroad and they weren't able to honour my return to work request.
• 9:49
  Irmeen Khan: So, from, like a remote place, I had to return to Ottawa if I wanted my job.
• 9:53
  Irmeen Khan: So I kind of decided that okay, well, I'm just going to look for a new job which, as you can imagine, at the end of your maternity leave, looking for a new job is, like really stressful.
• 10:04
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, yeah, and obviously what I mean.
• 10:06
  Elizabeth Willetts: I'm gonna obviously ask you about that, but I'm interested to know what.
• 10:09
  Elizabeth Willetts: What are the cultural?
• 10:10
  Elizabeth Willetts: You know any interesting cultural differences between UK and Canada In like?
• 10:16
  Irmeen Khan: workplace or generally, no just general.
• 10:18
  Elizabeth Willetts: Is there something you sort of think oh gosh, that's so funny, that's really odd, oh, gosh.
• 10:23
  Irmeen Khan: I think the biggest thing is I definitely think Canadians are sort of more.
• 10:28
  Irmeen Khan: The culture is definitely more outgoing.
• 10:31
  Irmeen Khan: I don't want to say friendly, because I think, like you know, british people are friendly once you get to know them, but it is just this kind of.
• 10:37
  Irmeen Khan: What I miss the most is you'll be standing in the line in the grocery store and everybody's having a conversation with, like the random person behind them and you know everybody's making small talk and you don't really see that, at least not in London, probably in other parts of the country.
• 10:51
  Elizabeth Willetts: No, you don't do it.
• 10:52
  Elizabeth Willetts: It's like silence people, maybe looking on their phones.
• 10:54
  Irmeen Khan: No one like making eye contact exactly so I find that really, you know, funny.
• 10:59
  Irmeen Khan: Uh, that is a big tip.
• 11:01
  Irmeen Khan: My husband, who's British, also noticed that he's like you can't take anything to the dry cleaner without having to have like a 15 minute conversation like in Toronto.
• 12:02
  Elizabeth Willetts: That's that.
• 12:02
  Elizabeth Willetts: So how is it then looking for a job after essentially especially in a new country?
• 12:07
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, and I had lived here before and then I'd sort of gone back.
• 12:10
  Irmeen Khan: So I've been back and forth.
• 12:11
  Irmeen Khan: But yeah, it was, you know, totally panic inducing.
• 12:14
  Irmeen Khan: My son was going to nursery.
• 12:16
  Irmeen Khan: We were like banking on me being able to go back to my government job and I kind of.
• 12:23
  Irmeen Khan: I ended up taking a job with a small company and it was great because it was not very high pressure me to find that balance, adjusting to having a nine-month-old in nursery and starting a new job that I wasn't expecting to start and I learned a lot there.
• 12:40
  Irmeen Khan: But I was again sort of plagued with this idea that I wasn't really being fulfilled.
• 12:45
  Irmeen Khan: This wasn't.
• 12:45
  Irmeen Khan: I didn't see a future for myself, there were no growth opportunities.
• 12:49
  Irmeen Khan: And then I started a friend of mine that was an economic consultant and he had kind of planted the seed in my head and a couple of recruiters had mentioned it too.
• 12:57
  Irmeen Khan: And the thing you have to understand is the job market in Canada is quite different, so there are not as many economic consultancies.
• 13:04
  Irmeen Khan: I didn't even really consider it as an option.
• 13:07
  Elizabeth Willetts: You weren't doing economic consultancy at this point?
• 13:09
  Elizabeth Willetts: What were you doing at this point?
• 13:10
  Irmeen Khan: No, I was working, I was doing sort of similar stuff like business case analysis for a smart metering cooperative and it was really interesting and I learned a lot and it was a fantastic mission that drove that company.
• 13:26
  Irmeen Khan: But again I was kind of feeling like I need this career fulfillment.
• 13:28
  Irmeen Khan: I have a master's degree and you know, this has always been such a huge part of my life that I'm rather perhaps unusually.
• 13:35
  Irmeen Khan: I was looking for more of a challenge after having a baby and I know that's not a lot of people actually, myself included, I mean.
• 13:43
  Elizabeth Willetts: Ambition actually seems to be fueled after children rather than the other way around, isn't that?
• 13:47
  Irmeen Khan: interesting because I think you are kind of driven to, also because you lose so much of your identity when you become a mother.
