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Issue Description
Gender equality has come a long way since the 1970s: however, inequalities do still exist. Although girls outperform boys in education, this does not translate into a career advantage, with women being paid on average 17% less than men. In addition, statistics show that women are still more likely than men to take responsibility for housework and childcare. This book examines equality issues at home, at work, at school and in law.
The information comes from a wide range of sources and includes government reports and statistics, newspaper reports, features, magazine articles and surveys, literature from lobby groups and charitable organisations.
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Key Facts
- By about 18 months, most children begin to display gender-specific behaviours. Boys will tend to choose vehicles or construction toys to play with; girls go for dolls. These behaviours appear so early that some suggest that they must be innate, while others argue that they simply reflect parental influences or the child’s desire to conform. (page 1)
- Women earn on average 17% per hour less than men for full-time work. (page 5)
- The majority of the world’s poor are women: around 70 per cent of the 1.3 billion people who live in extreme poverty, on less than one dollar a day, are women and girls. (page 12)
- Men have a less traditional view of gender roles than they did 20 years ago. Yet according to the latest British Social Attitudes report, women are still far more likely than men to do the household chores. (page 15)
- Girls are more likely to stay on in full-time education at age 16 (82 per cent of girls and 72 per cent of boys). Girls are also more likely to be entered for A-levels than boys (54 per cent of entries are female), in contrast to the 1950s and 1960s when only a third of A-level entries were female. (page 22)
- While girls are now achieving better academic results than boys at age 16, relatively few young women are choosing science or science-related subjects for further study. (page 26)
- A study of people now in their 40s has revealed that those who went to single-sex schools were more likely to study subjects not traditionally associated with their gender than those who went to co-educational schools. Girls from single-sex schools also went on to earn more than those from co-educational schools. (page 27)
- In choosing future careers nearly six in ten girls (57%) received information about going into teaching and over two-fifths (43%) about working in childcare. Conversely less than a third were told about the opportunities to work in IT (29%) or business and entrepreneurship (28%), only a fifth were informed about engineering (21%) and fewer than one in ten received enough information about construction (9%) or plumbing (6%). (page 28)
- Increasing women’s participation in the labour market and reducing gender segregation in the workplace is estimated to be worth between £15 billion and £23 billion to the UK economy. (page 29)
- Despite the fact that women represent 59% of university graduates in Europe and have a better educational attainment, their employment rate remains lower than men’s (by 14.4 points) and they continue to earn on average 15% less than men for every hour worked. (page 33)
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Table of Contents
Chapter One: Gender in Society
Upbringing versus biology, The gender gap, The gender agenda, Equality for girls?, Changes since the 1970s, Prevalence of sex discrimination, Why men should care about gender stereotypes, Do men speak Martian?, Today’s girls prefer to look sexy rather than be clever, Man made news?, International gender equality, Because I am a girl...
Chapter Two: Equality at Home
Who does the housework?, Men’s changing lifestyles, Britain and EU failing to mind the gender gap, A bride by any other name, Equality is the way to a woman’s heart.
Chapter Three: Education and Careers
Gender and education, Gender and subject choice, Boys and single-sex teaching, The myth of single-sex schooling, Gender bias still blights school careers advice, Women and work: the facts, Women in non-traditional training and employment, Better jobs for women still scarce, Want a difficult job done? Then ask a woman, UK gender pay gap worst in Europe, Being positive, Gender pay gap, Pay gap ‘costs women £300,000 over lifetime’, Waiting for equal pay.
Key Facts
Glossary
Index
Additional Resources
Acknowledgements
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The Study Guide for: The Gender Gap - Volume 154
Each book in the Issues series has a study guide. These four-page guides provide a variety of discussion points and other activities to suit a wide range of ability levels and interests.
Publisher: Independence Educational Publishers
Price: £1.95
ISBN: 978 1 86168 459 2