Women's Views on News |
- New award for non-sexist toy shops
- G4S still to deliver women’s services
- Female screenwriters slowly changing the script
- Finance issues still a barrier
| New award for non-sexist toy shops Posted: 19 Jul 2013 08:01 AM PDT
Let Toys Be Toys, the parent-led campaign that aims to see 'boys' and 'girls' signs removed from toy shops and websites, has announced the launch of a good practice Toymark: to be awarded with the help of mystery shoppers. As well as challenging gender-stereotyped toy marketing, Let Toys Be Toys is also keen to recognise shops and websites that are displaying toys and books in a way that is welcoming and inclusive to all children. Campaign supporters have been asked to nominate shops that fulfil the campaign’s good practice criteria. Stores that meet the standards required will be awarded the Toymark; a badge of quality to help parents choose shops with displays that welcome children generally and which do not divide toys – or children – by gender. Megan Perryman, a Let Toys Be Toys campaigner, said: "As parents we know that gender labels are confusing and send the wrong messages to children. "This is a fantastic opportunity to celebrate the many retailers who don't limit children's interests." The criteria? Toys should be labelled or displayed by theme, age or activity; there should not be any signposting for "Girls" or "Boys" – and that includes gender filters on websites; and there should not be any display signage that implies that certain toys are for boys or girls only, fo rexample by pink/blue colour-coding. Petit Chou, for example, an independent toy shop just off London's Oxford Street, gets top marks from campaigner Tessa Trabue for its gender-neutral displays, and she has nominated the store for a Let Toys Be Toys good practice "Toymark" award. If you would like to become a Let Toys Be Toys "Mystery Shopper" and nominate a shop for a Toymark, please drop us an email. The Toymark scheme is a change of tack for the Let Toys Be Toys campaigners who, up to now, have applied public pressure to retailers to remove gendered signs and labels. Boots, Tesco and The Entertainer are among those who have agreed to make changes. Boots promised to end the practice of gendered signage in their stores, Tesco has announced that they will be removing all gender labels on toys from their website, and The Entertainer has been persuaded to remove 'Boys toys' and 'Girls toys' signs from their stores While they intend to keep the pressure on shops with gendered signage, Let Toys Be Toys say the Toymark is a way to reward those retailers who do not use gender stereotypes, as well as help adults and children find gender-inclusive shops. Let Toys Be Toys campaigner Leanne Shaw said she was really excited about the Toymark scheme. "As a supporter of Let Toys Be Toys it's good to have something positive to shout about, and as a parent I'm looking forward to checking out some of the award winners during the summer holidays. "It will be good to know I am spending my money in shops that allow both my children to make their own choices, free from gendered marketing". Let Toys Be Toys is a grassroots consumer campaign, run and organised wholly by volunteers, calling on retailers to stop limiting children's interests by promoting some toys as only suitable for girls, and others only for boys. You can help by signing the Let Toys Be Toys petition on change.org, asking retailers in the UK and Ireland to remove gender labels, and organise toys by theme and function. Or you can follow us on facebook or on Twitter @lettoysbetoys  |
| G4S still to deliver women’s services Posted: 19 Jul 2013 06:14 AM PDT
Why? We can learn a lot about how G4S might run services in the women's sector by looking at some of the findings of last week's inquest into the death of Jimmy Mubenga, who died after being illegally restrained by three G4S officers while being deported to Angola. The Guardian this week described the "reality of the murky private removals industry", and the inquest revealed two of the G4S guards' phones contained 'extreme racist' text messages. We might turn our attention to how G4S and Serco used taxpayers' money to monitor dead criminals under contracts for criminal tagging schemes, over-charging the UK government by up to £50 million by billing for offenders who were dead, back in custody or no longer in the UK. And although Serco has agreed to the Government's request for an audit of the contract, G4S has refused. We could look at the Department of Work and Pensions' Work Programme, contracted to firms like A4e. Private Eye (No. 1344) recently revealed that "contractors receive around £400 simply for 'attaching' an unemployed person to the scheme before even finding them a job. Thus firms have been paid more than £400 million so far for failure." And commentating for The Independent, Jim Armitage concluded that "The profit motive will always dominate for such service providers." So why are private sector giants still getting work at the taxpayers' expense? This is a question increasingly being asked of government by small voluntary sector providers, including social enterprise Kazuri, frontline service for victims and survivors of violence Aurora New Dawn and the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group (SYMAAG). They are joined by independent commentators in Private Eye, Open Democracy and WVoN; and by a small number of MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn and Keith Vaz. This growing number of social justice campaigners represent a collective of Davids and Davinas increasingly working to take on the corporate Goliaths of G4S, Serco, and others. Kazuri's Farah Damji is leading a call for a public inquiry into the awarding and subsequent monitoring of public service contracts to corporate outsourcing giants. This week, she submitted a Freedom of Information request to NHS England, asking, among other things, what assessment was made of G4S’s capacity, experience and capability of running SARC centres. Damji believes it is vital to monitor existing contracts run by private sector giants. "We're calling into question the mechanism by which contracts of massive scale and value are let by authorities. This is public money and if it was you or I defrauding the public purse in this way, we'd be corresponding with the outside world at Her Majesty's leisure. "The Home Office and the Ministry of Justice are as culpable for letting these contracts without suitable precautions in place." Speaking in the House of Commons last week, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Chris