Equal-Works

Background

The Genderwise Scotland Development Partnership brought together organisations wanting to trial practical and innovative solutions to reduce gender gaps and support desegregation in the Scottish labour market.

When Genderwise began, there was a 15% pay gap between men and women in Scotland. This pay gap increases significantly with age and on average a women’s income in retirement was only 57% of men’s. There are many reasons for this and the partnership chose to focus on those around organisational policy, training opportunities, career breaks and care. We hoped to highlight ways in which good equality policies benefitted individual organisations, and what could be done to enhance these benefits further.

Aim

Our aim was to create long-lasting improvements in the world of work, enabling both men and women to better access non-traditional occupations, and to improve access for women to higher level jobs in a variety of sectors. The partnership operated across Scotland, running a variety of pilot projects involving various groups of partners.

Objectives

• To achieve gender mainstreaming within the main regeneration agencies involved in the community planning process.
• To promote policies and organisational cultures compatible to care responsibilities in the workplace, with a particular focus on older women workers.
• To identify and overcome (by vertical desegregation) issues that limit women’s career prospects by bringing cultural change into professional sub-cultures.
• To enhance the career opportunities of care workers for the elderly through innovative training and delivery techniques using a 'virtual college'.
• To pilot innovative training approaches to increase the number of men employed in the care sector.
• To identify learning gained on long-term caring breaks that is directly transferable to the workplace, and looking at ways to articulate and accredit this.
• To pilot ‘family systems’ that support women with children who wish to enter further and higher education, with a view to mainstreaming this throughout Scotland FFC.

• Women
• Lone parents and those with care responsibilities
• Labour market returnees
• People over 50

Despite over 20 years of equality legislation in the UK, and a substantial volume of work having been done to highlight these issues, the UK still has a 19% gender pay gap which is not closing, and there is substantial horizontal and vertical desegregation in the work force. It was therefore critical that the partnership should approach this issue in innovative ways. While there were a number of existing initiatives and materials (toolkits, case studies, etc.) the partnership believed it was their integrated application that would impact on gender equality.

South Lanarkshire Council Regeneration:

Improved understanding of how to work with local councils to engender policy, and ongoing work with South Lanarkshire to improve their policy making processes.

Gender Action Project:

Integrated Equality and Diversity Unit in the University of Glasgow with top-level buy-in and a long-term commitment to improving equality for staff.

Family Friendly Colleges:

Improved access to education for parents with care responsibilities, including improvements in information provided by Jobcentre Plus, a parents charter supported by the National Union of Students, and evidence that will be used by One Parent Families as part of their ongoing policy lobbying process.

Advancing Women's Employablity:

Improved career aspirations and opportunities for women aged 50 and over. This is being mainstreamed with a variety of funding sources and will be widened out to additional areas and to include men aged 50 and over.