• 13:53
  Irmeen Khan: I was, you know, just shocked by how my life had changed.
• 13:56
  Irmeen Khan: So it was really like searching for that thing that's going to fulfill me outside of the home as well.
• 14:02
  Elizabeth Willetts: You know a lot of I've spoken to people is like if they're putting their children into nursery, then the time they spend at work has to be really worth it.
• 14:11
  Irmeen Khan: that's exactly it you prioritize, because you're in economics terms, your opportunity cost is higher, right?
• 14:17
  Irmeen Khan: So, even with although the transition to consulting has been quite challenging and it is like the most, um, you know, in some ways it is like the most, you know, in some ways, it is the most demanding in terms of hours.
• 14:29
  Irmeen Khan: You know that you have to work, but because I'm like, ok, he's at nursery for whatever nine hours and I have to make most of this, I literally type like there's steam or like smoke coming out of my mouth.
• 14:41
  Elizabeth Willetts: I'm like, I'm like never typed the first of my life.
• 14:45
  Irmeen Khan: Exactly because you got to make every minute count and actually as a, a consultant, that's fantastic and we're charging on time, you know, like on an hourly basis.
• 14:53
  Irmeen Khan: So you really want to maximize your productivity it's been the form you wrote, which was.
• 15:00
  Elizabeth Willetts: I noticed that's quite nice that you said that historically, economics has been underrepresented by women, I guess, and a lot of sectors have been like that.
• 15:08
  Elizabeth Willetts: But it'd be interesting to get your take on, I guess, how damaging this has been for women as a whole in society.
• 15:15
  Elizabeth Willetts: And you know, looking back at some of previous economic policies, maybe they didn't consider women.
• 15:22
  Irmeen Khan: Yes, Can I just start by sharing my favourite kind of quote and I'm totally blanking on who said this, but it was something about how the GDP of a country decreases when a man marries his maid because suddenly she goes from paid work to unpaid work.
• 15:40
  Irmeen Khan: Right, it was talked about in like this isn't a good thing.
• 15:43
  Irmeen Khan: It was meant to be kind of like a sardonic comment and I'm totally blanking on who said it, but the idea is that economics has been the domain of sort of privileged white men for decades, centuries even, and labor models the models that we learn in our undergraduate courses that are very simplified.
• 16:06
  Irmeen Khan: They're meant to capture very complex dynamics in a very simplified way, but they equate anything outside of paid work as leisure.
• 16:16
  Irmeen Khan: So there's only two options it's work or leisure, and leisure includes everything that isn't.
• 16:21
  Irmeen Khan: And, of course, what does that mean?
• 16:23
  Irmeen Khan: That it's this pejorative way of looking at you know how people work outside of, outside of paid employment, and I think that no, if there had been women involved in the founding of economics, no labor model would have ever, you know, split time between paid work and leisure yeah, it's interesting because when I first started this business, I used to do a lot of blogs and I wrote about GDP and I did some research and I cannot remember the lady.
• 16:49
  Elizabeth Willetts: It was a lady that accompanied two gentlemen that were the founding fathers, if you like, of gdp and they went to africa and they were still trying.
• 16:58
  Elizabeth Willetts: I think they went to a tribe and they excluded, like you said, all that unpaid labor that the women in this tribe were doing to keep this like tribe afloat, and the woman was trying to argue that no, that should be included and was overruled.
• 17:12
  Elizabeth Willetts: Do you think that unpaid labour should be included in GDP?
• 17:15
  Irmeen Khan: That's a very interesting question.
• 17:17
  Irmeen Khan: I think there's a lot of difficult questions to answer, but what I will say is that it is kind of shocking that you know it isn't or at least there isn't some other way of reflecting it in GDP, and that's why I think there's this.
• 17:31
  Irmeen Khan: I don't know the personal view, it's not an Oxira view, but I do think that there's this hyper focus on GDP and GDP growth, when it is not telling the full story, you know, and it doesn't account for all sorts of things, including income inequality between, you know, different sort of socioeconomic groups, nor does it account for unpaid labor, which is just like.
• 17:53
  Irmeen Khan: I feel like if you don't modify GDP, there should at least be an additional indicator that is considered alongside it.
