Women's Views on News |
- Google search results sexist and chilling
- From today women are working for free
- Another look at Edinburgh’s saunas
| Google search results sexist and chilling Posted: 07 Nov 2013 08:06 AM PST
It was with horror and deep distress that – following on from reading the recent ad campaign run by UN Women which exposed how deep rooted sexism by looking up through Google search suggestions – I typed 'Women will' in to the Google search bar. The resulting ‘top search suggestion’ finished the sentence with 'Women will never be equal to men'. Utterly chilling. The UN Women’s campaign, publicised last month, was based on real searches entered into Google in March 2013. Developed for UN Women by the creative marketing company Memac Ogilvy and Mather Dubai, the campaign illustrated the outcomes of entering the beginning of sentences and noting the Google search suggestions or ‘autocomplete’ as it is known. Typing in ‘Women should’ resulted in the statements – in order as listed – ‘Women should stay at home’; ‘Women should be slaves’; ‘Women should be in the kitchen’ and ‘Women should not speak in church’. In a personal capacity I entered ‘Women know’ and was treated to – again in order as listed by Google – ‘Women know your limits’ and ‘Women know your place’, with subsequent deviations of the same theme According to a Google help page: ‘The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users’. The heart sinks. UN Women said that ‘the searches confirm the urgent need to continue making the case for women’s rights, empowerment and equality’. They are ‘heartened by the initial strong reaction to the ads and hope they will spark constructive dialogue globally’. Jessica Lee, of Search Engine Watch, explores and highlights the difficulties, dangers and controversies surrounding autocorrect. She said that Google already censors autocomplete, and wondered if Google will look into the propagation of stereotypes in light of this campaign. Lee also that observed the absence of intent was available in these autocomplete searches, and asked: ‘Are people searching for the answer to these queries because they are trying to gain an understanding in to another group they are not familiar with, or are they fuelled by hate?’ This issue must be explored further, and the ensuing dialogues engaged with by Google. For out of all the search suggestions that we are given, it seems most important that ‘Women should’ not have to experience discrimination.  |
| From today women are working for free Posted: 07 Nov 2013 03:55 AM PST
Women working full-time still earn almost £5,000 a year less than men, though the pay gap in some jobs is three times bigger, according to a Trade Union Congress (TUC) analysis of official figures published to mark the UK's Equal Pay Day. Equal Pay Day – which is on 7 November in the UK – marks the point at which women working full-time effectively stop earning as they are paid 15 per cent less per hour than men working full-time. But in some professions the gender pay gap is much wider, says the TUC. According to the TUC's research, female health professionals have the biggest pay gap at 31 per cent, which works out at £16,000 a year. A key reason for the size of the pay gap in health is the earnings of the best-paid professionals. Top male professionals in health earn nearly £50 an hour, twice as much as top earning women who earn £24.67 an hour. Women working in culture, media and sport experience the next biggest pay gap at 27.5 per cent – which works out at £10,000 a year – while women working in manufacturing occupations earn nearly 24 per cent less than men. Women earn less than men in 32 of the 35 major occupations classified by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The three major occupations where women earn more than men – transport drivers, electricians and agricultural workers – are all male dominated. Less than 50,000 women are employed in these sectors; 1.5 million men are. The gender pay gap in the private sector is 19.9 per cent, the pay gap in the public sector 13.6 per cent. The gender pay gap is even bigger for women working part-time. Equal Pay Day for women working part-time was back on 27 August. Women earn 35 per cent less per hour than men working full-time. The TUC believes that as four decades of equal pay legislation have only halved – rather than eradicated – the gender pay gap, and a tougher approach is needed to stop millions of workers losing out on pay and career opportunities simply because of their gender. One of the reasons for the gender pay gap is the lack of transparency in pay systems. That allow companies to pay female employees less than their male colleagues, without staff even being aware of it, says the TUC. Publishing annual gender pay gap information and conducting regular pay audits would enable companies to identify any gender pay gaps, and then action could be taken to close them. However, just one in 100 companies voluntarily publishing equal pay information. The TUC wants the government