SOCIALIST feminists should resist two equal and opposite errors about equality law. The first is legalism: the belief that discrimination can be abolished principally through statutes, courts and better institutional procedure. The second is abstention: the claim that because law is shaped by capitalist social relations, defending legal rights merely props up the existing order.

Both positions mistake the relationship between reform and transformation. The Equality Act 2010 is neither an adequate programme for women’s liberation nor an obstacle to it. It is a terrain of struggle: a body of rights won through organised pressure, used every day by workers and service users, and vulnerable to erosion unless the movement defends it.

The Act is currently under attack from the right with parties such as Reform pledging to scrap it and to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Its authoritarian agenda represents a growing and powerful, globally connected assault on our hard-won rights and freedoms. Unfortunately it is also under attack (and misunderstood) by some sections of the left.

A campaign to defend and extend the Act should therefore combine an uncompromising defence of every protected group that also includes recognition of socio-economic inequality and the need for a class programme to make all rights effective. The aim is not to ask disadvantaged or oppressed groups to compete for recognition, but to unite them around expanded social provision, stronger workplace power and enforceable duties on employers and the state. Here we will direct attention to women — over half of the UK population.

Capitalism depends not only on labour performed for wages but on the daily and generational reproduction of labour-power: feeding, cleaning, caring, educating, healing and sustaining people. This work is unpaid women’s work within households or underpaid in feminised public and private care services.

This is why anti-discrimination law is both necessary and insufficient. It offers formal equality to individuals who enter the labour market with profoundly unequal power, resources and responsibilities. Capitalism profits from the super-exploitation of women and black workers.

At the same time, the state transfers the costs of social reproduction onto the household, where unpaid or grossly underpaid caring labour — performed mainly by women — absorbs the strain. The oppression of women is bound to class exploitation, but it cannot be reduced to it: capitalism uses and reproduces women’s inequality because it increases profit via the super exploitation of women (and black) workers and sustains the daily reproduction of labour-power.

Women are not a minority group. We are half the population and over half of the labour force. Thus we will concentrate on the equality law as it relates to (and fails) women.

What the Equality Act does — and does not do

The Act consolidated previous anti-discrimination statutes and identifies nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. It prohibits direct and indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation across employment, education, services and public functions, with different provisions applying in each field.

Its Public Sector Equality Duty requires public authorities, in exercising their functions, to have due regard to eliminating prohibited conduct, advancing equality of opportunity and fostering good relations.

These protections matter. They give a pregnant woman grounds to challenge dismissal, a disabled person a right to reasonable adjustments, and workers a framework for contesting unequal pay and discriminatory rules.

Yet their practical force is sharply limited by individualised enforcement, short time limits, legal costs, insecure employment, weak trade union organisation and fear of retaliation. A right that must be enforced by an exhausted worker against a well-resourced employer is formally equal but materially unequal.

Even when a claimant wins, the remedy generally addresses a particular wrong after it occurred; it rarely transforms the organisation of work, ownership or care that continuously reproduces inequality.

The Supreme Court decision, the EHRC Code and the Equality Act

In For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers (2025) UKSC 16, decided on April 16 2025, the Supreme Court held that the words “sex,” “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex for the purposes of that Act.

A gender recognition certificate therefore does not alter a person’s sex for Equality Act purposes. The court stressed that it was interpreting Parliament’s statutory scheme, not deciding wider political or social questions about sex and gender.

The judgment does not remove the Act’s protection for trans people. Gender reassignment remains a protected characteristic, and trans people may also be protected against discrimination because of sex, perceived sex or association, depending on the facts.

The decision instead fixes the meaning of sex-based provisions across the Act, including those concerning pregnancy and maternity, sexual orientation, positive action and the exceptions for separate and single-sex services.

The relevant instrument is the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s statutory Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions and Associations. The updated code came into force on August 5 2026 and replaced the 2011 code. It explains how Parts 3 and 7 of the Equality Act should operate after the Supreme Court judgment, including discrimination, harassment, victimisation and the handling of separate or single-sex services.

The legal hierarchy matters. The Equality Act is primary legislation and the Supreme Court’s interpretation is authoritative unless Parliament changes the law or a later binding decision alters that interpretation. The EHRC Code does not amend the Act and cannot override the judgment, but it has statutory status as practical guidance: organisations should follow it when designing policies and courts may take relevant provisions into account.

Why do we say the Act should be extended and what does this mean?

Make socio-economic inequality central. Bring the section 1 socio-economic duty fully into force across Britain, strengthen it from “due regard” toward measurable obligations, and require equality impact assessments of budgets, procurement and major policy. The statutory model already directs strategic public decisions toward reducing inequalities of outcome arising from socio-economic disadvantage.

Enable collective enforcement. Permit trade unions, equality organisations and representative bodies to bring cases in their own name; provide legal aid; extend tribunal time limits; restore accessible advice; protect representatives from victimisation; and empower courts to order structural remedies.

Impose proactive duties on employers. Require pay audits and time-bound equality action plans covering hiring, grading, progression, outsourcing, pregnancy, menopause, disability and harassment.

Strengthen equal-value claims. Simplify procedures, reverse the evidential burden once a credible disparity is shown, make pay transparency a right, and establish sector-wide mechanisms to revalue care and other feminised work.

Recognise multiple discrimination. Introduce a broad, usable cause of action for discrimination involving any combination of protected characteristics, with remedies reflecting cumulative harm.

End exemptions that make rights conditional on immigration status. Guarantee safe reporting and equal access to resources and remedies for migrant workers, and separate labour inspection from immigration enforcement.