• 18:01
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, that's kind of not how, how economics work it's difficult because if you don't do the work, like you know, I'm very fortunate I have a cleaner, but if I didn't I would have to do that work, and you know, and I guess it would make sense of the government to for me to pay for a cleaner, because there's like tax implications and etc, etc.
• 18:20
  Elizabeth Willetts: But the work doesn't disappear.
• 18:22
  Irmeen Khan: Exactly, and as economists we consider opportunity cost in all of our modeling right, like when we do cost benefit analysis, where you're looking at the opportunity cost of that time being spent on something else, for example.
• 18:36
  Irmeen Khan: But we don't do that really for unpaid labor and that is a huge opportunity cost.
• 18:42
  Irmeen Khan: And I also have a cleaner and the thing is the amount of time that I would have to spend doing that work is work.
• 18:50
  Irmeen Khan: That is time that I could be spending on paid employment or with my child or whatever Right.
• 18:56
  Elizabeth Willetts: So for me it is totally worth it because yeah, obviously it won't be worth it for some individuals that are earning the same, if not less, and they want to pay their cleanerer, but then their work is not being recognised and it does seem unfair.
• 19:13
  Irmeen Khan: It is totally unfair and I think we have a long way to go before any of our national metrics sort of reflect that.
• 19:20
  Irmeen Khan: But it is important that we're having these conversations and that they are recognizing that actually, child care support means that more women will be able to re-enter the workplace and some women want to stay at home and I 100% respect that decision.
• 19:39
  Irmeen Khan: But it's more about those women who feel like they can't afford it or they can't justify it as a household expense because their income is the same as paying I know, because this is the problem, isn't a lot of people?
• 19:50
  Elizabeth Willetts: I mean, we're obviously recording this and I know the new child care, we're going to come on to that but a lot of people feel their pain to go to work, and then it's very hard then for the government, for anyone else, to persuade those individuals, even if they really love their job.
• 20:04
  Elizabeth Willetts: You know that it's worth it.
• 20:06
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, that's fair and it's expensive.
• 20:08
  Elizabeth Willetts: I think you know, even with these new policies and we're going to obviously chat with that is so expensive, particularly in London, where I know me and you are based, it's you've got to be earning a good amount.
• 20:19
  Elizabeth Willetts: It's not even like average wage.
• 20:21
  Elizabeth Willetts: You've got to be a real high flyer and then actually, at that point then the support disappears.
• 20:27
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, it's what we call the effective tax rate.
• 20:29
  Irmeen Khan: You know it's so silly as well, because if your household so, for example, the policy at the moment is, even with the new childcare supports coming in, if either you or your partner earn over 100,000, you lose that benefit.
• 20:44
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, completely.
• 20:45
  Irmeen Khan: But if both of you earn 99,000, you get to keep the benefit.
• 20:49
  Irmeen Khan: It doesn't make any sense.
• 20:51
  Irmeen Khan: It should be done on a household basis, you know, household income basis, because one partner could be unemployed or you know, not unemployed but actively at home with the family, and the other partner could be working outside of the home and that partner is earning a hundred, their household income is only a hundred thousand, yeah, so why should they lose?
• 21:09
  Elizabeth Willetts: the benefit.
• 21:10
  Elizabeth Willetts: Right like it is tough, isn't it?
• 21:12
  Elizabeth Willetts: So we'll rewind, because you obviously.
• 21:13
  Elizabeth Willetts: What was it that appealed to you about oxera and why did you want to join oxera?
• 21:17
  Irmeen Khan: yeah, so I actually, I was reading something that oxera had published for my old job and I read it, I think and it was, you know it was an independent review of Ofgem's energy supply market.
• 21:30
  Irmeen Khan: So after the whole, you know, there was a bunch of energy retailers that went out of business after the crisis, and so Auxera was commissioned to do this independent review, and I was reading it for work at my old job and I thought, oh, my gosh, like I want to be doing this kind of work.
• 21:46
  Irmeen Khan: This is so interesting, this is so impactful and it is all the like conceptual stuff I loved about economics really being brought to life in real ways, which, again, I didn't think that we did in the civil service as much, right.
• 22:00
  Irmeen Khan: So I sent my CV through, not expecting to hear anything.
• 22:05
  Irmeen Khan: I just it was kind of on a whim, I wasn't expecting anything, yeah, and then a few weeks later, the recruiter or the HR person added me on LinkedIn.
