The success of reformism?

The pay gap between the sexes  in 1997 the pay gap between men and women was 27.5 per cent. Over the intervening years it has narrowed steadily – but in 2013 it rose for the first time, from 19.6 per cent to 19.7 per cent. At the current rate of progress it would take women more than 60 years to achieve financial equality with men – more than a century since the promise of equal pay was first made in Labour’s Equal Pay Act of 1970.

Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said: “It is a scandal that four decades after the Equal Pay Act, women still earn on average £5,000 a year less than men. This pay gap can add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds over the course of a woman’s working life.”
The Government’s Women’s Business Council recently claimed that “women’s equality is in a better place than ever before”. Nicky Morgan routinely cites progress of women on boards as one of the Government’s biggest achievements for women.  But let’s remember we’re talking about 0.002 per cent of working women.

Hundreds of thousands of women in Britain are waking up not knowing whether they’ll even get a day’s work, because of the explosion of zero-hour contracts. As for those who aren’t in work, 60,000 young women have been out of work for over a year, while the number of women over 24 unemployed for over two years is up since the election as well.