The Guardian view on gender inequality in the UK: time to change the facts

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/28/guardian-view-gender-inequality-uk

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In 1946, in a dissenting note to the report of the Royal Commission on Equal Pay, three of the commission’s women members stressed that hard actual evidence of inequality should not be brushed aside by the (largely male) tendency to rationalise why women were not treated on the same basis as men. The women’s argument still holds just as good 68 years later. It remains a powerful principle to apply when confronted with the evidence in this week’s World Economic Forum gender survey, which shows that Britain is slipping quickly down the world equality table for material reasons that need to be confronted, not explained or rationalised away.

The evidence in the new report is very plain indeed. In Britain, the gender gap between men and women is stuck or widening. As a consequence, the UK is heading down the gender equality league table, as other countries do more and give higher priority to reversing their own inequalities. It is only eight years since the WEF began conducting this annual survey. In that short time, however, Britain has gone from ninth in the world in 2006 to 26th this year. Britain is also increasingly adrift in each of the four categories that the WEF assesses in compiling its rankings: down from 37th to 46th in economic participation; from first to 32nd in educational attainment; from 63rd to 94th in health; and from 12th to 33rd in political empowerment.

That is not the same thing as saying that everything about the gender gap in Britain is getting worse. That would be untrue. Britain’s level of equality in economic participation has improved slightly since 2006, while the educational equality level remains broadly constant, and things have got slightly worse in health and in politics. What is striking, though, is that if things merely remain the same they lead to a comparative decline, while others do better. The five Nordic countries that score best in the new survey all started from a higher equality base than Britain. Crucially, however, they have all made big improvements in most of the component categories while Britain has stalled and been overtaken.

The lessons from this survey are clear. If we want women to narrow the gender gap, as we should, we have to will the means as well as the ends. Left to the market and to good intentions, gender inequality will tend to increase. The issue will get worse if it is not tackled consciously and consistently. That means the onus has to be on management and government to act and then act again. Without such reiterative habits, unfairness will reassert itself in every field.

There have been improvements in recent years. The world is moving in a more gender-equal direction, based on these measures. But the progress remains too slow. At the current rate, it will be 2095 before the world’s pay gap at work and equality gap in management are eliminated. That is 81 years away. It is a bigger time gap than the one that separates us today from the demand of the three women experts in 1946 to focus on the facts not on prejudices. That is still true in 2014. Even today, we have a lot to learn and to do.