Women's Views on News |
| Women badly affected by spending cuts Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:12 AM PDT
Data published by the Local Government Association shows that the number of women working in local government has fallen by 253,600 to 1.43 million since the coalition came into power in May 2010. The number of men in local government has only decreased by 104,700 to 452,300. Back in March, the Fawcett Society, an organisation that campaigns for women's equality and rights, warned that cuts to the public sector would disproportionately impact women. 'Women make up around two thirds of the public sector workforce, so cuts to this sector are hitting them hard. 'What's more, there is evidence that women are not sufficiently benefitting from government action to create jobs in the private sector,' Fawcett, one of the UK's leading campaigning organisations, explained. And added: 'We would like to see government think carefully about how it might reduce the [budget] deficit in ways that do not hit women so much harder – such as through increasing the amount of money raised through taxes or investing more heavily in measures for growth.' The data emerged after Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott requested information about the number of men and women employed within the public sector and was denied a clear answer. He told the Guardian: "Public sector job cuts hammer women hardest. "Rebalancing the economy on the back of sacked women in the public sector is utterly unacceptable to most Liberal Democrats as it should be to our government as a whole. "I'm also shocked that the government don't know how many women they employ or so they claim in a misleading written answer I have received." Oakeshott's criticism of the government comes after the Office for National Statistics released disappointing statistics about women's current position in the labour market on 12 June. While the proportion of unemployed men in the UK has fallen by 0.5 per cent to 8.2 per cent since the coalition came into power, female unemployment has risen by 0.4 per cent to 7.3 per cent. As Oakeshott pointed out to the Guardian, the increase in female unemployment is worrying. "Since May 2010, women’s longstanding advantage in unemployment rates has halved from 1.8 percentage points to 0.9 percentage points and it's getting worse," he said. Oakeshott also told the newspaper that he is pushing for information about the impact of Chancellor George Osbourne's spending review on women's careers and for "transparent, regular reporting on how many women we employ in central and local government, the NHS and the police". The Trades Union Congress, commonly known as the TUC, agreed with Oakeshott's belief that women are unfairly suffering from the government's austerity measures. Frances O'Grady, General Secretary for TUC, said: "Women are bearing the brunt of the cuts through reduced pay, job losses and cutbacks in the services they run and use. "In local government, where workers have felt the greatest pain of redundancies, three in four staff are female." With 144,000 jobs to be cut from the public sector as a result of the Chancellor's 2013 spending review, which he delivered to parliament on 27 June, women are set to suffer further. "The Chancellor has tried to gloss over public job losses… by playing divide and rule with public and private sector workers. "But with three in ten working families having at least one parent in the public sector, the Chancellor will pay a heavy political price for ignoring the affects of austerity on women," O'Grady warned.  |
| Facebook revamp misses the point Posted: 09 Jul 2013 04:30 AM PDT
A campaign initiated by Women, Action and the Media (WAM!) and supported by over 100 women’s groups and organisations worldwide, including Women’s Views on News (WVoN), claimed victory just over a month ago when Facebook committed itself to refining its approach to gender-based hate speech. The #FBrape campaign, launched on 21 May and highlighted by WVoN, called upon the social media giant to remove content openly and clearly promoting violence against women, including domestic violence and rape in line with its own rules on postings. The campaigners also contacted advertisers whose brands were shown alongside such sites and encouraged its supporters to tweet those companies using the hashtag FBrape. At least 15 companies including Dove, Marks and Spencer and Sky, dropped their Facebook advertising campaigns as a result of the action, which raised 60,000 tweets and 5,000 emails in just one week. Following that reaction by its major advertisers, Facebook last week announced it would be changing its advertising policy. In a move which acknowledges the fact that offensive content still exists, last week Facebook said it would remove advertising from thousands of potentially ‘controversial’ pages. In a statement the company said: “We will now seek to restrict ads from appearing next to pages and groups that contain any violent, graphic or sexual content – content that does not violate our community standards. “Prior to this change, a page selling adult products was eligible to have ads appear on its right-hand side; now there will not be ads displayed next to this type of content.” In response to the announcement, WAM! said: "This new policy will protect advertisers, but do nothing