Members of committee, we have on video conference, as you can see, our witnesses from the City University of New York, Professor Marilyn Rubin; the Scottish Women's Budget Group, Angela O'Hagan; the UK Women's Budget Group, Janet Veitch; and Glasgow Caledonian University, Ailsa McKay.
Now, I have to let you know that when they are talking, they'll appear on the larger screen. When they're not talking, they'll fade into the background. The Scottish Women's Group has to leave by 10 a.m. They have a prior engagement. We will start off with Angela O'Hagan and Ailsa McKay. They'll do a joint presentation. There will be half an hour of presentations, totally, because everybody will be doing 10 minutes.
There is a delayed reaction, so please do not speak fast. The chair is the only one who seems to speak fast, but please do not speak fast. Go slow, and wait for them to hear and then respond. Okay?
Welcome to all of you. Can you hear me?
:
Good morning, Madam Chair.
It's very nice to see you there in Canada, London, and New York.
Good morning, distinguished members of the committee. On behalf of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, I would like to thank the committee for this very special opportunity to address you and for the recognition of our work that this invitation represents. I would also like to commend the committee for its initiative in undertaking this current study on gender budgets. I hope that our own relevant parliamentary committees will follow your lead and that a similar study on gender budgets might be undertaken in Scotland.
I would also like to imagine a scenario where witnesses could offer such frank, open, and progressive evidence to the committees of the Scottish Parliament on the importance and benefits of gender budget analysis, as previous witnesses to this committee have done.
I look forward to the rest of the study and to hearing your final recommendations and decisions.
Madam Chair, thank you for recognizing our time pressures and that we have to leave the session, as you say, at the end of the first hour. Thank you very much for accommodating our other appointments.
I will now make some comments on the history, character, and outputs of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, which hereafter I will refer to as SWBG.
SWBG is a non-funded group of individual women with a commitment to positive change for women through analysis of resource allocation and policy in the budget process in Scotland. SWBG was formed in 1999, following the creation of newly devolved government institutions in Scotland, including the primary legislature of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive of ministers and the civil service, now known as the Scottish Government, following elections in May 2007.
SWBG membership is fairly small, with some 25 women on the list and an active core of 12 to 15 women. Our activities over our lifetime have included tracking the budgetary process in Scotland, responding to government proposals for spending plans, responding to consultations on key policy areas, giving evidence to parliamentary committees on the budget process and the incorporation of gender analysis within it, and giving evidence to committees on key policy areas such as child care, social justice, skills, and economic development strategies. Our responses are formulated collectively, drawing on the wide range of skills and policy expertise that members bring to the group.
A brief summary of the promotion of gender budget analysis in the Scottish budgetary process runs as follows. Early in its existence, the SWBG lobbied the first minister for finance in the first round of draft spending plans for the Scottish Executive. He responded positively to the initiative and lent his support. SWBG further lobbied for inclusion of a commitment to gender analysis in government spending plans and budgetary processes in the first equality strategy of the Scottish Executive. With support from the Equal Opportunities Commission, which was the statutory body for sex discrimination, which has now been subsumed within the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, SWBG lobbied for the creation of a ministerial advisory group on integrating equalities in the budget process.
There are a number of important aspects of the Scottish policy context to note at this point. The first is that the commitment to equality is enshrined in the Scotland Act and in the founding principles of the Scottish Parliament. While very positive, it is a commitment to equal opportunities, not to gender specifically. This led to the development of a broad-reaching equality strategy covering a number of strands of equalities, including race, disability, sexual orientation, age, religious belief or faith, and gender.
While there have been specific policy initiatives directed at women and men and a considerable program of work specifically targeting violence against women, sex equality and gender policy have not been a priority area of government policy or related spending.
In policy terms particularly, for example, in social justice policy, there has been a tendency for social justice and equality to be used as interchangeable terms and for a growing absence of any gender analysis in both the policy analysis and resource allocation out-turn.
The commitment to mainstreaming, which underpins the Scottish government's equality strategy, is a commitment to mainstreaming equality, not specifically gender. The ministerial advisory group on budgets is the equality proofing budget and policy advisory group and not the gender budget group.
