When we first ran the conference 18 years ago, we had no idea how discrimination law was going to expand. At that time all we had in place were sex and race discrimination laws dating back to the 1970s, with legislation to protect disabled people from discrimination in the workplace due to take effect later that year. Since then, we’ve seen discrimination based on a wider range of protected characteristics become unlawful (gender reassignment, sexual orientation, religion or belief and age) and the new bans on discrimination extend from just covering employment to apply to a much wider range of activities (though we still await the extension for age).

Let’s not forget either that it was in response to the institutional failure of the police and criminal justice system in dealing with the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 that the important step was taken of imposing a statutory duty on public bodies requiring them to take active steps to eliminate discrimination and promote equality in all that they do. This duty was recently extended to cover all the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010, a landmark piece of legislation bringing together all our disparate discrimination laws.

But after years of positive developments, the outlook for equality law looks bleak and the progress we have made threatens to go into reverse. This Government is shortly expected to announce its response to the Red Tape Challenge on equality – an exercise in which it actively sought views from businesses on what bits of the Equality Act should be scrapped. It has already decided not to commence some of the new progressive measures in the Act (e.g. the socio-economic duty on public bodies) and seems intent on repealing others (e.g. the protection it gives employees who suffer repeated racist, sexist, homophobic or other abuse from customers or service users).

But perhaps the greatest threat to progress is not from changes to the legal rights themselves (most of these are underpinned by EU law requirements) but to the practical realisation of them. Whilst we have good legal protection on paper, ensuring that this is the case in practice is another matter. Discrimination case law is notoriously complex and it is increasingly hard to point to that one smoking-gun statement or overtly discriminatory act. Bias is still there but it is hidden behind more palatable reasoning or is unconscious, often the result of apparently neutral policies and practices which on examination are found to unjustifiably disadvantage certain groups.

Even when discrimination claims are brought to tribunal, they are far from being good experiences for the victims, as various research has shown. For example, a study by the Institute of Employment Studies found that individuals who brought race discrimination claims found it a difficult experience, reported lasting negative effects, such as mental health problems, reduced income and difficulties in securing proper references and future employment. And despite, the very high awards reported in a few cases, such as in the ‘sexism and the City’ cases which reflect loss of earnings for very highly paid claimants, the median awards for most types of discrimination case last year were between £5,500 and £6,892.

The Government’s proposal to charge individuals for use of employment tribunals is the latest obstacle to be thrown in the path of victims seeking redress.  As discrimination cases are among the most complex cases to be heard by tribunals and the reasoning for introducing charges is that claimants should contribute towards the cost of hearing their cases, it is proposed that the charges for these cases should be higher than for others. Under the proposals, an individual would have to pay a minimum of £600 and possibly as much as £1,750 to get their case heard.

Some individuals will be able to claim a full remission for the fee. For a single person without children this will be the case if they have a gross annual income of £13,000 or less, which is around the minimum wage for a full-time job.  For someone in a couple the means test will be based on joint income (an £18,000 cut off if they don’t have children, higher if they do) which seems particularly inappropriate for a woman trying to pursue a sex discrimination claim – surely, the assessment should be based on her own income rather than her partner’s too?

Given the complexity of discrimination cases and the likelihood of employers using solicitors or barristers to robustly defend any accusation of discrimination, legal representation for individuals has always been advised – and this will be even more so if individuals do not want to waste the large sums of money they will have to pay to get their case heard – but for non-union members the sources of legal support are shrinking.

Last year the Government pulled the plug on the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s legal grants programme, which has funded specialist discrimination law workers in Race Equality Councils, Law Centres and Citizen’s Advice Bureaux up and down the country, and just before Christmas it announced it would not be making available any alternative source of public funding for these services.

The EHRC itself, whose statutory duty is to promote and ensure compliance with discrimination law, is facing huge budget cuts (60% by 2014-15) and it has been stripped of its helpline function which has provided expert advice to around 40,000 individuals a year. We also await the Government’s response to its consultation to revise the legislative basis of the EHRC. In the TUC’s view, the proposals for reform that were put forward would result in a further weakening of our statutory equality and human rights body and threaten its political independence (as a consequence it could lose its current A* rating as a National Human Rights Institution from the UN).

Over nearly two decades we’ve seen our legal framework for equality advance in ways we could not have foreseen back in 1995. Now we face the challenge of maintaining progress and keeping employers, businesses and public bodies focused on the need to provide equal employment opportunities and equal access to goods and services and public functions while the stick we hold behind our backs is shrinking.    

Health Protection Agency UK statistics show that 1 in 20 gay and bisexual men and approaching 1 in 20 black Africans are living with HIV. These are communities that already face discrimination and barriers to accessing services, but will also feel the impact of the current economic and political climate.   

The Government’s focus is on work as a route out of poverty. With high unemployment, finding a job is difficult enough for anybody at the moment.  HIV can add further hurdles relating to health and stigma and discrimination; approximately 50% of people living with HIV are unemployed. Recent welfare reforms have further complicated their situation, particularly the replacement if Incapacity Benefit with Employment Support Allowance. These difficulties will only increase as more people living with HIV try to return to work.

