EQUAL - Genderwise Scotland

Description

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. Currently there is a 15% pay gap between men and women in Scotland and this pay gap increases significantly with age so that on average a women’s income in retirement is only 57% of men’s. There are many reasons for this and the partnership has chosen to focus on those around gender, career breaks and care. We will highlight ways in which good equality policies benefit individual organisations and what can be done to enhance these benefits further.

Aim

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 all sectors. The partnership has operated Scotland wide in its aim to combat gender poverty and disadvantage and demonstrate the economic advantages of good equal opportunities strategies

Objectives

• Achieve gender mainstreaming within the main regeneration agencies involved in the community planning process.

• Promote policies and organisational cultures relating to care in the workplace, with a particular focus upon older women workers.

• Identify the effects of care responsibilities of women on their career paths

• Identify and overcome (by vertical desegregation) issues that limit women’s career prospects by bringing cultural change into professional sub-cultures.

• Enhance the career opportunities of care workers for the elderly through innovative training and delivery techniques using a Virtual College.

• Pilot innovative training approaches to increase the number of men employed in the care sector.

• Identify learning gained on long term caring breaks that is directly transferable to the workplace, and looking at ways to articulate and accredit this.

• Identify and overcoming barriers faced by

• Piloting ‘family systems’ that support disadvantaged women with children who wish to enter further and higher education with a view to mainstreaming this throughout Scotland.

Target Groups

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

Video interviews

Purpose of Project - Mhairi Taylor, DP Partner 1.3 MB
Self Confidence - Julie Innes, Beneficiary 640.4 KB
Sustainability - Sheryl Harvey, Partner 817.1 KB
There's Life in the Old Dog yet! - Vivian Maxwell 169.6 KB

Round

2

Round 1 to Round 2

This development partnership was not involved in Round One

Lead partner

Glasgow Caledonian University
www.gcal.ac.uk

Core partners

Adam Smith College, Fife, Engender, One Parent Families Scotland, Oxfam Poverty Programme Scotland, Rosemount Lifelong Learning, South Lanarkshire Council, University of Glasgow, University of Strathclyde, Senior Studies Institute

Contact

Sheryl Binnie, Glasgow Caledonian University,

End-dates

Action 2: 30 June 2007
Action 3: 31 December 2007

Equal theme

Gender equality

Origins

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 substantial horizontal and vertical desegregation exists in the work force. It was therefore critical that the partnership should approach this issue it in new 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.

Beneficiaries

Employed in large firms, Employed in SMEs, Labour market returnees, Lone parents and people with care responsibilities, People over 50, Women
Total beneficiaries: 305

Intended impact/ sustainability

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 all sectors. It is considered vital to establish permanent support so that such good practice would continue beyond the life of the partnership. Potential mainstreaming targets (including policy makers), were engaged throughout Action 2 informing them of and seeking their opinions on activities being undertaken. Where possible they have been included in DP and project level steering groups and their opinions incorporated into the implementation of the activities.

Scatter plot

	City	Regional	National	European
Process	X	X	X	X
Practice	X	X	X	X
Product	X	X	X	X
Policy	X	X	X	X