Resource the regulator and inspectorates. Give the Equality and Human Rights Commission and labour inspectorates sufficient funding, independence and regional capacity to investigate sectors, compel information and enforce compliance without waiting for individual victims.

Link equality to public money. Make compliance, union access, pay transparency and decent work conditions mandatory in public procurement, grants, licences and contracting.

The role of trade unions

In a context where there is a growing threat from the right, the role of trade unions could not be more central to the defence of universal human rights and protections, including those for women.  

Trade unions should not make opposition to the EHRC Code their organising position. In fact, doing so risks alienating women and denying the protections of union membership to half the working population.

The code does not create new law: it explains the existing statutory framework following the Supreme Court’s binding interpretation of “sex” in the Equality Act. Campaigning as though the code itself had removed rights risks misdirecting members, obscuring the distinction between legislation, judicial interpretation and regulatory guidance, and encouraging policies that may expose unions, employers or service providers to avoidable legal challenge.

Nor does the code authorise blanket exclusion. It retains the Act’s protections against discrimination, harassment and victimisation, including protection because of gender reassignment, and requires any reliance on separate- or single-sex exceptions to meet the statutory conditions and the test of proportionality.

That demands attention to purpose, evidence, privacy, dignity, safety, the effect on excluded people and the availability of less intrusive arrangements. Unions should insist that employers and public bodies undertake that careful assessment rather than treat either inclusion or exclusion as an automatic rule.

A general campaign against the code would also weaken the labour movement’s defence of equality law as a whole. The document covers all protected characteristics and gives practical guidance on reasonable adjustments, indirect discrimination, harassment, victimisation, positive action and access to services. Rejecting it wholesale would surrender a useful standard against which discriminatory conduct can be tested, while allowing employers and service providers to present trade unions as indifferent to clear and lawful implementation of workers’ and service users’ rights.

Trade unions must make equality and women’s rights a core industrial issue rather than leave it to individual complaints or employer policy. They should organise and bargain for equal pay, secure work, reasonable adjustments, pregnancy and maternity rights, flexible working, harassment prevention, transparent recruitment and fair promotion.

Workplace representatives should be trained to identify direct and indirect discrimination, support grievances, protect members from victimisation and pursue strategic cases where necessary.

Sectoral collective bargaining is especially important to equal pay because discrimination is often embedded not only within individual employers but across fragmented labour markets in which feminised occupations and industries are systematically undervalued.

Equal pay has historically advanced when workers converted a legal principle into a collective demand backed by the power to withdraw their labour. Sectoral bargaining and industrial action therefore turn isolated claims into a struggle over the value of work itself, raise standards for workers in small or weakly organised workplaces, and make employers and government share the cost of remedying structural pay inequality rather than leaving individual women to litigate employer by employer.

Unions should negotiate regular equality impact assessments, pay and grading audits, workforce monitoring and time-bound action plans instead of waiting for harm to occur.

Repeated individual grievances should be treated as evidence of structural problems and converted into collective bargaining demands. Equality representatives need statutory recognition, protection, access to relevant information and sufficient paid facility time for their duties and training.

Unions must also maintain unity across protected groups and make their own structures exemplary. A no-rollback position means that no group’s protection should be weakened to advance another’s.

To extend the Act, unions should campaign for collective and representative claims, stronger equal-pay enforcement, longer tribunal time limits, legal aid, protection against multiple discrimination, mandatory equality action plans, a stronger socio-economic duty, and properly funded tribunals, regulators and inspectorates. The strategy must shift from individual rights enforced after harm to collective prevention backed by bargaining power.

Beyond legislation: the social infrastructure of inequality & the campaign for women’s rights
Extending legal rights without altering material conditions would leave the structure of inequality intact. The campaign should therefore couple legal reform to universal, publicly provided services:

• free high-quality childcare;
• properly funded adult social care;
• reproductive and wider healthcare;
• affordable and accessible housing and transport;
• properly funded refuges and specialist support for survivors of violence;
• an adequate social-security system based on individual entitlement.

In addition, the campaign must:

• Ensure that the equality principle applies to all women including migrant women
• Include meaningful design and delivery of actions and attitudes against VAWG & domestic abuse, including within public services
• Expose the ideologies that are used to perpetuate women’s inequality and the commodification of women’s bodies for male gratification
• Improve access and rights to abortion.
• End women pensioner poverty by reducing the state pension age to 60 and increasing the state pension in line with average earnings.
• Ensure that women have an absolute right to sex- based self-organisation.

These are not auxiliary “women’s issues.” They are the infrastructure through which people gain real freedom to work, organise, leave an unsafe home, care for others and participate in public life.

Conclusion

The Equality Act embodies a real contradiction. It asserts equality within a society organised through exploitation and unequal social reproduction. That contradiction is not a reason to abandon it; it is the reason to struggle over it & extend it. Legal rights can supply language, leverage and limited remedies. Collective organisation can turn those rights into power, expose their limits and press beyond them.

A socialist-feminist campaign should therefore defend the Act as a minimum civilising achievement while refusing to confuse minimum standards with emancipation. It should extend protection to class inequality and multiple discrimination, make enforcement collective and proactive, and join the fight for legal equality to the fight for wages, services, time and democratic control. The strategic goal is not merely equal treatment within an unequal system. It is to build the solidarity and institutional power through which equality becomes material—and liberation conceivable.

For more information about the Women’s Liberation Alliance visit www.womensliberationalliance.org.uk