For those in work, it is not always easy. NAT’s employment research with City University found that 1 in 5 gay and bisexual men who had disclosed their HIV status at work had experienced discrimination, with 40% of this group thinking they had lost their previous job as a result of discrimination. Clearly trade unions have a vital role in supporting people living with HIV in the workplace. However it is not all bad news – more than half of respondents said HIV had no impact on their working lives, and improvements in treatment meant the majority of respondents had not taken any HIV-related time off in the past year.

Improvements in treatment have not been matched by improvements in public awareness. Last year NAT commissioned Ipsos MORI to conduct a survey looking at public attitudes to HIV in the UK. Three decades on, knowledge about HIV is still worryingly low among the general public.

The survey found that one in five people don’t realise HIV is transmitted through sex without a condom between a man and a woman. The same proportion did not know that HIV is passed on through sex without a condom between two men.  To mark World AIDS Day this year NAT is asking everyone to ‘ACT aware’ and find out more about HIV. To find out more visit: www.worldaidsday.org

25 Nov: UN Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

Today, 25th November, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and it seems a fitting moment to ask the government to reaffirm its commitment to eradicating violence against women with a very tangible, and rather overdue, step. We’ve chosen today to start a petition urging the government to sign up to the Council of Europe convention on combating and preventing violence against women and domestic violence (the convention is known as CAHVIO).

Now, the UK has a comparatively good track record on initiatives to end violence against women and girls (VAWG) – leaving aside recent retrograde steps such as cuts to local authority funding of refuges and other VAWG services and the disastrous Legal Aid reforms which will leave women fleeing domestic violence with no access to justice unless they can afford to pay. Compared to many parts of the world where violence against women is tolerated or even sanctioned by the state, the UK has taken many steps over the years to attempt to eradicate violence against women and girls.

In its report to CEDAW (the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) earlier this year, the government made much not only of its efforts to eliminate violence in the UK but also its overseas work, through DFID and FCO, to tackle issues such as female genital mutilation and “honour” based violence.

It’s also worth noting that earlier this month the UK assumed the Chair of the Council of Europe. So we have a leadership role. Presumably we should be leading by example.

So when the Council of Europe opened a new convention to combat violence against women in May this year, you’d think the government would be falling over themselves to sign up.  What could be easier than signing up to a convention that doesn’t really ask you to anything more than what you’re already doing? William Hague was at the front of the queue, biro in hand, ready to sign on the dotted line, right? Wrong. Shamefully, seventeen member states signed but the UK government has not.

The purposes of the Convention are to:

a)   protect women against all forms of violence, and prevent, prosecute and eliminate violence against women and domestic violence;

b)   contribute to the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and promote substantive equality between women and men, including by empowering women;

c)   design a comprehensive framework, policies and measures for the protection of and assistance to all victims of violence against women and domestic violence;

d)   promote international co-operation with a view to eliminating violence against women and domestic violence;

e)   provide support and assistance to organisations and law enforcement agencies to effectively co-operate in order to adopt an integrated approach to eliminating violence against women and domestic violence.

These are all things that we should be able to get behind. In fact, these are all things that we claim to be doing. We’re doing so well at them that whenever a government minister gets an awkward question about how the cuts and other government policies are affecting women, the usual defense is to point to the government’s VAWG strategy as an example of all the positive steps the government has taken to improve women’s lives.

If this is one area that the government can be truly proud of, their reluctance to sign up to CAHVIO is puzzling.

By not signing the convention (CAHVIO), the UK government is sending a signal that violence against women – nationally and internationally – is not a priority.

Please sign the petition and demand that the government acts now on violence against women and girls, both in the UK and overseas.

For more information about the Convention and other signatories, see the Council of Europe website.

Importantly, the conference aims to build alliances between the voluntary sector and trade unions. This isn’t about listing the many (and they really are many) ways in which the government’s swingeing cuts programme has disproportionately affected different equality groups. It’s about sharing knowledge, expertise, and experience and identifying campaigning and organising strategies.

As well as two plenary sessions and workshops on welfare reform, health and social care, pensions, further and higher education, contracting out of services,access to justice, and using the equality duty to challenge cuts, the conference will also see the launch of a new TUC publication on the gender impact of the cuts. The Women and Cuts Toolkit follows on from the success of the Coventry Women’s Voices report called Unravelling Equality earlier this year which compiled data on the gender impact of cuts and welfare reform in Coventry. As well as providing data and sources of further information on the national gender impact of the cuts, the toolkit acts as a step-by-step “how to” guide to compiling a report on the gender impact of cuts in any given region or sector. 

There will be a live webcast of the main plenary sessions of the Equality Deficit conference starting at 09:45.

Today, the Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality, Theresa May, in a speech on ‘Women and the Economy’ launched two new initiatives to boost women’s role in the economy: the creation of 5,000 volunteer mentors to help budding women entrepreneurs and the establishment of a Women’s Business Council.