I should note at this point as well that the equality strategy of the Scottish Government is due to be reviewed this year, and we are hoping to see a renewed and reinvigorated commitment, and especially some action flowing from that equality strategy.
Another important point to note, and a point of distinction between the Scottish and Canadian experiences, is that the Scottish Parliament has the power to levy taxation within restricted parameters, but it has not done so. So the budget that the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are concerned with is the expression of the government's spending commitments against its policy priorities, as there is no tax collection or other fiscal activity within it. Funding for Scotland comes to the Scottish Government from the U.K. government at Westminster, and that is where tax, benefits, and other receipt functions currently and continue to reside.
This is a crucial part of what we call the devolution settlement, and subsequently one that is yet again being revisited within the whole question of how devolved government is working in Scotland.
I'll speed up through some of the things the Scottish Government's budget group has been involved in. As I've said, we consistently comment on Scottish Government spending plans and budget proposals, and these responses are available on our website at swb.org.uk. We make specific recommendations on individual and policy program proposals and more general recommendations on the core approach to adopting gender budget analysis.
Specific pieces of work have been commissioned by the Scottish Government over the period in response to targeted lobbying and analysis by the Women's Budget Group. These include “Understanding the Scottish Budget”, a research project early in the life of the Scottish Parliament, conducted by Ailsa McKay, sitting beside me, and Rona Fitzgerald, to track the newly introduced budgetary process. Subsequently there were pilot studies on gender budget analysis in smoking cessation and women's access to sport. Both of these studies are available from the Scottish Government website.
In response to SWBG pressure and focus on the budget process and documentation, several changes have come and gone from the budget documents, including equality statements within the spending plan proposals and the budget itself and a restatement by the Scottish Government in 2003 of its commitment to equality proofing in the budget process. That was in its one and only annual report on progress against the equality strategy. So in common with many gender budget initiatives and many women's lobbying groups, we seem to take one step forward and several more back are forced upon us.
As a lobby group, the Scottish Women's Budget Group seems to punch above its weight, is the phrase that is used. We are seen as an independent and authoritative credible voice. We have been consistent in the quality and approach of our analysis, and that we are independent from government or other institutions has helped protect our autonomy. However, as an unfunded, unconstituted entity relying on the entirely voluntary contributions of a small core membership, we're vulnerable. Sustaining a growing volume of work against a backdrop of receding commitment to gender equality is a significant challenge.
We have in our lifetime secured pockets of funding, and we have employed, at times, temporarily, part-time development and parliamentary liaison officers. We have produced publications and so on.
We'll conclude with a note on our international connections. One of the main levers behind the creation of the Scottish Women's Budget Group was learning from abroad. In fact, the first public event of the Scottish Women's Budget Group included representatives from the Canadian government—in 2000, I think. SWBG has retained these international links, and members are closely involved in the emerging European gender budget network.
I'll stop now and hand over to Ailsa McKay, who will present the specific activities with the equal opportunities committee of the Scottish Parliament and the challenges facing both the Scottish Women's Budget Group and the future of gender-sensitive budgeting in Scotland.
Thank you.
:
Thank you, Angela, and thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to speak to you today.
I want to say a little bit more about some of the other activity that's been happening in Scotland around gender budget analysis that perhaps isn't directly to do with the activities of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, although indirectly it is.
I'll start off being a bit pessimistic, saying that, yes, after nine years of sustained activity, which Angela has eloquently detailed, and evidence of political will in Scotland to progress with a gender budget initiative, no gender sensitive budget is yet in place in Scotland. In fact, we can find no evidence of any concrete policy shifts arising from our activity over the past nine years. However, that's as pessimistic as I want to be. I would now like to be optimistic.
In Scotland we do have a gender budget initiative, and that gender budget initiative is ongoing. I'll take the next five to 10 minutes to say how and why I think that is. Angela has covered the work of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, and suffice it to say, I think that activity is sustained and it's ongoing. All I can say is, watch this space with regard to future activity.
The second aspect I'd like to cover, which may be of particular interest to the committee and its members, is the more recent activity at a parliamentary level in Scotland. As you may be aware, we had an election last May, and that brought about significant political change for us here in Scotland. We have a new minority government. We have a whole set of new committees and we have a significant number of new members of Parliament following that election.
