Quotas to get more women into key positions in politics, business and the arts must be introduced to address a massive imbalance of power in Britain, according to equality campaigners.
With a statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett set to become the first of a woman in London’s Parliament Square on Tuesday, analysis from the Fawcett Society Sex and Power Index has shown that men still overwhelmingly dominate positions of power in every sector of society.
The figures show that women make up only 6% of FTSE 100 chief executives, 16.7% of supreme court justices, 17.6% of national newspaper editors, 26% of cabinet ministers and 32% of MPs.
“When we see this data brought together it is both shocking and stark – despite some prominent women leaders, men haven’t let go of the reins of power and progress is painfully slow,” said Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society.
“Equality won’t happen on its own. We have to make it happen. That is why we are calling for time-limited use of quotas and making all jobs flexible by default.”
She called for legislation that would force companies to advertise all jobs on a flexible basis unless there was a business reason for them not to be.
The organisation is also urging the government to enact section 106 of the Equality Act, which requires political parties to report the diversity of their candidates. Despite the law no data is collected and there is no monitoring of party representation regarding disability, ethnicity or gender.
Reflecting of the length of time it took to get a statue of a woman in Parliament Square, Smethers added: “It is no coincidence that male-dominated decision-making has to date commemorated so few of the great women in our history. We have to correct this imbalance for future generations and we have to ensure that women today can overcome those persistent structural barriers, which hold all of us back.”
Figures from the Fawcett Society also show that black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) and disabled women are further excluded from decision-making positions. BAME women are 7% of the UK population, but just 4% of MPs and there are no BAME female chief executives of companies in the FTSE 100. There are only two women MPs in the Commons who identify as disabled.
Caroline Criado-Perez, who launched the campaign to have a statue of a woman erected in Parliament Square, said the battle for equality was far from over. “If Millicent Fawcett were alive today, I wonder what she’d think about how far we’ve come,” she said.
“The past hundred years for women have been momentous and have left us more liberated than ever before – at least in law. But equality on paper isn’t the same as equality in real life, and as the dismal figures outlined in this report reveal, we still have a long way to go.”
Revealing the gender breakdown in politics, the Fawcett Index reveals that women make up 26% of cabinet ministers, and 34.5% of those who attend cabinet. Labour fares better - achieving gender parity in the shadow cabinet. Women lead 33% of select committees and make up 26% of the House of Lords. In local government, just 17% of council leaders are women, compared to 33% of councillors. Women make up only 11% of combined authority representatives and 17.5% of police and crime commissioners. None of the six directly elected metropolitan mayors are women.
In public life only 16.7% supreme court justices are women, and for university vice-chancellors the figure stands at 26%. While 62.5% of secondary school teachers are women, only 38% of schools have a female head teacher, and 31.6% of NHS trust chairs are women.
Women are also under-represented in the arts, according to the analysis, making up 65% of theatre audiences but only 39% of casts and 28% of playwrights. Women are over-represented in some areas though: they make up 91% of prostitute characters and 91% of housekeepers on screen.
Only 21.7% of gallery and museum chairs are women, and 34% of directors. Just 2.7% of statues in the UK depict women. The Fawcett Society is calling for arts funding to be be tied to proactive gender-equal representation.
