International Women’s Day in numbers: How the fight for equality is lagging behind

Women around the world are still facing considerable inequality when it comes to pay, jobs, household work and access to healthcare, figures analysed by The Independent reveal.

As International Women’s Day is marked more than 100 years after it was first celebrated in 1911, this publication takes a deeper look at the progress made toward worldwide equality.

To celebrate the day, Women 2025 – The Influence List, The Independent has chosen to highlight 50 influential women who are changing British lives, several of whom have had to battle against sexism and discrimination to achieve their success.

Have your say on what gender equality means for you.

From judges to politicians, sports champions to artists and influencers, the list focuses on the women who are making change happen.

In many ways, women in the UK have seen huge strides towards gender equality, with salaries and representation at executive level improving over the past few decades.

But persistent problems remain, with women still not receiving equal pay, and some advancements obscuring deeper gender inequalities. In the UK, women still earn considerably less than men on average, performing worse than other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Women are also still vulnerable to domestic abuse with one in four in the UK experiencing domestic abuse in their lifetime, while one woman is killed every five days.

Internationally, there have been some notable steps backwards with the Taliban suffocating education for women while the US clamps down on abortion.

Here, The Independent looks at the status of gender parity in the UK, and worldwide, spotlighting progress in women’s rights and where more work is needed.

Overall, the UK’s gender pay gap is at 13.1 per cent, meaning that the average woman earns 13.1 per cent less than a man by the hour. Though this is below the global gender pay gap, the UK performs worse than other OECD countries, where the pay gap is just 11.6 per cent.

This is largely because more women work part-time, and part-time workers tend to earn less per hour. Of the 16.4 million women working in the UK, a third are working part-time.

On the positive side, among full-time workers the pay gap is 7 per cent, the lowest on record in the UK. This is well below the global average of 20 per cent, according to UN figures.

Women in the UK have an employment rate of 71.8 per cent, according to government figures, not far short of the male employment rate of 78.2 per cent.

This is significant progress from 1971, when the employment rate for women was just 53 per cent in the UK.

The UK has emerged as a hub for female business owners, with nearly half (46 per cent) of all entrepreneurs being women, according to a 2024 survey.

And at the highest level, over 4 in 10 directors at FTSE 100 companies are women, such as Amanda Blanc at Aviva and Margherita Della Valle at Vodafone.

In the financial sector, just 12.5 per cent of fund managers worldwide are women, according to Citywire’s Alpha Female report; with the UK lagging slightly behind the global average.

Other areas of finance are some of the worst offenders for gender parity, with women occupying just 10 per cent of senior roles in private equity, and 4.9 per cent in venture capital firms.

Women are the most overrepresented in the health and social care sector, and education.

The majority (77 per cent) of health and social care workers in the UK are women, government figures show, which include some of the lowest-paying jobs, according to recruitment company Indeed.

Although the UK has made significant steps in women’s rights and equality, it is ranked 18th worldwide for gender parity, according to PwC’s Women in Work Index.

“Research shows that increasing workplace participation rates of women has the potential to boost productivity in the UK economy,” say the analysts at PwC.

Gender parity goes far beyond equal pay and opportunities in the workforce. It also requires a dismantling of entrenched misogyny, patriarchy and social norms which put women at a disadvantage, and sometimes, in physical danger.

Last year, The Independent launched the Brick by Brick campaign with domestic abuse charity Refuge.

The campaign set out to raise £300,000 to build a home as shelter for domestic abuse survivors in the UK. After just six months, the campaign had raised £584,608, which meant a second home could be built.

The scale of domestic abuse in the UK is largely shrouded in secrecy, but remains a daily reality for many women.

Around 1 in 4 women in the UK will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, while one woman is killed every five days.

Most Britons (74 per cent) are unaware of the high prevalence of domestic abuse on their doorstep, according to a survey from Refuge, while many are also unable to identify less obvious forms of abuse.

Non-physical forms of abuse include economic and psychological abuse, such as isolating someone from their family and friends, or closely tracking someone’s spending to the point of coercion.

Men are significantly less likely than women to be able to identify these “red flags”, according to research from Refuge.

Actor Olivia Colman, an ambassador for Refuge, said: “Abuse doesn’t always look the way we expect it to. It’s in the small moments, the quiet control, and the silent manipulations. No red flag is too small to be noticed, because every woman deserves to live without fear.”

With more women in the workforce, many studies show that the burden of housework and childcare is still a long way from being equally distributed.

Part of the reason is that more women are in part-time work than men; and for women working full-time, it often leads to an imbalance of responsibilities.

A recent study from the University of Bath found that mothers handle the majority (71 per cent) of household tasks that require mental effort, such as planning meals, managing household finances, and arranging activities.

Mothers in the UK also take on twice as many daily household chores as fathers, mainly cleaning and childcare.

The rise of remote working has only made things worse, in some cases.

Women working remotely consistently add more than 4-8 hours of housework each week, reinforcing existing gender inequalities, a study of heterosexual couples in the UK by the National University of Singapore found.

Meanwhile, men working from home saw little change to their housework burden.

“These patterns of intensified gender inequalities are more pronounced in routine housework tasks (cooking, washing, and cleaning),” write Senhu Wang and Cheng Cheng, the report’s authors.

“Rather than providing an ‘opportunity’ for a more egalitarian division of household labour, the use of [flexible working] maintains or even exacerbates the ‘exploitation’ of women under the existing traditional gender norms.”

Gender equality is a fundamental human right, but many women around the world are facing increasing threats to their rights and health in 2025.

In the United States, abortion is banned in 14 states, while six more states restrict abortion between six to 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Since the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, reproductive rights have faced creeping restrictions in the US. The right-wing activists which surround the Donald Trump administration have even gone so far as to suggest restricting contraception, seeing it as a “potential abortifacient”.

And the total dismantling of US foreign aid will almost certainly have lasting impacts on women and girls, with nearly 1 million losing access to contraception each week, not to mention the loss of midwives and maternal healthcare for many women in remote areas of Africa.

Around 287,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes each year, according to the World Health Organisation, and while women in the UK are far less at risk, pregnancy can be deadly for many women in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

In South Sudan, the maternal mortality rate is 1,223 deaths per 100,000 live births, the highest worldwide. Women need access to safe birthing conditions, skilled midwives, and maternal care in order to survive.

An estimated 736 million women worldwide have experienced rape or sexual assault – 798,000 of which are in the UK each year, say Rape Crisis.

It is not just the Taliban in Afghanistan preventing women from having an education; 122 million girls are out of school worldwide, according to Unesco.

The dangers which women face are as prevalent as ever, and it is vital to continue to fight against inherent biases and outright violence against women.

There is no gender parity until all women, worldwide, have equal rights.

Source: independent.co.uk