Toothless Bill won’t stop women being paid less

The Equality Bill has been a long time coming and will no doubt delight and disappoint in equal measure. Whist we welcome the Bill as a demonstration of the governments continued commitment to equality we, as women, hoped the bill would finally enable us to achieve what many think has already been achieved – equal pay. But no, whilst this bill requires employers with over 250 staff to publish gendered pay audits it does not require them to explain why they have gender pay gaps, or what they are going to do about it.

We have had an equal pay act for almost 40 years and the reality is that the gender pay gap, whilst reducing over the years, is again on the increase and is currently around 17.1%. If you asked anyone in the street if women should be paid less than a man in the same job it would be rare these days to find anyone that agreed that women should be paid less because they are worth less …so why is it so hard to create policy that reflects today’s values? UK employers have had their chance to pay women equally and have failed. Whether through old-fashioned notions of women working for ‘pin-money’, or that it’s a man that ‘supports the family’, the pay gap has endured under their watch. So despite their swift and predictable cries of “a recession is no time to be increasing costs on business!” we don’t think the Bill goes far enough. Compulsory gender pay audits for the private and public sectors and the end of so-called ‘gagging clauses’ preventing employees from disclosing salaries may provide us with one of the tools we need to tackle the pay gap – transparency, but to make a real difference it needs to come with teeth - accountability, that is mechanisms that prevent women being paid less than men and that ensure justice for those that are.

Published in the The Herald 28th April 2009

Women Thinking Equality Reports Published

Engender have been working with BEMIS (Black and Ethnic Minority Infrastructure in Scotland) on the Women Thinking Equality project since June 2008. The project was funded by the EHRC and the remit was to bring a group of women from diverse backgrounds and perspectives together to discuss the various discriminations. We advertised in the The Big Issue and throughout our networks and were thrilled at the response we received. Over 60 women were involved in the lifespan of the project (June 08-March 09) and they committed to meet each month, where they would hear from a guest speaker who would present an overview and kick off the debate.

The wide-ranging discussions revealed some incredibly interesting ideas and observations and the emerging themes were pulled together into highly readable conclusions by Ceri Mollard of Creative Inks. Read the Summary and the seven reports here:

Out-r-age (age)
Click to view .pdf

Stripped (disability)
Click to view .pdf

Dis-count! (economics)
Click to view .pdf

The Equalities Red Herring (Religion or Belief)
Click to view .pdf

Device(ive) (Race)
Click to view .pdf

Object-ed(Sexual Orientation)
Click to view .pdf

Bio-logical? (Transgender)
Click to view .pdf

The Equality Bill

Engender are part of the Equality Bill Scottish Reference Group which is has been commenting on aspects of the Bill from a Scottish perspective and we have responded to the EHRC on-line consultation on the Bill briefings and general information that has been released by the Government. We have also provided comments to the Scottish Parliaments Equal Opportunities Committees on the legislative consent memorandum expressing our concern that the Bill in Scotland is not covered by the Socio-economic duty Our Inspiring women met to discuss the bill and the transcripts reveal a wide-ranging debate that shows little confidence in legislating to reduce gender inequality while attitudes remain unchallenged. The second of these was attended by Muriel Robison from the EHRC who guided the group through the proposals.

We responded to the Government Equalities Office discussion paper on multiple discrimination provision and our comments highlighted the issues around the definitions of direct and indirect discrimination and the limiting of the number of grounds for discrimination an individual could bring. We were also concerned that marital status and pregnancy appear to have been dropped as recognised areas where discrimination can occur.

Engender will be responding to the forthcoming consultation on the policy proposals for specific duties in Scotland which we understand will run over the summer and concurrently with the UK consultation.

UN Committee calls on UK to conduct ‘comprehensive review of equality policies’.

Engenders Shadow Report comments on the Gender Pay Gap, Poverty and Health. Read the full report here: Click to view .pdf

The summary is taken from the Concluding Observations relating to gender for the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland

Read the summary here: Click to view .pdf

The new Covenanters? Bringing the voices of Scottish women to Geneva

Can the UN help women in Scotland get equal pay, access to better-paid jobs, freedom from violence against women, and equal participation in public life—some of the commitments the UK government made when, 43 years ago, it signed up to the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966? Two weeks ago, Emma Ritch and I, directors of Engender and members of the Scottish Women’s Budget Group, attended a UN human rights meeting in Geneva to find out.

Every five years, a UN committee “invites” our government to Geneva to report on UK progress toward realising basic human rights. The report is in a sense the UK’s exam on 5 years of work. The UN examines the government’s statements in the context of ‘shadow’ reports provided by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and publishes a report card in the form of Concluding Observations.

The UN encourages NGOs to join in this process to keep the government’s reporting honest and, in April this year, Engender sent in a shadow report detailing our concerns about the stalled agenda for women’s rights in Scotland (see www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/cescrs42.htm). NGOs meet the UN committee members the day before the UK session, so on Monday 11 May, Emma and I pitched up at the Palais Wilson on Lake Geneva, notes on protocol and the CVs of the UN committee members clutched in our hands. As the only delegates from UK women’s organisations, we constituted the Scottish Sister Act: We had 3 minutes each to summarise the status of women’s rights in Scotland. A desperate attempt to be passionate, coherent and concise produced a stark declaration about the near-invisibility of Scottish women in the UK’s reporting, accompanied by a staccato description of the bittersweet landscape that is gender politics in devolved Scotland.

My 3 minutes focused on government failure to identify the impact of policy and budget decisions on women (a little robust gender budgeting and impact assessment would go a long way) and on our conviction that national economic stimulus proposals will make women poorer and Scotland’s public sectors even more male-dominated. Where are the investments in infrastructure that will promote recovery AND narrow gender gaps—in child care, for instance, where arguably Scotland has the worst provision in the UK?

Emma spent her precious minutes on the continuing pay gap for women in Scotland despite the almost-40-year-old Equal Pay Act (the gap is currently 14 percent for full-time work and a staggering 33 percent for part-time) and on the damage done by a labour market that undervalues work traditionally done by women while preventing their entry into better-paid jobs. Emma used the example of the government’s own £50-million-a-year Modern Apprenticeship scheme, citing its 31% pay gap for apprentices (the comparable figure for those working full-time and not in a training programme is13%).

Tuesday and Wednesday offered 12 mind-numbing hours of recitations and exhortations by the 18 UN Committee members and the 23—yes, 23—UK civil servants. At breaks and lunch Emma and I practised creative lurking, hoping to waylay a UN official on the way to his or her respite (mostly his—the UN committee has 3 women and 15 men) to offer additional information or propose an additional question for the government.

The first test of our success will be in the Concluding Observations—did the UN Committee listen to Scottish women speaking in this process?

The second test will be the response of our government to the UN recommendations. Will women’s equality be considered a luxury good in these economic hard times or will we use this upheaval as an opportunity to fix the structures that have wronged so many for so long?

Marsha Scott

May 2009

And then there were 11…

Hazel Smith is the Director of Women Onto Work, a Lothian based voluntary organisation which provides a range of career and personal development programmes to help vulnerable women access education, employment and citizenship opportunities. She has been involved in working and volunteering with groups, organisations and communities throughout Edinburgh and Scotland for 20 years.

Most of her work has been on behalf of young people, homeless people and women. Over the last 10 years she has worked across Scotland with a range of voluntary and public sector services. She has undertaken social research and participatory evaluation work to support the development of good practice and assist the Scottish Government and others in developing better services for disadvantaged groups and communities. She has managed a range of national and area-based voluntary organizations working with vulnerable and disadvantaged children, young people and women and has been commissioned on a number of occasions to develop and implement change management processes within large voluntary organizations.

Wendy Davies jointly established OSDC in 1988 and since then the focus of her work has been training, consultancy and the production of training and good practice manuals in the areas of equal opportunities and empowerment.

She has written extensively in this area – including equality standards documents for small and medium sized enterprises, distance learning packs, trainers’ manuals and a managers’ guide to implementing equality policies. Her clients have included the Irish Government, the Scottish Government, The British Red Cross, the Church of England, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Huddersfield Giants Rugby Club.

Emma Ritch is the Manager of the Close the Gap project, which works across Scotland with employers and employees to encourage and enable action to address the gender pay gap. Emma is interested in women’s experience of the labour market, violence against women, feminist economics and gendered policy development, and human rights approaches to tackling women’s inequality. She chairs the boards of Glasgow Rape Crisis and the Glasgow YWCA, and is an active member of the Scottish Women’s Budget Group. Emma is also involved with the equalities work of her union, the GMB, and is a member of the National Equality Forum, Regional Equality Forum and is Branch Equalities Officer for GMB Glasgow Apex.

Women inspiring women

The groups involved will represent the range and breadth of the campaigning work that women are engaged in and it’s hoped it will inspire others to get involved. The groups will be filmed over the summer and the DVD launched in the autumn.

The UK campaigning groups profiled are Object, Southall Black Sisters and Dumfries Classroom Assistants.