• 22:13
  Irmeen Khan: We started a conversation and it took a few months for them to figure out where I would fit.
• 22:18
  Irmeen Khan: But you know, the rest is history and I kind of took a chance.
• 22:22
  Irmeen Khan: I wasn't even really actively looking for a new job, that's a really good lesson.
• 22:27
  Elizabeth Willetts: So if anyone's listening to this, I always say if you see a company that you like, just send that speculative cb.
• 22:33
  Elizabeth Willetts: You know there's no harm at that point and, like you said, and actually the best time to look is when you're not actively looking, because stakes aren't quite as high.
• 22:41
  Irmeen Khan: You can afford to be a bit picky and you really have nothing to lose, just just sparking that initial conversation yeah, for sure, and uh, since it was been a difficult transition at first, but it's been the best decision I made for my career and I'm, like so fulfilled by the work I do why do you say it was difficult?
• 22:59
  Elizabeth Willetts: just because you were learning a new in?
• 23:01
  Irmeen Khan: yes, and it's.
• 23:02
  Irmeen Khan: It's totally Like you have to track your time and I just wasn't used to any of that.
• 23:06
  Irmeen Khan: So it was a bit of a learning curve in that sense and also just getting used to the sort of challenging work we do on tight deadlines and that kind of thing.
• 23:15
  Irmeen Khan: But it's actually really fun and you kind of work as a team to get something delivered and you have a really good sense of camaraderie after I don't know if that's the right word, but you know you come out of it feeling like you've really accomplished something and then your work is taken seriously like a lot.
• 23:32
  Elizabeth Willetts: You know, like it's like people actually listen people kind of you're respected, aren't you as a, you know as a company?
• 23:37
  Elizabeth Willetts: And then obviously the individual voices within the organization carry a lot of weight for sure, and so, yeah, it's uh.
• 23:44
  Irmeen Khan: You know, I'm just uh really, really glad I made the decision to to try something more challenging.
• 23:50
  Elizabeth Willetts: I feel like I never would have felt fulfilled if I hadn't you know so I think it's so interesting that we're chatting today, because this morning I was brushing my teeth and I have the times news up on my phone, so I literally opened it up and the headline was all about the falling birth rate in the UK and other western organizations.
• 24:07
  Elizabeth Willetts: So replacement birth rate is 2.1.
• 24:09
  Elizabeth Willetts: I think it dropped I think probably due to the pandemic to one of the lowest levels 1.49 in 2021 and obviously it's very low.
• 24:16
  Elizabeth Willetts: In South Korea it's 0.89.
• 24:18
  Elizabeth Willetts: From an economic standpoint, is this a worry that the birth rate is falling so dramatically?
• 24:24
  Irmeen Khan: so yes and no, yes and no.
• 24:26
  Irmeen Khan: So I will say that, of course, for, like a, we have a inverted pyramid.
• 24:31
  Irmeen Khan: Our demographics are, you know, represent an inverted pyramid.
• 24:34
  Irmeen Khan: By that I mean we have a rapidly.
• 24:36
  Irmeen Khan: You know that aging population, those in their sunset years, is the biggest demographic and it's increasing as baby boomers retire.
• 24:44
  Irmeen Khan: We don't have the core working age to be able to support all of those retirees, so that needs to be filled in the longer term through having more babies now and having them join the workforce.
• 24:57
  Irmeen Khan: And in the shorter term, immigration is a component of how you fill those labor market shortages, and what we're seeing right now is of how you fill those labor market shortages.
• 25:04
  Irmeen Khan: And what we're seeing right now is we have an incredibly tight labor market in the UK, which means that unemployment is really low.
• 25:10
  Irmeen Khan: But it also means that there's maybe, you know, labor mismatch.
• 25:14
  Irmeen Khan: People are not being fit into the right jobs or you know, there's jobs that are going unfilled.
• 25:19
  Irmeen Khan: Those are problems for the economy.
• 25:21
  Irmeen Khan: Productivity is low and productivity in economics term is output per hour worked as measured by GDP.
• 25:28
  Irmeen Khan: It's not how hard you're working at your job.
• 25:31
  Elizabeth Willetts: So, just to make that, I think people get a bit offended, don't they?
• 25:34
  Elizabeth Willetts: When they say you know, like the headlines, productivity is so low and people are probably thinking about working so hard.
• 25:39
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah it's totally not about that.
