Red Pepper » Feminism

‘I can hear the roar of women’s silence’

emma — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:36:06 +0000

It was Thursday, 4th August 1983 in what was soon to be renamed Burkina Faso. On this day, a coup d’etat led by Captains Thomas Sankara and Blaise Compaoré set in motion a Pan-Africanist, Marxist, revolution which sought to liberate Franz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” from the clutches of imperialism and neo-colonialism. Sankara emphasised the universality of the Burkinabe revolution in his address to the UN General Assembly a year after becoming President of the National Council of the Revolution.
“Our revolution in Burkina Faso embraces the misfortunes of all peoples. It draws its inspiration from all of man’s experiences since his first breath. We wish to be heirs of all the revolutions and all the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World.”
Sankara’s revolutionary vision was based on ‘self-reliance’ and solidarity and included an ambitious programme of development – health, education, agriculture, infrastructure and an end to the excesses so familiar in African governance today- hyper corruption and consumerism. He embarked on an agrarian revolution which including the planting of millions of trees and land reform. He called for the full cancellation of the continent’s debt, rejected foreign aid and asserted that only a complete rejection of the norms of global capitalism and imperialist domination would liberate Africans.
But it was Sankara’s focus on women’s emancipation and its meaning for all of humanity, that distinguished his revolutionary vision. Sankara argued that the key to social transformation was in improving the status of women and he demanded that they be a central part of the revolutionary project. Sankara did not just make pronouncements, he was meticulous in explaining class relations and the everyday ways in which African masculinities work in collaboration with capital in exploiting women’s labour and abuse of their dignity. His analysis of gendered and sexualised social relations would be considered progressive even today:
“It was the transformation from one form of society to another that served to institutionalize women’s inequality. This inequality was produced by our own minds and intelligence in order to develop a concrete form of domination and exploitation. The social function and roles to which women have been relegated ever since are a living reflection of this fact.”
Describing the home as the premier sight of capitalist reproductive exploitation and sexualised oppression, Sankara’s government campaigned against forced marriages, polygamy, and female genital mutilation and tribal markings. Women were for the first time able to initiate divorce without the consent of their husbands. Sankara insisted that men take an active part in the domestic sphere by experiencing those activities traditionally left to women such as preparing meals, going to the market and caring for children. At the same time he encouraged women to take on jobs that had previously been the domain of men including joining the military. He also began a programme of dismantling traditional sites of patriarchy by reducing the powers of village chiefs and nationalising all land. Other areas where his government prioritised women’s equality were in providing improved access to education and public health through a nation-wide adult literacy and grassroots health programmes. Significantly he was the first African leader to appoint a large number of women to government positions including the cabinet.
One of the primary instruments in the transition of women towards full citizenship was the Women’s Union of Burkina Faso [UFB]. Sankara described the UFB as “the organisation of militant and serious women”. These were the women of the revolution drawn from the urban workers and rural ‘peasants’ classes. Sankara repeatedly urged the UFB women to break away from the “kind of practices and behaviour traditionally thought of as female”.
On International Women’s Day March 8th, 1987 Sankara addressed thousands of women in Ougadougou calling for the emancipation of women in Burkina Faso and throughout the continent. In the speech he explained in great detail, the material base for women’s oppression rejecting simplistic theories such as biological differences
“At this moment, we have little choice but to recognise that masculine behaviour comprises vanity, irresponsibility, arrogance, and violence of all kinds towards women. This kind of behaviour can hardly lead to coordinated action against women’s oppression. Such attitudes are in reality nothing but a safety valve for the oppressed male, who, through brutalising his wife, hopes to regain some of the human dignity denied him by the system of exploitation. This masculine foolishness is called sexism or machismo. It often gives politically conscious women no choice but to consider it their duty to wage a war on two fronts.”
On Thursday 15th October 1987, the Burkinabe revolution ended when Sankara along with 12 comrades were assassinated in a counter-revolutionary coup led by Blaise Compaoré. In his betrayal like Mobutu’s betrayal of Patrice Lumumba, Compaoré donned the “white mask” and returned the Burkinabe people and Burkina Faso to a neo-colonialist state.
Sankara lived the Burkinabe revolution by example and insisted his ministers and government officials do the same. Thomas Sankara’s was committed to removing the injustices of imperialism not just in Burkina Faso but in the whole continent. In remembering Sankara we are also reminded of the enormity of the struggle we face if we are to achieve the kind of social transformation he envisaged.

Go Feminist: Feminism for all

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:31:22 +0000

Photo: Carrie Bradin
Specifically designed to connect feminist activists, spark debate and showcase the diversity of the movement, the inaugural Go Feminist conference took place in London at the beginning of February. As the organisers stated in their F Word blog post:
‘We do this as a response to feminism’s most sustained critique: that it is not for all women. Although women from all backgrounds and communities identify with feminist beliefs, the movement still does not completely take into account their needs and realities. Too often in our feminist spaces, the voices of a few are privileged. Race is inadequately dealt with. Our spaces, both physical and virtual, are inaccessible to women living with disabilities. Trans women’s involvement is actively discouraged.’
To that end, this was a conference that at its core was concerned with how to make the movement accessible to all. From the availability of speech-to-text and signers for the hearing impaired at every plenary session to the range of workshops on offer, the aim was to reflect the multiple faces of feminism today.
Attending other feminist conferences, I have often left feeling that my identity as a woman was deemed more important and treated separately from other important elements of who I am. For me, this has resulted in leaving my identity as a working-class black immigrant at the door. This lack of dialogue around how various forms of oppression act upon an individual, as well as how many of us, myself included, experience other areas of privilege we do not readily recognise, was something the morning workshop, ‘Ensuring feminism is a movement for all women: the way forward – intersectionality’, aimed to confront.
The workshop sought to tackle head on issues around oppression and privilege. One of the ice-breaker activities involved attendees stepping forward or back according to whether a particular statement applied to them: ‘I grew up in a household with more than 50 books’, ‘My parents were professionals such as doctors, lawyers, teachers etc’ and so on. The activity was a learning exercise for participants who had not previously considered themselves as having any privileges. It also demonstrated how assumptions about the makeup of an individual’s identity are invariably two‑dimensional. We are all much more complex and share far more connections than we first believe.
The group discussion that followed allowed people to talk through ideas on how they could actively place intersectionality at the core of their feminism. Importantly, the facilitators were themselves challenged on how the workshop had not been entirely inclusive in relation to people from single‑parent households and with physical disabilities. This was something that they acknowledged and promised to rectify in future sessions. All of us can and do make mistakes, but we must, as a movement, provide a space and atmosphere in which such challenges are greeted not as antagonistic but as helpful and therefore acted upon.
One of the highlights of the conference was the penultimate plenary session on sexism in popular culture, chaired by the writer and broadcaster Bidisha, which looked at the skewed and sexist representation of women in this arena. Beginning with an analysis of women and sports, Bidisha succinctly stated that coverage invariably focused on ‘boobs, bums and bikinis’. And a question from a young participant around how the movement can engage more with those who are not already converted was thought-provoking.
Panellist Kealy Hastick, from the women’s organisation Platform 51 (formerly the YWCA), eloquently told us that young women find it difficult to identify as feminists because ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. This gave something of an answer as to how and why the movement seems to only speak to the same select and, often, privileged few. Despite the fact that feminist ideas and ideals are broadly supported by, dare I even say it, the majority of men and women I know, they would nevertheless be loath to label themselves feminists. Yet few would agree to championing violence against women.
It is apt, then, that the conference towards its close opened up a space to discuss this most important of issues: how do we engage people who are receptive to our ideas but outside our ‘normal’ feminist circles? It seems to me that we must go back to both the aims of the conference and Kealy Hastick’s idea. We, feminists, have to show the wider public that the movement is made up of people exactly like them, and debunk the myth that a feminist looks and speaks in a particular way. We have to prove, through our inclusive practice, as bell hooks put it, that ‘feminism is for everyone’.
Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and journalist