The Women’s Business Council will be a small group of business women who will provide advice to the Home Secretary, the Chancellor and to the Business Secretary “on what we can do to maximise women’s contribution to our future economic growth”. It will give recommendations on “public policy that affects women in business and will seek to improve the business environment for women so as to maximise profit and success”.

It is welcome that the Government has recognised that women’s needs are not always met or adequately represented within the business community or within the corridors of economic power. But the announcement today of the Women’s Business Council just brought home what a tragedy it was to close the Women’s National Commission.

This time last year, the Government Equalities Office announced that the WNC would be closing. For over 40 years it had been the independent, direct voice of women to Government. But without any consultation with the women it represented, the decision was taken to close it as part of the Government’s bonfire of the quangos.

The WNC had over 670 partners from the UK’s women’s sector and from organisations seeking to promote women’s equality. It represented the voices of around 8 million women and addressed issues as diverse as tackling violence against women, supporting women into leadership positions and providing a voice for widows, minority ethnic women and those seeking asylum. It had a proven track record in reaching out to some of the most marginalised groups of women who really struggled to have their voices heard by politicians and policymakers.

The contrast between the WNC and the work it did and the creation of a group of ten or so, no doubt highly successful business women, providing advice on how to improve the environment business women so as to maximise profit and success is stark.

Alongside Theresa May’s announcements today, the GEO did publish the results of its consultation “Strengthening Women’s Voices”. This is the consultation it has carried out so “women’s voices could be brought to the heart of Government” in the absence of the WNC. The response promises the continuation of GEO’s “Women’s Engagement Newsletter”, outreach events for women, and online and digital engagement with women. At first glance, this doesn’t appear to be a near adequate replacement to make up for the loss of a permanent body and independent voice within Government representing the full range of women’s voices, including the most excluded.

I know nothing of Mr Beecroft’s background but I wonder how much he really understands the daily practices of people managers. It seems he wants to get rid of the right to bring a claim for unfair dismissal, introducing instead a basic no fault dismissal law in which individuals dismissed through lack of performance would receive the equivalent of a redundancy payment.

The right to bring a claim for unfair dismissal was introduced following the 1968 Donovan report on trade unions and employers associations and was an element of the 1971 Industrial Relations Act introduced by the then Conservative Government under Sir Edward Heath.

Something simply had to be done to address the widespread capricious use of ‘the sack’ which was an irritant giving rise to many unofficial strikes and stoppages of work. The right to complain of unfair dismissal is underwritten in conventions of the International Labour Office.

As matters stand, capability and performance are among the fair reasons for dismissal. An employer wishing to dismiss an employee for incompetence or just not working hard enough may do so. The only restraint is that they have to follow a fair procedure, giving adequate warnings and allowing the individual to have a hearing, etc.

So unless he is suggesting an end to these procedural rules too, there might be little practical change from Beecroft’s proposals that would represent any real ‘gain’ for the employer who wishes to fire someone. Denial of a fair hearing would probably amount to wrongful dismissal, a different concept, and could give rise to legal claims in the county court.

Compensating individuals (perhaps after many years service) by giving them basic state redundancy pay – nowadays much reduced in value – would be sure to provoke an indignant response among employees. Beecroft’s idea would seem to be designed to cut costs but it would probably lay the basis for endless negotiations with legal representatives and unions on acceptable pay off levels that would probably end up using existing unfair dismissal compensation as a benchmark.

Beecroft’s changes might invite employers with ‘a thing’ about declining performance and age to revert to the now outlawed default retirement age. The other side to the coin, however, would be that anyone who wished to challenge a dismissal would look to whether or not they could bring a claim of discriminatory dismissal on grounds of age, gender, sexual orientation or whatever.

One consequence of this would be that cases would be hard fought, with the bar for costs and compensation levels at the far higher ‘no limits’ levels that apply in discrimination claims. Many would be settled out of court but the stakes might well be higher than they are at present where the issues are simpler and less inflammatory than an accusation of discrimination.

So long as there are rights of one sort or another to bring complaints of unfairness, it is natural that people will look hard to see if their case fits. Rather than delving into histories of bickering and poor relationships (forgotten skeletons in dark cupboards) it would be better to leave well alone in my view.

Beecroft’s view of managers exercising their responsibilities for managing performance is worrying. (I wonder what his evidence is that large numbers of people are backsliding and idling away the hours in the way he implies?)

If his picture resembles the truth, it is surely important to introduce more responsibility and professionalism among managers to manage performance, talk to their employees and ensure that round pegs are in round holes.

Such elementary approaches are surely preferable to stripping away the basic rights of employees to a fair hearing and, at the end of a very long road, a statutory right to complain of unfairness.

But were Beecroft’s ideas to gain acceptance, look out for a spike of complaints of age discrimination. In the US, where there are no rights to complain of unfair dismissal, age discrimination claims are soaring. Is this the future we have to look forward to? I really hope not.

