British women make the decisions

Press, 30 June 1983, Page 12

British women make the decisions

By

IAN DICK,

AAP correspondent,

in London.

Mrs Thatcher apart, English women are taking charge in this country in leaps and bounds, if the results of recent surveys are to be believed.

Women are making more of the big money decisions on such things as cars, homes, and holidays, and taking over as the do-it-yourself (DIY) house handyperson. Even the number of women drivers is rising faster than men.

Britain’s thoroughly modern women are rolling up their sleeves and tackling everything from plumbing to plastering. Banks and building societies reckon the wives are making a better fist of handling the family money, with an overwhelming 80 per cent of them joining in the decision-making in the home, or taking it over entirely. A research agency questioned more than 2000 women readers on behalf of I.P.C. magazines to see just who controls the family purse strings. A separate survey was done among 1000 women shopping at Payless DIY stores throughout Britain. A Payless spokesman said: “We found the results very surprising. Heavy do-it-yourself jobs used to be a male macho thing. Now everything’s changed.” According to I.P.C. chief

John Godfrey, in nearly every financial area the rate of involvement of women, married and single, outstrips that of men.

“Females are now the financial directors of the family.” The I.P.C. survey shows that the rise in wives’ financial awareness has coincided with the increase in the number of them taking jobs. More and more are opening bank accounts. Women outnumber men as building society savers. Almost 70 per cent of wives have a building society savings account, either in their own name or jointly, the survey shows. On the handy-person front, it seems that more than 50 per cent of women share the household fix-it jobs or do all the work alone. The Payless DIY survey found that the little woman of the house takes nearly all the decisions on what jobs need doing and picks the colour scheme and materials.

And lazy, beer-sipping TV-watching husbands are being nagged off their sofas faster than ever before. In south Wales, for in-

stance, 65 per cent of women interviewed claimed they had to nag their husbands before they would do any work around the house.

The typical DIY woman is said to be aged between 18 and 45, is buying her own home, and is put off by the high costs often charged by professionals. Only nine per cent of women would not attempt a DIY job, the figures show. But 14 per cent admitted their husbands were “hopeless,” and 65 per cent voted their men as “passable amateurs.” The ultimate disgrace? — calling in a professional to mend a job botched by the husband. The latest motoring statistics reveal there are 25,568,000 driving licence holders in Britain, a 3.8 per cent increase during three years. . But the number of women licence holders rose over the same period by 15 per cent, way above the rate for men. Britain’s roads are becoming more and more crowded. The number of cars on the roads is now 19.4 million — up 729,000 in three years. In 1960 the average number of vehicles on every

kilometre of road was 29. This has risen to 57 vehicles in the latest count, making Britain’s roads among the most crowded in Europe. The country’s senior citizens are not being ignored as British women race to the forefront. A plan has been launched to put a granny at the bottom of everyone’s garden. Director of Kent’s social services, the Reverend Nicholas Stacey, wants private companies and local councils to rent out mobile “portakabins” so elderly relatives can spend their last years on the back lawns of their children’s homes. Each “portagrannexe,” as they have been called, would be lifted in by helicopter and then removed once the elderly relative had died. He sees it as a way to ease the pressure on housing for the aged to meet the large increase in the over 75s predicted for the rest of this decade. British women do not rate their menfolk as good subjects for the camera.

Both men and women are extremely doubtful about their own worth before the lens.

This burst of British modesty is revealed in the results of a Gallup Poll conducted for the photographic industry.

A picture of British sentimentality about preserving the memories of childrearing emerged from the poll. It found that people listed their family photo albums far above jewellery, clothes or other possessions as items they would least like to lose.