Engender blog

Guest Post: Equally Safe at Work

Women’s labour market participation experts, Close the Gap, are running an exciting employer accreditation programme called Equally Safe at Work. We asked Programme Officer Kelsey Smith to give us an update on the project so far.

Violence against women (VAW) occurs at epidemic levels. It affects all aspects of women’s lives and the workplace is no exception.

Over 70% of women reported having experienced or witnessed sexual harassment in the workplace in Scotland. However, the vast majority (80%) of women who experience sexual harassment in the workplace will never report it due to fear of being blamed, not being believed or losing their job. Other forms of VAW, such as rape and sexual assault, can significantly impact on women's ability to hold down a job, as a result of needing to take extended periods off because of the emotional and physical impact. Victim-survivors often experience trauma which can make it increasing difficult to be in work situations which involve groups of men or being alone with men.

Celebrating Scotland's Gender Pay Gap Action Plan

Our Executive Director Emma Ritch reflects on the feminist journey to Scotland's first action plan to tackle the pay gap, and welcomes a substantial step towards women’s and girls’ economic justice.

Feminist policy advocacy requires determination, grit, and the willingness to work towards sometimes infinitesimal change in pursuit of a different world for women & girls. When we do see what amounts to a leap forward in a long-term, shared advocacy project it’s vital to pause, appreciate the moment, and recognise the women who collaborated over years to see it happen.

What's in it for women? Programme for Government 2018-19

Last month we were thrilled to welcome Eilidh Dickson to the Engender team as our new policy manager on maternity cover. As her arrival coincided with the return of parliament to session, she has collated a gender edit of the Programme for Government 2018-19. Here, in her first blog post, she gives us a handy overview.

Personally, I always secretly enjoyed the start of a new school year – with the new stationery, bigger shoes and fresh start that came with it. And now as a grown-up working in Scottish policy, I can never quite shake the same feelings that the end of the long recess brings in September.

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?