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In the past three years, women in Afghanistan have been barred from jobs, universities, parks and gyms. Nearly 20 US states have made abortion illegal or harder to secure. Deadly protests have rocked Iran after a young woman arrested for “improper” clothing died in custody.
Americans have re-elected a president who campaigned against a female rival he called “retarded”, “mentally impaired” and a “dummy”.
Then there is Andrew Tate, the self-declared misogynist influencer and Trump champion who thinks “everything on the planet was built on a woman obeying her man in the family”.
He made it to the US from Romania last month after Washington officials pressed Bucharest to lift restrictions on his travel. He and his brother had been detained in Romania since 2022 on charges including sexual exploitation and human trafficking, which they deny.
Against this background, any hint of progress in female equality is welcome. And as it happens, things are looking up. Marginally.
For the past few years, a growing share of people around the world have said they think the push for women’s rights has gone far enough.
But that proportion dropped from 53 per cent last year to 48 per cent, a 30-country study by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London and the Ipsos polling firm showed this week.
Likewise, the share of people who think equality efforts have gone so far that men are now suffering discrimination has fallen, as has the proportion who think a man who stays at home to look after his children is less of a man.
These declines are welcome but small. And the study still suggests nearly every second adult in countries across the world thinks it is job done on female equality, which it patently is not.
Working women still earn 20 per cent less than men globally and as of last month, only 27 per cent of all national parliamentarians were female.
Even in rich OECD countries, it will take more than 46 years to close the gender pay gap at current rates of progress, PwC data showed this month. And the gap has actually widened in financial services boardrooms in Europe, where EY says male directors were paid at least $100,000 more than their female counterparts in 2023.
There’s another thing about the King’s College research. If you dig into the data, it shows the improvement in attitudes about female equality is far from uniform. Across the G7, progress has been pronounced in Italy, the UK and other western European nations. But opinions in the US and Canada have barely budged and things have gone mysteriously backwards in Japan, where the share of people who think female equality efforts are leading to discrimination against men has risen markedly.
It is not entirely clear why. Perhaps views in France were galvanised by the horrific case of Dominique Pelicot, who repeatedly drugged his wife and invited dozens of strangers to rape her while she was unconscious. Maybe Trump’s election win affected opinions in the US. But one thing is clear: the gulf between young men and women is still alarming.
Among the under-30s in so-called generation Z, a striking 57 per cent of males think feminism has gone so far that men are now suffering discrimination, versus 36 per cent of females.
And 28 per cent of young men think a man who stays at home to look after the kids is less of a man, compared with 19 per cent of women. Half the women in this generation define themselves as feminists compared with about a third of men.
This is in line with the widening political divide that has opened up between increasingly conservative 20-something men and ever more progressive young women. Indeed, the MeToo movement is thought to have been a big driver of the gap.
The question is how to close it. I agree with feminist thinkers who want more recognition of the many problems boys and men face, from educational underachievement to dispiriting rates of homelessness, suicide and loneliness.
Ultimately, gender equality cannot be seen as a zero-sum game that women can only win at the expense of men.
This idea is rocket fuel for the likes of Tate. It also threatens to unravel the progress that has taken so many decades to achieve. Alas, it seems more entrenched today than ever.
Read the full article here
