Engender blog
Engender joins equalities organisations working together to improve political representation
Today, along with organisations working for equality for women, disabled people, black, minority ethnic people and the LGBT community in Scotland, we're delighted to announce a joint project aimed at increasing diversity within Scottish politics. With funding from the Scottish Government, organisations Engender, Inclusion Scotland, BEMIS, the Council for Ethnic Minority Voluntary Organisations (CEMVO), Stonewall Scotland, the Equality Network and the Women 5050 campaign will work to enable political parties to remove the barriers that stop underrepresented groups from taking part in politics as party members, activists, party staffers, and as elected representatives.
#ScotSocialSecurity and why we need gender-balanced experience panels
Emma Trottier is Engender’s policy manager, and leads our work on social security. Since March, Emma has been blogging about the key issues at the heart of the debate about Scotland’s new social security system. Here, she talks about why Scotland needs gender-balanced experience panels.
What do women want from local councils?
That’s the question that we, along with campaign group Women5050 want to answer this spring.
The decisions made by local councils have a significant impact on women’s lives, from allocating spending on education and leisure, to deciding how and where public transport runs. And yet it is in local councils that women’s underrepresentation is clearest – with only 24% of local councillors being women. Of the 1,223 local councillors in Scotland, only four are women from BME communities.
We've created activities and resources which can be used by groups across Scotland to explore what powers local councils have, and how women can have influence them. The workshops will be used to crowd-source 10 questions local councillor elected in May to ask themselves about how they are involving women in their work.
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 21st 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.
RSSDownloads
Engender Briefing: Pension Credit Entitlement Changes
From 15 May 2019, new changes will be introduced which will require couples where one partner has reached state pension age and one has not (‘mixed age couples’) to claim universal credit (UC) instead of Pension Credit.
Engender Parliamentary Briefing: Condemnation of Misogyny, Racism, Harassment and Sexism
Engender welcomes this Scottish Parliament Debate on Condemnation of Misogyny, Racism, Harassment and Sexism and the opportunity to raise awareness of the ways in which women in Scotland’s inequality contributes to gender-based violence.
Gender Matters in Social Security: Individual Payments of Universal Credit
A paper calling on the Scottish Government to automatically split payments of Universal Credit between couples, once this power is devolved to the Scottish Parliament.
Gender Matters Manifesto: Twenty for 2016
This manifesto sets out measures that, with political will, can be taken over the next parliamentary term in pursuit of these goals.
Scottish NGO Briefing for UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women
Joint briefing paper for the UN Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.
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