Gender Equality in the US vs. UK: Key Similarities and Differences

Introduction

The United Kingdom is often called the mother country of the United States. However, in some ways the two countries still differ, including in their measures of gender equality. Perhaps the most notable example can be found in political leadership. Unlike the US, the UK has already had female heads of government in the form of Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, and before that the UK was led by female monarchs as heads of state. The US has lacked such a female figurehead at a similarly prominent position, though Hillary Clinton came close to securing the White House in 2016, and several female members of Congress have risen to prominent positions, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.

Still, these are but a few examples, and the differences in gender equality between the US and the UK go beyond positions of power. They also touch on issues such as the character of the women's movements in the two countries, pay, leisure, and even how gender equality is viewed — though on this latter point the two countries have more in common than they have different.

Where the Countries Differ on the Issues

Both nations lag in terms of ensuring equal pay for equal work and in achieving parity between the genders. In the UK, 78% of companies pay male employees more than female employees (Covert, 2018). One silver lining to this statistic, however, is that it was compiled at all: the UK now requires all companies to make their salary data transparent and public, so companies can at least be publicly shamed and held accountable. The US lacks such public data, and at many American companies, sharing information about one's salary is considered taboo.

The UK also historically has a much stronger tradition of a militant women's rights movement. It was not until the suffragette movement in the UK during the early 20th century began to take more radical measures — including actions that might be considered terroristic today, such as vandalizing buildings, bombing, cutting telephone wires, and in one case throwing themselves in front of a racehorse — that the US movement began to take similar actions (Gray, 2015). Without the radicalization of the US suffrage movement, many historians believe it would have taken even longer for women to secure equality. In fact, the only reason the women's movement in the US obtained suffrage in the first half of the 20th century was that it traded its anti-war platform for the right to vote: by backing Woodrow Wilson's push to enter WWI, the movement led by Carrie Chapman Catt abandoned its pacifist stance and helped push America into the war, allowing Wilson to promote his League of Nations (Van Voris, 1996). In exchange, the 19th Amendment was ratified and signed into law in 1920. This rather complicated episode in the history of the American women's movement illustrates that militancy has never had the same character in the US as it has in the UK.

It should be noted, however, that the UK does not rank among the most gender-neutral nations in the industrialized world. As noted by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), the UK lacks a written constitution to enshrine equal rights under the law. Similarly, the US failed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, though because the US does have a written constitution there remains the possibility of codifying such equality at a future date. The US is also a federalist system, and laws protecting women's equality may vary widely between states, although officially, discrimination on the basis of gender and pregnancy status is prohibited under federal law — that is, gender is a protected category.

Although it lacks a formal constitution, the UK passed its Equality Act in 2010, which prohibited unequal treatment based on gender and consolidated previous anti-discrimination laws. The Act was passed with the intention of "helping to achieve equal opportunities in the workplace and wider society" in a more active manner than simply banning outright discrimination ("United Kingdom," 2020, par. 4).

The UK still has a stronger central authority than the US, but by European standards "efforts towards gender mainstreaming in the UK have been described as highly fragmented and disconnected from general policy and agendas, with little evaluation taking place" among Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland ("United Kingdom," 2020, par. 2). The entrenchment of the UK's class system can also mean that women of lower-class status may struggle even more to find parity — though this is certainly true in the US as well. Members of historically marginalized groups who are also women may likewise face compounded discrimination. Thus, while the UK has exhibited some more positive features historically regarding gender-based discrimination, it is far from a world leader in equality — and nor is the US.

Where the Countries Are More Similar

One way in which the US and UK are similar on the issue of gender equality is that the issue remains a matter of debate in both societies. In the US, for example, it is still contested whether gender inequality meaningfully exists or whether it is a socio-political narrative deployed by particular interest groups. The wage gap and the gender leisure gap are two points that are widely debated.

According to Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a writer for Time, the answer is that a true pay gap does not exist: "The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time." The enduring claim that "women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns — for doing the same work" is based on an average earnings statistic, not on an actual side-by-side comparison of pay for men and women doing the same work (Sommers). By contrast, Nikki Graf, Anna Brown, and Eileen Patten, writing for Pew Research, reach a very different conclusion. They argue that the pay gap is closing but that women still lag by as much as 15 cents on the dollar.

If one pays close attention to the data Graf et al. use, however, Hoff Sommers's critique has some merit — which is why the issue is so hotly debated. Data interpretation is shaped significantly by the analytical perspective one brings to it. As Hoff Sommers argues, these studies are not side-by-side comparisons of wages for men and women doing identical work; they are statistics of median earnings, and all they reliably show is that men earn more than women overall. They do not reveal how that gap arises — whether men are working more hours, holding different jobs, or occupying higher-level positions. Both sides of the argument have a point: there is an earnings gap. The disagreement lies in how each side interprets the statistics.

Conclusion

In terms of politics, the character of the women's movement, and pay transparency, the UK has certainly outstripped the US when it comes to making concrete advances in addressing gender equality. The UK has had more female leaders at the highest levels of government than the US. But the US is built differently — it is a different kind of nation in terms of size, federal structure, and constitutional tradition. The fact that the US has come close to electing a female president is in itself significant. However, the two nations are strikingly similar in the fact that people on both sides of the Atlantic still question the nature and extent of the gender gap. There remains real debate over what the statistics actually show, and that shared uncertainty is perhaps the most telling measure of where both countries still have work to do.

References

Codina, N., & Pestana, J. V. (2019). Time matters differently in leisure experience for men and women: Leisure dedication and time perspective. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(14), 2513.

Covert, B. (2018). What the US can learn from Britain on equal pay. The New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/147882/us-can-learn-britain-equal-pay

Gray, E. (2015). How the British suffragettes radicalized American women. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/4084759/how-british-suffragettes-radicalized-american-women/

Maybin, S. (2016). Four ways the gender pay gap isn't all it seems. BBC. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37198653

Porter, J. (2014). The gender leisure gap: Why women are losing their time to just chill out. Fast Company. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/3034205/the-gender-leisure-gap-why-women-are-losing-their-time-to-just-chill-out

United Kingdom. (2020). European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). Retrieved from

Van Voris, J. (1996). Carrie Chapman Catt: A public life. New York City: Feminist Press at CUNY.