All over the world today, as this graphic based upon the World Economic Forum in 2019 shows, gender equality is in flux. Certainly the impact of the global financial crisis (whose effects have been evident for the whole of the last decade),
All over the world today, as this graphic based upon the World Economic Forum in 2019 shows, gender equality is in flux. Certainly the impact of the global financial crisis (whose effects have been evident for the whole of the last decade), the climate crisis and the refugee crisis – sparked by wars, destruction and persecution of peoples in the epicentres of conflict around the world – have placed often intolerable strain upon families and communities, with women bearing the brunt of sexual violence and caring for those who are injured, young, old and disabled by conflict.
The WEF’s assessment was that even a 100-year target for achieving gender equality was ambitious: ‘At the slow speed experienced over the period 2006–2020, it will take 257 years to close this gap,’ it said. We simply do not have the time to wait for this to happen.
Unfortunately, the UK is among the worst performers in terms of progress on gender equality. The graphic shows that in the year to the end of 2019, the UK fell six places down the global rankings for gender equality. Despite successive prime ministers pledging to take decisive action to tackle the gender imbalances in politics and wider British society, the UK has dropped from the 15th most gender equal nation in world to 21st: Albania, Canada, Costa Rica, Latvia, Switzerland, South Africa and Spain have all overtaken the UK in the quest to close the gender gap across politics, economics, health and education since the last audit in 2018.
The picture of gender equality is not only negative. In one sense, women’s voices have never been louder. Women have been speaking out, demonstrating, protesting, posting, demanding and working for change like never before. From the Tweet to the street, in the workplace and on the screen, women have been actively championing a very wide range of issues from sexual harassment and rape to pensions, from racism to disability rights, from the bedroom tax to the Grenfell disaster.
To give but a few specific examples of how the volume has been turned up on women’s voices around the world: poor Muslim women and an army of allies of all religions ages and genders in Shaheen Bagh in Delhi creating a flourishing ‘protest village’ to resist the erosion of India’s secular ideals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l728eyA3y6U; Greta Thunberg’s astonishing leadership of school going children in climate strikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAJsdgTPJpU; young women in Chile’s protests against sexual violence (which has gone viral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5AAscy7qbI); the #metoo campaign which has helped expose sexual violence at all levels of society https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/23/a-phenomenal-leap-tarana-burke-on-metoos-success-so-far-and-next-steps; the campaigns to address the disgrace of missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW in Canada and the US) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8bFL7WC4iE; the women who founded the Black Lives Matter campaign https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbicAmaXYtM; the resurgence of feminism among young women in the UK https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/young-women-uk-feminism/
Women in the UK are prominent, and often in the majority, in all kinds of activism, but there is nevertheless a gap where a broader ‘women’s movement’ might be. Perhaps this is our greatest challenge for the coming decade: to build an intersectional feminist movement, capable of inspiring and embracing women with very different lived realities, on different sides of structural inequalities.
This much most women who are born female have in common: a body which is on average softer slower and less muscular than men’s bodies, with the sex-specific ability to carry a child give birth and lactate; a lower income, less ownership of prosocial status and economic status than men; lower rates of property ownership; higher life expectancy than men (in all but two countries); less control than men over their sexuality and reproductive capacities; a higher exposure to gendered violence, particularly domestic violenc