Engender blog
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: Mainstreaming ambition
Louise Macdonald, OBE, is the co-chair of the First Minister's National Advisory Council on Women and Girls. The focus of the Council this year is 'gender architecture', a key part of mainstreaming gender. To mark the launch of our report What Works for Women: improving gender mainstreaming in Scotland, we asked Louise to blog for us on the work of the council during 2020.
Making gender inequality a historical curiosity is an ambitious vision – but sadly a necessary one.
The First Minister’s National Advisory Council on Women and Girls was established by Nicola Sturgeon in 2017 to help achieve that – with the aim of offering her insight and advice on how to tackle gender inequality at a systemic level.
The issues that the members of our NACWG Circle raised at our inaugural event that year were not new – we listened carefully to what they told us and designed our initial three year strategy to strategically address these issues through a whole-systems lens.
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