to legislate and make audits compulsory additions to annual company reports. More senior level part-time jobs are also needed to help women continue their careers after having children, says the TUC. Too many women are forced to trade down their jobs and abandon their careers just to find working hours that they can fit around their childcare arrangements. The TUC wants the government to boost the availability of more senior part-time jobs by encouraging employers to advertise all jobs on a flexible basis where possible. Ministers could take the initiative by making it a requirement for all public sector job vacancies, says the TUC. The government should also strengthen the right to request flexible working by removing the six month qualifying period and making it available to employees from the day they start a new job. Remarking on this, the TUC's General Secretary, Frances O'Grady, said: "It is a huge injustice that women are still earning on average almost £5,000 a year less than men. "This pay gap can add up to hundreds of thousands over the course of a woman's career. "The gender pay gap, which continues despite decades of girls outperforming boys at school and university, is also a huge economic failure. "Four decades on from the Equal Pay Act, it's clear we need to take a tougher approach so that future generations of women don't suffer the same penalties. "One simple way would be to force companies to be more transparent about how they pay staff. Pay transparency and pay audits would give employers the evidence they need to finally take closing the pay gap seriously." Charlie Woodworth of the Fawcett Society said: "It is scandalous that in modern Britain women can expect to take home just 85p for every pound men earn. "The persistent gap in pay shows just how far we still have to go when it comes to achieving equality between the sexes. "In recent years, progress on closing the gap has begun to slow. "As austerity continues to bite we now face the very real danger that the gap will widen, as more and more women find themselves forced out of the public sector and onto the dole or into the private sector workforce – where the pay gap stands at 20 per cent. "The labour market," Woodworth continued, "is experiencing dramatic change, and women are bearing the brunt of cuts to jobs. "If the government doesn't address this growing problem, we risk returning to a much more male-dominated workforce, with record numbers of women unemployed, those in work typically earning less, and the gap in pay between women and men beginning to grow instead of shrink."  |
| Another look at Edinburgh’s saunas Posted: 07 Nov 2013 01:09 AM PST
Until recently, Edinburgh had employed something of a laissez faire approach to public policy surrounding prostitution. The city’s saunas – which are licensed as ‘entertainment venues’ – had traditionally been tolerated by council members and police as part of the city’s more ‘pragmatic’ approach to sex work. According to supporters of this approach, sex workers employed at these saunas were granted a relatively safe and comfortable workplace, at odds with the violence and risk inherent in street-based prostitution. To others, Edinburgh’s 27-year tolerance of the indoor sex trade masked the reality; that sex workers can never be truly safe from the ‘core harm’, exploitation and gender inequality that marks the purchase of, usually women’s, bodies for sex. However, since MSP Rhoda Grant’s unsuccessful attempts to criminalise the purchase of sex in Scotland and the merging of the country’s local police forces in April to create one unified Police Scotland, there has been a marked change in approach. This change has been apportioned by some to the influence of the more ideologically-driven ‘zero tolerance’ policies in Glasgow and Strathclyde, which aim to drive the sex trade out of business in what MSP Margo MacDonald called a ‘vain attempt to eliminate prostitution’. Reports of raids on 13 saunas in June focused largely on the criminal activity allegedly uncovered and what this could mean for Edinburgh’s licensing policies. It was left to Scot-Pep, a charity dedicated to the promotion of sex workers’ rights, to condemn the raids and publicly reveal the abuse and ill-treatment meted out to the people who, after all, really matter in all of this; the women themselves. For example, one woman was ‘strip-searched, subjected to degrading and intimidating treatment and held without food or water for up to seven hours’. Whatever your view of sex work, incidences such as this are indicative of the wide-scale stigmatisation, prejudice and mistreatment sex workers face; not just, as campaigners focus on, by ‘punters’ but also by the societal institutions that are supposedly there to protect the vulnerable. Edinburgh council, in renewing previously suspended sauna licences, now seems to be locked in a battle with Edinburgh’s police. The suggestion by the police force that ‘no items of a sexual nature’ should be allowed on the saunas’ premises drew intense criticism from a number of commentators. The implications of seeing the use or presence of condoms as evidence of sex work – and thus the legitimacy of confiscating these condoms – has unthinkable ramifications for public health, and the safety and freedom of sex workers. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has previously condemned such strategies and one sex worker, Cat, told Scot-Pep: ‘They're going to perpetrate these traumatic, horrible raids, and for what? To find condoms in my purse? All women should be afraid of these developments, but sex workers especially. What if they confiscate my condoms and I still have to work that night?’ The practice of simultaneously ‘tolerating’ sex work to ensure safety yet considering the employment of increasingly oppressive tactics which enhance risk is symptomatic of the contradictory environment in Edinburgh. An environment that is doing nothing to support sex workers as such, and a blurred, indefinite policy reduces accountability and leaves the vulnerable open to institutional abuse. Edinburgh police swiftly rejected claims they were referring to the banning of condoms, insisting they were concerned with the safety of sex workers. Regardless, Edinburgh council refused to accept the proposal, possibly conscious of the imperative to ensure the city does not return to its past, when misguided police crackdowns on drug users led to it shouldering the tragic and burdensome moniker of the ‘AIDS capital of Europe’. Sex work is a hugely complex issue, with arguments from both sides of the debate sometimes overlapping. The centrality of the issue is surely the primacy of safety for a group of, predominantly, women who are unjustifiably stigmatised, maligned and put at risk, while those with the power jostle for position. Anti prostitution campaigners and Edinburgh police argue that they want women to be safe and that they do care for sex worker’s welfare. This is no doubt true. Yet banning condoms or closing saunas will not see the sex trade instantaneously perish and does not address the question of where these women go after their livelihood is snatched away without any warning or any support being given. Pulling the rug from under women will not ensure their safety and will surely increase the stigmatisation they face. It will also not stop these women working if that is what they need to do. It will just make it more dangerous. Sex workers are 18 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the population. This is a horrific manifestation of gender violence which begs the question: why on earth would you not take the chance to lower this figure? Closing saunas and potentially driving women to work on the infinitely more dangerous streets is not going to do it, nor is criminalising clients, which drives sex work deeper underground, further out of sight, leaving only the dangerous, twisted individuals on the streets. Sex work is indeed symbolic of gender inequality but proselytising about how repugnant men are for paying for sex and how sex work is commodification misses something. There are deep cultural, political and systemic reasons – beyond any surface-level notions of misogyny and sexualisation – as to why women engage in sex work. A large part of this is in relation to what so many refuse to see – that for some, sex work is work. That is, the absence of decently paid work that women, denied other chances because of structural inequalities, are so often faced with. Many women who function below eye level in society live in absolute poverty because policy makers do not want to think about drug users, or multiple deprivation, or the lack of appropriate accommodation for homeless women, or entrenched prejudice towards single mothers. We need to address all of these factors because society, the economy and government policy all help to make selling sex the easiest or only option for a lot of women. Some sex workers stress their autonomy and freedom to choose sex work. Many others do not and it is those who have had little or no choice that many are quite rightly concerned with. Policies driven by a dogmatic adherence to ideology rarely address the whole picture and, true to form, some of the recent approaches in Edinburgh seem to be dealing with one aspect while the wider ramifications go untouched. Having said that, in all of this there is a truism so many of us writing about sex work so often forget; it is not about us. Sex workers are not puppets we can manipulate to further our causes. Sex workers, lest we forget, are human beings who deserve as much safety, dignity and respect as anyone else. We talk so much about disempowerment and the structural forces that operate behind many women’s entry into sex work. And yet a lot of this feels as if we are debating over the top of their heads while they remain voiceless, left to pick up the pieces after opposing world-views lock horns once again.  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Women's Views on News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |