Ninety-six years ago today, American women finally won the right to vote thanks to Woodrow Wilson and to committed suffragists such as Alice Paul.
Almost a century later, writes Gwen K. Young, Hillary Rodham Clinton has achieved another important first in American history, becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major political party.
And yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, women are still being paid less than their male counterparts for the same work, an imbalance reflected, too, in terms of political representation: men still make up the overwhelming majority in Britain’s House of Commons and in the U.S. Congress, for example.
“There is an undeniable correlation between gender parity in government,” argues Young, “and equality in society, including a narrower pay gap.”
Take Sweden, for example, a country that reached 50-50 parity in the cabinet in the 1990s. Today, Sweden currently has one of the narrowest gender pay gaps in the world according to the World Economic Forum.
