CWS at University of York Announces A Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism

Carol Ann Duffy Reading, Questions and Book Signing in Lincoln

Like Marmite, I dislike Maggie Thatcher but where do you fit on the love/hate divide and why?

What About Women? A pre election hustings on Women’s Issues
Location: The Quaker Meeting House, 10 St. James Street, Sheffield, S1 2EW
Time: 7.15p.m.
Date: Tuesday 23rd March 2010

Tom Scott – Labour Party (Standing in Sheffield Hallam constituency)
Nicola Bates- Conservative Party (Standing in Sheffield Hallam constituency)
Paul Scrivens – Liberal Democrats (Standing in Sheffield Central constituency)
Jillian Creasy- The Green Party (Standing in Sheffield Central constituency)

Chairing the event is Patricia Daniel.
This is a free event with provision of refreshments. All are welcome.
Please contact Jude Dodds 01142660434 or sheffieldfems@gmail.com

London Local Elections Hustings 2010 – Get your voice heard by the London Councils Grants Committee!
Location: Amnesty International Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, EC2A 3EA
Time: 2p.m. – 5p.m.
Date: Wednesday 24 March 2010
WRC, HEAR (London’s network of equalities organisations) and Voluntary Sector Forum (VSF) are hosting a hustings event for the 2010 London Local Elections.

This is an excellent opportunity for voluntary and community sector organisations (frontline and second tier) to ask questions of questions of councillors from the main political parties and get their voices heard.

There will be questions, focused locally, regionally and nationally on the following areas:

General voluntary and community sector and pan-London issues
The equalities sectors
The women’s sector

The Conservative’s A Post Bureaucratic Age conference held in Shoreditch on Monday was an outing for the tories progressive face: an open data, crowd sourcing, power to the people fist in the air for politics—however it may have oversold itself a little bit.

The day started well with Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov talking about the empowerment of the citizen, not the corporations with an emphasis on bottom-up politics and with the “radical freedom of data act” making it possible for a truly diverse slice of people to be active in the crafting of policy and the direction of their lives.

David Cameron’s turn saw him talk about a four prong future: Transparency, Participation, Decentralization and Accountability, and the phrase ‘a post bureaucratic age’ made itself apparent numerous times as if saying it would will it into existence. The celebration on the stage was that all data would be available online for all to see and interact with but it truly missed the point, as Martha Lane Fox of LastMinute.com would mention later, that 10million people in Britain are still not online, 4 million of those are the most disadvantaged of our society –the power then would continue to shift to those who already have a palpable chance of being in the mix. Not to mention the additional barrier of being able to read and use raw data which could not really be described as a laypersons job.

Another layer of confusion was met in the Q&A after Cameron’s speech where his importance of access to the internet was undermined by the “three strikes and you’re out” rule for illegal downloads. Cameron dodged the bullet the first time miss understanding the content of the question and relied on stealing is bad rhetoric rather than what does this mean for citizen participation in government.

And entwined with this celebration of technology of connecting the people directly to the power was a the new roll of tory policy; passing control from central government to local councils; offering the right to buy on local amenities that the government chooses to close down; local meetings to define local needs and local planning without the obstacles of bureaucracy. And this just struck me as bad.

If the power is shifted away from the government do they no longer take responsibility for the country? For example if you people in this village can’t organize yourselves to keep this school/post office/leisure centre running, if you can’t figure out to divert money to community building then it’s your fault. The policy feels a bit like the split of the American states, where women’s reproductive rights have been hacked to pieces one state at a time.

Cameron’s example of a local service that could change radically with his open data act was the criminal system, namely the accountability of the police. His rallying point for this was crime maps, so we the people could see what was happening, what needed cracking down on. However, crime maps don’t make the rapes counted as non-crimes suddenly appear, crime maps don’t radically change the systemic discrimination and racism in some forces, just sharing information and ridding yourself of responsibility will not change the world.

And as an example of this post bureaucratic age: a panel of nine of ten people, a largely white male panel which failed to navigate crowd input and diverse interaction as most of the conversation took place between panelists. Martha Lane Fox, my new favourite business woman, not only pointed out that not everyone is online but that government could not simply bail out of a situation because where amazing community work was happening there was still a need for guidance and funding. The discussion, albeit on stage, about changing the parameters of success and failure so that testing, testing, testing and organic routes to the right end were acceptable was entirely on point but would no doubt come at the cost of oodles of paperwork and bureaucracy.

You can’t rid bureaucracy with a snappy new title but you can work towards a more positive form of politics with less polemics but probably a lot of paperwork.

Many women come to the UK, often legally, in the hope of improving their lives. They may come on temporary work permits, student visas or spousal visas. Some women come to the UK to marry. The ‘no recourse to public funds’ rule says that a woman in this position – even if she’s married to a British citizen – is not entitled to certain state benefits, including housing benefit and income support.

But these are the benefits a woman must be able to claim to get a place in a refuge if she needs to escape violence. As a result, many newly-married women in the UK are trapped in violent marriages and even if they do muster the courage to seek help from the authorities, they are simply turned away.