• 25:41
  Irmeen Khan: It's like how much are you earning per hour?
• 25:44
  Irmeen Khan: You work right, so, and that is indicative of a labor mismatch if our productivity is low, effectively, that's one of the components anyway, policy analysis about these new childcare supports that are coming in.
• 25:56
  Irmeen Khan: When we have looked at case studies from Canada, from Quebec, the province of Quebec that introduced these types of subsidies two decades ago, the fertility rate increased, controlling for other factors, and it continued to increase as maternal employment rate also increased.
• 26:19
  Irmeen Khan: So women were not only having more babies but also returning to work more.
• 26:23
  Irmeen Khan: It was kind of a win-win, you know.
• 26:24
  Irmeen Khan: So that's why these policies are really important and I actually think that the official estimates have underrepresented what a big impact they're going to make.
• 26:34
  Elizabeth Willetts: Interesting.
• 26:34
  Elizabeth Willetts: I don't know if it was Rachel Reeves, who potentially may be our new chancellor, you know the um, the shadow chancellor.
• 26:39
  Elizabeth Willetts: It may have been her, I may be misquoting, maybe someone else, but it was sort of she was talking about.
• 26:44
  Elizabeth Willetts: I think it would have been a woman.
• 26:45
  Elizabeth Willetts: They were talking about productivity and actually one of the best ways to increase productivity in the UK is actually to invest in that child care because it encourages more female, you know, labour participation.
• 26:58
  Irmeen Khan: Exactly and, yeah, that's another point we look at in our in our analysis, and this was really more of a passion project rather than anything we did for a client.
• 27:06
  Irmeen Khan: But one of the key things is when we talk about labor matching, the more employees you have available, or the more potential employees you have available in the labor market, the better they can match to certain jobs, right?
• 27:19
  Irmeen Khan: So it's better to have a mother returning to work after mat leave who's better suited to a job because she's going that well suited to, or you know that she doesn't really want as much, and then she's earning less than she could for, you know the same skill set.
• 27:49
  Irmeen Khan: So when we make those educational investments in early years, they're not being fully carried through to the labor market and that's that's why there's there's a problem, if that makes sense so what you know it's been implemented.
• 28:01
  Elizabeth Willetts: It looks my children are slightly up there at school now so I wasn't quite as sort of like okay, you know in the weeds into it.
• 28:07
  Elizabeth Willetts: But I just look and I was following pregnant and screaming.
• 28:09
  Elizabeth Willetts: There was a lot of hoo-ha when all the codes that came out and it looked messy and I mean what's wrong with how it's been implemented, what's right and what could be made better?
• 28:19
  Irmeen Khan: yeah.
• 28:20
  Irmeen Khan: So you're absolutely right.
• 28:21
  Irmeen Khan: The implementation is the key.
• 28:23
  Irmeen Khan: Now the problem is is that there will always be a bit you know teething period where the system's getting to adjust.
• 28:31
  Irmeen Khan: What is key here is that the childcare supports have supported the demand for these placements right in nurseries.
• 28:39
  Irmeen Khan: Nurseries are under pressure.
• 28:41
  Irmeen Khan: They have been under pressure for years.
• 28:43
  Irmeen Khan: Since the pandemic, many shut down, so there's more pressure on the ones that are still standing.
• 28:47
  Irmeen Khan: If you don't address the supply, it's a classic supply and demand issue.
• 28:52
  Irmeen Khan: If you only address the demand and don't address the supply, you have not solved the problem.
• 28:57
  Irmeen Khan: So you can't have a situation where there's all of this demand on one nursery and the only eligible nursery that has space is like 50 miles from people's houses.
• 29:07
  Irmeen Khan: That's not going to work right.
• 29:09
  Irmeen Khan: So I mean, I don't know if I have core solutions here, but I think they will have to step in potentially with funding for additional nursery staff or to create, you know, more nurseries themselves, by providing that extra sort of revenue support to nurseries, because a lot of them did, you know, have to cut down a lot during the pandemic.
• 29:33
  Irmeen Khan: They were suffering at that time and it's only now that things are starting to get back to normal.
• 29:38
  Irmeen Khan: I think the demand is great because I think sometimes demand does create supply and I know personally of people who are registering for their child minding.
• 29:45
  Irmeen Khan: Uh, you know certificate.
