Politics

The UK is 74th of 186 in terms of female representation in parliament. We are below Sudan, where they operate sharia law; below China, where there is a government policy that coerces professional women to get married, called (yes, really) Leftover Women; below Belarus, which is a patriarchal dictatorship; and below Iraq. I hope I don’t need to elaborate on the architecture of misogyny in Iraq. Let’s just say it’s still possible to get stoned to death for being raped.

In other words, women in far more oppressive regimes than ours, in democracies far less mature, still manage more equal representation.

The problem isn’t the electorate: 41% of MEPs are female, against 23% of MPs and 23% of Lords. The reason for that euro-spike is that those elections aren’t held onto so tightly by the three main parties, two of which make it their core business to ensure that women never feel equal or accepted.

We have a prime minister who responds to female MPs with facile derision (“calm down, dear”; “I know the honourable lady is extremely frustrated”) and is greeted with hoots of laughter from regiments of sycophants. We have a liberal-democratic party that will receive multiple accusations of harassment against the same man without investigating. And a Labour party – actually, with 86 female MPs, the Labour party is the best by a mile. But the recent stunt of trotting the ladies out onto the front benches, to make the point that it is doing better than the Conservatives, was childish. This institution, whose atmosphere and unspoken codes blare out the constant message that only men govern, creates a democratic deficit. It fosters the not unreasonable view that the Westminster perspective is narrow, unintelligent and homogenous. Serious attention is required, in other words, rather than petty-minded point-scoring.

The media has a role: constant policing of women’s outfits, childcare arrangements and love lives give the impression that to be elected is to be wing-pinned like a butterfly and put in a display case. When you’re a man, people will leave you alone until you’re literally taking photographs of your penis and sending them to people.

Harriet Harman called on David Cameron to apologise for telling Labour MP Angela Eagle to “calm down, dear”. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

On television, male presenters on current affairs formats go first to the man and interrupt the woman constantly, which broadcasts the view that men are more important and that you can always guess what a woman is going to say. This makes public life even less attractive. Female presenters tend to be more even-handed and do nothing to rectify this imbalance by talking over men. The only way I think this could be repaired is if all presenters were female, but that will be a long time coming.

The increasingly closed circuit of Westminster doesn’t help – the conveyor belt, from researcher to thinktank to spad to candidate, draws from a very small selection of rich people with a PPE degree. They’re not all men, but the institutions from which they hail suffer from the same endemic sexism that makes the establishment look so worryingly thick and unimaginative. ZW

Health

The good news is that health and survival has the narrowest gender gap in the report across all the countries. And while the gender gap in the UK has not closed completely, it is not one of the factors that is pulling down the UK’s overall ranking. Women in the UK have a “healthy life expectancy” (the length of life, minus the years lost to disability or disease) of 72 years, while men have a healthy life expectancy of 70 years. While this shows women have a longer healthy life, according to the report’s author, a “natural” difference between women and men’s life expectancy would be five years; in the UK, this gap is closer to two to three years.

John Middleton, of the UK Faculty of Public Health, says this may be where economic equality hits health outcomes. “The different opportunities for men and women play out at every stage of women’s lives,” he says. “Wages and opportunities for promotion impact on health.”

He says women face specific problems in terms of reproductive health, but are also more likely to be on antidepressants and tranquilisers – which, he says, relates to the disadvantages women face in the job market.

He says not enough is being done to tackle this. “I think in recent years there has not been enough attention on women’s health,” he says. “It was given greater prominence by the women’s movement in the 70s, but it has almost become unfashionable to talk about women’s problems specifically, so I think more does need to be done to improve women’s health.”

Professor Majid Ezzati from Imperial College’s school of public health suggests that the fact women and men’s life expectancy is closing is likely to be due to unequal social constraints on men and women’s behaviour. For instance, men traditionally smoked and drank more than women. “It’s a social inequality which led to a good health outcome [for women]. The thing to worry about is why are women not keeping their advantage? Is it about advertising products, such as alcohol, being targeted at women?” HK

Economics

Last week, we learned that there are now more women in the British workforce than ever before. A triumphant Treasury press release announced that “under this government, female employment has increased in every sector of the economy, with nearly 80% of the increase being in highly skilled occupations”.

This week, we learned that the main reason why the UK has fallen out of the top 20 countries ranked for gender equality is its poor score in “economic participation”, which looks at the ratios of women in the workforce, wage equality for similar work done by men and the number of women in senior roles.

Why the apparent contradiction? It’s simple: despite the Treasury’s optimism, women remain badly paid in all sectors and under-represented in senior positions.

Only 23% of FTSE 100 boardroom seats are occupied by women. Photograph: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report found that the UK was a long way off closing the gender gap in terms of economic participation and opportunity, “with the country ranking 48th in terms of both labour force participation and wage equality, and 66th for estimated earned income”.

The report’s conclusion comes as no surprise to equality campaigners here. The gender pay gap – the disparity between men’s and women’s incomes – widened last year for the first time in five years, with women overall now paid 19.1% less than men.

Forty years after the Equal Pay Act was passed, we have almost no idea which companies offer fair pay to their staff because a requirement set out by the 2010 Equality Act (section 78) which would have given powers to make companies disclose pay differences between men and women was never enacted by the government. The coalition devised the Think, Act, Report initiative instead, hailing it as a constructive, business-led policy that would encourage greater pay transparency.

