Women's Views on News |
- New quota for board members in Wales
- Back to the office?
- UKBA puts pregnant women at risk
- Don’t blame computers for rape T-shirts
- Charity boosts support for eating disorders
| New quota for board members in Wales Posted: 07 Mar 2013 07:00 AM PST
According to current figures, only 32.2 per cent of new appointments are women, but the Government aims to improve the gender balance by setting a target of 40per cent of places for women. Welsh Equalities Minister Jane Hutt said that positive action is needed, including legislation if necessary. "There is growing evidence that the number of women taking up public or political roles is reducing," she said. "The Welsh Government is committed to reversing this trend, but we all have a role to play in increasing women's representation in public appointments – from public sector bodies to political parties and the media." The move follows the example of Sport Wales, the organisation responsible for increasing participation in sports. In 2012, Sport Wales improved the gender balance of its board, going from eight men and one woman to nine men and five women. This dramatic change was achieved by approaching female candidates directly and encouraging them to apply. Application material was also updated to make it more appealing to both genders, resulting in a threefold increase in applications from women. The Welsh government seems to be making the issue equal of representation a priority. Last month, Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood supported legislation aimed at boosting the amount of women elected to the Welsh Assembly. Following a decline in the number of female Assembly Members – currently 44 per cent of AMs are women, down from 52 per cent in 2006 – Wood told the BBC that there is "a gap in gender balance". "If nothing is done that will continue to grow and we will end up being dominated by the usual agenda which is male, pale and stale," she said.  |
| Posted: 07 Mar 2013 05:57 AM PST
Last week, the chief executive of Yahoo!, Melissa Mayner, took steps to stop her staff from working from home. In an office memo sent out to all the company’s California-based employees, the efficiency and productivity of working from home was placed under much scrutiny. The memo read: 'To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. ‘That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices.' ‘Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,’ it went on to say, and continued: ‘Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.’ The memo ordered all office staff to return to work by the summer or risk losing their jobs. Mayner is thought to have returned to work only two weeks after giving birth to her first child. Her return was made easier by her adeptness of bringing home-life to work: by building a nursery next to her office that allowed her to put in extra hours. However, another high profile working woman agreed with her surprising announcement. The head of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, welcomed Mayner's decision, saying, “We have come to believe that working at home is a completely adequate alternative to showing our face in the office. But it’s not." “It’s very pleasant and often very constructive, but it is not doing the same job as I do at work and neither is it for anyone else," Shulman insisted. Elsewhere, reactions differed greatly, with some resenting the proposed change. Unsurprisingly, Yahoo! employees felt the most displeased. One anonymous staff member reportedly said, "When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honour the thankless sacrifices that women too often make." Mayner's move has sparked a huge debate in the corporate world about whether working from home makes a significant difference to businesses. CEO of WPP advertising group, Sir Martin Sorrell, argued, "You want a bit of both. You need to have flexibility." "Women are much better organisers of time in our industry than men. I would argue they’re even better at doing their jobs than men in our industry generally," he admitted. Stefan Stern, of Cass Business School in London, disagreed with Mayner's memo. "I find it slightly depressing actually – five decades of management thought and research has told us we should be worrying more about what people do and how they do it, and not where they do it. "In this era of knowledge work, brain power, empowering well-educated, intelligent people to do interesting things – the idea that you need to recreate the classroom ethos, that physically turning up is the answer to creativity and better ideas. I don’t get it." "Offices can be incredibly unproductive places. But managers do like to supervise and they do like to see people," he said. Virgin tycoon, Sir Richard Branson also disagreed with Mayner's step. "If you provide the right technology to keep in touch, maintain regular communication and get the right balance between remote and office working, people will be motivated to work responsibly, quickly and with high quality," Branson argued. Writing for the Guardian, business entrepreneur Heather McGregor argued that employment was hugely dependent upon the trust between the staff and its management, and in most cases, flexibility was essential to success. In a 2011 survey by business organisation, CBI, it was found that 59 per cent of companies allowed their staff to work at home. "I still believe the future of work will be more about working from home – or on the move – and less about offices with expensive commercial rents and sky-high business rates," McGregor insisted. "I employ talented people who are not easy to replace, so when they ask for flexibility in the form of remote working, I would much rather find a way to accommodate that than lose them. More than half the staff in our company work flexibly. "People of both sexes want and need to work from home for many reasons, including ageing/infirm relatives, medical appointments, or because their partner is posted a long way from our office. “It makes good business sense to accommodate these requests," she concluded.  |