So far, so good. Acknowledging that government policies may not be going down well with women is a good starting point. Where the author of the leaked memo starts to go wrong though is when possible remedies are suggested.

Suggestions such as giving women “personal budgets” for maternity care to “force the pace on choice in maternity” are ill-conceived (no pun intended). With maternity units closing up and down the country and a chronic shortage of midwives, women’s choices in maternity care are dwindling. Personal budgets will do nothing to reverse this.

A personal budget is no use to a woman whose local maternity units have all closed and who has no option but to give birth at a hospital miles from home with too few midwives to ensure the level of care she needs. A personal budget will not afford any more choice to a woman who wants to give birth in a midwife led unit but, due to NHS cuts, only has access to a hospital with an understaffed maternity ward.

David Cameron made a pre-election pledge to recruit an extra 3,000 midwives. Implementing that pledge would do more for women’s “choice in maternity”, let alone maternal mortality rates, than a cash handout.

There is also a suggestion that a website for women to anonymously disclose pay would be a step forward for equal pay.  Surely what we need is for more employers to disclose and monitor progress on equal pay, rather than individual employees having to work it out for themselves based on anonymous testimonies on a website?

What is really striking amongst the blue-sky suggestions – which range from the sensible to the half-baked – is the gulf between the government’s understanding of the issues that matter to women and the reality.

If the motions to the TUC’s women’s conference and TUC Congress are any indicator of what working women want, the coalition would do well to look at some alternative strategies for winning women’s votes. How about defending abortion rights, halting the savage cuts to public sector jobs, ringfencing Sure Start funding, increasing the childcare element of tax credits, committing more funding to ending violence against women and girls, safeguarding the NHS, strengthening, rather than weakening employment rights and equality legislation?

This is the kind of “blue sky thinking” that might win a few women’s votes.

After school clubs for kids, Christmas lunches for old people, wheelchair loan services, sexual health advisory services, meals on wheels, support services for disabled children, all axed. Welcome to the Big Society.

I was particularly taken aback by the number of women’s sector organisations and violence against women and girls (VAWG) services that have faced cuts.

I’ve blogged before on the closure of rape crisis centres  and cuts to VAWG services. Today the TUC, End Violence Against Women, and the Women’s Resource Centre released a joint statement highlighting the number of VAWG services facing funding cuts.

As Vivienne Hayes, Chief Executive of the Women’s Resource Centre, explained,

“Women’s organisations provide some of the most cost effective services across the UK for women and families in need. They have also long been grievously underfunded, and seeing these figures shows all too starkly the terrible impact these cuts are having on such vital services.”

Holly Dustin, Director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, pointed out that funding for many of these services was inadequate even before Local Authorities started cutting in earnest. She said,

“We already have very patchy provision of these essential services and by cutting funding to existing services, or withdrawing it altogether, Councils are leaving women high and dry at a time when they most need support to escape violence and rebuild their lives. Violence against women support services are not a luxury that can only be afforded in good economic times, they are core services that all women should have access to no matter where they live.”

The scale of the cuts to the VAWG sector will no doubt come as a surprise to the Equalities Minister, Lynne Featherstone, who just last week boasted that the coalition is doing more than Labour did to protect VAWG services. She said,

“If you look at rape support, under Labour two centres a year were closing. We are going to open four this year. Even in this age of austerity, we’ve ringfenced money for those sort of things.”

Sixty four of the cuts listed in the False Economy research are categorised as “Domestic Violence and sexual abuse”. However, there are others that offer VAWG services which fall into different categories. For example, the Pakistani Women’s Welfare Association in Waltham Forest offers advice and information on domestic violence but falls into the “Community” category.  Eaves, an organisation that offers VAWG services, is categorised as a “Housing” organisation.

This isn’t a criticism of the data – it’s simply a reflection of the fact that VAWG is a cross-cutting issue which has wide reaching implications for both individuals and society. Cuts to housing, policing, courts services, advice services, and Legal Aid – as well specialist VAWG services such as rape crisis centres and domestic violence refuges – will combine to create sometimes insurmountable hurdles to any woman fleeing violence.

There’s sometimes a terrible fatalism about inequality – most people agree that Britain is unequal and that this is a problem, but many believe that  this  is inevitable. This sense that nothing can be done about inequality is encouraged by Ministers who like to emphasise the large sums spent by the last government, and then add “but it didn’t do any good.”

A good example was Iain Duncan Smith’s statement response last week to the annual Households Below Average Income report, when he made a point of the ”astonishing £150 billion injected into tax credits alone.”

But benefits and tax credits and the taxes that pay for them do make a difference to inequality – a massive difference. Today the Office for National Statistics published their annual report on The Effect of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income. This looks at the distribution of income before and after taxes and spending, looking at patterns of original, gross, disposable, post-tax and final income. Their summary of the figures includes a very useful diagram to show what these terms mean:

At each stage of this process this system reduces the level of inequality. If we look at original income – roughly, what you’d have if we didn’t have any taxes, benefits or services –  the poorest fifth of people had an average income in 2009/10 of £4,847 while the richest fifth had £77,896.