Niger Delta: a quiet resistance

admin — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:30:32 +0000

Women stand next to an oil wellhead that since 2004 has been regularly spilling crude oil near the community of Ikot Ada Udo in the Niger Delta. Photo: Kadir van Lohuizen/Science for Human Rights
The Niger Delta has been at the centre of Nigeria’s post‑independence military project from the first coup in 1966 through to the present. To the outside world it remained a forgotten outpost, however, until the 1990s and the rise of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Since then, unequivocal evidence has emerged of how the region and its commerce – primarily the oil industry – has been systematically militarised, with violence by the state, multinationals and local militias deployed as an instrument of governance and intimidation to force the people into total submission.
This militarisation – and resistance to it – has taken place in the context of an ongoing series of struggles over resources. As the dispossessed indigenous communities have continued to demand corporate responsibility, environmental, economic and social justice and proper compensation, their protests have been met with murders, torture, rape, the burning of homes and property and an ever increasing military presence. The outcome is an intensely militarised region ‘secured’ by an unrestrained and unaccountable tripartite force, comprising the Nigerian military, multinational oil companies and local militias.
Women in the Delta
Formal women’s groups have historically been a part of the social and political organisation in the Niger Delta. Though these have tended to be based around cultural activities, they have also provided women-only spaces to organise voices of inclusion and assertion. The establishment and recognition of these organisations has helped provide a strong power base from which to challenge the multinationals.
Women’s resistance in the Delta can be traced back to the early 1990s and the Ogoni movement MOSOP, which was led by the late Ken Saro-Wiwa. Ogoni women formed the Federation of Ogoni Women (FOWA) and were at the forefront of the demands for autonomy and control of resources in Ogoni land. FOWA was instrumental in preventing Shell from returning to Ogoni land after the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged by the Nigerian state along with eight other activists in 1995. By the early 2000s, women in Rivers, Baye lsa and Delta State were organising protests and occupations against environmental destruction, lack of development in their communities and lack of employment by oil companies such as Shell, Chevron, Elf, Mobil and Agip.
Demonstrators protest in Warri
In 2002, 600 women from different generations and ethnic groups – Ijaw, Itsekiri and Ilaje – came together in an alliance with young people in actions against oil firm Chevron. The women led the protest against Chevron at the company’s Escravos facility near Warri. They demanded jobs for their sons and husbands, investment in the local infrastructure and a cleanup of the environmental damage caused by oil exploration. For ten days, refusing to move, they blocked the production of oil. This was a huge achievement because the different ethnic groups had previously been in conflict with each other for many years over the meagre resources handed out by government and oil companies.
Women have often been drawn into political activity as a result of attacks by the Nigerian army’s Joint Task Force (JTF) or repeated intimidation by local militias. In 2009, the Ijaw communities of Gbaramatu were invaded by the JTF using attack helicopters and tanks. Homes and farmlands were destroyed and, fearing for their lives, women ran into the mangrove swamps with their children and the elderly, where they either hid from the soldiers or attempted to make their way to the nearest city of Warri. About 2,000 women were eventually housed in a refugee camp for six months before returning home. In September 2011, hundreds of women from the Gbaramatu communities occupied the Chevron facility at Chanomi Creek, disrupting the laying of pipelines for a liquid gas project. The protests were a response to broken promises, made by both Chevron and the federal government, to provide communities with water and electricity.
In Rumuekpe and Okrika women have organised to protect themselves and their livelihoods following intimidation by local militia, many of whom were found to have been paid by oil companies, including Shell. Rumuekpe is unusual in that there are four oil companies operating in the vicinity of the town, which has resulted in rivalries among the militias, traditional leaders and carpetbaggers all vying for a share of the oil monies.

During a recent visit to the region, I spoke with women activists from Rumekepe. The women told me how militia members paid by oil companies had terrorised the town to the point where everyone was forced to flee, abandoning their homes, property and farms to seek refuge in nearby Port Harcourt. During the period of terror, 60 people were killed.
What is left is a ghost town. On the day I visited, the women were fearful that we were being watched and it was too dangerous for me to stay for any length of time or walk through the town centre. The women made the point that in towns and villages that did not have oil people lived in peace. This confirmed for many that it was the oil, and the oil companies, who were responsible for the violence and militarisation of their town.
The decision by the women to meet me in the abandoned town and speak out was an act of resistance and great courage. Okrika was under double occupation: on the one hand by the JTF soldiers and on the other by local armed militias. The prize is access to oil storage and processing revenues. The result is a community of mainly women, children and the elderly living in fear.
Sitting on oneself
The impact of militarisation has been especially brutal in its impact on the lives of women and girls and resistance to the violence is not always obvious to an outsider. What may initially appear as passivity in these circumstances may actually be a show of strength. For example, ‘sitting on oneself’ – the act of a mature woman standing in quiet dignity – is a silent response to violence and intimidation that can become a very powerful act. Individual actions such as these are ways of managing suffering on a personal level by turning inwards to the self and one’s family.
Much of the organising today takes place around prayer gatherings. Again, this may seem passive, but the church plays a central role in the lives of women and their communities by providing support and opportunities for collective actions that can become radicalised. This happened with the women of Liberia, who were united through the church in their fight for peace.
The success of women’s protests should not be seen solely in terms of the immediate impact on multinational oil companies. We should consider the wider impacts: the politicisation of women and the bringing together of communities such as the Itsekiri and Ijaw women in Delta State, who were driven into manipulated conflicts by the actions of the state and multinationals.
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian feminist, writer and social justice activist. She blogs at Black Looks