We’ll keep you posted…

What’s On

Public Policy Exchange National conference

The EHRC: Delivering Fairness for All
Tuesday 14th July, London
Some of the key themes to be explored at the conference include:

Maintaining Compliance and 'Future-Proofing' Equality and Human Rights.
Recognising Multiple-Identities, Developing a Multi-Dimensional Framework.
The Challenge for Local Authorities, Public Bodies and Employers.
Preparing for New Legislation: Update on the Equality Bill.

Click to view this page

Green Economics Institute

Progressive economics
Conference: Green Economics and Sustainable Development.
July 31/1 August, Mansfield College, University of Oxford.
Focussing on a social and environmental justice and equity approach and on how economics is changing fast. Examining the life style changes, such as greener travel as well as techno fixes such as geo engineering needed to get things back on track.
Click to visit Green Economic Institute site
Click to e-mail Green Economic Institute

Exhibition opening soon!

Scottish Women’s Aid

Annual Conference: Paying The Price: The Social And Economic Costs
Of Domestic Abuse
Wednesday 16th September, Edinburgh
The day will consider the cost of domestic abuse not only to individuals but also to the services supporting those individuals, to employers in lost hours, reduced
productivity, morale and to society, which is both economic and social.
Keynote speakers; Bea Campbell and Ailsa McKay.
Click to visit Scottish Womens Aid site

Women's History Scotland

Conference/workshop: 'The Past is Myself: Women's Life Narratives and Women's History'
Saturday 26th September 2009, Napier University, Edinburgh
For further details see website: Click to visit site

Gude Cause

Suffrage Procession Centenary Celebration
Saturday 10th October 2009

The GUDE CAUSE Project was founded to celebrate the courage, inspiration and achievement of women campaigning for the vote, for equality and for justice - in 1909, when a great Women's Suffrage Procession took place in Edinburgh, and over the hundred years since then. We also want to highlight what still needs to happen, in Scotland and around the world, for women's equality, wellbeing and human rights. The culmination of the celebration will be a re-enactment of the procession, in Edinburgh on SATURDAY 10 OCTOBER 2009. Thousands of women from across Scotland and beyond will take to the streets to celebrate past, present and future. Men and children are also invited to participate.

The registration form (with more information about the event) is now available and the planners invite you, as groups or individuals, to sign up as soon as possible to take part in a unique and special day. The Gude Cause website www.gudecause.org.uk and facebook group provide much more information and ideas about the procession, music, banner making, and all sorts of events and activities going on around the country.

Transnational Feminisms Conference. Call for Papers.
4 -5th December, University of Manchester
Click to visit Manchester University site

Gems

Gender and Equality Mentoring for Senior Managers.

Policy makers and senior managers in the public sector are expected to provide leadership and vision in fulfilling the three equality duties on gender, race and disability, and other equality obligations with regard to age and sexual orientation. This requires that they increasingly need to be able to apply equality analysis to all aspects of their organisations’ policy and practice.

Engender recognises that this can be a challenging role, especially as we move towards a single equalities act, and has brought together a team of consultants with a wealth of knowledge and experience in the different areas of equality Gender and Equality Mentors [GEMS] to provide support.

Building on Engender’s involvement in an EU Equal Development Partnership ‘Genderwise’ that evidenced the effectiveness of gender mentoring for senior officers in the Swedish, Austrian and Dutch armed forces we believe mentoring is more effective than providing consultants to ‘do equalities’ for you.

Our vision is a public sector that exudes expectations of equality, where the values and norms of each public body are so grounded in equality that incidents of inequality are met with disbelief, and where equality practice is integrated into everything they think and do.

To achieve this GEMS work one-to-one with managers, meeting them two or three times a month outwith the office environment to provide them support in developing their equalities lensing [ways of looking at things]. They do not do equality impact assessments or write equality schemes but rather support the senior manager in understanding the equalities implications of different aspects of the policy and practice they are responsible for. They support them to develop a clearer understanding of what to look for, of which questions to ask, of what issues to take into consideration and how to develop strategies, plans, budgets and ways of working with equality in mind.

Cost: The standard rate is £65 an hour. However, Oxfam and the Scottish Government have provided funds to Engender to promote the use of GEMS in the public sector so we can provide this service free for 6 months to the first managers that apply, although this comes with strings attached*.

How much time will I have to allocate? This depends very much on the individual’s needs, but generally it requires a 1 to 2 hour meeting every other week. Some mentors and their clients establish extra support by phone.

Why should we meet be away from the office? This is not a hard and fast rule, but taking the physical step away can assist in enabling the manager to take a mental step back and see things differently. It also assists in creating the rapport needed for an effective mentoring relationship. Some GEMS and managers meet over coffee or lunch, others walk and talk…

Interested in GEMs?

Contact: Niki Kandirikirira
Email Niki at Engender
0131 558 9596