women in london

Speaking at the launch of the independent National Equality Panel* report on Wednesday 27th January 2010, Fawcett Society’s Chief Executive, Ceri Goddard, will highlight the importance of tackling the stark economic and class inequalities revealed by the report. However, she will warn that action to address this must be combined with, and not at the expense of, tackling other inequalities such as those between women and men.

Ceri Goddard said:

“This report shows that both the economic equality gap, between the have and have not’s and the gender equality gap, between women and men, are both still unacceptable and require bold and urgent action from government, policymakers and employers. Women’s and other equality campaigners have known for years that it is just not helpful and way too simplistic to say one kind of inequality – say between rich and poor – and other kinds say between black and minority ethnic people and white people, are either more important than the other or can be addressed in isolation from each other.”

Whilst welcoming progress in some areas such as the slight narrowing of the gender pay gap and improvements in the educational attainments of girls and young women and some ethnic minorities groups she will point out that much more remains to be done especially in the area of employment highlighting:

“Despite the fact that women up to 44 years old on average have better qualifications than the average man we still get paid 21% less an hour. Even though many people think we have ‘moved on’ from old fashion sexist and racist attitudes, the facts in this report show that there is clearly still large scale discrimination against both women and ethnic minorities in employment.”

She will also comment on one of the report’s headline findings, that there are now larger differences in economic outcomes within each social group than there are between them saying:

“This does not alter the fact that however you divide social groups – whether by race, age, disability, sexuality or social class it is the women in all of these groups who earn less or have less access to economic resources.”

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* Launch of the report of the National Equality Panel, Wednesday 27 January 2010, 9.45 to 11.45am. The National Equality Panel was asked by Rt. Hon Harriet Harman, Minister for Women and Equality, to produce a report on how inequalities in people’s economic outcomes are related to their characteristics and circumstances. Information on the Panel’s terms of reference, activities and commissioned research can be found on its website at: http://www.equalities.gov.uk/national_equality_panel.aspx.
* The Executive Summary attached contains some of the key findings from the Panel’s report, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK. The report and a fuller summary are available from 27 January on the websites of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics and the Government Equalities Office at: http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/case and http://www.equalities.gov.uk/national_equality_panel.aspx.