A neoliberal assault on women

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:25:36 +0000

Within hours of the 22 June announcements it was clear that the burden of the regressive emergency budget would fall disproportionately on women. A study published by the House of Commons Library in early July went some way to confirming this. The gender audit of the budget, commissioned by shadow minster for work and pensions Yvette Cooper, concluded that more than 70 per cent of the revenue raised from direct tax and benefit changes is to come from female taxpayers. This research excludes the effects of public service cuts; the full impact on women is set to be much worse.

Hitting the family hard

While all departments (apart from the NHS and overseas aid, they claim) face major cuts in their annual budgets, the immediate pain will be felt most by those with young children and single parents, nine out of 10 of whom are female.

The picture was gloomy even before the cuts: 52 per cent of single parent families are below the government-defined poverty line and in one survey more than half the mothers questioned said they are not adequately prepared to cope financially once the baby arrives. Benefits cuts are set to exacerbate the situation, with the coalition budget attacking women and single parents on several fronts.

First, income support will be cut for all parents – when their children reach school age they will be moved onto jobseeker’s allowance. This will mean that single parents will effectively be forced into work or face their benefits being cut off completely.

Second, the health in pregnancy grant, a £190 payment to all pregnant women beyond their 25th week of pregnancy, will be abolished next April. The government will also restrict eligibility to the Sure Start maternity grant to the first child only. The grant is a one-off £500 payment for those on a low income to help towards the costs of a new baby. The new ‘toddler tax credit’, which would have provided an extra £4 a week for families with children aged one or two, is also to be scrapped, along with the child trust fund. Child benefit has been frozen for three years – an effective cut in real terms.

All this means that the lowest income families with new babies will now be £1,293 a year worse off. Those with second children on the way will be hit even harder. And this before you take into account changes to housing benefit: lone parent families are three times as likely to live in rented accommodation as families with two resident parents.

Liz, a mother of two and a part-time NHS worker, told Red Pepper: ‘The impact on women who are lone mothers smacks of total ignorance of the knock-on effects on children. The expectation to work does not take into account the support needed to let this happen, particularly if service cuts will lead to further deterioration in provision. There’s the potential cost of a rise in mental health issues and child protection issues resulting from the lack of support.’

The education sector has already seen cuts that hit women disproportionately hard. Manchester’s Mule reported in June that workers at Manchester City College had described proposed cuts at the college as ‘fairly overt sex discrimination’ after crèche workers faced compulsory redundancies. A source told the paper: ‘It is an undisputed fact that most childcare arrangements fall onto the shoulders of mothers in society. By changing holidays and increasing working hours, the college has not taken childcare needs into account.’ The state was effectively turning back the clock and shifting the burden back on to women.

A similar situation arose last year at Sussex University, which announced cuts of £8 million over two years due to reductions in government funding. Among the 115 redundancies announced were plans to axe the campus nursery and crèche.

Employment problems

Even before the cuts were announced it was obvious that women would bear the brunt of the austerity measures focused on cutting back the public sector. Sixty-five per cent of workers in the public sector are women and around four in ten women work in the public sector, compared with fewer than two in ten men.

Most Whitehall departments face cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent and unions estimate that this will lead to around a million job losses over the next few years.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (see page 13) puts the figure slightly lower at 610,000 by 2016. The analysis by this newly independent body, set up by the Treasury, suggests just 4.92 million people will be working in the public sector in 2015-16, compared to 5.53 million today.

And the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) suggests that a majority of the staff likely to lose their jobs will be women in part-time work or on low wages.

Those remaining in work could also find it difficult. The CIPD has warned that there will likely be ‘ongoing real wage cuts in the public sector’, with the government announcing a two-year pay freeze for all but the lowest paid.

Ceri Goddard, the Fawcett Society’s chief executive, says: ‘Against a backdrop of unequal pay – women are still paid 16.4 per cent less for full time work and 35 per cent less for part time work than men – the impact on women will be huge.’

A difficult retirement?

The cuts will also have an impact on women into their retirement. The political blog Left Foot Forward reports that pensioner poverty is already ‘far more prevalent among women than men, with women’s average income in retirement just 62 per cent of the level that the average retired man will have to live on’. Public sector pensions currently improve women’s overall level of pension provision but with the loss of jobs will come loss of pension rights and the gender gap may widen further, plunging more women pensioners into poverty.

The BBC is now trying to close its final salary pensions, a move that could pave the way for similar cuts in the public sector. The corporation has proposed that pensions are based on how much an employee has paid in and that they increase by a maximum of one per cent per year rather than being linked to final incomes. Unions are now worried that this model will be adopted across the public sector, disproportionately affecting women in an area where there are already gross inequalities.

Katie, an NHS worker from Manchester, told Red Pepper: ‘They say the NHS is protected but we know cuts are coming. We’re all worried about our pensions because cuts there will have a huge long-term effect across the public sector.’

More to come

We have yet to see the true extent of the cuts, which could be as deep as 40 per cent for some departments. What we do know is that Osborne aims to cut £99 billion from annual government spending by 2016.

The emergency budget was just one aspect of the recent neoliberal attacks on the state, now dressed up as the ‘Big Society’, the depth of which Thatcher could only have dreamed. But in among the swinging axes and falling debris, there are the green shoots of a grass-roots recovery. Over the page we look at some of the organisations that are starting – or continuing – the fightback.

All together now

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:22:25 +0000

Mainstream analyses of the budget announcements have noted, to varying degrees, the disproportionate blows Osborne’s axe has inflicted on women. The coverage is welcome. Yet the newly-in-opposition politicians making the issue front-page news, such as shadow work and pensions minister Yvette Cooper, appear to have forgotten their own previous stances in government. Real opposition comes from the bottom up.

