Engender blog

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.

F-words: Finn McKay on gender ideology

Dr Finn Mackay is a sociology lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol and author of ‘Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement’. Here, ahead of the release of her new book 'Female masculinities & the gender wars’, Dr Mackay explores the term ‘gender ideology’ and what it means for feminism in the UK.

What is gender ideology?

The term “gender ideology” is not new (Graff & Korolczuk, 2018).This language began to be used by the Catholic church in the mid 1990s, for example in Beijing at the fourth World Conference for Women. Pope John Paul II wrote to the UN Secretary General, emphasising the natural complementarity of men and women, masculinity and femininity, and restating that the sexes are equal, but different. Catholic education guides warn against gender ideology, which they see as indoctrinating children into viewing sexuality, gender and sexed identities as fluid or influenced by personal choice. In the US, right-wing, Christian evangelical groups like the Family Research Council, label gender ideology as the third wave of attack against the heterosexual nuclear family; the first wave being the women’s liberation movement and the second being the gay liberation movement (O’Leary & Sprigg, 2015). The term is an evocative enemy, and platforms set up to oppose it can stand for traditional family values, separate sphere gender roles and nationalism. Activism against “gender ideology” has become a shorthand, and successfully unites many who are against abortion, women’s rights, equal marriage, LGBTQI+ rights, divorce rights or immigration for example.

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.

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.