Grayling agreed, saying that "…it is not only the behaviour of the suppliers that needs to be examined closely…it is quite clear that the management of these contracts has been wholly inadequate." He then placed 'on hold' a contract for the management of prisons in Yorkshire, recently awarded to Serco – but announced the successful award of a similar contract in Northumberland to private company Sodexo. In the meantime, the women's sector holds its breath and waits to see how the G4S contract to run Sexual Assault Referral Centres might unfold in light of these recent allegations. These cases – and others highlighted recently by WVoN, including the sexual harassment and forced evictions of female asylum seekers by G4S staff – perfectly exemplify the troubling trend of awarding public service contracts to private sector providers with no specialist expertise in the service areas they purport to deliver. Commentators are left to wonder what advantage, other than low pricing – G4S senior managers recently admitted that many of their current contracts are 'loss leaders' as they prepare to expand their role in UK public services even further – G4S and other corporate providers can possibly offer. How can big business compete with the longstanding expertise, commitment and proven track record of service delivery displayed by voluntary sector organisations like Rape Crisis? Recent G4S advertisements for a SARC manager said that "experience dealing with victims of sexual assault (is) an advantage". A similar advertisement for frontline crisis workers providing out-of-hours support to victims of rape and sexual assault offers payment of £12.50 an hour and again, mentions that experience of working with victims of sexual assault would be 'advantageous'. Many in the women's voluntary sector might view it a necessity for a Sexual Assault Referral Centre managers and/or their team to have previous experience of working with victims of sexual assault and rape. Instead, the growing body of evidence suggests that corporate providers are unable – and unwilling – to prioritise people over profit. And as the Secretary of State makes a show of wringing his hands over individual contracts, the rest of us are left to wonder how much longer private sector giants will be allowed to profit from vulnerable women.  |
| Female screenwriters slowly changing the script Posted: 19 Jul 2013 03:00 AM PDT
Female cineasts are practiced at low-level suffering; that perpetual ache as we sit through hour upon hour of celluloid stereotypes, cringing at false representation, raging at the denial of agency, resigning ourselves to a life of 'looked-at-ness'. For the predominantly white, masculine, heteronormative framework of moviemaking has long served to house absurd ideations of femininity and misconceived, often damaging, depictions of womanhood. We've been the perfect housewife; the femme fatale; the kooky foil; the deranged pursuer. More recently we've been machete bait; power-mad with shoulder pads or a wallflower deftly concealing her 'hotness' behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. This century, more often than not, we've been the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl (MPDG): cultural shorthand for "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures". This latter example is the most recent incarnation of woman as cipher, serving only to advance androcentric plots. The MPDG has become nothing short of a cultural irritation, a scabrous exercise in infantilisation and a reminder of what young women should be to men: a muse; a pretty thing with cow eyes and a lilting voice who props up the hero and soothes his ire with whimsy and daisy chains. Laurie Penny wrote recently of the spectre of the MPDG in her own, and other women’s, lives. She asserted the cultural and sociological importance of the stories we read, and see, and astutely dissected the effects of fictional representations of gender on behaviour: "women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who know better, and men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of a girl they met in a book one day when they were young and longing". If the comments section beneath Penny's New Statesmen article is anything to go by, the MPDG trope has fettered a generation of young women, binding them to subordinate self-perception and denying them agency. It's as pervasive as the 'bunny boiler' trope, yet all the more insidious for masquerading as something inspirational, if not aspirational. And when us women do get to talk on film, we talk, of course, about men. The Bechdel Test, created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985, exposes and critiques the gender bias in filmmaking and the limitations of female characterisation. To pass the test, a film must satisfy three criteria: (1) It must have at least two women (2) who talk to each other (3) about something other than a man Unsurprisingly, a large proportion of films fail this test. The Bechdel Test has its limitations, and a pass is not necessarily the hallmark of a feminist, or even a very good, film. It is, nonetheless, the most prominent and easy to apply gauge of gender parity in film. It highlights the one dimensional nature of female conceptualisation and the disinclination to depict women as anything other than hollow carriers communicating meaning through the relationships between the primary male characters. A recent, wonderful, film that would fail the Bechdel Test miserably yet reclaims and rescues female characterisation is Before Midnight, the third in Richard Linklater's trilogy of films disseminating and dissecting the intricately etched romance of its protagonists, Celine and Jessie. These films are the very definition of intimate and do not pretend to be about anything other than love and romance, and whether there really can be anything magical or sustainable in either. They contain carefully, deeply drawn characters of the opposite sex who do little but talk. In equal measures. The depiction of the female character, Celine, is so rare precisely because she is depicted from the interior; we make our own judgements on her character based on the things she says and the way she acts. She is not perceived solely from without, delineated through male eyes. Both characters are how we perceive them to be, and how we make sense of the way they make sense of the world. Unsurprisingly the actor and writer Julie Delpy co-wrote the screenplay and contributed largely to the conceptualisation of Celine. Steve Rose recently wrote in the Guardian about the wave of female actresses who are turning to screenwriting in, as he perceives it, an attempt to create better parts for themselves. 