How Equality Lost Its Balance

Fifty years after the Sex Discrimination Act, women have more opportunities than ever, but less freedom to stop. While AI, burnout and bias are reshaping the meaning of equality at work.

I was born in 1975, the year the Sex Discrimination Act became law. It was heralded as a new dawn by both politicians and feminists, the moment Britain promised that women would no longer be held back by their gender in education, work, or everyday life.

According to my photo albums, it was also the year my dad wore polyester polo necks and bell-bottomed trousers, and my mum grew out the last traces of her hippy middle parting and began her journey as a career woman.

For my mother’s generation, the Act was a victory decades in the making. As an active feminist, she would have welcomed it not just as legal protection, but as a promise that her daughter’s world would be different.

In the words of MP Clement Freud, speaking during the 1975 parliamentary debate,

“I hope… that by the time we reach the end of this century we shall have got so far with equal opportunities for women that the Bill will become obsolete.”

Although we still haven’t reached that point, with the gender pay gap plateauing around 13% (and higher for women over 40 in senior roles), this Act paved the way for profound change. It outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status and created the Equal Opportunities Commission to uphold those rights. Women could no longer be denied a job or dismissed for becoming pregnant. It opened professional doors that had been locked for generations.

Within a decade, everything seemed possible. More women were at university (the number in higher education tripled), in courtrooms, in boardrooms, and the pay gap began, at last, to narrow. Maternity rights were written into law. Women could finally be ambitious in their careers and become mothers, not either/or.

It was also a time of defiance and discovery. The Women’s Liberation Movement gave women not just rights, but language, to name what they had long felt but never said. “The personal is political” became both a rallying cry and a revelation. What had once been dismissed as private struggle was suddenly recognised as collective truth.

And yet, half a century later, despite great leaps in progress, in some ways the struggle has only changed shape. The same system that once kept women out now keeps them fighting to stay in.

Where We Are Now - The New Frontier

Women today make up half the workforce and outnumber men in higher education. We’ve earned a presence in places our mothers only dreamed of, yet many of the same forces that shaped their struggles have simply evolved.

The world has moved on, but bias has adapted. It now hides behind algorithms and automation, shaping the opportunities we see and those we are unaware we have missed.

A Stanford University study, published in Nature Human Behaviour (2025), revealed deep age and gender bias embedded in the digital systems that now govern everything from recruitment to visibility. Researchers found that women are systematically represented as younger and less experienced than men across the millions of online images, videos, and articles on the internet.

Even when there’s no real-world difference, the digital world insists on one: women as youthful and replaceable; men as more seasoned and credible. When AI tools are used to filter job applications or assess résumés, they unconsciously replicate those patterns by undervaluing women, particularly those over fifty.

Even more concerning is the fact that participants in the study who viewed these AI outputs went on to hold stronger biases themselves. In other words, technology isn’t just reflecting old prejudices; it’s retraining us to believe in them again.

And it doesn’t stop there. On LinkedIn, where visibility equals opportunity, research shows that men’s posts and profiles still receive higher engagement and reach. Posts about inclusion or gender rarely travel as far as those about growth, strategy or AI. The algorithms reward what they already recognise as powerful messages, a pattern hauntingly familiar to anyone who’s ever had to work twice as hard to be seen online.

The tools designed to make work fairer are now quietly amplifying the same structural bias the Act tried to end.And beyond the algorithms, the effects run deeper, not just in data or opportunity, but in the lives of the women navigating them.

The Daughters of the Revolution

Many of us are living the promise our mothers dreamed of, and bearing its cost.

I grew up being told I could do anything, and I believed it. I attended a high-performing girls’ school where ambition was encouraged and confidence came naturally. Many of my classmates went on to senior roles in banking, law and business, but others quietly stepped out of the system, disillusioned by the promise of having everything and exhausted from the effort of holding everything together.

We had more opportunities than our mothers ever did; we certainly believed the playing field was a lot more level. But we had lost the get-out clause, the option to stop. The expectation wasn’t just to succeed, but to sustain it all: careers, families, marriages without a break. My mother’s generation had fought for our right to work; mine learned to work without rest.

Somewhere along the way, unstoppable became unsustainable. In many ways, we have become the burnout generation, doing it all, and realising too late that equality had come at the cost of balance.

And now it is time to ask a quieter, harder question: Is this what equality was meant to look like?

From Compliance to Consciousness - The Future of Leadership

The Sex Discrimination Act transformed the landscape of opportunity, but it couldn’t change the invisible habits of culture, or the digital ones still being written today.

For leaders, the next frontier of equality isn’t compliance; it’s consciousness.

Inclusive leadership now means recognising that equality cannot be achieved by expecting everyone to behave the same. True inclusion understands that difference is not a deviation from excellence; it’s the driver of it. According to research by Boston Consulting Group, diverse teams are up to 60% more productive and innovative than their less diverse counterparts. But productivity is only the by-product of something deeper: psychological safety, empathy, and authenticity. Not to mention the essential right to rest and take a break.

The new leadership model is not about demanding uniform performance, but allowing for variation in energy, working style, life stage, and even ambition. It’s about creating cultures that serve, rather than strain, those within them.

If the 1975 Act gave women the right to enter the room, today’s leaders must make sure the room itself is fit for everyone to thrive.

Fifty years on, the real work is not about breaking ceilings; it’s about rebuilding foundations.