For Cooper and co, it’s politics as usual, but there is a lot more at stake here than point scoring. These are not temporary measures. We cannot afford to overlook the ideology behind the cuts, as particular behaviours are rewarded when others are punished.

As Tim Hunt shows (see page 28), the UK’s two million single parents, 92 per cent of them women, will suffer terribly as a result of the cuts. And we don’t need to read between the lines for the message; David Cameron has been quite open about it. Last December he declared: ‘Commitment and relationships and marriage are good institutions. We shouldn’t be completely neutral about them as a society. I think the tax and benefits systems … need to think about what other long-term signals that we are sending out as a society.’ The implications of this budget go deeper than our wallets.

Social attitudes towards gender equality have evolved over recent decades. The mere acknowledgement that welfare and public service cuts will differentially and disproportionately affect women would not have made headlines 20 years ago. Then, unemployment was still largely a male issue. As the rhetoric of ‘necessary pain’ beds in, however, this progress faces reversal. The space for addressing pervasive inequalities that has been opened must be quickly seized.

Call to arms

In the last issue of Red Pepper (Jun/Jul 2010), Catherine Redfern and Laurie Penny debated contemporary currents in feminism. Penny concluded that, without groups coming together with shared goals of social justice for all and taking real action to achieve them, the number of women self-defining as feminists is largely irrelevant. The groups featured over the previous pages answer Penny’s call to arms.

At the Crossroads Women’s Centre in Hackney, space and resources are shared by groups including WinVisible and Single Mothers Self Defence, alongside the English Collective of Prostitutes, All African Women’s Group and Wages Due Lesbians, among others. In their activism, each notes degrees of social exclusion and political marginalisation including but not limited to gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality and disability. Here, equality is inclusive and no one should be oppressed. If the marginalised are to be empowered, take action and force change, we must recognise that we are in this together.

These groups are raising awareness through lobbying, petitioning, protesting and writing to local and national press. They are forming solidarity-led networks to share information and stand in allegiance. Their focus is on supporting those who need it.

Austerity measures announcements have been met by women-led campaigns elsewhere. On 8 March this year, the Greek Communist Party-affiliated union PAME held a peaceful protest coinciding with International Women’s Day, symbolically emphasising the gender-biased impact of cuts to civil servants’ salaries, pension freezes and increased general sales tax. In May, women public service workers rallied outside the Italian parliament in Rome, protesting against similar budget decisions. Just as European governments find justification for their actions in mirroring other states’ language and policy, campaign groups are being handed opportunities to form international bonds.

Inspiration can be drawn from the past as well as abroad. While comment and comparison with Thatcher era cuts have littered budget analyses, attention should also be turned to those who fought her policies on the streets, picket lines and through non-payment campaigns.

In histories of anti-poll tax campaigns, there is a sad yet predictable paucity of women’s voices, despite their undoubted presence. Unions and political parties were marked then by a disproportionate presence of male voices, a tendency that continues to this day. But where women are still unable to be heard institutionally, grass-roots organisations will emerge.

Theoretical disagreements occasionally blunted explicitly feminist movements during the 1980s, and these movements often overshadowed women-led movements reacting to more broadly felt social injustices. Women Against Pit Closures, for instance, creditable as the glue that held the miners’ strike together, deserves more attention. This grassroots, working-class movement put feminism into practice, empowering women to step into a male-dominated world and assert the importance of their opinions and roles in the community.

This time round, the marginalised voices speaking out against the cuts demand to be listened to, now.

These articles are part of our series on emerging political movements, made possible with the help of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust

Together we can win

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:20:48 +0000

National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts Women’s Liberation

After six successful months in action, women in the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts took the decision to pioneer a newly formed affiliated movement, NCAFC Women’s Liberation, as a logical route to expansion.

The liberation movement is set to tackle imminent threats to women who are studying and working in education. This includes resistance to childcare cuts, with nurseries being swatted like flies at Queen Mary University, University of Westminster, University of the Arts London and elsewhere. We are also highlighting cuts in ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) teaching, which specifically targets and discriminates against immigrant women, making them even more vulnerable.

We are intent on wedging into the National Union of Students (NUS) bureaucracy and lobbying women’s officers to carry out audits on how education cuts will affect women on their campuses – and to build campaigns on top of the research. We will be conducting our own audit and actively encourage students to pass motions at union AGMs in favour of assigning a designated women’s officer where there is not one already. Most of all we are looking to link up with other feminist campaigns to fight the cuts.

NCAFC Women’s Liberation made its first public outing by intervening at the NUS anti-cuts meeting on 29 June. Since then we have been gathering momentum as the gender-biased knock-on effects of the government’s plans become clear. When term starts up again, we will be ready to fight them all the way.

www.anticuts.com

Women in Prison

We have been fighting the inequality experienced by women in a criminal justice system designed for men for over 25 years. We believe that the vast majority of women in prison should not be there. For the few women for whom a custodial sentence may be appropriate, the custodial settings we currently have certainly are not.

More women than men report a financial motivation for their offending behaviour. An emergency budget that penalises those out of work and devalues mothering (through loss of health in pregnancy grants, freezes in child benefit and the loss of the maternity grant for additional children) will drive many of the women we work with deeper into poverty.

Concurrently, we risk losing ground gained to massive public spending cuts. Over the last few years there has been increasing recognition that prisons, police and probation need to work in a women-specific way. In 2009, government funding was provided to establish more than 30 new projects working to divert women away from custody through community-based, holistic support services. WomenMATTA, a partnership project between Women in Prison and the Pankhurst Centre in Manchester, is one such project. Launched in February, WomenMATTA is providing individual and group support, advice and information, drop-ins and channels for women to engage in campaigning.

Responsibility for sustaining funding for these projects belongs to directors of offender management, regional heads of the National Offender Management Service. This agency is facing budget cuts of 25 per cent and over. Will all of these projects be continued? What will happen to the women who have built up relationships of trust with projects that may vanish?

WIP convenes the SWAP (Supporting Women – Against Prison) campaign network, bringing organisations together to challenge inequality in the criminal justice system and reduce the women’s prison population. These public spending cuts only emphasise how much is still to fight for.

www.womeninprison.org.uk

WinVisible

We are a multi-racial group of women with visible and invisible disabilities campaigning for independent living resources. We are united as service users, from Fife to southern England, to challenge care charges and losses.

In an inaccessible world, disability is work. But our workload is scarcely acknowledged, let alone reduced. As women, we are often looking after other people while coping with our own disability. Those of us who are black, immigrant or seeking asylum are judged to deserve even less.