The UK government has taken significant steps to address violence against women – particularly domestic violence. In its paper on domestic violence ‘Safety and Justice’, the Home Office recognised that support and accommodation to victims of domestic violence was ‘life saving and critical’. So the UK government knows it is in the wrong when it fails to protect women arriving in the UK

We believe that the government position puts the UK in breach of international human rights standards to which it has signed up. The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) says clearly that states must respect, protect and fulfil all women’s human rights, regardless of immigration status or any other factor.

Book an appointment with your Member of Parliament on November 4th, between 12.45 and 3.30. Find out who your MP is at www.theyworkforyou.com or telephone the House of Commons Information Office: 020 7219 4272.

The quickest way of making an appointment is to telephone your MP’s constituency or Westminster office. When calling, you might like to mention:

• The No Recourse ruling is affecting women all over the country and is likely to be affecting women in their constituency now
• A number of constituents will be taking part and therefore wanting to meet them
• Ask for a time to meet them between 12:45 – 3pm (the earlier the better) and ask for confirmation in writing.

Find out more information at the Women’s Resource Centre and we’ll see you there?

“We are campaigning for the Welsh Assembly Government to improve their policies to tackle violence against women in Wales. 2 women a week are still dying of domestic abuse alone in Wales, and the rape conviction rate remains a shocking 8% in Wales.

Please visit our Facebook group – lots more info there: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=162717965118&ref=mf

Most importantly – PLEASE email the following letter to the Social Justice Minister, Brian Gibbons AM.

Spread the word! Thanks so much!”
______________

SEND LETTER TO: brian.gibbons@wales.gsi.gov.uk

Dear Minister

RE: INTEGRATED STRATEGY TO TACKLE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

The level of violence against women in Wales still remains very high, with one in four women suffering some from violence during their lifetime.

Though the Welsh Assembly Government has made good progress on tackling some elements of violence against women, there is no integrated, cross-governmental strategy to protect women from violence.

I am calling on you to redouble your efforts to tackle violence against women in all its forms, and ensure that the women in Wales are not less protected than women in other parts of the UK.

Only a strategy and action plan led by the Welsh Assembly Government will be able to bring together the disparate strands of public services and investment will tackle violence against women and fulfil the UN CEDAW obligations.

Violence against women blights thousands of lives in Wales each year, and its time for a whole-government approach to protect women.

Yours sincerely

[NAME]

In The Guardian write-up, Mary Bousted (general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers) is quoted as saying:

The problem has been that in the 1960s and 1970s boys were getting 12-13% more O-level passes than girls and no one really talked about it. When girls started to do better there were Panorama programmes and inquiries and a national debate. There’s a national panic if girls and women start to be successful. Girls have been more successful at GCSE and A-levels but that hasn’t closed the gender pay gap. Even if they do better they don’t get paid as much.

This is exactly the points I have stressed again and again in any writing on the gender gap in education – firstly this completely unjustified panic over girls ‘doing better’ than the boys and secondly the fact that despite what the qualification statistics show, better attainment at GCSE/A-Level does not equate with the better pay. Why can’t female students be seen as ‘doing better’? And why this stress on the “gender gap”? What about differences according to ethnicity or socio-economic background? Because I’m sure as hell that it’s not every girl ‘doing better’ – what about those who aren’t?

Teacher training courses emphasis the importance of differentiation and using a variety of techniques for learning and assessment in our lessons because no-one learns the same. We are told that coursework is becoming a problem because of plagiarism but then is that really a reason to remove what is potentially an effective assessment method for a large number of female students (if indeed we take the slightly deterministic argument that coursework benefits girls, exams boys)? Isn’t reliance of assessment through exams not differentiating?

A side thought (not properly investigated or backed): I think it’s telling that coursework is being removed at the educational stages where firstly girls are ‘doing better’ and secondly where girls and boys are present in proportional figures to the population when, for instance, no-one would dare suggest the removal of essays (or even dissertations!) at undergraduate level. It would be interesting to see whether such gendered patterns are present at this educational stage and the ratio of female to male undergraduates.

Laura

Had the Daily Mail not carved up one statement from Harriet Harman this week I feel that many peoples shackles would not be up. They’d be on team, we’d all be on team calling out the bullshit misogyny and derailing of her work that is happening so crazy blatantly.

Yes by forcibly making your readers/listeners/watchers believes a handful of words meant Harriet hated men, didn’t trust them, thought them two dimensional sexist stereotypes, you can entirely overlook the fact that men can’t be left to run everything alone, not because they’re inept, though I’m sure some are, but because looking passed gender privilege does not come naturally.

In one week Harriet has shown what could be done if parliament thought it important, if men felt more ready to champion causes that don’t directly effect their everyday thoughts and so on and so forth.

This has been covered fabulously and not all over the interweb and news things, roll around in it, have some fun.

Charlotte

Laura