Engender blog
Guest Post: Mainstreaming Spotlight - Close the Gap
To mark the release of Engender's new report, What Works for Women: Improving gender mainstreaming in Scotland, we're sharing how mainstreaming is important to the work of some of Scotland's equalities organisations. Here, Lindsey Millen from Close the Gap talks about how mainstreaming is essential for their work on women's labour market participation.
Why is gender mainstreaming important to your organisation?
Gender mainstreaming is critical to delivering women’s labour market equality and, in doing so, tackle wider gender inequality. Many of the causes of the gender pay gap are not unlawful, e.g. the lack of quality flexible working at senior levels and a lack of affordable wraparound childcare. In order to tackle these issues, gender must be at the heart of policymaking. Policy that responds to the specific experiences of women is also better quality and better value for money – put simply, it delivers for everyone. Gender mainstreaming is such a valuable tool for policymakers and we need to see it being used effectively.
What area(s) of mainstreaming are you focused on?
Close the Gap works on women’s labour market inequality, which includes policy advocacy and employer engagement. The Scottish-specific duties of the public sector equality duty (PSED) are a big focus for us as they require public bodies to mainstream gender across all of their functions. We are interested in how public bodies are using their gender pay gap, occupational segregation and employment data to do gender mainstreaming. This supports our work to advocate for a duty that delivers for women and has formed the basis for our employer guidance on PSED and the work we do to support individual public bodies to improve their compliance.
If you could snap your fingers and change one thing to make gender mainstreaming happen, what would it be?
It is difficult to pick just one thing and there are really three things that have to work in concert in order for gender mainstreaming to happen. Firstly, public bodies need support to develop their understanding of gender inequality and how this relates to the work they do. Without this it’s difficult to develop good quality solutions. Secondly, we need to see real accountability for public bodies to ensure gender mainstreaming is done – and done well. Thirdly, we need leadership at the most senior levels of public bodies that makes clear gender mainstreaming is a core part of their work as public service providers, employers, and in their other roles.
Where can people find out more about your work on mainstreaming?
A good place to start would be our assessments of public bodies’ performance of the duties – here and here. Public sector employers (and PSED geeks) will find our guidance helpful in developing their work on gender mainstreaming and the duties in general – this can be found here. Gender mainstreaming is woven throughout our work – there’s plenty of other content to be found on our website.Guest Post: Mainstreaming Spotlight - Scottish Women's Budget Group
To mark the release of Engender's new report, What Works for Women: Improving gender mainstreaming in Scotland, we're sharing how mainstreaming is important to the work of some of Scotland's equalities organisations. Here, Sara Cowan from the Scottish Women's Budget Group talks about how mainstreaming is a vital component of creating a gender equal economy.
Why is gender mainstreaming important to your organisation?
Women and men use public services differently – they have different life experiences and face different economic realities and challenges. Women are often disadvantaged by policies that do not recognise these different experiences. Gender mainstreaming is important to us to redress this balance when decisions are made across a range of public services.
What area(s) of mainstreaming are you focused on?
We’re concerned with how public finances are spent and how budgetary decisions can work to reduce gender inequality. Gender mainstreaming through government and local authority budget decisions across all areas of public funding is a vital component to building a gender equal economy.
If you could snap your fingers and change one thing to make gender mainstreaming happen, what would it be?
Comprehensive equality impact assessments would be conducted for all budgetary decisions by local and national Government.
Where can people find out more about your work on mainstreaming?
Find out more about our work and become a member online here. We're also hosting two 'Introduction to Gender Budgeting' webinar sessions, one on 10th December from 9.30am-11.30am, and another on 15th December from 7pm-9pm - you can sign up for whichever session works best for you here.
Guest Post: Mainstreaming Spotlight - CRER
To mark the release of Engender's new report, What Works for Women: Improving gender mainstreaming in Scotland, we're sharing how mainstreaming is important to the work of some of Scotland's equalities organisations. Here, Carol Young from the Centre for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER) talks about how they use an intersectional approach in their mainstreaming work.
Why is gender mainstreaming important to your organisation?
While CRER is an anti-racist organisation and our work is primarily focused on race equality, we adopt an intersectional approach where possible. People’s identities are multifaceted, and everyone has multiple protected characteristics, so it's not feasible to get mainstreaming right for one characteristic without considering the others.
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What area(s) of mainstreaming are you focused on?
We focus on all aspects of mainstreaming, with particular attention to race. We produce guidance for public bodies on the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), which includes mainstreaming activity. We previously delivered an in-depth Mainstreaming Equalities Organisational Development Programme for voluntary sector leaders, along with our partners at GCVS.
If you could snap your fingers and change one thing to make gender mainstreaming happen, what would it be?
We would want public bodies to have a better evidence base and to use the evidence they gather in mainstreaming equality. If public bodies produced detailed intersectional data, this would aid identification of gaps in equality mainstreaming and allow targeted interventions. Inequalities for minority ethnic women are worse than for minority ethnic men on most issues, but the situation varies widely between different ethnicities. The more detail, the better!
Where can people find out more about your work on mainstreaming?
You can find out more about our work on mainstreaming by looking at the publications section on our website. We also maintain a PSED portal which outlines the reports and data published under the public sector equality duties by public bodies in Scotland.
GUEST POST: Food for thought
Dr Shridevi Gopi-Firth is a Speciality Doctor in Eating Disorders working in Scotland. Her international education and career, including third sector work across India, Russia and the UK have given Shri a wide exposure to diverse cultural, social, educational and healthcare settings, thus successfully complementing her lived experience and clinical skills to develop a holistic understanding of the person. Here, she explores how stigma around eating disorders can affect women in BAME communities.
Eating – the most basic need of all things living, from the prokaryotic amoeba to the Dalai Lama. So when this signal in the brain gets scrambled and the eating becomes disordered, the inevitable reaction of the general populace is confusion, indignation, frustration and pity – empathy is a far way off since one cannot truly understand what causes a person to turn away from this basic need. This is never more pronounced than in Asian and African cultures where food brings people together and is the centre of every festival and get-together, big and small. Food is serious business in these cultures – I mean, in Asia alone, there are several deities devoted to food, the growing of it, the eating of it, the digesting of it, the gifting of it – one does not mess around with the concept of food!
F-words: Emojis can be feminist too
Amy King is a PhD researcher at Edinburgh Napier University and Digital Officer at YWCA Scotland - The Young Women’s Movement. Her PhD investigation into online violence and the mechanisms of harm in language often take her research to weird and wonderful places, including contemplating the harm - and hope - of the humble emoji.
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Do you remember the first time you used an emoji? I have to admit, I don’t. But I do remember the first time my Mum sent me one, about 7 years after they had become a mainstream element in digital communication. Now I’m priming her for the GIF library on WhatsApp. I’m lucky, though - my Mum has never sent me the wrong emoji before, like a crying laughing emoji in a sombre context, or an awkward emoji shoehorned into a sentence to prove she’s ~down with the kids~. And that’s important because emojis carry specific meaning, have acceptable and unacceptable uses, and they often hold crucial extralinguistic detail that we rely on to ensure we’re understood properly.
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