“ Everything we consume shapes our view of the world, and young people are increasingly looking to the internet for their education,” Phipps adds. Misogynistic influencers and podcasters are also ubiquitous, with teenage boys 21 per cent more likely to have heard of Andrew Tate than Rishi Sunak. TikTok is full of marmalade-making tradwives clad in hideous floral-print dresses, who unironically say things like “ we believe our purpose is to be homemakers”. She’s right – there are signs everywhere that attitudes seem to be regressing, especially on social media. “Things have not gone nearly far enough in fact, in some ways we are going backwards – for instance, the impact of the cost of living crisis on women, attempts to roll back reproductive rights, online harassment and violence, and the outpouring of prejudice directed at trans women in particular,” Phipps says. So, evidently, despite some positive steps forward, we can’t get complacent. “It’s likely that it’s both – we are seeing increased gender equality, but we’re also seeing resentment of that.” ![]() “There could also be an element of backlash - studies of ‘lad culture’ at university have found that it tends to be a way for young men to reassert territory and entitlements in the face of young women’s relative success,” she says. However, she also acknowledges that equally, these figures could suggest that young people are more intentionally eschewing feminism. “ This is possible given the fact that girls now tend to outperform boys at school, young women tend to do very well at university, and some forms of discrimination against women – for instance, workplace inequality or issues related to motherhood – often don’t make themselves known until later,” she says. Phipps also points out that it’s not necessarily a bad thing if young people think feminism has “gone far enough”, as that could imply that they’ve not encountered much gender inequality in their lives so far. “In Britain 38 per cent of people said things had gone ‘far enough’, and nobody said things had gone ‘too far’ - that’s The Telegraph ’s spin.” “It was a study of 32 countries, with 1,000 respondents from Britain, and across the whole sample Britain was amongst the most supportive of gender equality,” she says. She stresses that we shouldn’t spiral into a panic about these figures. Additionally, under half of the survey’s Gen Z respondents said they defined themselves as a feminist.Īlison Phipps is a feminist scholar and Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University. They found that out of all the respondents, 52 per cent of Gen Z and 53 per cent of millennials thought that we’ve now gone so far in promoting gender equality that we’re discriminating against men. The survey, conducted by Ipsos UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, spoke to over 22,000 people aged between 16 and 74 from 32 different countries. In spite of this, though, new research has found that the majority of young people believe women’s rights have already gone far enough. Research published last year found that 99 per cent of rape cases reported to the police do not end in a conviction. Women take on 60 per cent more unpaid domestic and care work than men. ![]() ![]() At present, the average woman in paid employment effectively works for free for nearly two months of the year compared to the average man in paid employment. That said, there’s still a long way to go before true equality is reached. Thanks to the tireless work of campaigners and activists, women’s rights in the UK have taken huge leaps forward in the past 100 years: in that time, we’ve won the right to open our own bank accounts the right to abortion the right to vote.
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