Curious Femme

Britain likes to imagine itself as a fair society, one in which the battles for women’s equality have largely been won and only minor tidying up remains. Yet the latest YouGov polling tells a more unsettled story. Half of Britons say more still needs to be done to achieve gender equality, while only 19% believe it has been achieved and 22% think it has gone too far. Public concern is especially strong around sexual misconduct, sexism and misogyny in schools, equal pay, and support for women’s health in the workplace. This is not a picture of a country that has finished the work of equality. It is a picture of a country that knows the problem remains, even if it cannot agree on what should happen next.

What is especially revealing is where the resistance now sits. Conservative voters are divided almost evenly between those who think more needs to be done and those who think gender equality has gone too far. Among Reform UK voters, however, the backlash is much sharper: only 19% say more needs to be done, while 49% say equality efforts have gone too far. That is not a fringe irritation. It is evidence of a political current in which feminist progress is increasingly framed not as justice, but as overreach.

The contradiction runs deeper still. Britons overwhelmingly support equal wages for the same job and responsibilities, and majorities also support measures such as classes for boys on misogyny, blind hiring, and equal prize money in major sport. Yet support weakens when equality becomes more visible, more political, or more demanding. This is the fault line running through the debate: Britain is often willing to endorse equality as a principle, but much less willing to embrace the structural or cultural change required to make it real.

That tension matters because political backlash does not remain abstract. Reform UK’s 2024 general election contract pledged to replace the 2010 Equality Act, claiming that the Act requires discrimination in the name of “positive action”. Reform’s current policy page also states that a Reform government would immediately leave the ECHR. Taken together, those positions suggest that resentment towards equality protections is not merely rhetorical. It has the potential to become legislative. This is why the polling matters, not simply as a snapshot of attitudes, but as a warning about the kind of politics that can grow when women’s rights are reframed as excess

This is where the polling becomes more than an interesting snapshot of public feeling. When nearly half of Reform voters say gender equality has gone too far, and the party itself proposes replacing the Equality Act while abandoning the ECHR, we are no longer dealing simply with scepticism about feminism. We are looking at a political current that is willing to weaken the legal architecture that underpins anti-discrimination and rights protections. Backlash is always most dangerous when it stops sounding like a grievance and starts taking the form of policy.

The deeper contradiction exposed by this polling is that many people are still happy to support equality when it sounds like fairness, moderation, and common sense, but far less willing to support it when it names male power, requires structural remedies, or demands public solidarity with women. That is how progress stalls. Not always through open misogyny, but through a culture that praises equality in theory while retreating from the political action needed to secure it.

The lesson from this polling is not that Britain has rejected gender equality. On the contrary, most people still support the basic language of fairness, especially where equal pay, workplace respect, and the protection of women and girls are concerned. But the findings also show the limits of that support. The moment equality becomes political, structural, or explicitly feminist, resistance grows louder. Britain appears comfortable with the idea of equality, but less comfortable with the social and legal changes that equality demands.

That is precisely why the Reform UK position should be taken seriously. When a party whose supporters are the most likely to say gender equality has gone too far also pledges to replace the Equality Act and leave the ECHR, the danger is no longer simply cultural backlash. It becomes a question of legal rollback. Rights do not disappear only when a public openly renounces them. They also erode when protections are recast as ideological burdens, and when the institutions that uphold them are treated as obstacles to be removed.

Women’s equality in Britain has not gone too far. The evidence suggests that, in many of the areas that matter most, it has not gone far enough. What has grown is not female power, but the backlash against naming male dominance, misogyny, and structural disadvantage for what they are. The real danger is that a society which still benefits from feminist gains may become increasingly reluctant to defend them. That is how progress stalls, not only through open sexism, but through complacency, political cowardice, and the seductive fiction that equality has already been won.

References

Reform UK (2024) Our Contract with You. Available at: Reform UK manifesto PDF.

Reform UK (2026) Policies. Available at: Reform UK official website.

YouGov (2026a) Gender equality: Britons think more is needed, so what would they be willing to do and see done? 7 March 2026.

YouGov (2026b) Survey report linked from article, fieldwork 4 to 5 March 2026.

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