Over recent decades charges for council care, rationing and privatisation have brought suffering to disabled and older people, mainly women pensioners. Councils have devolved responsibility for support onto local disability organisations. Created to defend us, many have become council gatekeepers.

Jennyfer Spencer, a wheelchair user and former teacher, was found dead in her inaccessible flat after Camden Council stopped her direct payments. A coalition of friends, disability and anti-racist groups are now demanding a public inquiry. Last year, the same council made an elderly couple choose between humiliating means-testing or paying £13 per hour for care. After we protested, their free service was reinstated.

But the new round of cuts will put many more at risk. And if the new ‘medical test’ for disability living allowance is similar to examinations carried out by the multinational company Atos, which assesses capability for work, it will exclude two thirds of claimants, including some with terminal cancer.

The transfer of existing incapacity claimants to back-to-work contractors such as A4e rewards businesses, not claimants. These companies make millions, yet place only 6 per cent of disabled participants in work, compared to 14 per cent at Jobcentres.

WinVisible is part of the No to Welfare Abolition Network. On the 16 June national day of action, one picketer reflected: ’People too unwell to work are bullied into work. Others who want jobs are set up to fail.’ Another expressed the general mood: ‘We can’t let them get away with it.’ Together, we can win the support we are all entitled to.

www.winvisible.org

Women’s Budget Group

We are an independent organisation, with around 200 members – researchers, policy experts and activists, working together to promote gender equality through appropriate economic policy.

We have been scrutinising the gender implications of UK budgets since the early 1990s. In all our work, we ask the question: where do resources go, and what impact does resource allocation have on gender equality? The WBG aims to not only encourage but assist the government in using gender analysis to improve its economic policy making. We also advocate specific policies requiring public bodies actively to promote gender equality and combat discrimination.

This has already had an impact. The last government was intending to pay working families tax credit through the pay packet of the main earner (usually a man). Lobbying from the WBG and others led to it being paid as a benefit to the household. There is also an equality duty requiring every government policy to be subject to analysis from the point of view of its impact on women.

Our latest report, A Gender Impact Assessment of the Coalition Government Budget, June 2010, is available on our website.

www.wbg.org.uk

Single Mothers Self Defence

We are a network of single mothers defending our entitlement to income support, the main benefit recognising the work of raising children. We assert the societal value of mothering and other caring work, and the damage caused to children deprived of it.

Emma Harrison, founder of government contractor A4e, herself a single mother, is reputedly ‘worth’ £40 million. But the story is very different for most of the women employed through her work-for-welfare business. Mothers are furious at being forced into US-style ‘workfare’, expected to park our children in battery childcare for the benefit of employers. Once we have been unemployed for 12 months, we’re expected to ‘work for our benefits’ for £1.60 per hour.

SMSD member Kim says: ‘They want companies to employ us so they can bypass the minimum wage, bringing everyone’s wages down. Unions must realise that they can’t defend members’ wages without working with claimants to defend benefits.’

Child benefit is now frozen. More children will be threatened with care because of their mothers’ poverty. We recently defended a single mother threatened with fostering after she asked social services for support. Other mothers are resorting to sex work. Jenny, from Manchester, said: ‘Benefits don’t cover the cost of gas, electricity and water rates. That’s why I go out. If they cut benefits there’ll be more of us out there facing arrest and violence.’

Contact 020 7482 2496 / smsd@allwomencount.net

Feminist parenting

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:27:35 +0000

1 Integrate

Feminists should confront all forms of oppression, exploitation and hierarchy. Parents, carers and children are often marginalised and discriminated against, even in radical political organising. Insist that childcare is provided at every event. Understand that ‘mothering’, ‘parenting’ and ‘childrearing’ have different connotations: the next generation needs people of all genders, races, classes, sexualities, ages and abilities to help it develop healthy attitudes to life. Involve children and treat them as equals worthy of respect.

2 Bin the box

Television only makes the gender divide worse. As a compromise, try using the set just to watch videos or DVDs. Until your kids are old enough to sneak in Ben 10 box sets under their jumpers, you can more or less censor what gets played, without any annoying adverts. However, if the electronic babysitter is your lifeline to parental sanity, then keep it on. TV provides a parent with a wealth of material that highlights the inequalities in society – and therefore gives lots of opportunities to talk constructively about the realities of patriarchy with your child.

3 Be honest

You may try to kid yourself that the media and peer pressure are the biggest influences on your child, but actually it’s you! The main parent or carer is a child’s most influential role-model. Are you sexist, racist, homophobic? What, not even a little bit? Children can subconsciously absorb even the most subtle of parental behaviours. It’s okay to make mistakes – no one is perfect. But it’s important to deconstruct our own words, actions and attitudes to ensure that we don’t inadvertently pass our own prejudices onto our children. Be honest with yourself and your kids. Talk openly about sex, relationships and sexuality. Encourage children to freely express all of their emotions – no matter how painful they are.

4 Express yourself

Creatively expressing the often intense feelings that come with parenthood can be a great emotional release – whether through art, writing, music or dance. Bringing up children can seem like a lonely business at times, but there are lots of parenting blogs, networks, groups and resources out there. If it’s more anger management therapy you need, then try this: find a magazine photo of the latest yummy-mummy female celebrity, stick it onto on a dartboard and get throwing those arrows! You will begin to see the cracks appear in the smooth airbrushed image of maternal perfection … and feel a devilish sense of satisfaction.

5 Research the issues

Research the many conflicting feminist and parenting schools of thought. Natural parenting options may work for some, but others argue that it’s pushing more burdens upon the mother. For example, using washable nappies isn’t only the eco-option, it also increases parental autonomy and challenges the capitalist-consumption machine. But what about the extra housework that washable nappies can bring? Will it really be shared equally among family members? Work out what’s best for you and your family – a critical factor of feminist parenting is to stop pretending we are perfect parents.

6 Pick your battles

Constantly nagging your kids to over-analyse sexist books or toys will only push them further into the open arms of Mattel and co. Sometimes it’s best to accept minor defeat, in exchange for fostering a closer, mutually respectful parent-child relationship. Finding other ways to help build a child’s self-esteem or emotional intelligence may be more important in the long-run than bickering over Barbie.

7 Develop emergency tactics

As a last resort, when all else has failed and you find yourself in the depths of a feminist parenting emergency, nonviolent direct action can be deployed. Don’t be afraid to discretely dispose of the Action Man machine gun given by Uncle Bobby last Christmas, or the Bratz bikini set for your four-year-old from your so-called best mate. However, donating an offending item to a charity shop is only dumping the burden onto others!