As a direct result of the lobbying conducted by the Scottish Women's Budget Group, our new equal opportunities committee—we previously had an equal opportunities committee—following the election took the decision to appoint a specialist advisor with reference to the budget process. Although the committee had the capacity to appoint an advisor previously, they had never availed themselves of that opportunity. This year they took the opportunity to appoint an advisor, I think directly due to the lobbying activities of the Scottish Women's Budget Group.
The budget process this year in Scotland was truncated. It took place over a period of eight weeks. That was because of a delayed announcement of the spending review at the U.K. level because of the U.K. elections and the change of prime minister. So we had to wait until we knew how much money we were getting from the U.K. before we could conduct our own budget. It meant our budget process took place over a period of eight to 10 weeks.
Bearing in mind what I said about a new government, a new committee, and new members, my feeling is the committee felt better placed to appoint an advisor to assist them with the scrutiny process, given the newness of the situation and the very short time period available to them.
The advisor was appointed on the basis of open competition. A few names were put into the hat and I was subsequently appointed as advisor for that period, November, December, and early January. My subsequent remit was advise on prospective witnesses the committee may want to call to give evidence with regard to the contents of the Scottish budget; to provide the committee members with guidance on the appropriate line of questioning of those witnesses; to brief the committee members on the contents of the budget with a specific focus on where equality considerations were evident or, in many situations, where equality considerations were not evident; and, finally, to have input into the equal opportunities committee's written response to the finance committee of the Scottish Parliament, which is part of the formal scrutiny process.
We went on to have two evidence sessions. One involved the minister with the remit for equalities, and we also had a meeting of all the advisors for all the committees across the Scottish Parliament. My understanding is this was the first year that every single parliamentary committee of the Scottish Parliament appointed a budget advisor. Previously, only a handful of committees had appointed budget advisors, and the finance committee has been the only committee that's had a regular advisor throughout the lifetime of the Scottish Parliament.
The outputs from my role as advisor with the committee were the briefing on the budget with a focus on equalities, and the final report, which was submitted to the finance committee. I believe those outputs contributed to the scrutiny process in a very positive way by bringing gender concerns and broader equality concerns to the fore, albeit, I would say with a word of caution, at a marginal level. I don't think any significant change happened. However, I think there was a significant amount of awareness raising amongst committee members with regard to making the link between their equalities remit and the budget.
So for me the experience of working with the committee indicated the value of a specialist advisor. It may have been the first time in Scotland, but I firmly believe that it won't be the last. I think all members and the committee collectively recognized the value added of appointing a specialist budget advisor and will continue to do so in the future. In fact, we have a meeting scheduled for April 18 of all the specialist advisors to all the committees to consider how effective the process actually was.
The second main issue I'd like to raise with regard to the activity that's not directly associated with the Scottish Women's Budget Group is where I put on my academic hat and talk specifically about how we can relate our gender budget activity to the academic work in the field of feminist economics. In Scotland we've been acutely aware of the lack of understanding of gender budget analysis, in fact of gender as a concept within the resource allocation process, or rather its limited significance within the resource allocation process. In recognition of this, in 2004, with funding from the Equal Opportunities Commission, I and a number of colleagues initiated a pilot study, which we called Economics For Equality—not economics of equality. The focus was on understanding the economics of the gender pay gap, and we invited a number of community activists to a number of sessions to explore the economists' understanding of the gender pay gap and the policy responses that followed from that.
That pilot was pretty successful, and we've since secured funding from Oxfam to run a subsequent pilot with a focus on the national budget process. The purpose of this next stage of this program of work is twofold. One is to engage local community activists with the budget, but also, second, to engage policy makers with the equality and gender issues as they relate to the budget. So what we're trying to do with this pilot is bring feminist economic analysis out of the classroom, in an applied sense, and to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Now the Scottish Women's Budget Group has been heavily involved in these pilots in informing the work through their outputs and also participating in the work.
Finally, I'd like to say that this combination of activity represents for us a really well-thought-out response to the challenges we identified way back in 1999 about how we would progress with a gender budget analysis in Scotland. Those challenges remain for us nine years later, and I'd just like to briefly say what they are.