If you look at disposable income – how much money you’ve got to spend – the poorest had £10,535, the richest had £60,388.

And if you look at final income – roughly speaking, taking into account how much you’d have spend on the public services you use – the poorest have £15,125, the richest £58,070.

In other words, this country would be about four times as unequal without taxes and benefits:

There’s two really important lessons we ought to take from these figures. One is that fatalism about inequality is really an expression of ignorance: we already do a great deal to equalise incomes. The other is that if we want to do more, there are instruments to hand and we already know they work.

So what did he say that was wrong? In case you missed the furore today, I’ll briefly recap. Kenneth Clarke was asked about plea bargaining plans on Radio 5 Live this morning. In the course of the interview, in a discussion about sentencing and tariffs, the Justice Secretary shared his rather troubling views on rape. He said:

“[Rape] includes date rape and 17 year-olds having intercourse. Serious rape, I don’t think many judges give five years for a forcible rape, frankly, the tariff is longer for that and a serious rape where there’s violence and an unwilling woman, the tariff’s much longer than that.”

In fact, the hapless Mr Clarke has, in his attempts to extricate himself from this mess today, made many other objectionable and questionable statements on the subject of rape. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on the quote above.

Let’s start at the beginning.

1. Rape does include date rape. Women are in fact most likely to be sexually attacked by men they know in some way, most often partners or acquaintances. This in no way diminishes the seriousness of the crime or the devastating effect that it can have on the victim’s life.
2. Rape does not, as far as I know, include consensual sex between teenagers over the age of 17. I should qualify this by saying that I’m not a lawyer (worryingly, Kenneth Clarke is) but from what I can glean from the Sex Offences Act of 2003, I understand that although this might constitute an offence under the Act, it does not constitute rape unless it is non-consensual or one party is under the age of 13.
3. Rape is serious. There is no category of “serious rape” as opposed to some less “serious”, unimportant type of rape.
4. By definition rape involves “an unwilling woman”. The act itself is violent. The degree of physical violence and assault may vary but there is no such thing as rape with a willing woman. I believe that’s what’s known in common parlance as “sex“.

To hear someone in a position of power perpetuating such cliched and harmful old rape myths is worrying in itself. The fact that the person in question is the Justice Secretary is truly alarming.

Liz Kelly of End Violence Against Women summed it up nicely when she said today:

“The Justice Secretary’s comments appear to trivialise the seriousness of rape and are in conflict with the Government’s own Violence Against Women Strategy which seeks to tackle attitudes that condone sexual violence, and to improve the criminal justice system’s response to rape.

“The facts are that around 60,000 women are raped in Britain every year – the majority by partners or men they know – and only a tiny fraction, around one in ten, report it to the police. Of these few cases, less than 7% result in conviction.

“We want to see more perpetrators brought to justice and convicted and better treatment of rape survivors. However we are very concerned that the Justice Secretary’s comments reinforce common myths and stereotypes about what rape really is, he seems to be relying on an outdated understanding that only rape of strangers is ‘real rape’ and harmful.”

I was hoping that by the end of the day I would be able to blog that Kenneth Clarke has now realised the error of his ways – or has been sufficiently chastised and berated by the Prime Minister – and has apologised. Sadly he has not. He has admitted this evening that his comments were a “mistake” but when asked by the BBC whether he was apologising he said “I haven’t apologised, as far as I’m aware.”

The equal civil rights for LGBT people that were brought in under the previous Government have been accompanied by an increased awareness of the continuing problem of homophobic bullying in schools, and the persistence of homophobic attitudes among many young people.

But the setting up of Free Schools and Academies with a licence to disregard the requirements of current good educational practice may end up creating islands of homophobia – schools where pupils, their parents and teachers are subject to ongoing discrimination and prejudice without challenge.

Indeed, the greater ‘autonomy’ given under the Free Schools and Academies legislation could be used by those who actively wish to opt out of good practice for their own homophobic ends.

Whilst Michael Gove has claimed he wants his reforms to give more freedom to teachers to make decisions over curriculum, assessment and teaching and learning approaches, this is pretty empty rhetoric.  What is happening in practice is that as we’ve seen with the setting up of Academies, the coming Free Schools may instead place additional constraints on what teachers can do, as many of these schools will be more narrowly driven ideologically and dominated by the profit factor.

Sex and relationships education can be (and in many cases is) pursued in faith schools in an inclusive and non stigmatising way. There are examples such as the Roman Catholic Diocese of Birmingham’s ‘All that I am‘ initiative. There are many progressive faith organisations and individuals who are prepared to tackle faith-based homophobia in their own traditions and institutions.

There are many people in all the different faith communities who do not want to be used as ammunition by a Government which is all too ready to cut back, or even reverse, the legal frameworks which protect LGBT rights, and the duty to promote diversity, equality, and social cohesion, not least for all our young people.

