Women's Views on News

Posted: 16 Jun 2016 01:21 PM PDT

Why is the government doing nothing?

It’s been two years since David Cameron pledged to add mothers’ names to marriage certificates – so why hasn’t it happened yet?

In 2014, more than 70,000 people signed a petition asking for mothers names to be included on marriage certificates along with the names of fathers of the bride and the groom.

As a result, David Cameron announced that he would address this “inequality in marriage” and acknowledged that “the content of marriage registers in England and Wales hasn’t changed since the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign”.

Speaking at a Relationships Alliance summit, the Prime Minister said: “At the moment, they [marriage certificates] require details of the couples’ fathers, but not their mothers.

“This clearly doesn’t reflect modern Britain – and it’s high time the system was updated. So I have asked the Home Office to look at how we can address this.”

But, two years later, nothing has been done.

In December last year, the Home Office rejected a proposal to add mothers’ names to marriage certificates because it did not take gay couples into account, and said that assuming that all couples have opposite-sex parents is exclusionary.

Home Office Minister Richard Harrington said that the proposed Bill did “not take account of different family circumstances, where there may not be a mother and father”.

He also claimed: “after we have amended the law, the matter may not be looked at again for another 100 or 200 years, so we have to get things right”.

However, Green MP for Brighton Caroline Lucas, who tabled an early-day motion (EDM) calling for change on the issue last September, claims that whilst it is true that the proposed Bill did exclude same-sex couples, it is an “incredibly simple thing to address”.

When asked by BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray what she was asking for in her motion, Lucas told her: “I was asking for the rules to be brought up to date, for the whole system to be dragged into the modern world, and for people to be able to put their mothers’ names on marriage certificates. I simply cannot understand why there is still so much delay and foot dragging.”

And speaking about the issue of people with same-sex parents, Lucas said: “Caroline Spelman, the Conservative MP, brought forward a very practical suggestion of how you would deal with that, simply by bringing the rules around marriage certificates into line with the way in which civil partnerships are already dealt with in England and Wales.

“This would simply mean that you would replace the marriage certificate registers with an electronic register. This has all kinds of benefits in terms of flexibility, being able to reflect whatever the particular situation is, and it also means that there’d be less administration and it would be cheaper.

“It’s already done for civil partnerships, and even for marriages in Scotland. It isn’t rocket science.”

A change in the law was expected to be announced in last month’s Queen’s Speech, but the issue of adding mothers to marriage certificates didn’t get so much as a mention.

This begs the question, does the government really want to implement this change?

The issue has been raised time and time again since the petition and the Prime Minister’s announcement in 2014, and a Conservative MP has even offered a simple and efficient solution – but still nothing.

If Scotland and Northern Ireland have already done it, why can’t England and Wales? You’d think that the government would be eager to pass a bill that is relatively straightforward and would be popular with many.

In the meantime, women continue to be written out of history, and mothers can still only have their name on their child’s marriage certificate if they are a witness.

As things stand, marriage certificates are sexist, outdated and unfair, and I for one certainly won’t be tying the knot until both of my parents’ names can be on the certificate.

Let’s hope that 2016 will be the year that mothers finally get the recognition they deserve.

Securing Scottish women’s futures

Posted: 16 Jun 2016 01:19 PM PDT

Using Scotland's new social security powers to close the gender equality gap.

Engender, Close the Gap, Scottish Women's Aid, the Scottish Refugee Council and Carers Scotland work across a broad range of issues towards women's equality.

They work on women's political, social and economic equality, on enabling women to speak to government, on violence against women, on unpaid care, and with refugee and asylum-seeking women.

Across all of these contexts, social security policy has a significant impact on women.

The UK government's 'welfare reform' programme and wider agenda of cuts to public spending is having an egregious impact on gender equality.

And as women's organisations they have now, in a new report, called ‘Securing Women’s Futures: using Scotland’s new social security powers to close the gender equality gap’ set out how and why welfare reform is affecting women, why this demands a gendered response from policymakers and made some recommendations regarding how this can be attained.

The Scottish Government's programme of welfare mitigation is extremely welcome. Unfortunately, however, the approach has not taken account of the gender inequalities at the heart of our social security system or the complexities of women's lives.

Nor has work to mitigate welfare reform been concretely linked to devolved strategies over related areas such as women's employment, social care, childcare and violence against women.

The Scotland Act 2016 devolves a number of powers over social security that overlap with devolved policy and services that are crucial for women's equality.

This provides an opportunity for the Scottish Government to make progress against commitments on gender equality, by pausing to take stock of ways in which social security, and specific welfare reform measures in particular, have not delivered for women.

Scotland can avoid replicating ungendered policies which are entrenching women's inequality across the UK and create a divergent approach.

Without such an approach, policy and programmes undertaken by other Scottish Government departments and public bodies will be less effective, and high-level targets and commitments will be undermined.

This joint report summarises why and how women are affected by social security policy and sets out ways in which new powers can be engaged to increase women's equality in Scotland.

The recommendations are presented in terms of systemic gender inequalities that dictate the impact of social security policy on women – paid work, unpaid work, domestic abuse and multiple discrimination.

They also highlight experiences of women with whom they work.

It is this documenting of daily realities and of growing anger, fear and stress that remains the basis of the call to action on women's social security.

Welfare reform and the UK government's wider austerity agenda are having a grotesquely disproportionate impact on women's access to resources, security and safety.

Over the decade of austerity, from 2010 to 2020, 86 per cent of net 'savings' raised through cuts to social security and tax credits will come from women's incomes.

The explanation for this enormous imbalance lies in women's pre-existing inequality:

Women are twice as dependent on social security as men, with 20 per cent of women's income coming from the benefits and tax credit system, compared with 10 per cent of men's.

Women have fewer financial assets and less access to occupational pensions than men, and women are 66 per cent of the paid workforce living in poverty in Scotland.

92 per cent of lone parents are women, and women make up 95 per cent of lone parents in receipt of Income Support.

Women provide around 70 per cent of unpaid care and 74 per cent of Carer's Allowance claimants are women. Women are twice as likely to give up paid work in order to care.

The gender pay gap in Scotland is 14.8 per cent. Women working part-time earn 33.5 per cent less than men working full-time, and women are 75 per cent of the part-time workforce. On average women earn £175.30 less per week than men.

The gender inequality of welfare reform will have far-reaching impacts for many different women.

Women have been placed at greater risk of deeper and sustained poverty.

In addition to meeting basic needs, economic inequality affects access to social and cultural participation.

Welfare reform measures have created and will continue to create further barriers to women's full participation in society, including within their communities and in political spaces.

By 2020, women who are lone parents will experience an estimated loss of £4,000 per year, a 20 per cent drop in living standards and a 17 per cent drop in disposable income.

Where women's disposable income is reduced, spending on children decreases and links between women's and child poverty are widely recognised.

Child poverty shapes life chances, development and wellbeing, and subjects children to extreme stigmatisation.

This is the backdrop against which the Scottish Government gains new powers over social security.

The report sets out details of women's diminishing social security in the UK, and ways in which the Scottish Government could engage these new powers to help alleviate the harm caused.

To read the rest of the joint report from Engender, the Scottish Refugee Council, Scottish Women's Aid, Close the Gap, and Carers Scotland, click here.

To read the summary of the recommendations, click here.

24 UK News

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