• 29:47
  Elizabeth Willetts: I was gonna say you know, if that appeals to you, then you know, I mean I've spoken to somebody that was gonna do that.
• 29:51
  Elizabeth Willetts: I was like, you know, you will always have work.
• 29:54
  Elizabeth Willetts: It's actually a very secure this is.
• 29:57
  Irmeen Khan: Could not be a better time to register as a child minder, to be honest, and I think you just need to have, like you know, a yard and like sufficient space in your house and stuff.
• 30:03
  Irmeen Khan: So that is aminder, to be honest, and I think you just need to have, like you know, a yard and like sufficient space in your house and stuff.
• 30:06
  Irmeen Khan: So that is a great avenue to be able to address some of these shortages that we're going to see in the next few years so maybe it needs to be marketed better, doesn't it?
• 30:13
  Elizabeth Willetts: as a as a job, you know as a career choice and yeah, and maybe it needs to be incentivized as well.
• 30:19
  Irmeen Khan: You know, like you do your child care certification and maybe you get some sort of you know a payment from the government or support for that education that you or certification that you need to do.
• 30:30
  Irmeen Khan: It's free, I don't know, just some ideas, but I haven't, you know, considered this from like a purely academic perspective.
• 30:37
  Irmeen Khan: So I was just sort of spitballing on some ideas, but yeah, it seems.
• 30:41
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, I mean, and is there any other policies that you think would help?
• 30:44
  Elizabeth Willetts: Female participation in the workforce.
• 30:47
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, so my colleagues are looking at, you know, the disparities between men and women in STEM and sort of the science, technology, engineering, mathematics fields, and economics falls under that, especially more of the data science kind of thing, and I just know from my own experience you know it was undergrad was there was a smattering of women in a lecture hall full of guys.
• 31:07
  Irmeen Khan: So there's something about it that I think turns women off or something.
• 31:14
  Irmeen Khan: But the labor market of the future is going to be based on technology.
• 31:20
  Irmeen Khan: It is going to require a high level of qualification and we need to equip young women to be able to fill those roles.
• 31:29
  Irmeen Khan: The current disparity is, I think 28% of women in the UK are in STEM fields versus 72% of men.
• 31:36
  Irmeen Khan: So you know, I mean I think men and women might have different interests or different skill sets.
• 31:42
  Elizabeth Willetts: That might too, but there's nothing preventing young women besides, maybe, social difficulty, because I'm obviously very into this and as a mom, I'm always like trying to get the lego out, you know, trying to get them to do that and then, and then they'll play with their dolls and I'm like, and I'm trying not to encourage that, you know, like knowing, like, like you said, these, these stem rolls, you know, will be the future, but I wonder if there's something sort of ingrained in and you know, if they've been given dolls by family members, then they're going to play with them.
• 32:14
  Irmeen Khan: And fundamentally, there's nothing lesser than playing with dolls or anything.
• 32:19
  Irmeen Khan: It's just like just leaving.
• 32:21
  Irmeen Khan: I guess those avenues open to them.
• 32:23
  Irmeen Khan: And I feel like sometimes we close avenues to women or we discourage them from speaking up when they're interested in something.
• 32:30
  Irmeen Khan: And I think part of that is when it is a boys club it's harder for young women to feel like they can infiltrate it in a way.
• 32:37
  Irmeen Khan: So you have to, I guess, like just raise girls who are very, you know, confident and able to step in and fight for what they're interested in.
• 32:46
  Irmeen Khan: So I would think about it, I guess it's different.
• 32:50
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, and obviously you don't know.
• 32:51
  Elizabeth Willetts: You know if they go to mixed schools, which obviously you know there's pros and cons to all education settings.
• 32:56
  Elizabeth Willetts: But you know, I have noted.
• 32:57
  Elizabeth Willetts: I'm reading again.
• 32:58
  Elizabeth Willetts: This time in the comments it was talking about single-sex schools and someone in the comments had sort of said that women, girls in female schools mine go to mix, but and then they went and switched to a mixed sex school but the girls are actually more confident speaking up in science in their single sex school.
• 33:15
  Irmeen Khan: That does not surprise me.
• 33:16
  Irmeen Khan: I think I had had a colleague who mentioned that boys do better in mixed sex schools and girls do better in single sex schools, and you know.
• 33:24
  Irmeen Khan: That kind of tells you everything that you can know about us.