8 Self-organise

Set up a childcare or home education collective, together with parents or friends who have similar ideals. Providing your own curriculum can be empowering for both adult and child, and give you much needed support. Or start a feminist children’s book club and swap revolutionary bedtime stories.

9 Raise some hell

Getting involved in activism is the best thing a feminist parent can do. If we want our children to live in a world free from oppression, then we need to actively work towards creating a world that is freer and fairer. Parents and carers will continue to be marginalised until we get out there, with our kids, to demand and organise for change. Set a good example. Show your children that they are worth fighting for, and instil in them the courage and confidence to stand up for themselves and their future.

Visit feministchildrearing.blogspot.com for links to related resources

Do you remember Olive Morris?

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:24:19 +0000

In 2006, while researching the history of black British activism at Peckham library, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre came across a photo from a Black Panther demonstration at Coldharbour Lane in Brixton. Within a crowd of men, the image captured a barefoot woman, fag in hand, holding a placard that commanded ‘Black Sufferer Fight Police Pig Brutality’. That mesmerising figure was Olive Morris: the memorial name also given to the housing benefit office Lopez de la Torre had dealt with after moving to Brixton from Uruguay.

Intrigued by the convergence, Lopez de la Torre turned to Google. ‘I went online and there was nothing about her. And then I went to libraries and archives and there was nothing about her there either.’

Lambeth Archives hadn’t anything on file on Morris, but the staff there knew of her and put Lopez de la Torre in touch with Liz Obi, a close friend of Morris who had organised a Remembering Olive exhibition back in 2000.

Obi started filling Lopez de la Torre in. Before her death in 1979, Morris had been involved in the squatters’ movement, the British Black Panthers, and the black women’s movement – co-founding the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent. But what Obi remembered most was the bangles and bicycle that always accompanied Morris and the lesson she had taught her: never to be afraid of anything.

The two women began collecting and consolidating materials relating to Morris – college essays, correspondence with community organisations, albums of personal pictures, notes of condolence after her death (the artefacts are now housed in Lambeth Archives). Together they also founded the inter-generational Remembering Olive Collective (ROC) in 2008.

‘She wasn’t someone who was famous in the sense of leaders,’ explains Lopez de la Torre of the need to chronicle Olive’s life. ‘She also died very young, at 27. Maybe she would have become an MP or an academic or been able to produce some more permanent form of documentation, but she was really a grass-roots activist.’

Collective portrait

Lopez de la Torre set up the blog Do You Remember Olive Morris? as the public face of the project in 2007. Its purpose was to create ‘a collective portrait of Olive Morris’, blending oral histories with information about the political currents of the time, encouraging people who knew Olive to also get in touch. Monthly meetings with the all-female collective followed soon after.

Through gathering information and testimony about Morris, ROC created grass-roots histories that honoured connections, creativity and participation – even if it also meant bending the rules of laying down history proper. ‘History is a discipline that is very structured, that has all these laws,’ Lopez de la Torre explains. ‘But a lot of community groups are being trained in these things. Where before oral history would be done by proper oral historians, now it’s done by all those wannabe oral historians who did a couple of days training and are going in there and completely mongrelising oral history. I’m all for it!’

There is a strong need to recuperate activist histories. In a book published by the collective last year, Obi warns that ‘Olive was part of a black youth movement that had developed in Britain in the 1970s, a generation that had fought against racism of the state and society but whose contribution seemed to have been lost somewhere between the Windrush arrivals and the 1981 riots.’ Following Obi, the publication’s title Do You Remember Olive Morris? begins to take on another angle: if you don’t remember Olive, why not?

The fact that grass-roots histories are so poorly remembered – especially those of women, people of colour, those disenfranchised or living in poverty – is no simple accident. Propping up the status quo with selective examples of the past feeds assumptions that change only happens periodically, in ways that can be marked and contained by state-sanctioned memorials or anniversaries.

These narratives also naturalise the power relations of dominant groups: our collective cultural memory consistently fails to highlight continuous, linked up, grass-roots struggles for social change. Ditto to facilitating the transference of political experience or understanding the contours of colonialism and imperialism, for example. That many people do not remember Olive Morris – have never even heard of her – means that they cannot build on her strength or learn from her successes.

Activist strategy

Reclaiming radical histories has long been an activist strategy – from the self-publicising of the Women’s Social and Political Union to the inner city oral history projects that Lopez de la Torre is involved in today. To legitimate people’s lives as a form of history is a powerful form of activism; to document activist history is to create a toolkit for the future.

But there are limits to using new media to create these kinds of political archives. Lopez de La Torre notes, ‘Lots of people I work with have little internet access or struggle to even read emails. There is a lot of emphasis on the futuristic vision that technology is going to make everything wonderful and it’s about all these voices, and it’s really not. It’s still pretty much a monoculture of people who are educated and have the technology.’

The ROC project has had many successes through the blog, however. A major victory was ensuring that the plaque and photo of Olive that had been taken down during a refurbishment of Olive Morris House was reinstated – a long and frustrating process that came to fruition after two years of campaigning. Thanks to the collective, the council’s commemoration also filled out to include a small window display in the building and a dedicated web page.

‘I think it’s interesting how histories have been deactivated and have to be started all over again,’ Lopez de La Torre observes. Just don’t call the process empowering. ‘I hate that word, empowerment. It’s very heroic. All the women who were part of the ROC collective were strong, independent women already involved in community activism. But we brought everything to another level.’

With a collectively produced book, blog, range of community events and deposited archive materials, Olive Morris’s legacy shines on fierce and strong, helping to disrupt the silence and invisibility surrounding black British feminist history. Much can be learnt from the celebration and struggles of Morris, whose fight and example remains current to life in the UK and beyond today.

Red Chidgey is a DIY feminist historian. As part of her PhD on feminist media and cultural memory, she is looking for people with experience or knowledge about feminist media projects from the late 1960s till now.

Her research blog is feministmemory.wordpress.com

ROC: rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com

The militarised zone

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:19:11 +0000

In academic-speak a definition of militarism might run something like this: the stretching of the military into civilian spheres – culture, education, the family, politics, public space – such that militaristic presumptions become normalised and military functions, such as war, are facilitated. But it’s Or Ben-David, a 19-year-old Israeli woman, jailed three times for her refusal to serve in the army, who provides my favourite example when she ends her list of the militarisation of her life – ‘commercials, an old school book with soldiers in, my mother singing old songs of the partisans and Eretz Israel …’ – by exclaiming: ‘My underwears are army underwears!’

