Banyard - The equality illusion: the truth about women and men today

Today it is widely believed that feminism has achieved its aims and that the struggle for equality between women and men is over. Some even worry that feminism might have gone too far. Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, author of The Golden Notebook considered by many to be a key feminist novel suggests there is now an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible, and says that she has nothing in common with feminists. Sir Stuart Rose, Chairman of Marks & Spencer, has insisted that there really are no glass ceilings despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time Youve got a woman fighter pilot who went on to join the Red Arrows I mean what else do you want, for Gods sake? Women astronauts. Women miners. Women dentists. Women doctors. Women managing directors. What is it you havent got? And when Conservative Party leader David Cameron was asked in public whether or not he was a feminist he replied, Er, I dont really know what it means any more, then venturing, But I suspect probably not. The general consensus seems to be that feminism has had its day. But what does our apparently equal society actually look like?

• Women in the UK are paid 22.6 per cent less per hour than men.
• Women do two-thirds of the worlds work, yet receive 10 per cent of the worlds income and own 1 per cent of the means of production.
• At least 100,000 women are raped each year in the UK and the rape conviction rate is 6.5 per cent.
• Only 18.3 per cent of the worlds members of parliament are women (the UK figure is under 20 per cent).
• During the 1990s the number of men paying for sex acts in the UK doubled.

These are not statistics from a bygone age this is our world. The equality that so many people see existing between women and men is an illusion. Proclamations that we are there now, that equality has been achieved, have chased feminism from the mainstream. It is time to find the way back to recognise feminism for what it is: one of the most vital social justice movements of our age.

Insidiously, the problems that remain seem to have become an accepted part of the landscape of our everyday lives normal and inevitable. Rape happens; women hate their bodies; world leaders are usually male thats just the way it is. Having spent our lives in a society with these attributes, we have grown accustomed to them. And with so many people asserting that feminism has achieved all it can, it is tempting to conclude that the remaining gaps between women and men are mere by-products of natural physiological difference. But this would be a mistake. The majority of human beings are, of course, born with a chromosomal structure, reproductive system, and sexual characteristics that are either distinctly male or but although our sex is the result of a biological lottery, the inequality gaps that remain between women and men are not. Rather, they are constructed by society and assigned to us at birth. Gender, and all that word implies today, is the net result of the decisions, debates, accidents, and battles played out amongst our 100 billion forebears. It is what it means to be a boy/man or girl/woman in todays society: what constitutes masculinity and femininity. But crucially the two genders are not alike in value or status. Throughout the world, men still hold a higher status in society than women. In fact, gender itself pivots on a power relation: the height of masculinity a real man is when it is furthest away from the depths of femininity. While the level and forms vary, women and girls in every society on earth have less access to opportunities, resources, and political power than men and boys not because of sex, but because of gender something we create.

There have undoubtedly been huge gains for womens rights over the past century. The three periods of most intense activity often referred to as the three waves of feminism have helped deliver monumental reforms: equal voting rights for women and men; the legal right for a woman not to be denied employment because of her sex or fired because she becomes pregnant or gets married; and though only as recently as 1991 the right not to be subject to rape in marriage. There have also been huge cultural shifts, with issues such as domestic violence now seen as a serious crime rather than a private dispute, and a network of refuges established to support the victims. From Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer to Ariel Levy activists and theorists throughout the years have created a rich body of feminist thought and together brought about historic gains for women.

Yet despite all this, in reality the struggle for gender equality has only just begun. We are still very early on in the process of unpicking from our society the laws, decrees, practices, and cultures that have accumulated over millennia to enshrine womens subordination. So many legal victories, such as the right to equal pay won in 1970, remain abstract pledges that are yet to translate into reality. Hard-fought gains, such as the right to a legal, safe abortion, are under continual attack: in 2008 all but one of the Conservative Party front bench voted (unsuccessfully) to reduce the upper time limit for women to have an abortion, and routine abortion remains illegal in Northern Ireland. The constantly evolving economic and political world order means the ground we are working on for gender equality is constantly shifting, and new technological developments present challenges unique to this age. To top this all off the route to gender equality is, metaphorically speaking, badly signposted, littered with dead-ends, and beset with traps. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the present-day normalisation of the sex industry, widely proclaimed as an empowering choice leading towards womens sexual liberation, yet ending in a scale of commercial sexual exploitation never witnessed before in human history, and leaving feminist campaigners in uncharted territory.