Engender blog

Our bodies, our choice: the case for a Scottish approach to abortion

Today Engender has released a key report highlighting current issues affecting access to abortion in Scotland, and calling on the Scottish Government to use the opportunity presented by the devolution of abortion law to put women’s equality and rights at its heart. The report, supported by Amnesty Scotland, NUS Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, Rape Crisis Scotland, Close the Gap, and Zero Tolerance, calls for abortion to be decriminalised, and for improvements to services, access, and education around abortion.

Guest Post: A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen (a professional kitchen, that is)

Guest post from Leonie Sooke

Leonie is a freelance chef and food stylist. Strongly influenced by working under a number of inspiring female head chefs, her career spans television; cookery books; London restaurant work; writing and presenting prominent talks for the V&A and Tate Britain, which showcase irreverent women in food history. Find her at curatedcakes.com or on instagram @Leoniesooke

Once again, this year’s employment figures highlight the inequality within the restaurant industry: data from the Office for National Statistics shows that only 18.5 per cent of Britain’s top chefs are women.[1] It’s an age-old problem. From Renaissance cooks and Victorian culinary masters to the macho celebrity chefs of today, men have taken centre stage on the professional platform.

Yet much has changed in the past few years. In the wake of pioneers such as Alice Waters, Ruth Rogers, Angela Hartnett and Margot Henderson, there’s a rising generation of young women taking the food scene by storm. Just consider Claire Ptak and Lily Vanilla with their pioneering bakeries, Florence Knight heading up the kitchen at Polpo or Kim Woodward at the infamously masculine Savoy Grill (to name but a few). The ‘boys club’ of late has certainly lost much of its cool.

Guest Post: #AGORA16: After Young Feminist Summer School

Claire attended this year’sAGORA feminist school organised by the European Women’s Lobby. Her place was sponsored by Engender who offered funding for a young BME feminist from Scotland to attend. We are hosting a series of blogs by Claire throughout her time at AGORA. Here are her thoughts after completing the AGORA.

My intention for Young Feminist Summer School had three parts: 1) Learn about effectively bridging the gap between theory and activism. 2) Support other women in their learning and be part of collective growth. 3) A bonus objective – have fun and meet new people. AGORA ’16 brought me all of these things and more.

Women-only leadership: progressive or discriminatory?

A very familiar question was raised again this week: should women-only organisations, women-only services, and women-only governance and leadership be lauded as progressive or shunned as discriminatory? Several media outlets reported on the fact that Moray Women’s Aid has elected to leave the Scottish Women’s Aid network. The local women’s aid is in contravention of its network’s shared commitment to individual services being governed and staffed by women, having confirmed that is has at least one man on its board of directors, Cllr Graham Leadbitter.

“We disaffiliated ourselves because we were not prepared to discriminate blatantly,” Moray Women’s Aid’s manager, Elle Johnston, was reported as saying in the Herald. Catriona Stewart, Glasgow Women’s Aid board member and journalist, took very public aim at the policy in another piece in the Herald, describing it as “a rigid model that threatens to weaken the network and refuses to allow for evolution as society evolves.”

The notion of women-led services has been framed in much of the coverage as backwards, inflexible, and an impediment to the very equality that feminists purport to want. So is Scottish Women’s Aid’s policy discriminatory? And what is the point of women-only feminist leadership anyway?

In her piece, Stewart asks whether having men on Moray Women’s Aid has been effective: "Has it done any good, should be the test?" A paper from Moray Council suggests that the original vision for Moray Women’s Aid governance was almost as an arms-length organisation of the local authority, with two elected members as executive directors and a further three serving on the board. That plan was shelved, but unusually, Cllr Leadbitter was nominated directly by the council onto Moray’s board as it was established. According to its annual accounts, Moray Women’s Aid board was majority male or fifty-fifty between its incorporation in 2008 and 2013, which means that decision-making was possible for most of those years by an all-male quorum. While Moray Women’s Aid certainly delivered vital services during this time, its account of itself gives the impression that it lacked some of the governance that might, for example, have enabled it to meet some of the digital demands of 21^st century service delivery. Its 2015 accounts plead for a “knowledgeable computer expert” to help keep its internal systems up to date, and it doesn’t have a website. Other strategic decisions made by the board run contrary to the gendered analysis in Scotland’s bold new violence against women strategy, Equally Safe. It says that it has redesigned its logo to “encapsulate a more generic outlook, while still focusing on the needs of women and children”.

But it is on the needs of women and children that the call for feminist, women-only governance and leadership rests.