The United Kingdom and India: A Study of Gender and Economic/Regional Cleavages

The United Kingdom and India: A Study of Gender and Economic/Regional Cleavages

Introduction

The United Kingdom, a former world power and colonizing empire, and India, the second most populous country in the world and former colony of the United Kingdom, share a bond of democracy. The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy with a Parliament consisting of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Similarly, India is a federal state also with a parliamentary form of government. Despite these similar political systems, studies of the individual histories, economies, and political cultures of each country reveal cleavages within each society affecting aspects of the governments such as institutions, voting behavior, and policy making. This paper will address two major cleavages within the United Kingdom and India, gender inequality and economic/regional divisions, and will analyze the effects each cleavage has upon political systems of each country.

Gender Cleavages

Although the United Kingdom and India include legal equality, or suffrage, for men and women, both countries experience a persistent gender gap including discrimination against women. The United Kingdom distinguishes itself from India in that gender issues affect the population primarily in government and in the labor realm, while India's cleavages influence the government, labor, and social realms. With the efforts of National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, formed in 1897, and the Women's Social and Political Union of 1903 (Bartley 8), women gained partial suffrage as those over thirty were allowed to vote in 1918, and in 1928, those twenty-one and older were included (Shively 111-112). Legislation was not passed until 1970, with the Equal Pay Act establishing that women should receive equal pay for the same work as men, and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 attempted to curb unfair practices preventing women's equal access to jobs (Makepeace 1). Despite these governmental attempts to close the gender gap, women share only twenty-eight percent of total labor income (although this has increased from seventeen percent in 1965), and, while women continue to spend more time than men doing unpaid domestic work, women receive only sixty-four percent of men's average hourly pay in the labor market (Horrell 12-13). Further, women are underrepresented in government--they compromise less than one-fifth of the House of Commons (Taylor 1), sixteen percent of the House of Lords, and only twenty-five percent of local councilors (Follett 3). According to Parliament member, Barbara Follett, these few women in the House of Commons must conform to a male culture that is "competitive, confrontational, conservative, conformist, and ceremonial.