Centenary of the women's vote: Is there gender equality 100 years after women were given the vote?
2018 marks one hundred years since a major landmark in the history of our democracy – the first time some women in the UK had the right to vote. And while it would be another decade before women under 30 would receive the same right, 1918 was the year the UK set itself on the path to equality.
Yet 100 years later, the journey is still far from complete.
Men and women share the same voting rights – but there are other barriers to parity which remain, for example, the recent reporting disputes within the BBC over pay inequality.
Another good example to show how gender inequality exists is the following riddle which appears at the beginning of our Equality and Diversity training course.
“A young boy and his father are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene. The boy is transported to the hospital, taken immediately into surgery but the surgeon steps out of the operating room and says, “I can’t operate on this boy – he is my son”.
How is this possible? The answer is that the surgeon is the boy’s mother or second father.
Because of gender stereotypes and conditioning, some people can’t come up with a solution to this simple riddle. The surgeon could be the boy’s mother or second father for example. Of course, this does not mean that anybody unable to answer the riddle is sexist or homophobic, but it does say a lot about gender roles, relationships and our expectations of certain careers.
A hundred years after many women got the vote, there is clearly still a long way to go until women truly are treated equally.
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Equality & Diversity
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This one module course delivers one CPD hours and comprehensively covers:
- what equality and diversity mean and how they affect you
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- the Equality Act 2010 and the ‘protected characteristics’ that form the basis of the law