There was a time when such a list would never have occurred to her. It was only after getting involved in New Profile’s youth group that she began to notice these things, to understand how the military had saturated the civilian realm.

New Profile (NP) was established just over a decade ago as the first Israeli political group with demilitarisation as its top priority. Its two main areas of work are around military enlistment – encouraging young people to think before enlisting and supporting those who decide to refuse – and educating about militarism. A current travelling exhibition features images alongside questions that expose militarism. There is a photo of a roundabout in Be’er Sheva. At its centre is a fighter jet; one of a number the previous mayor had chosen to decorate his city with. The text alongside asks: ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’

Long-time NP member Diana Dolev explains the importance of her work on the education team: ‘If you speak to people in Israel, Jews in Israel, and you point out that we are a militarised society, they’re shocked, they say “We, militarised?” It’s so much a part of our everyday life that we can’t see it … militarised mindsets are so deep rooted; it is like part of us.’

Her point is proved on the bus journey to my next NP interview when a conscript, surprised by my accent, asks where I am going (he proudly tells me he is visiting the hospital for an injury incurred in military service, before sheepishly elaborating that it is RSI from excessive computer use). I describe NP, showing him their leaflets. His reaction is a mixture of amusement, confusion and disbelief.

He completely rejects the idea of even asking ‘Should I enlist?’ and that the militarisation of Israeli society could be a topic of discussion. He also refuses to accept what I tell him a friend of mine reported from the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza: thousands of chickens systematically bulldozed.

‘But he was there, he saw it with his own eyes, he took photos.’

‘No, that didn’t happen,’ he laughs. As with his reaction to NP, he completely identifies with the military; the military is unquestionable and always right. His is a militarised mindset.

Even a picnic basket

Similarly, the militarisation of everyday life, especially family life, takes on a habitual, unquestioned character, while being essential to the functioning of the army. Cynthia Enloe, a feminist international relations theorist, writes that even ‘making up a picnic basket can be militarised if it is packed with the intention of keeping up the morale of a soldier.’

Michal Gelbart talks me through the NP exhibition, which she helped put together. One of the pictures is an advert for bread yeast, with a mother and son and text that reads: ‘When my boy is home on his ordinary leave, he deserves extraordinary pastry.’

‘The mother is mobilised, we are all the time, from when they are small,’ she elaborates. ‘You go after them everywhere and you bring the schnitzels and all kinds of food. Now I’m aware of being mobilised, the whole society is mobilised around it.’

If militarism sustains the occupation and war, demilitarisation becomes an important anti-occupation and anti-war strategy. But for NP it is also distinctly feminist. While strains of Israeli feminism promote women’s enthusiastic entry and achievement in the military as demonstrative of their equal worth and as a path to societal equality, there is a more inclusive feminism present in NP.

‘When I told my mother I was going to resist the draft because I’m a feminist, she said, “If you’re a feminist, go be a fighter pilot,”‘ writes Shani Werner, another NP activist. ‘People tend to see feminism as an attempt to prove that “we can do it too”. They don’t get the message that means the most to me: feminism is a struggle against oppression. All oppression.’

‘It’s about demilitarising Israeli society in order to end the occupation but also to stop doing all the other terrible things that we do to our own citizens,’ Ruth Hiller, NP co-founder, tells me. ‘We don’t provide equality for women, Mizrahim [Jews of Middle Eastern descent], Ethiopian citizens, the Arab population, the handicapped …’

Much of that inequality stems from the unchallenged centrality of the military in Israeli society; the military is the institution through which you earn power and economic opportunity in civilian spheres. And since able-bodied, Ashkenazi (Jews of European descent) men dominate the combat units, home to the most valued roles in the army, they also dominate Israeli society.

The vision of feminist-as-fighter-pilot is not a solution, Orna Sasson-Levy of Bar Ilan University emphasises: ‘What I find in my research is that even when the army is trying to create an equal-opportunity environment, the culture is so gendered, so masculine that women cannot achieve an equal place without completely co-operating with its chauvinistic structure and reproducing it in their behaviour towards other women.’

‘When we’re talking about militarised, we’re also talking about patriarchal,’ Ruth Hiller argues. ‘Women do not have the same kind of input or the same sort of influence on society. Who are our prime ministers, who are our ministers? How many of them are from the military, how many of them are commanding officers? Why is it that in this country that has 51 per cent of the population women there are not even 30 Knesset [Israeli parliament] women?’

Something among men

Diana Dolev recounts to me a lunch with friends shortly after the attack on Gaza. She told them she had been against it right from the beginning. Her host said that was nonsense, everybody was for it in the first few days and then turned to her husband and started talking about the rights and wrongs of the attack. ‘It was like I didn’t exist because what I have to say is not as important. I see this happening all the time – war matters and high politics, that’s something among men, they understand better.’

‘The military creates a mindset where women are worth less,’ she concludes. Michal Gelbart had noted to me that it’s never a female soldier or a daughter who ‘deserves an extraordinary pastry’. The worth-less mindset also translates into lower pay for the same work and fewer opportunities for highly paid, high-status professions.

Hiller believes that soldiers in the occupied West Bank don’t leave their aggression at the checkpoint; they bring it back home. Indeed, when I explain to Or Ben-David that that my militarism article will be focused on women, she leans across the table, wide-eyed and animated: ‘I want to tell you about the women I met in [military] prison … There was one woman who had been in the jail for two months and didn’t want to leave; her boyfriend had beaten her for four years. I don’t know if you can really blame it on the army … but it is, it is the army.’

‘A militarised society altogether believes in force,’ Dolev says. ‘The first idea that comes into people’s heads of how to solve a problem is by force, no negotiating, no listening to the other side – no, you solve things by force. You see this everywhere in Israel.’

She admits that the process of educating a society into demilitarisation will be difficult and slow going, but she and New Profile believe it is possible. As Cynthia Enloe put it, ‘The world is something that has been made; therefore it can be remade.’

