International Women’s Day 2024: Is now really the best time to be a British Woman?

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British ladies outlive British males. Girls outperform boys in GCSEs, and are extra possible to go to college than males. The final basic election noticed the highest proportion of feminine MPs elected but. Now, 30 per cent of younger males assume it should be more durable to be a man than a girl in the subsequent 20 years.

International Women’s Day presents an evaluation of whether or not it’s a good time to be a girl. And it may appear affordable to recommend that in 2024, 100 years after ladies have been allowed to vote, get divorced and inherit property, it’s even the best time to be a girl.

But is that this really correct? The interplay between society, enterprise and politics is advanced and shifting. Fixing the inequalities in ladies’s lives can really feel like making an attempt to change the tyres on a transferring automobile. Feminism’s efforts have contributed to legislative progress, from the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 to the Equality Act of 2010.

But the 54,000 pregnant ladies being pushed out of labor every day in the UK know the limits of legal guidelines. And the Equality Act didn’t forestall the Conservatives from pushing by austerity insurance policies that damage ladies to such an extent that The Women’s Budget Group referred to as them “gender-based violence”.

Worse, two polls this 12 months recommend we’re going backwards. A current Ipsos ballot discovered that 60 per cent of Gen Z males throughout 31 nations believed that ladies’s equality discriminated in opposition to males, whereas a survey by the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed lower than half of all 18- to 24-year-olds understood you may be raped with out drive or if you’re in a relationship.  

 “What I notice over years of campaigning is men’s refusal to listen to the learnings of feminism and look at root causes – sex inequality, the sexual objectification of women, male entitlement – because then they’d have to make systemic change,” says Karen Ingala-Smith, an knowledgeable in male violence in opposition to ladies. 

In 2012 she counted eight ladies killed by males in the first three days of the 12 months. She saved counting and in 2015 based The Femicide Census with Clarissa O’Callaghan. Its information exhibits “things haven’t changed much in the last 15 years. On average, a woman has been killed by a man in the UK every 2.5 days and 60 per cent of them are killed by a partner or former partner.”

The scale of violence in opposition to ladies, together with home abuse and rape at a price skilled by one in 4, may appear a precedence for the UK police and justice system, not least given rising protests. (Activism amongst younger folks extends to 70 per cent of Gen-Zers concerned in a social or political trigger.) 

But this 12 months, the Femicide Census learn in parliament on the similar day the Angiolini Inquiry discovered police techniques so poor there’s nothing to cease one other Wayne Couzens – reported to police eight instances earlier than he killed Sarah Everard – from “operating in plain sight”. 

“Unfortunately, you can be living in the ‘best time’ for a woman to be speaking out about gender inequality and also the worst time to expect anything to be done about it,” says Laura Bates, founding father of the Everyday Sexism Project, nodding in the direction of information exhibiting reported rape circumstances are at an all-time excessive whereas a pitiful 1.3 per cent end in a cost. “This is perhaps the worst period in history for the exposure of institutional misogyny, racism and sexual violence.”

Pushback in opposition to ladies’s rights is fierce – see the huge fan base for self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, facilitated by social media platforms that Bates factors out are boosting the backlash by way of an algorithmically facilitated radicalisation of younger males and boys.

“The severity of this problem and the risks it poses are massively under-acknowledged, and the toll on women and girls of living amid an onslaught of digital harassment and crimes – revenge pornography, online abuse and coercion – is largely invisible because nobody takes any of these harms seriously.”

Mental well being stats present ladies buckling in a approach that they haven’t reported earlier than: practically a quarter of 16-year-old ladies in England have been involved with public psychological well being companies final 12 months, greater than twice the proportion accessing this care 4 years beforehand.

It’s a vicious circle: Young Women’s Trust has discovered that 32 per cent of younger ladies with a long-term psychological well being situation wouldn’t really feel comfy reporting situations of discrimination in the office. Furthermore, discrimination at work seems to be changing into the norm for younger ladies – half of whom say they’ve confronted it – and it’s on the rise.