First is political change. I think we're all very aware of the significance of political change and the subsequent dynamics of the budget process and how we can keep abreast of that. I think we have done that in Scotland through the sustained activities of the Scottish Women's Budget Group and through our Parliament work. Our relationship with the equal opportunities committee of Parliament has been crucial in that.
Second, our biggest challenge I think has been the lack of understanding of gender and where gender sits within the policy process. I think our most recent activity in terms of the work I've been doing with the parliamentary committee has been crucial in raising awareness of that.
Thirdly, a significant challenge has been to try to ensure buy-in from across the wider community with regard to the concept of gender budgeting. I think we're getting somewhere in Scotland with that, with our economics for equality program.
I'd like to finish there and open it up to any questions the committee might have for Angela and me.
Thank you.
The best way for me to explain it—and Angela may want to add something—is to give you a practical example of where I think we misunderstand gender in terms of the policy process.
There appears to be, in Scotland, a practice of viewing gender as synonymous with women and viewing gender issues or dealing with gender issues as dealing with women's issues. Understanding that, yes, there are a lot of issues that we need to deal with that are focused on women, as we all know that's not what we mean by gender-sensitive analysis.
The example I'd like to give to you relates to some work we've been doing around one of our skills training programs for young people in Scotland. We call it the modern apprenticeships program. I don't know if you have anything similar in Canada, but it's a government-funded training program that supports young people at an entry level into the labour market to gain skills that give them a trade.
We noticed early on, through the work of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, that the program seemed to be dominated by young men. There may be reasons for that, and maybe very good reasons, but we campaigned on it and indicated to the government that their spending may be allocated or may be benefiting young men predominantly and there may be a problem there.
Three years later, when we looked at the program again, a lot of work was done to encourage young women into the program. We looked at the figures, and yes, young women had increased their participation rates by 211% over three years as a result of direct action by the government to encourage young women.
The government used that as a mechanism to say that they had done gender or had considered gender. However, when we looked at the allocation or the nature of the participation of young men and women, we found that young men were participating in the program in the four-year-long funded training programs—plumbing, construction, etc.—and therefore were benefiting from quite a significant degree of spending and were gaining access to good trades when they finished. Young women, however, were participating in six-month-long training programs in hairdressing, child care, and the retail industry and were not benefiting from well-paid jobs or good career-oriented jobs at the end.
Therefore, there was a significant difference in terms of the nature of participation. However, the Scottish government viewed the head count aspect of gender issues—that is, they had increased the numbers of women, therefore they had addressed that gender inequality.
For me, that stems from a lack of understanding of what gender issues are. Merely adding women into the scenario and increasing the numbers of women does not mean you've dealt with gender inequalities.
I think that's quite a useful example to illustrate how gender is misunderstood in the policy process.
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I'd like to follow up on Ailsa's comment about number counting. I think this is a problem we have in a mainstreaming approach. While we argue for the importance of quality data, there is a problem around how the data are utilized. It has to do with interpretation rather than statistics, simply counting numbers. This is one of the problems in the analysis of the modern apprenticeship scheme that Ailsa referred to.
In my introductory remarks, I made a comment about the backdrop against which we try to promote gender-aware policy. In Scotland, the U.K., and across Europe, we are increasingly in a policy context that wishes to talk about equalities from a broad perspective. Driving this are a range of groups pushing for increased legislative and rights protection under policy recognition. One of the more negative consequences of this is the assumption that women “have been done”, that women are no longer relevant to policy or legislative development, that it's old hat, unnecessary, and unprogressive to focus on women.
I don't think I'm overstating the case. I think it is one of the key challenges we face and one of the key reasons why the Scottish Women’s Budget Group is called what we are. That is, in a sense, our focus. It's difficult to conduct a gender analysis that breaks the policy-speak cycle. If you talk about women, then you have to talk about men in equivalent terms, and that is neither women-focused analysis nor gender analysis.
That's what we mean when we say there's a lack of understanding in gender. More broadly, as a student of public policy, I think the public policy process itself does not regard gender as a core variable. This is demonstrated by our various countries' attempts to follow Beijing in implementing gender mainstreaming. The public policy process continues to treat gender as an external variable relegated to the literature on women's networks.
:
Thank you, Madame Demers.