They have mopped up pensions, housing and jobs leaving those behind them facing a bleak future, the argument goes. Perhaps the most prominent advocate has been David Willetts in his pre-election book The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give it Back.  Francis Beckett has a much more nuanced argument from the left, and speaking up for youth are Shiv Malik and Ed Howker.

Understandable arguments about society nearly always rest on generalisations. We talk about and measure the experience of women or of ethnic groups and undoubtedly gain a lot from such insights into the nature of inequality. But there are also dangers that such generalisations lead us to pass over differences within groups, ignore the “tyranny of the average” and muddle up correlation and causality.

I’m particularlysuspicious of age generalisations. Unlike some other divisions – few of us change gender for example – being in an age group is necessarily transitory. It is no great revelation to discover that older workers have more assets than younger workers – they have simply had more time to build them up.

And there is always a danger of nostalgia when dealing with the past. Young people can legitimately claim that the government is making it much tougher to go to college (ironically a move spearheaded by David “the Pinch” Willets). Yet while my generation did not pay fees, there were far fewer university places. I undoubtedly did well, but those of my age group that did not get to college may not have done so.

One common argument in this debate is that older people have grabbed all the pensions. At one level  there is an obvious truth here. The older the worker the more likely they are to be ina good pension.

But to generalise from this would be a big mistake as new ONS figures today show (and if you can bear the excitement there’s an online podcast/presentation here.) This is how they summarise their snapshot of 50 to 64 year olds:

The estimated saving of households headed by 50 to 64 year olds in Great Britain in 2006/08 was £2.2 trillion (million million). Pension saving accounted for nearly three-quarters of this total (73 per cent).

Saving is unequally distributed between households: in 2006/08, the top 10 per cent of households had savings of £1.0 trillion (45 per cent), while the bottom 50 per cent had savings of £122 billion, accounting for 6 per cent of the total. (our emphasis and the 45 per cent is our calculation).
People taking part in the Wealth and Assets Survey – the main source of information for the new chapter of Pension Trends – were divided into ‘spenders’ and ‘savers’ based on their responses to statements about spending, saving and credit use. The results for ‘savers’ showed that 41 per cent had not saved from income in the last twelve months or ever.

This indicates that some people cannot save even though they wish to do so. A key constraint on saving is income. For households in the 50 to 64 age group, median savings increased from £74,600 for households with earned income of less than £10,000 to £797,000 for those with £70,000 and over.

The experiences within this one agre group are so diverse that I think it is a mistake to generalise about them.

My alternative account of change is almost certainly an over-generalisation too, but I think it makes more sense. This is what I would argue:

Since the 1980s we have become a much more unequal society both in terms of wealth and income. This reversed the social-democratic moment in UK history from the second-world war onwards where society tended to become more equal (if rather unevenly). The main beneficiaries of this are now reaching retirement – but they make up a pretty small proportion of their age group, the majority of whom have also been losers in this growing inequality.”

In other words it’s much more about class than age.

This year, George Osborne’s favourite international economic think tank addresses a couple of common claims about inequality. One is that inequality is a necessary price for rising living standards, but the OECD finds “no strong tendency for countries that grew richer faster to have rising inequality.” Indeed, if you look at their chart showing changes in household income and changes in inequality, it’s hard to see any relationship at all:

 Another is that economic growth is the answer to poverty; if you believe that inequality fuels growth, then living with inequality is the best way to defeat poverty.

However, economic growth and poverty have not been strongly related within the OECD in the past generation. There is little evidence of a relationship between poverty and household income growth in either a positive or negative direction. For example, Ireland has had very rapid income growth over the period and a large rise in poverty, while income growth has stagnated in Belgium in combination with a considerable reduction in poverty.

The report also includes some tough messages for egalitarians. In particular, the OECD’s charts show only a weak relationship between greater equality and better health outcomes. The report will be looked at in a lot more detail in a forthcoming “Touchstone Extra” on Fairness and Prosperity by Howard Reed. (By the way, have a look at Howard’s post on the impact of the 50p tax band, published on Touchstone earlier today, it’s well worth the attention.)

As Sarah Jackson, CEO of Working Families says:
“Any parent who needs flexible working for a teenager of 17 is likely to be dealing with a real crisis. Any employer who refuses even to discuss flexible working in such circumstances is not a good one. Parents in such circumstances may have to choose between supporting their child and staying in employment. Fairness for all employees is more important than ever during a recession: employee commitment and performance is critical to every business.”

