What Are Your Gender Equality Priorities?

This blog was first published on girlsmatter.org.uk.

From closing the gender pay gap to ending violence against women and girls, many actions could improve our lives in the UK.

Through my role as a Post-2015 Ambassador for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, I have attended many events and talk to UK politicians about how they could take action on gender inequalities at home and around the world. In that space I try to convey the diverse experiences of the hundreds of thousands of girls and young women who aren't able to be there with me - a very difficult task!

That's why I find it particularly exciting when there is an opportunity for everybody to easily and directly contribute their own views on such an important issue.

What progress has been made to improve the lives of women and girls?

Twenty years ago, a landmark event took place. Beijing, China played host to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, and 189 countries (including the UK) signed up to the resulting declaration and platform for action.

In June this year, the UK government released a progress report on how they have tackled gender inequalities in line with the outcomes from Beijing - and now they are asking for your thoughts. This week the Government Equalities Office has launched an online survey asking for your thoughts on two questions.

- What progress has been made to improve the lives of women and girls in the UK since 2010?

- What future priorities for women and girls should the government focus on in the next five years?

Tremendous progress has been made around the world since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action were signed, and you can help to ensure that progress continues for years to come.

Have your say

Head over to the Government Equalities Office website right now to find out more about the consultation and to complete the survey. It takes just five minutes to have your say and to shape future government policy on gender equality.

Where do your draw the (poverty) line?

If you've been following this blog for a while, you might know that Out For Equality started as my 'Take Action' project after participating in a World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts event back in 2010. That is why I'm particularly excited to be participating in Chat For Change - a human rights project set up by Erin Wicking in Australia after she too participated in a WAGGGS event. Chat For Change is all about speaking out for human rights, with a different focus subject each month, through blogs, videos and events. This month the subject is "Poverty" and this is my blog:

When I was 18, one of my first essays in the first few weeks of university asked me to define the poverty line - how do we decide who is poor and who is not? What about extreme poverty, absolute poverty, relative poverty? Is a $1 a day a useful measure? What about the poorest 10% of a population? Or those earning less than 50% of the median income in a country? The questions go on.

Looking back at this question after the intervening 6 years and I know from my experiences that the idea of a poverty line is only partially useful. A poverty line lets you decide where poverty is growing or receding, it's lets you make nice statistics and for bureaucrats to pat themselves on the back for making sure there's less 'poor' people in a given year for example. But it makes me uncomfortable because statistics can be manipulated, numbers can be twisted, and they don't tell you about the daily lived realities of the people either side of the line. Poverty doesn't effect "10%", it effects real people. 

That's why instead of focusing on the numbers, we should focus on the solutions - we should focus on enabling everybody to live a fulfilling life regardless of their economic means. 

Ending poverty is not about 'giving them more money' especially as, in the UK at least, the dominant discourse has a distinctly colonial flavour. White people give money to some more white people who make the decisions about how and where they will spend the money which will be eagerly received by black and brown people (largely in Africa and increasingly in Asia). 

I want to propose a different route to ending poverty. Whilst I think there are key projects that are necessarily for a fulfilling life such as education, healthcare, employment and being able to live free from violence, we need to co-commission any project with the community it will affect. By delivering poverty eradication strategies with local partners we enable people as creators of their own future, we will deliver more sustainable projects and we will deliver development which is relevant to that community, not to the small elite group of people who are funding or planning it. 

Relative poverty also isn't a concept we can ignore. This methodology would therefore be as appropriate to communities in the UK and Australia as anywhere else in the world - through the non-discriminatory provision of support and resources, we can enable everybody to become agents of development in their own communities. 

Training the Next Body Confidence Ambassadors with #FreeBeingMe

"When you comment on a picture on the internet, make it about the person/how you feel" - this was just one of the many suggestions this weekend on how to encourage friends and family to become body confident.

With some great timing to coincide with International Day of the Girl on Saturday and Body Confidence Week this week, I was excited to be leading a training last weekend for 26 young members of Girlguiding to become peer educators. 

4 Peer Education

4 Peer Education is Girlguiding's peer education initiative and something I have been part of since 2007. Through 4 I have delivered sessions for my peers on everything from bullying to alcohol abuse and the skills and knowledge have come in useful when helping friends through personal situations. Currently, Girlguiding's peer educators can lead sessions for members, other youth groups and schools on three topics: Youth Health (developed with Department of Health), Healthy Relationships (developed with AVA), and Free Being Me. This last initiative focuses of body confidence and was developed by the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts and the Dove Self Esteem Initiative. it is being delivered all over the world and the goal is to reach 3.5 million girls by 2016.

Free Being Me

This weekend's training for 26 young women in the Anglia region of Girlguiding concentrated on the Free Being Me resource. First we defined the image myth that dominates our media and society and then we broke it down. We covered practical skills for challenging this myth including spotting the changes in airbrushed images and talking to their friends about the subject. The suggestions in the photo above were their ideas on how they can break down the image myth in their day to day life. 

I was honoured to witness their development over the weekend - leaving on Sunday afternoon as confident and enthusiastic peer educators and ambassadors for body confidence. It was fantastic to hear that some of them are even leading their first sessions for Girlguiding units this week! 

Body Confidence For All!

I hope to help Free Being Me to grow and develop girls body confidence across the UK but it would be great if politicians would take notice of the impact of this programme, learn from it and ensure that all young people in the UK can be body confident by providing similar activities through schools. 

"Objectivity is Male Subjectivity"

I am now a little over two weeks into my PhD. I am looking at spaces in museums in the city of Sheffield - not a topic that is explicitly about gender, but as I believe there is a gendered perspective to most things I'm sure I will be thinking about it over the next three years.

Last week I sat in my first lecture for a module I have to take as a refresher on quantitative methods for the social sciences - that is, mostly statistical analysis. A few slides into the presentation there are a few bullet points on categorical variables - those that can be divided into discrete categories. Option one was binary variables and surprise, surprise the example read e.g. Sex male/female. Now the lecturer clearly sensed the discomfort with what he was proposing as he was met with affronted and quizzical looks and whispered comments. At least a half dozen students in the room are doing specifically feminist research. He moved swiftly on. 

Whilst I acknowledge that there are varying interpretations of both sex and gender as a binary, trinity or continuous spectrum, it seems lazy and ill thought out to include it as an absolute in a lecture when it can easy be anticipated that the students will have varying positions. It's incidences like these that make me uneasy with the use of quantitative methods as supposedly objective research. To me it is clear that categorising any data is done on the basis on personal bias and subjectivity, just in a more hidden and sometimes socially accepted way than more qualitative methods of research. 

This morning I was reading an article by Grayson Perry in the New Statesman - about the "default man". You can read it at http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/10/grayson-perry-rise-and-fall-default-man. Perry identifies this as an identity group which dominates  politics and big business. He also uses the phrase "objectivity is male subjectivity" which I believe is extremely applicable to academia. 

Whilst there is a growing visible presence of research that seeks to break down patriachical norms that I've come across, I think there is still a fair way to go before the notion of objectivity and a white straight male bias no longer dominate research across all disciplines.