I always knew there was a backlash coming. I could sense it when I was working on the Equality Act back in 2010 when I was an adviser for the Labour Party. “You’ve all gone too far this time, there’s gonna be pushback and it won’t be nice,” warned a male colleague. It felt ominous. The thing we were pushing for was transparency on the gender pay gap — not actually demanding to be paid equally but knowing by how much we women were getting shafted. It’s just nice to know these things.
Perhaps it’s because I am a woman and from an ethnic minority background that I’ve always felt anxious about banking “equality” wins because they were hard fought for and therefore felt eternally fragile.
