Many of the jobs which would have been previously unobtainable to women are now within their grasp. Jobs such as engineering and building are now open to women This is primarily due to the advance in technology. Which means there is less need for manual labour in which men had a clear advantage.
Politically women have also made advances. From gaining the right to vote in 19791 when Margaret Thatcher the first female Prime Minister. The view of many feminists was that she didn't use enough of her power to help women gain equality. However, since her resignation in 1990 the number of women in senior government positions has risen dramatically. She also put a huge amount of emphasis whilst she was in power on the family being a unit, and working together. Now more than 20% of MPs are women. Although equality is far from being achieved, it is a large advance from previously when there were next to no female MPs and it is the highest number ever. Scotland seems to be leading the way towards equality in British politics, as over 39% of the MPs are women.
Women also played a large part in local politics getting involved with the people that they lived with and forming groups in which to socialise and discuss ways in which women can politically gain more equality.
It could be said that women have gained some equality in raising children. The government in 1997 were supporting working mothers. However, in different areas in society there are many different views on the issue. As poorer or single mothers need to go work and then feel they are neglecting there children. It is harder even at the end of the twentieth century for women to earn good money as they were still only paid about 80% of what men were paid.
Surveys are now suggesting that 75% of women of mothers may believe mothers should be at home with children under the age of five. However, more than 25% of mothers so work which perhaps shows women's feelings to working whilst having children, even if they do themselves.
About 1/3 of marriages were breaking up at the start of the twenty first century. I believe that although this would not seen to be a positive statistic in talking about woman's equality with men I believe that it shows a move towards it. Previously it had been extremely hard for women to gain the right to divorce. Before 1923 women in order to get a divorce cruelty, incest, sodomy ect, whereas a man could divorce a woman for adultery. They were also heavily discriminated against in court by male judges having pre-concerted views of women. Women were also not able to leave there husbands because they would be left with nothing to help re-build there lives, not even what they went into the marriage with. This changed in 1969 with the Matrimonial Property Act, which gave the wife an equal share of the family assets. So the new figure of 1/3 shows that women have gained more rights and equality within marriages. The last and exceedingly important act came in 1991 in which a man could be convicted for the rape of his wife. Giving the female in the relationship sexual rights within the marriage. Although this is not to say that it made it easier to convict a man as rules can be broken in court as a result of sexism, and all the act did was to get them into the courtroom.
On paper girls by the mid 80's had overtaken boys both at GCSE and A level standards and at the end of the twentieth century there were more girls at university than boys. They were also covering a far wider subject base than before.
Despite these obvious advances within education women have certainly not achieved equality within the working world and within employment. This is due to a number of reasons, being that some jobs do still need manual labour and women in this instance are at a disadvantage. They are also still discriminated against within the workplace, even as low as sarcastic jokes made by there male co-workers. However it should not be over looked that women do also use there femininity in the workplace to there advantage.
They have also made headway legally with the 1970 Equal Pay Act meaning men and women legally had to be paid the same for doing the same job. Although some employers found ways round it by employing women under different job titles and then paying them differently.
I believe women have made large moves towards gaining equality with men by the end of the twentieth century. However there were still areas in which women had made little progress due to many reasons, and that there are still ways in which discriminatory rules in favour of women can be bent. So advances still need to be made in the future, and different societies will behave differently towards women and women's rights
