[user104658]

Originally Posted by Oliver_W

Okay, I'm actually with you on that one - women being denied promotions and/or jobs because of their sex is probably almost as responsible for what is inaccurately labelled as the "pay gap" as women working different jobs and hours to men.

The problem is that legal equality and social equality are not really the same thing. In Britain we have legal equality - absolutely - but there are still major issues when it comes to social equality and how people are treated, and this leads to a lot of functional inequality even where it legally should not. There are anti-discrimination laws but deliberate discrimination can be very hard to prove when it's low-level and systemic rather than in-your-face. There are social issues that aren't at the employer level so can't be tackled via that route. e.g. there's a lot of research that shows that people (both men and women) are more agreeable with men and more easily swayed by men, where they will argue with and second-guess a female (even a professional) and take them less seriously no matter their ability level. The practical effect of that in a business context is that a male employee will appear, on paper, to be more productive, thus will be assumed to be more capable, thus will secure promotion more easily etc. etc.

The question is how do we solve it. You can't legislate against opinion and bias... you can't, fully, legally enforce against social discrimination.

So yeah... it's extremely over-simplistic to look at the legal situation and say "problem solved, everyone IS equal now". There are some huge hurdles in the way - hurdles that are sociologically inevitable because we're only a generation or two removed from legal white male dominance - that mean functional inequality in the UK is still VERY real.