Inexcusable, appalling behaviour. An old boys’ club culture that treats women as of less importance and ability.
More revelations about the film industry or the charity sector? No. It turns out that male doctors – trusted, valued public servants – can’t treat female colleagues decently.
Last week’s shocking report by Daphne Romney QC pulls no punches in describing the patronising and devaluing treatment of women by male members and staff at the British Medical Association (BMA) trade union, which represents 70% of Britain’s 240,000 doctors. But it is not the only recent reminder that urgent action is required by public bodies to tackle gender inequality, even if it may be the most stark.
Women – who make up two-thirds of UK public service staff – are getting a raw deal at work and from cuts to public services. Austerity has been devastating for women’s rights and has fallen hardest on poorer women and women of colour. But gender equality progress is stalling at all levels of society, as the latest report from the European Institute for Gender Equality (Eige) makes clear.
The UK is fifth among the 28 EU member states on Eige’s index, scoring 72.2% on the five indicators of progress towards the holy grail of 100% gender equality. The UK is not even three-quarters of the way towards equality; worse still, the situation has changed by just one single point since 2005.
In the past two years women’s access to UK healthcare services has stalled and their access to education has got worse. Whether they work in low-paid or senior jobs, whether they care for others or whether they are pensioners, UK women are failing to catch up with men.
This is clear not just from the Eige index but a whole series of recent reports, including last week’s report on public appointments, which notes a “sharp, and so far unexplained, fall” in the number of women being reappointed to UK public boards. This has left the number of women at its lowest level for five year: of the 1,844 public appointments and reappointments last year, only 830 posts (45%) went to women.
There is more bad news from the Office of Manpower Economics (which surely should itself be renamed): the glass ceiling at the very top of public sector jobs remains firmly in place.
The report says about half of Britain’s gender gap can be attributed to unequal treatment of women in occupations like medical practitioners and prison service officers, despite these jobs being covered by public review bodies. “The residual or unexplained gap, our indicator of unequal treatment, is particularly prominent at the top end of the wage distribution in the public sector consistent with a ‘glass ceiling’, or greater gender inequality among higher earners,” says the report.
To get progress back under way, change is needed in policy-making. Investing in good public services matters to women. And not just the obvious services like having affordable childcare – especially in the UK, where childcare costs are among the highest in the world. This penalises women, who tend to stay in part-time jobs and take on unpaid childcare, while more men do full-time jobs.
But important though it is to have affordable childcare services open long enough to fit round parents’ working hours, that does nothing for gender equality if women continue to do drop-offs and pick-ups. The fact that more women than men work part-time creates a gender pay gap that continues into retirement.
As the Resolution Foundation thinktank points out in its report on structural inequalities in UK society, the gender pension gap is far bigger than the gender pay gap. The Pension Policy Institute says that women of all ages have less pension savings than men. There’s a gap of about 30% for women in their late 40s, but the figures are terrible for older women now in their 60s: the median women’s pension wealth is £51,100, while men’s pension wealth is near £156,500.
Bigger changes are needed. Better public transport, for instance, is an important component of equality. More women than men use public transport, and, indeed, every kind of public infrastructure. Investing in greener, safer mobility doesn’t just tackle climate crisis; it also helps empower women by giving them better access to more highly-paid jobs.
The Resolution Foundation is clear: discussions about structural inequality are sidelined from major policy debates. When planners think about public transport or the way cities are designed, do they put women’s needs front and centre? Are they thinking about the equality impact at all? Most European cities are designed by male planners for men like them: going directly between home and work, mainly at set times. But it is possible to think differently. City planners in Vienna have been considering the needs of women for 30 years, with a unique approach to urban planning.
Next year will be the 25th anniversary of the Beijing platform for action, which flagged 12 critical areas in which urgent action was needed to create gender equality, including tackling poverty and violence, while improving women’s health, education and training. Last year, the UN commission on the status of women noted that notwithstanding women’s greater participation in education and in the labour market, “significant gender gaps remain in working conditions, wages, job quality and the sharing of household responsibilities”.
A focus on tackling inequality would make every policy discussion different. It’s a change that is long overdue.