According to a recent Ipsos study in conjunction with the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at Kings College London, 47% of Britons think things have gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men. They go further, saying that men are now being discriminated against.
Pause while I adjust my what-the-fuck-face, as the data shows for the first time the majority of men, that’s 56% of men, now hold this view.
I don’t know what’s more shocking, that 56% of men hold this view or that 39% of women do too.
39% of women think we are doing ok. ‘We’ve got enough girls, let’s not be greedy and take it all from the boys.’
I’m struggling to control my face.
Let’s not mention that despite decades of legislation the gender pay gap means that women work for free for two months of the year.
Let’s not scream that in the UK a woman is killed by a man every three days.
Let’s not rage that in 2021 there were 67,125 rapes recorded by the police, yet the number of completed rape prosecutions was just 2,409, with most victims waiting 3 years to get to court.
Or that institutionalised misogyny is reported daily in our police service, the fire service, the NHS, in the way women’s health is treated or not treated, in the workplace, in the streets.
In the UK women do an average of 26 hours a week of unpaid work compared to 16 hours for men, and we don’t need to be told we are doing more childcare, more cooking, more cleaning, more laundry because, well, we are too busy bloody doing it. And if we were paid to do it we’d be earning £259.63 a week extra.
That would certainly increase our pay!
Women are still less likely to be business leaders, are less likely to seek promotions at work, even when they are more than qualified.
Online misogyny has become normalised with 1 in 10 women experiencing threats online. This rises significantly for women of colour and minoritised women.
Then there is the fact that in both the UK and globally women are more likely to live in poverty, are more at risk of poor mental health, are subjected to more health inequalities and are at greater risk of the impacts of Climate Crisis.
So, yeah, we have probably got enough equality now.
But what if the problem wasn’t women?
What if the problem was a global economic crisis, with decades of austerity, cuts in education and training, cuts in mental health support, increasingly insecure working patterns, a cost of living crisis, and the threatening of employment rights, the right to strike, the right to protest?
Oh, and then there’s toxic masculinity, with its emphasis on a narrow and nasty definition of what it means to be a 21st-century man.
For the first time, young men are more likely to think feminism has done more harm than good.
Taking a deeper look we can see that in schools, girls perform better than boys in GCSEs. Since 2013 more women are University graduates than men (though still not earning as much) and in those from disadvantaged backgrounds, more women apply for higher education than men.
Youth service provision has been eviscerated under decades of increasingly severe cuts in funding,- cuts to mental health services for young people cuts to careers counselling and support. Our young people are being abandoned, left dealing with the impacts of the pandemic on their mental health and future.
The number of young men not in education, employment or training (NEET) is increasing to 12.9%, that’s 467,000 young men not working or training in 2023. And the traditional industries and jobs that would have been open to these young men no longer exist.
We are at risk of a generation of young men blaming women for these problems. They are encouraged by the same sections of society that argued that the EU and immigrants are the cause of their struggle, rather than an outdated concept of masculinity and a capitalist structure that no longer has any use for them.
And for this, we will all pay.
I raised sons. I raised working-class lads and a daughter, who were all encouraged to see education as the way to give themselves choices in their lives, often despite or in direct opposition to the education system.
I worked with lads who were told they were rubbish at 14, who were excluded not only from school but from the rest of society, through poverty and lack of choice. I see those same lads, now men in my community, still excluded. Some of them have done ok, many have not.
So while I despair at all these statistics, while I adjust my life in all the myriad of ways that women do,- taking the long way home because it has better street lighting, walking with our keys in our hand, only one headphone in, chatting to our mums on the phone, being polite to pushy men because we fear their violent response, while I do more cleaning and cooking and childrearing and still earn less than the man next door, the question that I have in my mind is this.
How do we educate young men to see that women are not the problem?
Because if we don’t then the consequences will be a problem for all.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/gender-pay-gap-means-women-work-free-two-months-year-tuc
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/nearly-half-of-britons-say-womens-equality-has-gone-far-enough https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/womenshouldertheresponsibilityofunpaidwork/2016-11-10
Bordering Grey 