Findings from the annual survey by the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) and Ipsos show virtually half the British population now think efforts to promote women’s equality have gone far enough – up from just one in three as recently as 2019. So, there’s clearly a growing sense among the public that there aren’t any battles worth fighting anymore. On the basis of this evidence, perhaps it’s time to say, “job done” and focus our efforts elsewhere?
Added to this, we’ve made progress across so many aspects of public life that there are now some areas where we’ve pushed past equality, with men now falling behind women. For example, in 2021/22 57% of university students were women. Another really concerning area where we should direct our attention to men is around suicide prevention. The male suicide rate is 16.4 per 100,000 people in England and Wales – roughly three times higher than the female suicide rate of 5.4 per 100,000.
Despite the fact that in some areas we need to focus on policies that respond to disadvantages faced by men, as well as the public’s growing scepticism of the need to go further, there is unfortunately far more evidence that underscores just why IWD must still play an important role in the international calendar.
The World Economic Forum predicts that at the current rate of progress it will take 162 years for women to have political equality with men, 169 years to reach economic equality, and even in education, where much progress has been made, they predict it will still take 16 years for women to achieve equal outcomes with men across the globe.
In the UK, we have seen massive improvements, but there is still a long way to go. In 1979 women made up just 3% of MPs in the House of Commons. Today they represent 34% – a massive improvement yet still far short of equal representation (although some parties do better than others, with women making up 52% of Labour MPs, 35% of SNP MPs and 25% of Conservative MPs).
In terms of economic equality, the gender pay gap between men and women in full time employment has fallen by approximately a quarter over the last 10 years, and was 7.7% in April 2023 – again, a huge improvement. However, the headline gender pay gap figure masks continuing economic gender inequality in the UK, as it compares only men and women in full-time work. But women are much more likely to work part-time, largely because they continue to do a higher proportion of unpaid domestic work, particularly caring for children. The need to combine paid work with unpaid care has an enormous impact on many women’s financial security, due to the high cost of childcare and the lack of well-paid flexible work.
At their most extreme, political and economic inequality can be both a cause and consequence of violence against women and girls. Without economic independence, women and their children are more vulnerable to violent abusers, and women’s relative lack of political power makes it more difficult to fund and access support services, or to achieve criminal justice.
Globally, one in three women will experience physical or sexual violence, most often perpetrated by an intimate partner, or former partner – and there is a clear intersectional element to experiences, as women from marginalised groups, such as migrants, those who are economically deprived, or those from minority ethnic groups, often have the hardest time getting their voices heard and receiving the help they need.
At a recent GIWL event, we heard from Baroness Louise Casey about her review of the Metropolitan Police, which revealed horrific evidence of institutional sexism, racism and homophobia. But that’s the stuff we now know about. Our Research Fellow Dr Caitlin Schmid has written about the alarming paucity of quality comparable data on violence against women and girls across the UK, which means we simply don’t know the true extent of the abuse many could be facing on a daily basis.
It's clear to us at GIWL that despite the enormous progress there is still a lot of work to do to ensure that globally, and in the UK, women have full equality with men along a number of dimensions. We need to do more to raise public awareness and to garner support for further progress. This is a good reason to draw attention to the areas where women are disadvantaged on International Women’s Day, while also celebrating how far we’ve come.