for users. “It utterly misses the point of the #FBrape campaign, and makes it more difficult for users to hold Facebook to account going forward. “We condemn it in no uncertain terms." The exodus of big-brand advertisers forced Facebook to at least address the issue, and over a month ago they committed themselves to evaluating and updating their policies and practices relating to hate speech, improving training for content moderators and increasing accountability for those individuals who post misogynistic content. And since the end of the campaign, Facebook has been working with WAM! to develop a more careful approach to reviewing content, but by WAM!’s own admission, the pace of change as been frustrating. The process means people and organisations who have unsuccessfully reported content to Facebook have a second chance, as WAM! can then issue an appeal. On its website, WAM! says: "To date, we estimate that 70 per cent of the pages sent to WAM! by users and expedited to Facebook… have met violation of terms criteria and been removed. “Most of this content had been previously reported to Facebook by a user and deemed not in violation of their [Facebook's] terms of service. “We're working with Facebook to figure out why so much content is still not coming down when users initially report [it]." That Facebook clearly still has a problem in identifying what constitutes gender-based hate speech beggars belief; they could just apply the same standards as they do for say, race or religion; problem solved. The fact that so many pages and posts depicting violence against women get away with using the thinly-veiled cover of ‘humour’ just goes to show how entrenched attitudes are. If you tell a racist joke, it’s still racist, right? But ‘jokes’ about rape and domestic abuse, which target women just because they are women, are fine? And appalling images are allowed to stay, whereas pictures of women breastfeeding or post-mastectomy are removed for ‘violating nudity guidelines’. Speaking to the Social Times, Trista Hendren, who herself set up a Facebook page to try to address the problem, said of the new advertising policy: "I think they are still missing the point entirely. “There are still a lot of pages that just should not be up on Facebook whatsoever. “This statement may make advertisers feel a bit better, but… it does not mean that the violence against women and girls on Facebook has been addressed adequately. “It does not diminish what their advertising dollars are still paying for." So, Facebook has been quicker to appease its advertisers that its users, whose freely-given personal details they are using to make big advertising money. Some people argue that you can’t police the internet, but Facebook is still a company, with a corporate responsibility to its community of users to clamp down on any content which fosters hate. Whether we like it or not, Facebook is a huge cultural force, and reflects the views of the society we live in. The fact that it has been so slow to act on gender-based hate is unfortunately telling of the sexist attitudes that are so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives. If you see any content on Facebook which you think constitutes gender-based hate speech, please report it to Facebook, and if that doesn’t work, send it on to WAM!  |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2013 01:09 AM PDT
Inasmuch as, according to the Guardian, until last Sunday, Virginia Wade was the last British tennis player to win Wimbledon. She won three Grand Slam singles championships and four Grand Slam doubles championships, and is the only British woman in history to have won titles at all four Grand Slam tournaments. She was ranked as high as No. 2 in the world in singles, and No. 1 in the world in doubles. She won the women’s singles championship at Wimbledon on 1 July 1977, in that tournament’s centenary year, and was the last British tennis player to win a Grand Slam singles tournament until Andy Murray won the US Open in 2012. But she has been written right out of the headlines in several major British newspapers. The front page of the Times on 8 July, for example, read: “Murray ends 77-year wait for British win.” The front page of the Telegraph was: “After 77 years, the wait is over” and the Daily Mail reckoned “Andy Murray ends 77 years of waiting for a British champion.” The 77-year figure is the figure for the men’s championships. The last British man to win before Murray was Fred Perry in 1936. This does not, however, mean the real 'wait' was actually just 41 years. British tennis fans were never made to 'wait' at all. Dorothy Round Little won the women’s singles – for the second time in her career – one year after Fred Perry's much remarked victory, in 1937. And actually there have been four British wins since Fred Perry. Dorothy Round Little in 1937, Virginia Wade in 1977. The other two were partially deaf player Angela Mortimer, who won the championship in 1961, and underdog Ann Haydon-Jones who beat Billie Jean King to win in 1969. This is, as the Guardian points out, a(nother) dark day for sports journalism. Feminist writer Chloe Angyal, whose tweet “Murray is indeed the first Brit to win Wimbledon in 77 years unless you think women are people” has been re-tweeted, at time of writing, over 13,000 times.  |
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