However, the initiative is voluntary and – to no one’s surprise – only two companies have published details of their pay differences (and presumably these businesses only decided to go public with the results of their research because their pay gap was relatively small).

Eva Neitzert, deputy CEO at the Fawcett Society, said the “voluntary approach has failed; we warned it would”.

She said the shape of the recovery is exacerbating pay inequalities, with “growth concentrated in low-wage, feminised sectors of the economy and many of the new jobs part-time, temporary and insecure”. Women make up two-thirds of those in low-paid work; overall, one in four women are now in low-paid work, as opposed to one in seven men, according to the Resolution Foundation. One in eight women describe themselves as working on a zero-hours contract, according to Fawcett Society research.

At the other end of the pay spectrum, female bosses still earn only three-quarters as much as their male colleagues, according to Chartered Management Institute figures published earlier this year; a “mid-life pay crisis” hits female managers over 40, who earn 35% less than men. The average pay gap between men and women aged between 46 and 60 stands at £16,680, while male company directors take home £21,084 more than female equivalents. The number of women on boards of the UK’s largest companies is at a record high, but still stands at only 23% of all FTSE 100 boardroom seats.

Deborah Hargreaves, director of the High Pay Centre, an independent thinktank established to monitor pay at the top end of the income distribution, says the number of women earning multimillion-pound salaries is “miniscule”, pointing out in passing that women aren’t the only group underrepresented in that pay bracket, with very few people “other than old, white, middle-class men” getting all the multimillion-pound pay packets.

There are things the government could do to narrow the gap. Raising the national minimum wage would help raise the wages of large numbers of women. Enacting section 78 of the 2010 Equality Act (which the Lib Dems have promised to do), would require large businesses to publish the result of gender pay audits. Both might help the UK claw its way back up the global equality league tables. AG

Education

One of the brightish spots in the WEF Global Gender Gap Report is in the area of educational attainment. “Education and health, regardless of ranking, are really not playing a major part in the overall score for most developed countries,” says the report’s lead author, Saadia Zahidi. “Most countries that have almost closed their education and health gaps are so close to parity that those ranking differences are actually being derived out of fairly small decimal point differences.”

Indeed, the data reveals Britain isn’t far behind the country ranked top, Iceland, where they have achieved 100% equality (a maximum score of 1.000) for six of the report’s nine years; the UK has scored a perfect 1.000 for seven of the same period. It is the only category in which the UK achieves parity with Iceland. The UK actually has more women than men in university – 1.3 women for every man – but, as Zahidi notes, there are no prizes for this: “We reward up to parity, so if a country has a reverse gender gap, it does not get extra points.”

“The UK actually has more women than men in university – 1.3 women for every man.” Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

But before we start congratulating ourselves, it is worth noting two things. First, the contextual data (the report was only focused on outcomes, says Zahidi) paints a more interesting picture. In the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem), only 30% of the UK’s graduates at tertiary level are female; in Iceland that figure is 43%.

Last February, the Commons’ Science and Technology Select Committee published a report, “Women in STEM careers”. It brought up the effect of the “leaky pipeline”: the gradual and continuous loss of women at consecutive career stages within Stem. The report said: “Just 17% of all professors working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics are women.” From an already low point of 30%, the figure of Stem women drops a further 13 percentage points between graduation and employment. Where does the rot set in? In a response to the committee’s report, the Academy of Medical Sciences noted “women are still less likely than their male colleagues to advance to senior positions in academia ... despite their growing numbers in undergraduate and postgraduate courses since the 1970s.” Perhaps there is an answer in the 2011 spending review, which cut funding for the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (UKRC).

The “good news” is only a veneer. Whatever equality we achieve in education seems to be undone in the job market. Our relatively poor economic participation is no surprise – where are all the women? BA

And here’s how to fix things...

While the data presented by the World Economic Forum is vital in letting us see where we’re succeeding and failing, international league tables can be interpreted unhelpfully as an oppression Olympics, letting smug commentators make comparisons to the position of women in countries ranked lower down, as if to excuse our own shortcomings.

Curiously, this hierarchy of inequality seems only to afflict women’s issues – rarely do we see the argument, for example, that, since crime rates are higher elsewhere, the police should sit back and stop worrying too much about tackling law-breakers. The idea is that women should be grateful for what they’ve got and not get too uppity about demanding more “because it could be worse”. It’s the kind of logic that often goes hand in hand with ignorance about the extent to which human rights abuses – from rape to domestic violence, forced marriage to female genital mutilation – affect many women here in the UK. And it opens the door to lofty and ill-informed prejudices about which countries we “should” be beating.

Celebrating progress is all well and good, but we should measure ourselves against the ideal outcome of complete equality, not against our past failings; focusing on how far we still have to go, not how far we’ve come. Setting tangible future targets is another way to achieve this, since it focuses efforts throughout the year, rather than letting the subject fall off the radar between reports. It also allows a greater degree of accountability if we fail to advance. I’d like to see political leaders commit to measures to improve some of these numbers before next year’s report comes out – and be held to those promises.

And, to truly boost women’s participation, we have to start by tackling normalised sexist attitudes. I see girls at school openly laughed at for saying they’d like to go into business; I regularly encounter teenagers who tell me “politics is reserved for men”; and I hear from women who experience extreme sexual harassment at work. It’s not enough to react from the top down – we need to boost aspirations and dismantle sexist stereotypes, too. LB