Engender blog

A year in the life of Engender...

2017 has seen its fair share of ups and downs in the pursuit of women's equality, and we wanted to take this chance to look back at what Engender has been up to over this year.

This year we've highlighted all forms of women's work with our #MakingWorkVisible campaign around International Women's Day, and joined with our colleagues at Women5050 to run workshops and produce resources exploring What Women Want (from local councils) throughout the spring and summer.

We launched our fantastic new podcast, On the Engender - if you haven't listened to it yet, you can catch up on past episodes here. In September we hosted Scotland's Feminist Future, a two-day conference focused on building policy, taking action and making change. We also launched our Gender Matters Roadmap at the conference, and you can read the Roadmap online here.

We've had some policy successes this year, too. Women's equality has been recognised as a key issue for social security, and our work alongside Close the Gap and Women5050 was recently highlighted as the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Bill passed a Stage 1 debate in the Scottish Parliament. We have also seen tangible changes which will improve women's lives: the waiving of NHS charges for abortions for Northern Irish women, free sanitary products in some schools, and a shift to more sustainable funding for equalities bodies. You can find out more about what Engender has been up to throughout 2017 in our annual report, which you can read here.

Next year we're looking forward to continuing our work for women's equality through research and policy briefings, participatory events, and partnership working, and we'll also be celebrating our 25th Anniversary! Look out for special events happening throughout the year, and we’re particularly excited that we’ll be joined by a student from Stirling University who will be doing some work to chart Engender’s history through our archives. If you were involved in the early days of Engender, and think you might be interested in chatting to us about this project, please do get in contact with Alys.

Thanks, as ever, for all of your support throughout 2017; here's to another year of working together for women's equality.

In sisterhood,

the Engender team

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