While unions, the CIPD and organisations like Working Families have all questioned the logic of Cable’s announcement, the CBI, IoD and FSB have all proclaimed that the proposals don’t go far enough.
The CBI has put out a paper called – appropriately – “Think Small First”. In this manifesto for “thinking small”, the CBI suggests that maternity and flexible working regulations should be relaxed for SMEs. Amongst other worrying proposals, the CBI suggests that women should have to specify when they will return from maternity leave before they go on maternity leave and they could only change their return date if their employer agrees.
So how will this work? As it currently stands, maternity leave is calculated on the assumption that a woman will take her full entitlement (52 weeks). The woman must give 8 weeks’ notice of her intention to return to work earlier than a year and 8 weeks’ notice of any change of her intended return date.
The reality is that most women who have a good relationship with their employer will speak to their line manager or HR department in advance of their maternity leave about whether or not they intend to take the full year.
But the other reality that is ignored by the CBI’s proposals is that it is very difficult for a woman to be absolutely certain about when she will be able to or will want to return to work until after she has given birth. A wide range of circumstances and factors come into play when making decisions about returning to work. Maternal health, the child’s health, availability of childcare, affordability of childcare, changes to household income, amongst other things may all affect a woman’s decision to return to work earlier or later than originally planned.
No one can predict whether a woman will suffer pregnancy or post-partum related illness such as post natal depression. At least one in ten mothers suffers from post natal depression and it can occur at any point within the year after childbirth.
Few new mothers have any idea how difficult it can be to organise affordable childcare before they go on maternity leave and are often shocked to find 12 month waiting lists for local nurseries. With Sure Start centres shutting and scaling back their services up and down the country, affordable childcare for working families is becoming increasingly scarce. With changes to tax credits, including a reduction in the childcare element, many families will not yet know how much help they will be able to get with childcare costs.
With  more than 130,000 jobs lost from the public sector in the last year alone, it’s not unreasonable to imagine a scenario where a woman plans to take a year’s maternity leave but either her partner loses their job or she fears for her own job security and is forced to curtail her maternity leave and return to work early in order to support her family.
The CBI may well be right that “the enemy of progress in this [increasing participation of returning mothers in the labour market] is uncertainty” but the fact is that having children is fraught with uncertainty and forcing women to commit to a return date before they’ve even left to go on maternity leave will not remove uncertainty and it may even result in women leaving the labour market altogether if they are pressured to return earlier than they are ready or able to.

So much for growth.

It may be just the fact that it’s a centenary celebration that has generated the extra interest in International Women’s Day this year. Or maybe it’s because this is not panning out to be a very good year for women, at home or overseas, and today seems like an opportune moment to do something about it and make our voices heard.

The ETUC issued a press release today with a summary of the findings of a recent survey. In short, the survey found that women in Europe are bearing the brunt of economic crisis. Both the quality and quantity of women’s work is dwindling by the day. Women are increasingly facing redundancy and unemployment. Those who are in work are more likely to be in precarious, vulnerable, and agency work.

John Monks, ETUC General Secretary, said of the survey findings,

“There is an urgent need to look at the gender dimension of the economic crisis and to adopt measures that will strengthen the position of women in the labour market. Female employment has been an important element of Europe’s growth in the last years and policy measures to contrast the damages generated by the economic crisis should aim at reinforcing equality between women and men and not
exacerbate gender segmentation of the labour market”

The ETUC press release echoes a report from the ITUC this week which shows that, although the initial impact of the global economic crisis hit men and women equally hard, the balance is now shifting as increasing numbers of women are either losing their jobs or being forced into more precarious, temporary, and informal work.

The ITUC report points to the swelling ranks of the “working poor” – those, mainly women, who are in work but whose jobs don’t provide enough to meet their basic needs.

And let’s not kid ourselves that these reports are just about women in some far flung corner of the globe Both the ETUC survey and the ITUC report paint an accurate picture of the situation faced by women in the UK.

Unemployment, underemployment, and precarious, poor quality, low paid work are increasingly characteristic of women’s work here too. As the public sector loses more (predominantly women’s) jobs with every day that goes by, the chances are that women’s unemployment – in particular, young women’s unemployment – is only going to get worse.

There will be more from the TUC this week on women and unemployment so watch this space.

We’ve come a long way in 100 years but there’s a long way still to go.

To put this in perspective, the public funding received by Liverpool Rape Crisis in 2010 was less than the cost to the state of just one single rape. According to the Women’s Resource Centre, the estimated cost to the state of one rape is £73,487 – £13,487 more than the annual funding for the Liverpool Rape Crisis centre.

The news from Liverpool sits squarely at odds with the Home Secretary, Theresa May’s announcement just last month that the government would be safeguarding £10m funding for Rape Crisis services.  According to Theresa May, Rape Crisis centres are “a key element of the government’s wider strategy to tackle violence against women and girls. We are absolutely committed to ensuring every victim of rape has access to the support that they need to rebuild their lives.”

She has successfully drawn the media’s attention to the fact that, in spite of much vaunted government pledges to invest £10m in Rape Crisis centres, the charity sector, and the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector is facing a very bleak future as funding – central, local, and grant based – evaporates into thin air.

Denise Marshalls explained

“It [the OBE] has been keeping me awake at night. I feel like it would be dishonourable and wrong to keep it. I’m facing a future where I can’t give women who come to my organisation the services they deserve – I won’t be able to provide the services for which I got the OBE.We will see situations where women are in danger as a result of the cuts. There are disasters waiting to happen.”

And some of those disasters are already happening. Just last week Women’s Aid produced a survey with Channel 4 news which found that More than half of domestic violence services across the country do not know if they will be able to remain fully open after March due to funding cuts. Only a quarter of refuges have had their contracts extended beyond March. A quarter of respondents said they would have to close one or more services if they lose funding, with 40 per cent warning they would have to cut staff numbers. Devon County Council recently proposed a 100% cut to domestic abuse services.

While the funding landscape for this vital sector is still so unclear, Denise Marshall is absolutely right to be making her voice heard now.

Last May the Coalition Agreement assured people that it would:

“hold a review to set the date at which the state pension age start to rise to 66, although it would not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women.”

But a few weeks ago you could hear the tyres screech and smell burning tar when the government published new plans to accelerate the increase in the state pension age to 2018 for women, and then increase both men and women’s state pension ages to 66 by 2020. This is particularly bad news for women aged 56 or 57, giving them very little time to prepare or amend existing plans.

Bald statistics such as these often have very little impact on the public, which is why the TUC welcomes today’s campaign launch featuring Barbara’s story. Spearheaded by Labour’s Pensions’ Spokesperson Rachel Reeves MP, the campaign features an online petition which describes exactly who will lose out from this broken promise.

Almost 5 million people will be affected by the government’s new plans; in particular 500,000 women will now have to work for a year or longer, 33,000 will have to work for two years longer before they can claim their state pension.

Read Barbara’s story here and if you want to support her, sign the petition. The TUC Women’s Conference next month will be debating these unacceptable changes to our pensions.

The debate on welfare reform is already heating up in anticipation that the Government will introduce its Bill in the next couple of weeks. We have seen a steady stream of newspaper articles spreading the myth that the majority of people claiming Employment and Support Allowance are “faking” their disability or illness. Only this week, one of Britain’s best-loved dailies questioned why nearly a million people have been claiming Disability Living Allowance for at least 14 years, despite the fact that DLA is a benefit designed to meet extra costs resulting from long-term health conditions and impairments.

We urge the Government to work with sight loss charities to achieve the fairness that it promised in its reforms. If the DLA proposals are implemented, as many as 12,000 people registered blind or partially sighted could lose their Disability Living Allowance entitlement from 2013.

92% of employers say they would find it “impossible” or “difficult” to employ someone blind or partially sighted, yet the Government proposes to limit out-of-work support. Claimants on contributory Employment and Support Allowance in the Work Related Activity Group must defy the odds and secure work within 12 months, something that will prove impossible for many disabled people.

Like a perfect storm, welfare cuts will be debated in Parliament at the same time local authorities make swingeing cuts to services that enable blind and partially sighted people to live independently, participate in the community and find work.

Our report sets out an alternative vision for economic recovery based on inclusive recruitment and retention practices. Instead of removing people’s benefits, we argue the Government should focus on the support blind and partially sighted people need to move towards independence and employment.

The UKRC is the leading body in the UK offering advice, services and developing policy regarding the woeful under-representation of women in Science, Engineering, and Technology (SET).

In case anyone is in any doubt that the services offered by UKRC are needed, it’s worth noting that only 5.3% of all working women are employed in SET occupations, compared to 31.3% of all working men. Women comprise only 12.3% of all people working in SET occupations, in spite of the fact that women make up 45.1% of the whole workforce in the UK. For anyone interested in this area who would like to know more about women in SET, I recommend the UKRC’s recent statistics guide which provides 154 pages of meticulously researched data and analysis.

While a significant number of women study SET subjects at graduate level, few go on to enter SET professions and, of those who do end up working in SET sectors, they are less likely to progress than their male counterparts and many find it hard to return to work after maternity leave if they have children.

The UKRC has directly provided 6,000 individual women with information and resources. It has provided strategic support to companies from BT, to Rolls Royce, to Eon, to Laing O’Rourke. It has worked to support single parents and women from ethnic minorities in SET occupations. It has produced a wealth of high quality research and data for the STEM community. The list of UKRC’s achievements goes on. Using the Cabinet Office approved Social Return on Investment (SROI) methodology, the UKRC’s work gives a return of over 5:1 for every £1 invested. So the £2.8million invested in the UKRC from April 2008 to September 2009 generated an impressive £14.8m in return.

It’s no secret that the country is facing a skills shortage and that specialist and technician skills in science, engineering and technology are in particularly short supply. Earlier this year the CBI produced a report called SET for Growth which warned of a critical lack of skills in SET which threatens the country’s growth over coming years. The report found that 59% of employers anticipated struggling to recruit employees with the requisite skills in SET and maths over the next three years.

So, faced with a dire SET skills shortage and an equally dire shortage of women entering and remaining in SET occupations, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that effectively abolishing an organisation like the UKRC – with its proven track record in successfully working with employers, unions, careers advisers, and individual working women to improve the gender balance in SET workplaces – is a retrograde step both for the UK’s SET sector and for gender equality.