Engender blog

Guest Post: I care about……

Guest blog from Claire Cairns, coordinator of Coalition of Carers in Scotland

With the Scottish elections being held on the 5^th of May, Scotland will soon be gripped by election fever.

Party manifestos will be unveiled and candidates and campaigners will aim to convince us that their party holds the solutions to the issues that matter most to us.

We know that health, education, the economy and employment will all feature at the top of the agenda. People will weigh up what each party has to say and inevitable ask themselves the question ‘How will this effect me’

But I hope that with this election people will also be asking themselves – ‘What sort of society do I want to live in?’ ‘How does it respond to people when they need support? What happens when someone develops a serious health issue, gives birth to a child with a disability or becomes a carer for a loved one? What happens when you get older and need help with everyday living?

Guest Post: Social Care and Gender Equality: Independent Living in Scotland’s Dialogue on the Future Funding of Social Care

Guest blog by William Pinkney-Baird of Independent Living in Scotland (ILiS)

Scotland's social care system is in crisis. It's underfunded, the support being given to disabled people is narrowing dangerously, it penalises users with expensive charges, it increasingly relies on family kinship caring (usually women). Furthermore, it's staffed by people on permanently low wages (again usually women), both of whom are expected to deliver minor miracles. All of this creates a system which undermines the human rights of disabled people to society, democracy, the economy and their families and communities – as well as presents issues to gender equality. Women carers are more likely than men carers to be working part time, and thus more likely to be reliant on social security and experience poverty. Disabled women also experience economic gender inequality: the employment rate for non-disabled men is nearly 90%, but for disabled women it is 40%.

Scottish Green Party Elections - Female Co-Convener Q&A

On the eve of the close-of-poll for the Scottish Green Party internal elections, Engender put some questions around women's equality to the two contenders for the post of Female Co-Convener.

Rather than electing one leader, as many other political parties do, the Scottish Green Party has one male and one female co-convener. Up for the female co-convener position are incumbent Maggie Chapman (MC), former Edinburgh City Councillor and top list candidate in the North-East region for Holyrood 2016, and Zara Kitson (ZK), co-convener of the Glasgow and West of Scotland branch, and former co-convener of the Scottish Young Greens.

Guest Post: Challenge Povery Week: Women’s poverty and ‘austerity’ in the UK

Guest post by Professor Kirstein Rummery, University of Stirling and Engender board member. This post first appeared at www.challengepoverty.wordpress.com

Policies in the post 2010 Coalition government were dominated by the spectre of the 2008 private sector financial crisis, which by 2010 had turned into a global recession reducing economic production and seeing rises in unemployment. The UK in common with other G20 countries initially adopted a fiscal stimulus approach (quantitative easing) which slowed the recession but led to a sharp rise in the budget deficit to 11.6 % in 2009-10 the highest since 1945.