• 33:27
  Elizabeth Willetts: Yeah, we've got last days.
• 33:29
  Elizabeth Willetts: We've got to work with what we've got, so what do you think's next for you know, if you had half an hour with jeremy hump, what would you love to chat with him about?
• 33:40
  Irmeen Khan: yeah, yeah, I guess.
• 33:41
  Irmeen Khan: Just you know how are you thinking about the supply of childcare and you know rolling this out.
• 33:47
  Irmeen Khan: And also, why have they been so conservative with the estimates of how much this is going to impact the economy?
• 33:54
  Irmeen Khan: Because when you look at the OBR's estimates, they're estimating that, on average, women entering the workforce or people entering the workforce because this child care policy working 16 hours a week, and when you look at the data, most mothers after childbirth are still working 25 to 30 hours a week.
• 34:13
  Irmeen Khan: So it's almost like underselling this, like really big thing that could really change things for the economy and for women.
• 34:21
  Irmeen Khan: So I guess part of it is I would say that you really need to talk about this in a more sort of celebratory way and that might also help on the political side.
• 34:31
  Irmeen Khan: But I would also say that, yeah, the supply of childcare needs to be supported and that needs to be something that is built into how this is rolled out.
• 34:42
  Irmeen Khan: Now there isn't enough funding for it yet or, you know, the budget hasn't announced new, as far as I'm aware anyway, I might have to check that, but I don't know if they've announced enough support for childcare places and that's something that will really need to be worked out, because Canada's recently rolled it out and it's been, you know.
• 35:01
  Elizabeth Willetts: What's Canada done then?
• 35:02
  Elizabeth Willetts: Because they sound a little bit ahead of the curve.
• 35:04
  Elizabeth Willetts: What they?
• 35:05
  Irmeen Khan: they obviously did this 20 years ago well, quebec did it 20 years ago, the rest of the country didn't, and Canada's recently rolled it out.
• 35:12
  Irmeen Khan: And women's employment has gone from something like 79 to 85 percent and what's their policy?
• 35:19
  Elizabeth Willetts: look, is it similar hours?
• 35:20
  Elizabeth Willetts: Is it the same fun is it.
• 35:21
  Irmeen Khan: it's ten dollars a day daycare.
• 35:23
  Irmeen Khan: So that means, you know, whatever it is $300 a month Canadian, which is like way less than what we would be paying here.
• 35:31
  Irmeen Khan: So it's 180, maybe pounds a month.
• 35:35
  Irmeen Khan: So obviously that's created a lot of pressure on the supply side of it as well and that's why you're seeing massive wait lists.
• 35:42
  Irmeen Khan: So there is a bit of a teething problem whenever these massive social policies are introduced.
• 35:46
  Irmeen Khan: But you know they can get ahead of the curve by just really forecasting what the places might be appropriately, by not underestimating the impact of this policy, I guess, is my key takeaway here.
• 35:58
  Elizabeth Willetts: Well, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 36:00
  Elizabeth Willetts: I've loved our conversation.
• 36:02
  Elizabeth Willetts: I mean, I've just I found it absolutely fascinating.
• 36:04
  Elizabeth Willetts: Thank you so much for joining us and giving us all your insights.
• 36:08
  Elizabeth Willetts: Where can people find you, connect with you and learn more about you and Oxera?
• 36:12
  Irmeen Khan: Yeah, so you can connect with Oxera at oxeracom, my Women and Work.
• 36:17
  Irmeen Khan: You know the impact of child care support pieces is on the website and obviously you know I'm'm on LinkedIn so people can find me there.
• 36:24
  Elizabeth Willetts: But uh, yeah, let's put all those links, including your article, in the show notes, because it's a brilliant article.
• 36:29
  Elizabeth Willetts: I'd urge you all to read it.
• 36:30
  Elizabeth Willetts: So thank you so much for joining me thank you so much.
• 36:34
  Elizabeth Willetts: Have a great day thank you for listening to another episode of the work.
• 36:40
  Elizabeth Willetts: It like a mom podcast.
• 36:41
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• 36:48
  Elizabeth Willetts: If you're on linkedin, please send me a connection request at elizabeth willett and let me know your thoughts on this week's episode.
• 36:55
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• 37:00
  Elizabeth Willetts: Until next time, keep on chasing your biggest dreams.