‘Women are still being systematically excluded from the institutions which govern our public and political life’
This is according to the Fawcett Society’s April 2018 report, Sex and Power 2018 (pdf).
The report continues the series of Sex and Power reports released in recent years to coincide with the centenary year of women first getting the vote, and the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square.
The report displays percentages of women in positions of power across politics, law, education and health, arts and media, business and civil society and more, and analyses the realities behind these figures.
It finds stark inequality in the latest dataset, claiming that although the picture is changing, the pace of change remains far too slow.
Caroline Criado Perez asks:
If Millicent Fawcett were alive today, would she reflect that perhaps, formal, legal equality isn’t enough? That after 100 years, if formal equality was all it took, maybe more than 32% of MPs and 26% of cabinet members would be women?
The following recommendations are made to deliver equal power for women:
- Organisations to publish quotas of women in power. Where this isn’t possible, targets and action plans to be published.
- All roles to be advertised on a flexible working basis, and more roles available on part-time or job-share basis.
- Immediate implementation of Section 106 of the Equality Act 2010 to gather candidate monitoring data and extended to include local government.
Read and download the full ‘Sex and Power 2018’ report (pdf).
