Engender blog

Guest Post: During #AGORA16: Part 1

Claire is attending this year’sAGORA feminist school organised by the European Women’s Lobby. Her place has been sponsored by Engender who offered funding for a young BME feminist from Scotland to attend. We are hosting a series of blogs by Claire from AGORA throughout her feminist journey. Here she reflects on her departure from Scotland to Brussels.

You can follow Claire on Twitter @ClaireShrugged.

Guest Post: Before #AGORA16: Young Feminist Summer School

Claire is attending this year’s AGORA feminist school organised by the European Women’s Lobby. Her place has been sponsored by Engender who offered funding for a young BME feminist from Scotland to attend. We’ll be hosting a series of blogs by Claire from the AGORA, here she talks about her feelings one week before leaving for Brussels.

You can follow Claire on Twitter @ClaireShrugged.

(Images AGORA 2015)

Five reasons that media coverage of the pay gap is so bad (and why we think we should do better)

Yesterday saw the repeat of a ritual that happens a handful of times a year. An organisation - in this case the Chartered Management Institute - produces a figure it describes as a gender pay gap. News outlets contact organisations working on gender, or women and work, to ask for short quotes that explain both the pay gap and how we're going to fix it. These quotes are then strung together into pieces that are shaky on the facts and slight on analysis. In recent years, as the tenor of public discourse has softened slightly towards women's equality, they've been complemented by editorials denouncing the glacial rate at which the gap is narrowing. A couple of columnists may even take a swing at some particularly egregious examples of workplace discrimination, before the whole subject is unceremoniously bundled into an archive folder to wait for the next pay gap news release.

So why is there such fleeting, insubstantial coverage of this most pressing of gendered concerns? Why are we not having a grand conversation about women and work?

Shared Statement of Ambition on Social Care launched

Scotland’s social care support system is in crisis. It’s failing disabled people and carers and the way Scotland funds it is not working.

That’s Engender's view, along with coalition of 16 Scottish organisations, representing disabled people and older people, women, care providers and paid and unpaid carers and the voluntary sector, who are calling for urgent action by national and local government and policymakers. Others including academics, trade unions, politicians, local authorities, care providers and professionals also share their concerns on the future of social care funding.