Gender Equality Study for International Women’s Day 2021

70 % of professionals do not believe gender equality in the workplace has been achieved

March 8th 2021 marks International Women’s Day, and a Yoopies survey on equality has revealed that

70% our survey respondents believe there is gender inequality in the workplace in various ways. Pay

gaps, missing out on promotions and lack of access to positions of responsibility were cited amongst the

most pressing issues of professional gender inequality and furthermore, we revealed that women are far

more likely to have trouble balancing their home or personal life with their professional one than men.

Results of the survey regarding gender inequality in the workplace:

Our study revealed that women face great difficulties balancing their personal and professional life, are treated

differently in the workplace based on their gender and often have more pressures placed on them at home which

can inhibit professional progress and performance in some instances. According to our survey 70% of respondents do

not believe that women receive equal treatment to men in the workplace and this suggests there are many more

procedures and steps that must be taken to close the gender based gaps:

● 70% of respondents do not feel that equality for women has been achieved in the workplace.

● However, 82% of individuals questioned do believe that over the past 5 years society in the UK has evolved

towards achieving more equality for women in the workplace, yet evidently the changes have not gone far

enough.

● According to respondents, inequalities persist most prominently in areas including pay gaps (79% agree),

promotions (60% agree) and access to positions of responsibility (60% agree).

● 52% of women who responded to our survey remarked that they believed their professional progress had

been hindered because of their gender, meaning they had been passed over for promotions or career

development opportunities.

● 88% of women have already had difficulty reconciling professional and personal life, a survey respondent

commented that she felt that women without children were often expected to take on greater unpaid

burdens such as longer hours or more high pressure tasks as it is societally accepted that mothers have more

personal life responsibilities, yet the same discrepancy was not experienced by men.

● Finally, comments made by survey respondents suggested that sexism does not exist exclusively in one

direction (from male to female individuals) but between women there are discrepancies too from older

generations to younger generations. Examples of gender inequality included different standards of

acceptable dress code for men and women, assumptions of intelligence based on appearance and

appropriate behaviour within a professional environment. Some women themselves have different standards

for other women than for men.

UK Equality Index

The European Gender Equality Index measures the levels of gender equality across six sectors; work,

money, power, knowledge, health, and time. In the UK the average score for gender equality across all

sectors is 72.2, a relatively high score but still only 6th highest in Europe, falling a long way short of the

scores of Sweden (83.8) and Denmark (77.4).

Conclusions

Suggestions made from our survey and data gathered by the European Gender Equality Index suggest that

there needs to be significant change made to improve gender equality in professional environments within

the UK and companies must take a greater responsibility to narrow the gaps which prevail in our society.

The most prominent issues include removing gender pay gaps, improving access to positions of

responsibility to women and implementing measures to facilitate a better balance of personal and

professional lives. In general women take on more domestic responsibilities such as childcare than men and

the UK must recognise the barriers preventing women from reaching their full professional potential in

order to achieve more gender equality in 2021.

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