Today, puncturing the harrowing images and reports from Ukraine, social media timelines have been awash with an annual dose of queen emojis and Beyonce gifs, in celebration, of course, of International Women’s Day.
One company that decided to hop on the trend this morning was British pub chain Young’s Pubs, who posted a seemingly innocuous stock photo of two women drinking beer, with the caption: “Raising a pint to International Women’s Day”.
Innocuous, so they thought. They were quickly humbled by my new favourite Twitter account, @PayGapApp – a bot which quotes any employer’s tweet containing the hashtag #IWD (International Women’s Day) with the company’s gender pay gap. So simple, so genius.
This, incidentally, didn’t go well for Young’s, since it turns out their women’s median hourly pay is a whopping 73.2 per cent lower than men’s. Yikes.
Other particularly egregious offenders who were quickly called out by PayGapApp were RyanAir (68.8 per cent lower) fast-fashion brand Missguided (40 per cent lower), and, rather randomly, Sheffield Wednesday FC (41 per cent lower).
While watching companies scrambling to delete their virtue-signaling IWD tweets in real time when confronted with their hypocrisy undoubtedly made for some of the best live-viewing since Big Jet TV, it was also deeply depressing.
To be clear, I have nothing against companies tweeting their support for women on International Women’s Day. Do it every day, in fact. But there is something so profoundly offensive about companies bigging up their faux-feminist clicktivism for clout with one hand while underpaying women within their own organisations with the other.
Of course, the gender pay gap is nothing new and these figures are all in the public domain already. It is simply a reminder that in real terms, we still have a long way to go in achieving gender equality.
Women are people, not a PR exercise, and this International Women’s Day we need action, not empty words. Here are five key issues that must be overhauled in the next five years.
Make childcare affordable
The UK has amongst the highest childcare costs in Europe. Ranking only behind Slovakia and Switzerland, for a couple with two children, 30 per cent of their salary will be spent on childcare costs, according to OECD data.
Naturally, this lack of affordable and flexible childcare disproportionately affects women, setting back women’s participation in the workforce and leaving 1.6 million mothers wanting to work more hours, according to a study by the Centre for Progressive Policy think-tank.
In fact, they predict that investing in childcare would boost the annual income of working mothers in the UK by as much as £10 billion.
UK families are currently not entitled to free care for children under the age of two, leaving many mothers struggling to both participate in the workforce and cover the cost of childcare.
And costs are only going up: the cost of a one-year-old child’s nursery provision grew four times faster than wages in England, and seven times faster in London, between 2008 and 2016, according to research from the Trades Union Congress.
Make period products free
We’re all familiar with the gender pay gap by now, but what about the fact that, according to a study conducted in 2015, the average lifetime cost of forking out on period products and other items to make your period more bearable is estimated to be over a whopping £18,000?
As a result, despite being one of the most developed sovereign nations in the world, in 201, 1 in 10 girls had been unable to afford sanitary products according to a survey by Plan International UK.
Scotland became the first country on the planet to make all period products free in November 2020, and campaigners have been calling for the same to be done in England and Wales.
Create a national stalking and domestic abuse register
In the early hours of 18 June last year, Gracie was tending to her horse, Paddy, at the Blue Lodge Farm in northeast Derbyshire. Moments later, she received a fatal stab wound to the neck. Michael Sellers, whom she had previously accused of stalking her, is suspected to have killed her before killing himself in an apparent murder-suicide.
A quick Google search for “woman stalked” offers page after page of horror stories like this one, particularly from the last two years. During the pandemic, the combination of time spent at home and online caused stalking reports to skyrocket. In 2020, more than 80,000 incidents of stalking were recorded in England and Wales according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) – up from the 27,156 incidents reported the year prior.
Many campaigners have been demanding that the Government place serial domestic abuse and stalking perpetrators on the existing violent and sexual offenders register and monitor them in the same way as serious sex offenders.
However last year, less than two months after the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a cross-party group of peers abandoned a push to create an automatic register of dangerous domestic abusers and stalkers.
Increased protections for trans women
Transgender hate crimes have become one of the fasted growing crimes reported in the UK. From 2016-2018, reports of trans hate crimes throughout the UK rose 81 per cent.
Trans women are also more susceptible to some forms of gender-based violence than cisgender women. For example, between 2019 and 2020, more than twice as many trans women as cis women were subject to domestic abuse.
While the increased rates may be in part due to more people coming forward about their experiences, it is also clear that transphobia is a huge and growing problem in the UK.
Many have described the current plight of transgender people, and in particular women, as being similar to that of the gay rights movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Their existence is often debated and ridiculed, but little attention is given to the daily discrimination they face.
More support for migrant women suffering domestic abuse
The Domestic Abuse Act, passed into law in April last year, has introduced a number of tangible measures which will change the lives of countless survivors. However, for many migrant women, the act has left them behind.
Some migrant women do not have access to public funds, which means they are refused help by the authorities, and thus denied support to leave their partners and refused refuge space. Campaigners have long warned that perpetrators of domestic abuse often use insecure immigration status to control their partners, making them reluctant to seek help for fear of detention and deportation.
This means it is often left to services run by and for Black and minority women to provide help, many of which operate on very low budgets and are therefore limited in the help they can supply.