I'd like to start with your question on women's representation. In 1999 we celebrated grandly when 37% of the Scottish Parliament members were women in the new institution, very much part of the new politics of Scotland that had been a core feature of the campaign for devolution itself. The 50-50 campaign that was run by the trade unions and some of the political parties was very much in that spirit of new politics. We had high hopes that not just the physical presence of women but that an apparently more open attitude to gender politics would come to prevail in the Parliament.
Certainly in structural terms some changes did occur. The working areas of the Parliament are structured around school hours and school term times, and there is a crèche and child care facility in the Parliament, which unsurprisingly has come under regular threat of closure as it's not seen as an integral part.
However, nine years on from devolution, the number of women in the Scottish Parliament has fallen in successive elections. It's now just over 35%. We have seen an erosion of commitment among the individual political parties to 50-50 or women-only short lists or various other mechanisms that were used to promote women. Now the governing party in minority, the Scottish National Party, does have a number of women MSPs, and a number of those women are in the cabinet, which of course is to be welcomed even at the superficial level perhaps, all popular recognition of women in government. The SNP certainly would score highly there, and certainly more highly than on their selection processes and the promotion of women in the party. But that's a separate point.
As to whether women's presence makes a difference, I think that's a moot point in the experience of the Scottish Parliament. There has been a clear contribution by women MSPs. I personally believe some policy agendas would not have been so prominent had it not been for the women there—or domestic violence and child care. A number of individual women and men have made a significant difference to the promotion of domestic violence policy and prevention strategies in Scotland.
In terms of how we try to secure measures for gender budget analysis and women moving forward and how we try to introduce some unshakeable and structural provisions, we do have a number of levers we continue to use. The founding principles of the Scottish Parliament are enormously important. They state that equal opportunities and equal access to the Parliament—participation, openness, and accountability as principles of the Parliament—all add power from the outside to those of us who are looking to use the Parliament in that way. They can be very effective measures to hold the Parliament to account. There is a statute in our mandate to the equal opportunities committee of the Parliament, so there are some structural levers there.
The Scottish Women's Budget Group has found that the measures we have sought to embed in the budgetary process have been eroded as the budget process itself has evolved and changed in shape and timing. The equality statements that were secured have disappeared. The new legislation we have across gender budgeting, the public duty to promote gender equality, requires all public authorities to produce a gender equality scheme and to assess all policies for their impact on equality.
That approach is very new, and at the moment it's showing very mixed results, both in terms of the coverage and how deeply and practised those requirements are, but also the quality of the scheme is coming out and the quality of impact assessments. One of our major complaints to the new government is that in addition to the very strange language they use around equality and an erosion there apparently of commitments to equality is the lack of an equality impact assessment of this year's budget and the lack of any apparent equality impact assessments that went into the process of creating the budget. But as Ailsa referred to, this year was an extremely truncated process, with eight weeks to formulate the budget.
There was a lot of running around by civil servants, but I don't think that's good enough. It is a legal requirement to conduct an equality impact assessment and a stated commitment in the equality strategy to equality-proof the spending plans.
I mentioned earlier that that equality strategy is to be reviewed this year. The Scottish Women's Budget Group would wish to see a robust and deliverable commitment to effective gender equality scrutiny going forward. Measures to set targets, to pick specific policy and program areas, to apply gender budget analysis to those areas, to build on situations falling under the scrutiny of parliamentary committees year on year, to call to account the civil servants, and to incorporate these mechanisms—all these are key aspects of building in gender budget analysis.
:
Thank you very much, Ms. Mathyssen.
I cannot be so bold as to offer advice to Canada. I can offer my personal opinion.
I think both the opinion within our group, the Scottish Women's Budget Group, and independent assessment of the Scottish Women's Budget Group as a lobbying group attest that we have become, as I said, a credible and authoritative voice. I think that is evidenced by the fact that we are continually asked for our opinion. We are invited to parliamentary committees. We are invited to participate in government initiatives.
That brings with it its own frustrations. Are we being used by government by being drawn in? When the approach to policy making that we advocate is not being followed through, it leaves us very frustrated, but having been part of the process is something to be positive about. We constantly have a tension, I think, between the extent to which we are being mollified by being brought into the process and yet continually frustrated by the time it's taking to advance progress on gender budgeting.
