Op-Ed: Liz Truss’ downfall won’t end trickle-down economics – we’re fighting for the rights of all women and girls
For decades we have been told that the best-performing economies are those that employ women in the highest number, with the best employment rates, and are therefore able to give their citizens more opportunities in the workplace.
And they believed we would take these lessons to the rest of the world – that one of the reasons why so many are less equal now is because they are less economically active.
For too long we believed just that.
So the British Election Survey, which started in the early 1990s, was an attempt to put more of the gains that had made society so less economically unequal, to women and girls.
We wanted them to know that in Britain we know we can do better, that this is not a failure, and the changes made in the past 20 years, which increased our female earnings by 37 per cent, were not the result of the economic inactivity of the 1980s.
Inequality has fallen by more than a third in the past two decades for women and men. But in most of the rest of the world it has gone up.
It is for this reason that we are demanding an end to the “trickle-down” theory that has created the same inequality in the UK, and has seen millions of women, and girls, suffer.
The UK has the best ratio of women to men of any country in the developed world. Our population is now half female, and in the last year women have overtaken men as the majority occupation in Britain. But we know that it is nothing to do with the economic success of women.
We are demanding that the Government and others who have failed to take advantage of our success must now stop blaming women for the fact that they are not economically active. We are the ones we are blaming, and demanding action from them.
We are also demanding that the Government and others who have failed to take