Engender blog

Women and equality: 100 days until indyref

It’s one hundred days until the referendum vote, and today more than one hundred women will hear the female members of the Scottish cabinet speak about their ambitions for gender equality in an independent Scotland.

Scotland can take pride in the fact that women occupy 40 per cent of the seats around the cabinet table in Bute House, and in the individual commitment of the female cabinet secretaries to seeing other women flourish. They will be hoping that their words inspire women inside Dynamic Earth, and across Scotland, to decide where to place their cross come September.

The event comes as focus on women’s voting intentions sharpens. Much digital ink has been spilled in an effort to interrogate women’s attitudes to independence, and to get underneath our current preference for straddling the fence and leaning towards a no vote. Some commentators have decided that women are just ineffably different, but certainly slower to make up our minds, and less likely to take risks.

Common Weal: Eradicating gender inequality and violence against women

This paper was written by Lesley Orr, Emma Ritch, Marsha Scott, and Nel Whiting in May 2014. An edited version appears as part of the text of the Common Weal book. An expanded version will be published as a Common Weal paper later in the year.

Let us imagine a Scotland that begins from the hope of its citizens. It is a small but spacious country, and in our imagining, we see a society nurturing the common good of every girl, boy, woman and man. It offers that secure space for living in which each and all of us are supported to grow and flourish, developing our unique potential in safe environments that cultivate interdependence but also enable freedom to explore what makes us gloriously diverse and complex human beings. This spacious Scotland exercises a politics of dignity, justice, and care, in which all are invited to participate. All of us first, for our hoped-for commonweal is animated by the spirit and practice of equality. Such a Scotland cannot tolerate gender-based violation, exploitation, or abuse.

This section of the Commonweal manifesto describes how the current gendered nature of Scottish society creates a conducive context for ongoing gender violations. These are manifest in interpersonal relations, distribution of resources, institutional operations, and cultural norms. To tackle the systemic nature of gender inequality, we make recommendations for radical transformation that will truly enable “all of us first” to become a reality.

UN Special Rapporteur's appraisal of sexist UK causes stramash

If you've caught a newspaper, TV news report, or spent any time on social media over the last few days, you cannot have failed to notice the storm of protest that greeted Professor Rashida Manjoo's determination that there was sexism going on in the UK.

Professor Manjoo is the UN's Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, an independent and unpaid position with a mandate to identify the causes and consequences of violence against women within a state, and make recommendations for its elimination. The Special Rapporteur reports to the Human Rights Council.

Event on 'welfare reform' and gender

Last week we held an event at Holyrood to discuss our paper on ‘welfare reform’ and gender. This is a joint piece of work* that tells a story about why women are penalised by this agenda in so many different ways and turns to how we might address the gender impact.