Women may need been allowed to open their very own financial institution accounts since 1975, and entry a minimal wage from 1999, however discrimination finds loads of methods to restrict ladies’s monetary independence.

Young Women’s Trust notes that 23 per cent of younger ladies have been paid lower than the minimal wage and the similar quantity paid lower than younger males for the similar work. There are nonetheless practically as many males referred to as Simon as feminine chief executives of FTSE 100 boards. Meanwhile, Fawcett’s most up-to-date pay hole report discovered that, at the present price of change, issues gained’t shut till 2051 – that means ladies born earlier than 1983 can have a good time by drawing their pensions.

Racially minoritised younger ladies are extra possible to fear about salaries and job safety. Fawcett discovered that fifty per cent of ladies of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage and 48 per cent of ladies of Black African heritage have been criticised for behaviours different colleagues get away with at work.

The EHRC additionally discovered slightly below half of disabled ladies are neither employed nor actively searching for work, whereas those that do have a job face a incapacity pay hole of 18.9 per cent.

Tinuke Awe, businesswoman and activist, is blunt: “I don’t think there has ever been a good time to be a woman in Britain. I am a Black British woman – and those three words are very loaded.”

Awe co-founded and runs Five X More, which campaigns for higher maternal well being and outcomes for Black ladies in Britain who’re, as their title infers, 5 instances extra possible to die in being pregnant and childbirth. She can also be mom to an autistic youngster and is aware of that regardless of being extra usually recognized as having particular instructional wants and disabilities, Black youngsters are much less possible to get the assist they want. 

On high of that, she’s a self-employed entrepreneur up in opposition to the astonishingly dismal undeniable fact that in the final 10 years, Black feminine founders obtained 0.02 per cent of the enterprise capital funding whereas a separate report discovered that regardless of there being extra female-founded corporations than ever earlier than, in 2022 all-female-led companies obtained solely 6 per cent of enterprise funding.

Having extra ladies in authorities might make a distinction. In her testimony to the Covid inquiry, former deputy cupboard secretary Helen MacNamara defined how a “toxic” macho atmosphere affected decision-making throughout the disaster.

Now in the value of residing disaster, male-dominated Cabinet rooms and coverage places of work nonetheless fail to recognise that ladies’s decrease incomes and caring duties make them extra reliant upon – and weak to – the lack of social safety and public companies. As a consequence, extra ladies than males now reside in poverty in the UK.

Women’s political illustration remains to be caught at a third at each nationwide and native ranges. Meanwhile, 93 per cent of feminine politicians say that on-line abuse and harassment has a detrimental impression on how they really feel about being an MP. 

Hannah Stevens, director of ElectHer, is working to assist and fund ladies political candidates who are sometimes left feeling unsafe in an environment of relentless misogynistic abuse the place feminine politicians are sometimes on the receiving finish of threats to rape and kill them.  

Still, Stevens is seeing the dial shift and the consequence that’s having. “We are seeing an impact in spaces like the Scottish parliament which has 45 per cent women members. The period poverty bill also indicates progress made when more women are at the table.”

Could nationwide conversations sparked by ladies be a signal that ladies’s healthcare is bettering? Not essentially, the maternal mortality price is at its highest in 20 years and nonetheless lower than 2.5 per cent of publicly funded analysis is devoted to reproductive well being and childbirth.

Meanwhile, a lot medical analysis remains to be primarily based on the male physique and male experiences which has led to a “gender data gap” – typically with lethal results for girls.

Maternal rights are nonetheless woeful and in the final 10 years, Joeli Brearley and her charity Pregnant Then Screwed remains to be having to assist ladies being pushed out of the office. The authorities’s pandemic plans neglected childcare wants and there’s nonetheless a downside with unaffordable, inaccessible childcare in the UK – even with the authorities’s promised £4bn increase to free childcare coming into impact subsequent month.

So, when will we all know that it’s a good time to be a British girl? Brearly places it succinctly: “When women’s roles in conceiving and raising the next generation don’t render them liabilities in a system designed by and for men.” 

Sophie Walker was the founder and chief of the Women’s Equality Party from 2015-2019