| UKBA puts pregnant women at risk Posted: 07 Mar 2013 03:13 AM PST
The UK Border Agency (UKBA) came under heavy fire last week after it was accused of 'endangering' the health of pregnant asylum seekers. This although UKBA have been discouraged from detaining pregnant women. The report, which was carried out by the Maternity Action and the Refugee Council, interviewed 20 pregnant asylum-seeking women and 17 midwives. It discovered that hundreds of women were forced to move or relocate numerous times during their pregnancy, causing them unnecessary discomfort and distress. In many cases, women were separated from their partners and even made to deliver their babies without them. The report also indicated that many of these pregnancies were also high risk, given the background of the asylum-seeking women. Many of these women already suffered serious health conditions that led to them fleeing their own countries, including torture, sexual violence, HIV and genital mutilation. As a result, these women could be prone to or develop mental health conditions, such as severe depression and suicidal thoughts. The report concluded that constant relocation of these women had a "serious impact on their physical and mental health, and negatively affects the maternity care they receive." A spokesperson from UKBA claimed that, "This report draws conclusions from a small sample of cases and doesn’t take into account recent changes we have made." "We consider every case individually and, wherever possible, women in the latter stages of pregnancy will not be moved to a different area. "Last year we introduced a revised pregnancy dispersal policy which includes a commitment to not move any pregnant woman during the four weeks before or after her due date. "Any asylum seeker is only moved to a different area if it is safe and practical to do so and those with severe or complex healthcare needs have their clinicians notified throughout the process," he added. The report, however, found that even this ‘protection period’ failed to ‘prevent the interruption of maternity care or to recognise the importance of postnatal care for at least six weeks after birth’. It also insisted that the UKBA guidelines did not consider the mental or physical issues that were already present in pregnant women or that could occur during their pregnancy. The report also argued that it did not ‘address women's need for social and family support throughout pregnancy and labour’. And the sudden upheaval of these women was a costly and an unnecessary expense as it forced new midwives to repeat tests and scans. The Director of Maternity Action, Rosalind Bragg said, "It is high time the UKBA recognised asylum-seeking women as being a particularly vulnerable group with complex needs, and urgently ensure their policies reflect this." Shan Nicholas, of the Refugee Council said, "The UKBA must stop sending pregnant women to live in new cities unless all risks have been considered and adequate healthcare arrangements have been made." "We work with pregnant women every day who have been ripped away from their families and healthcare, causing undue distress and health problems at what should be an exciting and positive time of their lives," she added. Cathy Warwick, General Secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said health workers were unable to give the necessary treatment and support to these vulnerable women. "Our society is failing these women and their babies. “This is not acceptable, particularly when the solutions are so obvious," she said.  |
| Don’t blame computers for rape T-shirts Posted: 07 Mar 2013 02:00 AM PST
The computer says: rape; It wasn’t me, it was those damn algorithms; It was a running script which randomly threw up that nasty word; It was basically beyond our control. These were the gist of excuses a clothing company gave when a Twitter storm blew up over the sale of a shirt on Amazon’s UK website with the slogan: "Keep Calm and Rape A Lot" – a sick new twist on ‘been there, done that, now get the T-shirt’. Apologising for the offence caused, a company spokesperson was quoted on ITV news as saying: "Although we did not in any way deliberately create the offensive T-shirts in question and it was the result of a scripted programming process that was compiled by only one member of staff, we accept the responsibility of the error and are doing our best to correct the issues at hand." Basically the company is saying that a computer just generates hundreds of random phrases and this time it happened to come up with a really offensive one, which automatically got put up on the website. Naughty computer! This is an excuse it just doesn’t wash. Designer and journalist Martin Belam wrote: "The computer made me do it, is becoming the new ‘dog ate my homework’ of corporate excuses." Belam went on to explain: "You don’t get rape jokes at the end of an automated scripting process unless you put in rape jokes at the beginning. “And one member of staff doesn’t get to put rape jokes up for sale unless you have no editorial process on your products. “Computers didn’t make anybody