What did the coalition government do for equality? The short answer is not a lot.

Despite some efforts by the Liberal Democrats, for example, the extension of paid parental leave, the Con-Dems will mostly be remembered for their watering down of Labour’s Equality Acts of 2006 and 2010.

These were Tory-inspired deregulatory measures, enacted despite occasional token promises about commitment to equality of opportunity for all.

As far as equality goes, the Prime Minister is likely to be best remembered for telling Angela Eagle to “calm down, dear” and for allowing his Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith to introduce the bedroom tax — a measure which has caused untold misery and deprivation to disabled people.

Labour Force Survey figures for 2013 showed that employment rates for women were lower than for men.

Men are much more likely to be in managerial or senior official occupations than women — and consequently higher paid.

So despite the fact that women are increasingly likely to be the main, or the sole, earner in a family, their income still lags behind that for men. The coalition showed no sign of caring about this.

There has also been significant unemployment for those aged between 16 and 24. This is only partly explained by an increase in participation in higher education.

For some young people all that they have managed to obtain are unpaid internships or insecure casual work, often on zero-hours contracts.

As a TUC report on casualisation published last year showed, those employed on a casual basis miss out on a range of benefits, such as sick pay and cannot get mortgages or afford to pay rent in some parts of the country.

The disability employment gap has also been widening, from 6.4 per cent in 2008 to 11.1 per cent in 2013. The increase has been greatest for those with mental health problems.

Unemployment rates for those from minority ethnic backgrounds have also been greater than for those from white backgrounds, with significant underrepresentation in senior occupations.

All this matters because we cannot create a fair society if communities are discriminated against because of their ethnicity, their disability, their gender, their sexuality or their age.

Such discrimination sets one group against another instead of building a united movement that can effectively challenge this government and its brutally selfish policies.

The new government is already showing that it cares very little about equality. The only policy change it is looking at that will advance women’s equality is the introduction of gender pay auditing.

This is the result of some frustrated high-level professional women kicking up, rather than any new-found commitment to equality at work for all women.

If new legislation makes detailed pay audits compulsory it will have an impact on all women in an organisation. However, the consultation also offers a much lighter-touch version, which will simply require a snapshot of the average pay gap in an organisation with no indication as to where the problem lies.

Last time the public was consulted about equality legislation, under the previous government’s infamous Red Tape Challenge, the huge majority who responded, including the TUC and trade unions, told the government to leave the equality legislation alone.

The government chose to ignore that result completely and went ahead with deregulatory measures which included removing the third-party harassment provisions and removing the powers of employment tribunals to make wider recommendations when an employer had broken the law, as well as watering down Labour’s Public Sector Equality Duty.

Worse still, it introduced fees for employment tribunals. This has caused a huge reduction in the number of claims being made, particularly discrimination claims. An Equality and Human Rights Commission survey carried out this year shows that discrimination by employers against pregnant women workers has been increasing, whereas pregnancy-related claims at tribunals have decreased enormously.

Even when women manage to take maternity leave and return to work, they find that the lack of affordable childcare and the refusal of many employers to allow flexible working makes life very difficult.

Now of course the Tory government plans to cut tax credits for low-paid workers, so things are not going to improve for working families.

As if bringing in a charge for accessing justice was not enough of an attack on working people, the government’s current Trade Union Bill, which will, if enacted, make trade union organisation and industrial action a much greater challenge, is an even greater threat to equality in the workplace.

The current equal pay legislation would not have been enacted had it not been for the action taken by female trade unionists at Ford in Dagenham all those years ago.

Since then improvements to women’s pay and working conditions have been achieved directly by unions at work and in court, or enacted by Labour governments under pressure from unions.

Many unions have made great strides forward with the development of union equality reps. These reps, together with all other reps, will now find it very hard to get paid time off in the public sector, thanks to a recent addition to the Trade Union Bill that could cap facility time to a derisory amount.

At the forefront of many recent industrial disputes have been women trade unionists. Women trade unionists will be at the forefront of the TUC-led campaign to protect the right to organise and the right to strike.

Today’s demonstration against the Trade Union Bill, taking place near the Tory conference in Manchester, will be big, loud and above all diverse — women, disabled workers, black workers, LGBT workers and young and older workers gathered in unity against this terrible Bill.