'Most movie representations of women are male constructs' writes Rose 'and not all those males understand the opposite sex as intimately as their own'. Quite, but although Rose cites a wave of female actor/screenwriters doing it for themselves, he ignores the elephant in the room: the inhospitable and sexist nature of Hollywood for women without connections. A recent report discovered that contributions like Julie Delpy's are rare: women accounted for only 14 per cent of writers working on the top 250 films of 2012. A more recent report by Susan Orozco revealed that women screenwriters' scripts currently make up a smaller percentage of speculative script sales – scripts written before they are sold – than at any time in the last two decades. Between 2010-12 only 9 per cent of speculative scripts sold were written by women. And it still seems as if women are more likely to get films made if they are coded as 'feminine'; that is, independently produced, quirky, quiet, off the beaten track. It's no coincidence that Rose's list of stand-out female screenwriters includes a film about a 'dizzy New-Yorker struggling with post-college maturity' and last year's Celeste and Jesse Forever, a self-consciously cute and quirky story of divorce and acceptance. Female scriptwriters undoubtedly make for less limiting, more realistic and more progressive depictions of women and womanhood. Yet it feels as if they are still doing this within the confines of what has been designated 'female space'. We want more women talking about something other than men, yet we also want woman being and doing more without men. And we want them doing it loudly.  |
| Finance issues still a barrier Posted: 19 Jul 2013 01:09 AM PDT
Two new sets of research, one from the Women's Business Council and one from Social Enterprise UK, have identified access to finance as one of the main barriers to increasing the numbers of women in business. As a government advisory group, the Women's Business Council worked closely with members of the banking industry to identify ways to maximise women's economic contributions. One of the recommendations in the Council's June 2013 report was 'inclusivity – ensuring gender equality is embedded into everyday business practice,' with particular note taken of the need for flexible working and the 'untapped potential' of women in the third phase of their working lives. The report could be seen as part of the government's response to criticism about the rise in female unemployment. In April 2013, the Fawcett Society warned about the UK's female-unfriendly labour market. Ceri Goddard, the organisation's chief executive, said that if women continued to make up the majority of those that lost their jobs, but the minority of those being hired in new roles, the strides women have made in the workplace in the last half a century risk being undermined just when women, the families many of them support and our economy need them more than ever. The Women's Business Council addressed the business case for more women in the workforce, saying there were over 2.4 million women who were not in work but want to work, and over 1.3 million women who wanted to increase the number of hours they work. And if women were setting up and running new businesses at the same rate as men, we could have an extra one million female entrepreneurs. 'They are,’ the Council concluded, ‘currently only half as likely to do this, and they and the economy pays the price.' One of the chief recommendations the Council makes for increasing the numbers of women who start and run their own business is to increase the availability of role models. More than 80 per cent of women who start their own business know someone else who did as well. Finding and promoting senior female business leaders, however, was – and is – much easier said than done. The latest Grant Thornton International Business Report shows that 'globally, 24 per cent of senior management roles are now filled by women.' Francesca Lagerberg, head of tax at Grant Thornton UK and incoming global leader of tax at Grant Thornton International Ltd, said, "The economies where growth is high have greater diversity in their senior management teams. "Women are playing a major role in driving the world's growth economies, bringing balance to the decision making process. "In comparison, the mature economies are now playing catch up." In Japan 7 per cent of senior roles are occupied by women, the worst performer, and Japan, the UK with 19 per cent and the USA 20 per cent are in the bottom eight countries for women in senior management. “[Those] economies,” she pointed out, “are also experiencing low levels of growth.” The situation is even starker when looking at boardroom positions. In the G7, just 16 per cent of board members are women. This compares to 26 per cent in the BRIC economies and 38 per cent in the Baltic states. In the UK, one area of business that is thriving is the social enterprise sector. Research published in July 2013 by Social Enterprise UK (SEUK) in the People's Business Report shows that not only are social enterprises out-performing traditional businesses, they are also reaping the benefits of a relatively diverse workforce. 'Social enterprises,’ says the report, ‘are far more likely to be led by women than mainstream businesses – 38 per cent of social enterprises have a female leader, compared with 19 per cent of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and three per cent of FTSE 100 companies.’ And in addition, ’91 per cent of social enterprises have at least one woman on their leadership team’, whereas ’49 per cent of mainstream SMEs have all-male directors.’ SEUK recommends that to address the barrier created by the lack of access to finance, investors and policy makers 'design financial products and support programmes' to better reflect the needs of the sector, rather than expecting social enterprises to fit into current, traditional business structures and processes. The report also recommends full implementation of the Social Value Act. This would make it mandatory for public authorities to consider the community benefit of any contract awarded, which could make it easier for smaller enterprises to win more work. Currently, social enterprises contribute £18.5 billion a year to the UK economy. Imagine how much greater that value could be if the women wanting to work were able to work.  |
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