do either of these things." The excuse also faded when Sky News reported on Saturday that the same company also produced other slogans promoting domestic violence such as: "Keep Calm and Hit Her", "Keep Calm and Grope A Lot" and "Keep Calm and Grope On." These too have now been withdrawn. As Amazon UK were selling the product on their site, surely they should take some responsibility for the sale of such an offensive product? Shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman, reported the Independent, called on Amazon, as the host site selling a T-shirt, to make a substantial donation to a women’s refuge by way of reparation. The founder of the clothing company who produced the T-shirts later apologised again on the company’s own website – but still blamed computer error. On a different website forum, a user even came to the defence of the computer, suggesting its "innocence" saying: "Assuming this is a computer generated T-shirt, can anybody be certain that the shirt refers to rape as in forced intercourse". And goes on to suggest that the term ‘rape’ or ‘raped’ is just jolly slang for getting beaten on an American football pitch. This whole argument just too is spurious, because using the word rape so casually – whether on a T-shirt or in the sports stadium – trivialises the offence, and the distress of rape victims. Some will argue that we should just ignore it and not give the company any publicity. But without challenge and outrage, these kind of slogans become the norm, just like the T-shirts for children which say: "Your boyfriend thinks I’m cute" and trousers for five-year-olds with ‘bitch’ emblazoned across their bums. Keep calm? Maybe. But let’s carry on kicking up one big fuss.  |
| Charity boosts support for eating disorders Posted: 07 Mar 2013 01:20 AM PST
The Awareness Week was organised by Beat, a national charity that helps people affected by eating disorders, and took place from 11-17 February. Beat encouraged people to distribute leaflets, organise talks and use social media throughout the Awareness Week to spread the message that 'Everybody knows somebody' with an eating disorder. People were also asked to raise money through a 'Sock it to eating disorders' fundraiser. The charity suggested a variety of fundraising ideas, including knitting socks and selling them, organising a socks day at work or school and participating in a sponsored event while wearing socks. Stephen Fry was one of the many celebrities who decorated and signed socks to support Beat and the Awareness Week. These were then framed and auctioned online. MPs were able to express their support in a debate at Westminster Hall on 14 February. Caroline Nokes, the Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North, and the charity Anorexia and Bulimia Care helped to bring about the debate, which was the first time since 2007 that eating disorders have been debated in parliament. Anorexia and Bulimia Care director Jane Smith said: "It's fantastic that this debate has taken place and it marks a real step forward for us in raising awareness of the severity of the issue." Nokes opened the debate by informing MPs about the worrying state of eating disorders in the UK, which has the highest rates of eating disorders in all of Europe. She revealed that eating disorders are known to affect 1.6 million people in the UK, although the true figure may be much higher, and that anorexia kills 20 per cent of sufferers, while 40 per cent never recover. Concerning anorexia, Nokes added: "It is the single biggest killer of all mental illnesses. “It has been dismissed for too long as a problem of teenage girls who just need to get a grip on their eating patterns. “That is far from the truth. "Eating disorders are serious, potentially fatal, mental illnesses, which, even long after a sufferer has recovered, can have long-term implications for their health." MPs were shocked by Nokes's speech and resolved to address eating disorders. David Burrowes, the Conservative MP for Enfield Southgate, said: "All of us have to accept that we know a friend, family member or constituent who is dealing with the issue, and if we do not know one, we are out of touch with what, sadly, is the reality." Burrowes's comment was particularly apt as Brooks Newmark, the Conservative MP for Braintree, spoke out about his own battle with an eating disorder. "I suspect that a strange combination of stress, fear and anger created a tipping point for me, as a 17-year-old, when I just stopped eating," he candidly admitted. Newmark suggested that improving education for health care professionals, teachers and parents about eating disorders would help to ensure that sufferers receive the attention they desperately need. Norman Lamb, the Minister of State for Care and Support, also spoke about ways to move forward. "We must move from trying simply to treat the condition to working collaboratively with professionals and people experiencing the condition, and we must focus on recovery," he remarked. Lamb announced that the NHS will commission specialist services to deal with eating disorders and that the Department of Health will give £16 million to Time to Change, a campaign that aims to end the stigma against mental health and help people facing mental health issues. He also said that the coalition government will continue to and "must challenge" the negative impact that the media, particularly advertising, has on people's body image and self-confidence. Lamb ended his speech by assuring eating disorder sufferers that "we are listening".  |
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