Mind the gap

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:58:29 +0000

The UK’s oldest equal pay law was guided through parliament by Barbara Castle as one of the last acts of the outgoing Labour government in 1970. The then employment minister had been angered into championing the legislation following a walk-out by women sewing machinists at the Ford car plant in Dagenham a couple of years earlier. They had discovered that men doing the same work as them, making car seats for Cortinas and Zephyrs, were being paid 15 per cent more.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 finally came into force under another Labour government on 29 December 1975, with employers having been given the intervening period to adjust to its provisions. For many of them, though, not even 40 years has been enough, and overall the gender pay gap remains a gaping chasm. The Fawcett Society reckons that women working full time earn on average 17 per cent less than men, while part-time women workers earn 37 per cent less. Some of the worst offenders are public sector employers: the public service union Unison is currently representing some 40,000 low-paid women in equal-pay claims.

In April another piece of landmark anti-discrimination legislation entered the statute books. The Equality Bill finally became law in the ‘wash-up’ of bills passed in the dying days of the last parliament, pushed forward by another Labour champion of women’s rights, Harriet Harman. The much-anticipated new legislation was seen as an opportunity to address some of the deficiencies of the earlier law that was struggling to deliver on the promise of its title.

Taking notice

‘Nobody takes any notice of the Equal Pay Act. The simple truth is there’s never enough money,’ says Sue (not her real name), a 53-year-old home care worker. For almost two decades Sue has worked for Cumbria County Council helping the old and vulnerable in their homes. She is one of 1,600 low-paid women to have pursued equal-pay claims against the council through Unison. She recently received more than £30,000 in compensation.

While happy with the pay-out, Sue makes the point that the sum doesn’t represent ‘equal pay’. If there was genuine equality with her male council workers, how much should she have been paid? ‘Double that,’ she reckons, adding that her union had to fight ‘tooth and nail’ on her behalf to get her what she did receive.

Does Sue feel that the Equal Pay Act has made life any fairer? ‘Not really. My feeling is the council gets away with what they can. They know they have a group of women like us, loyal and who want to do their best for the vulnerable in the community, and who are for those reasons unwilling to strike. They take us for granted. We still don’t get paid time-and-a-half or double-time like the mainly male workers whose jobs have been contracted out.’

Although the first equal pay legislation took effect in 1975, it wasn’t until 1995 that legal action by Cleveland ‘dinner ladies’ kick-started a wave of settlements and equal-pay cases being brought through the courts. In the Cleveland case 1,500 women shared a £5 million payout. After that, the 1997 ‘single status agreement’ was constructed to abolish pay inequalities through pay and grading reviews in each local authority. A similar agreement in the NHS called ‘Agenda for Change’ was reached in 2004. But as negotiations dragged on interminably and councils pleaded poverty, women turned to lawyers because they felt their claims were either being stalled or under-settled.

Good business for lawyers

There is no legal aid for cases involving employment tribunals but lawyers took numerous equal-pay cases on ‘no win, no fee’ deals. It proved a lucrative income stream, with lawyers sometimes taking 30 per cent of any payouts – and it was growing fast. In 2003 such cases comprised less than 1 per cent of business dealt with in employment tribunals. Within five years, though, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was warning that equal-pay cases could ‘crash’ the courts, with as many as 150,000 women entitled to compensation from local authorities and the NHS. The Equal Pay Act was ‘past its sell-by date’, said Trevor Phillips, chairman of the EHRC.

Much of the ire of a coalition of equality campaigners, trade unionists and politicians was directed at Stefan Cross, a Newcastle-based solicitor, who acted for tens of thousands of low-paid women. ‘What he’s doing could mean that industrial relations in this country will be torn up,’ Brian Strutton, a leading official of the 600,000-strong GMB union, told the press. ‘It will be good for lawyers, but millions of people won’t have a union which can represent them.’

By contrast Cross, a former union lawyer who acted for the Cleveland dinner ladies, accused his former comrades of selling out their women members. Speaking to Cross earlier this year, I asked him how he responded to accusations that he was trashing the negotiations between unions and employers by pursuing individual cases in this way. ‘Total tosh,’ he replied, arguing that the ‘fact of the matter’ was that the unions were ‘neglecting their role’.

‘The men get preferential treatment to the women even in the new arrangements,’ he insisted. ‘The women’s interests get sidelined. The trade unions speak with forked tongue on these issues. They claim to espouse issues to do with equality – however, they seek to protect the status quo.’

The appeal judges seemed to agree with Cross, who still acts for 30,000 low-paid women, in a crucial case that came before them in 2008. They upheld an employment tribunal’s finding that the GMB union ‘rushed headlong’ into an ‘ill-considered back-pay deal’ in one case (Allen v GMB) and ‘accepted too readily the council’s plea of poverty’. The judges agreed that the GMB had indirectly discriminated against 26 female workers who had been paid less than their male counterparts when agreeing backdated pay deals. In that case, home carers (a female-dominated job) were on £5.88 an hour whereas a gardener on the same grade (a male-dominated job) was on £8.23 due to a 40 per cent bonus.

Some critics say that statistics measuring the gender gap between men and women are a hopelessly crude measure of progress, not least because they ignore the decision by women to choose lower paid jobs because such roles better suit their lives. The Fawcett Society disagrees, arguing instead that the main reason for the gap is explained by ‘paying women less than men for doing the same jobs or work of equal values’. The other big reasons are what they call the ‘motherhood penalty’ and the undervaluing of traditional ‘women’s work’, such as cleaning, catering and caring.

Problem with the Act

So will the Equality Act narrow the gap? ‘There are measures that will highlight the issues of equal pay but they won’t deal with the systemic problems of equal pay,’ says Unison’s legal director, Bronwyn McKenna. For example, the new legislation will promote transparency and will require public sector bodies with 150 or more staff to publish their gender pay gap and require the same of private and voluntary sector employers with at least 250 employees. ‘So that would leave about 40 per cent of the workforce not covered,’ she notes. It will also ban pay-secrecy clauses which effectively conceal inequality.

‘Our main problem [with the Act] is with the underlying legal framework, which means that cases just run for an inordinately long amount of time,’ says McKenna. ‘There is huge scope for tactical or time-delaying approaches, which the other side is going to throw at you and which you know aren’t going to succeed.’

She points to a recent successful case on behalf of women working with special needs children, care workers and dinner ladies in Sheffield. They claimed that they had not received bonuses that were being paid to their male comparators, street cleaning workers and gardeners, whose basic was 33.3 per cent and 38 per cent respectively higher than their pay. The women’s success this February also reveals the problem. ‘This case has been running for almost a decade,’ McKenna says. ‘There seems to be no limit to the amount of money that the public sector employer is prepared to throw at these cases.’