It feels like we are riding a wave of ambitious rhetoric towards a long-standing goal for society – gender equality. Waves created by an uprising populace that will no longer tolerate lower pay, glass ceilings, sexual harassment and a toxic media culture against women. But how much progress have we really made towards gender equality? And how does the UK compare to other countries?
It is notoriously difficult to ‘measure’ gender equality, because so many of the biases are hidden, creating eddies in the current that aren’t always easy to see, or stay below the surface of the water. There are indicators that we can use that might not tell us the underlying story, but certainly shine a light on the problem.
The European Union’s Gender Equality Index is one such beacon and, incidentally, some of my research is used as a measure of gender equality in their most recent assessment. It is published by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), which is responsible for monitoring progress, and advises the European Parliament and its Member States to make better-informed policy making to close the gender gaps.
The 2019 index examines gender gaps across six core domains: Work; Money; Knowledge; Time; Power; Health; and, a thematic focus on Work-life balance. I won’t go into detail explaining each one – there is intersectionality at play both within and between domains that complicate the analysis – but let’s look at some highlights. Perhaps unsurprisingly Sweden stands out as the most equal society and by a distance. In fact, it tops the rankings in all but one of the domains. What about the UK? Comparatively, we do ok, ranking fifth overall across EU Member States. We score particularly well in Health – with high life expectancy for women and very good access to healthcare because of our beloved NHS, and Knowledge – women are better educated but there is still segregation in terms of subject studied. We do ok in the domain of Money, with falling gender pay gaps and reductions in poverty, and Work – increasing participation of women in the labour market, but still showing segregation by sector. We don’t do so well on Power, with women under-represented in parliament and board positions of large companies, and on Time, with women still taking the responsibility for the major share of care responsibilities within the household. This relates to the thematic focus in the index on Work-Life Balance. How well does government policy, and business, support men’s and women’s job of balancing domestic and care responsibilities with economic provisioning? Is there good access to affordable childcare? To flexible working? And what about parental leave – job-protected time off work to care for their children? The latter was the focus of my research for EIGE, using the framework of an EU Directive that outlines the design of leave policy (which some countries, including the UK, have ignored) and mapping access to leave through simulating eligibility criteria on harmonized data. Whilst the EU Directive provides structure to policy design, it does not cover eligibility criteria for the policy, so one can expect some differences in rates of access across Member States. The UK has one of the lowest rates of access to leave because it has one of the most restrictive set of eligibility rules, and one of the most de-regulated labour markets in Europe. Around one-third of men and women in employment in the UK are not eligible for parental leave. Combined with poor access to flexible working and maternity/paternity leave, as well as gender imbalances in the policies themselves, means that it is very difficult to achieve that work-life balance, and it typically falls on women to bear the cost in terms of forgone earnings, as this graph from the IFS shows so starkly.
The wage gap between mothers and men opens up not because women miss out on wage and career progression because accumulated labour market experience falls behind that of men.
Enough negativity, let’s look for a positive, shall we? We have the 5th most gender-equal society in Europe! But the question posed at the beginning of this article was about progress, and there are some worrying signs for the UK. Actually, there are worrying signs for Europe; there is progress, but it is hard to distinguish improvements in the index score from a horizontal line – the EU is progressing at a snail’s pace. And the UK is lagging behind even that. Our gender equality score has improved by 1.7 percentage points since 2005. Is a sloth slower than a snail? If so, that’s us. In some domains our scores are tumbling and other countries are catching us quickly. We are still a long way from meeting the ambition of a gender equal society. Let’s not allow the wave to peter out.
The full report of my research on Parental leave on behalf of EIGE can be found here:
Eligibility for parental leave in EU Member States, European Institute for Gender Equality, published 27.02.2020.
Banner Image used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Attribution: Michael “Mike” L. Baird, http://bairdphotos.com