We have received funding in the past from charitable sources. Oxfam in the United Kingdom has a poverty program, and we have accessed money from Oxfam and previously from the statutory commission on sex equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission. It has now been subsumed within the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, which has a grant-making capability. It would be possible for the Scottish Women's Budget Group to access or to apply for grant funding from that new commission, should we wish to.
That then opens another question about how robust we are. Are we in a position to be able to receive and manage public moneys? We have in the past taken a very clear decision not to access government money directly from the Scottish government equality unit, on the basis that we wished to remain outside government and to retain the autonomy and independence of voice that we felt may be, if not compromised, questioned if we were in receipt of government funding.
I personally think it sounds very unfortunate that Status of Women Canada is reducing funding for women-specific and gender-specific activities, just as I would feel it would be most unfortunate if that were to happen in Scotland, if the equality unit or the EHRC were to reprioritize in such a way that women, either directly or indirectly, by failure to subsume gender analysis into all aspects of equality work, were lost.
First of all, I will say that the UK Women's Budget Group has now been functioning for about 20 years. As you know, having heard from our Scottish sister organizations, there are other similar organizations operating in other parts of the U.K., principally in Scotland and Wales. Scotland is actually some way ahead of us, I would say, in terms of gender budgeting.
We call ourselves the UK Women's Budget Group because we work principally on the economic and fiscal policies that are implemented by the U.K. government. We're a membership organization—we draw our members from women's organizations, from researchers, and academics—and we rely on our members for the expertise we bring to analysis of public policy.
We're supported by one paid project officer and by volunteers and interns, and we're funded through independent charitable foundations. We don't receive any funding from government.
The evidence I'm going to give will focus on the relationship between the Women's Budget Group and government. That is my particular area of expertise. I'm not an economist by training. My background is in gender mainstreaming within government.
What the Women's Budget Group seeks to do is to influence government in developing and setting both its annual budget and its general economic and fiscal policies. We see this work as an integral part of gender mainstreaming, following on from the U.K.'s commitments under the Beijing Platform for Action, because we see that adequate resources are essential in order to implement gender equality policies.
We believe that gender budgeting ensures that policy is evidence-based and is therefore more effective in achieving the objectives the government wants to set. But this efficiency argument is also based on the political premise that gender equality is a desirable political objective in itself.
This touches, of course, on the question of whether gender budgeting is a political activity or not. I believe that gender budgeting is first and foremost a better and more informed way of making policy and developing evidence-based policy. But it's also political in the sense that we in the Women's Budget Group and other women's budget groups across the world apply a feminist perspective to the work. We're challenging traditional gender roles and traditional divisions of labour, so for that reason I would also call it a political activity.
At the U.K. level, we've had some significant changes recently in our law, in our policies and procedures, and in some of the government machinery. I just want to run through those, because they set the context of the gender budgeting work and provide some opportunities for us to promote gender budgeting.
First of all, we have a Minister for Women and Equality who oversees the whole equalities agenda. Until recently she was simply the Minister for Women, giving her responsibility for all equality—all of the equalities agenda is a fairly recent innovation. She is now supported by a Government Equalities Office—also very recently set up—which is a government department in itself. Previously she was supported by a small unit that lived within the department that she had the main portfolio for.
So our minister for women traditionally has always held other government ministerial posts, and in fact our current minister for women is not an exception to that—and I'll come back to that. But she does have her own small government department now, which has just been set up. We believe this could produce a natural focal point for gender budgeting.
The Women and Equality Unit co-sponsored us to run a gender expenditure analysis project with the Treasury department here, and I'll say a little bit more about that later on. Treasury also has an equalities champion at a senior level who drives forward activity on this issue, and I think that's a very helpful initiative.
The Government Equalities Office also sponsors another newly created body, which is the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, to which I think my Scottish colleagues referred. The role of that commission is to offer independent advice and scrutiny to the government on equalities issues.
Originally we had three equalities commissions, working on race, on disability, and on women's equality—the Equal Opportunities Commission, which looked at gender. Those three commissions have now been subsumed into one, and they've also taken on responsibility for human rights and for protection of groups: of LGBT groups, of groups on the basis of age, and groups on the basis of faith. They take forward the whole equalities agenda, among them.
