Project staff and participants from the Women Like Us project

ESF funding has had an impact on helping to change employer perceptions of employing women in part-time roles, as well as helping to create part-time jobs and developing employability skills while funding childcare and travel assistance.

Women Like Us: From Playground to Payslip works with employers across London to challenge perceptions of women and part-time work, and to offer employers high-quality applicants. Women are targeted where they naturally meet, literally at the school gates. WLU's marketing and branding is very strong, and they have built a large and sophisticated network providing part-time careers for mothers.

This quote from the Women and Work Commission in 2009 encapsulates the key issues:

'The building of a fair and family-friendly labour market where everyone has the opportunity to develop their skills and experience is an economic necessity... . It is important to our society, because an equal society where there is genuine mobility is more cohesive and at ease with itself.

'There are now more women working in Britain than in almost any time in our history, and women increasingly hold influential positions. However, our labour market is still failing to make the best use of people's talents. In particular, pay levels for women, while improving, still do not reflect their qualification levels.

'It is difficult to quantify the resulting loss to the economy of this under-utilisation of women's skills; however, in 2006 it was estimated that removing barriers to women working in occupations traditionally undertaken by men and increasing women's participation in the labour market could be worth between £15 and £23 billion pounds or 1.3 to 2.0 per cent of GDP.’

'Women & Work Commission: Shaping A Fairer Future', July 2009