Women's organizations were quite ambivalent about that change. On the one hand, we could see that bringing the whole equalities agenda together might be an advantage for gender equality because it would give a stronger voice within government. On the other hand, we were very concerned about the possible loss of focus on gender because we see gender inequality as in some ways quite different from other forms of discrimination.
We also have a new law, a gender equality duty, which you may already know about. That came into law about a year ago. This duty requires all public bodies to promote gender equality—equality between the sexes. It means they have to carry out gender impact assessments of all new and existing policies. They also have to publish a three-year gender equality scheme, which sets priority gender equality objectives.
We believe this could be a key lever to introduce better gender budgeting, and certainly better gender mainstreaming generally. That will be a key lever for the equality human rights commission to use to determine whether government is meeting its quality objectives or not.
The other mechanism I wanted to mention to you is that all central government departments are required to publish public service agreements, PSAs. These set out their key high-level targets. There are a number of cross-departmental PSAs, some that relate only to a particular department and some that run across departments. There is an equalities PSA that sets some equality objectives.
These PSAs set measurable outputs for each department within the context of the comprehensive spending review, which is a three-year review and allocation of government spending. It sets out identified allocations of funding to each department.
One of the priorities in one of those PSAs is the need to close the gender pay gap, which is quite a significant pay gap in the U.K.; it hovers around the 18% mark for people in full-time work. If you look at part-time work, the gender pay gap is more around 44%, so it's quite significant. I believe we're still amongst the highest in Europe for that; I think we're either the first or the second in Europe in terms of our gender pay gap. The government has set closing that gap as one of the key priorities within its PSA.
The link I've just been describing here between targets and resources in budgets is still not as transparent as we in the Women's Budget Group would like.
That's the machinery and that's some of the context within which we're working.
:
Let me focus quickly, then, on what we believe needs to be done.
I've said something about the gender equality duty. I'd also like to say that we believe that the capacity of government officials to undertake gender analysis with the policies they are developing is still very limited. Most officials received some training on the equalities angle, but not enough. We think that needs to be improved.
We also believe the political pressure on government departments to implement gender budgeting is extremely limited. It mainly derives from women ministers who have been committed to this agenda for a long time. The more women ministers we've had, the more significant gender budgeting has become. We would like to see that further prioritized.
We believe the equalities focal points within government, the machinery I've just been describing, is not well resourced. The Minister for Women, for example, has a number of other portfolios. She is leader of the House of Commons. She's also deputy leader of the Labour Party. So she has a number of other hats that make it difficult for her to focus on women as such.
There is a lack of gender-desegregated statistical data available to officials. We do have a gender statistics users group, which is an NGO that is supported by our Office for National Statistics and the Royal Statistical Society, and they do a lot of work to try to improve this, but more needs to be done.
Finally, I want to say that we consider that gender budgeting should include macroeconomic as well as microeconomic policy. We believe, for example, state accounting principles are not gender neutral, and we think they measure mainly male economic activity, rather than, for example, unpaid caring activity, which is largely undertaken by women. So we would urge you, if you are undertaking this, to look at both—macroeconomic and microeconomic issues.
:
The title of my presentation really says what this is. “Gender Budgeting in the United States: The San Francisco Experience” is the experience of gender budgeting in the United States. So my presentation is going to be somewhat different from the previous presentations because I will be focusing on a local government. One of the lessons here, really, is that gender budgeting can be implemented at all levels of government.
Here is just a brief word about San Francisco. It's one of the 20 largest cities in the United States. It has about 750,000 people and a budget of about $6 billion, so it's a very large government.
Also, just for a very quick background, I know you're all familiar with the fact that the United States is, actually, the only industrialized country in the world that has not ratified CEDAW, and that really sets the stage for San Francisco.
In 1998, in frustration with the failure of the United States government to ratify CEDAW, the City of San Francisco became the nation's first government to pass its own CEDAW ordinance. This is very important because the gender budget initiative in San Francisco is in the context of human rights, so human rights has set the stage for gender budgeting in San Francisco. The CEDAW ordinance requires that city departments use a gender and human rights analysis to review their policies regarding budget allocations, as well as employment and service delivery.
San Francisco's CEDAW resolution is significant in its explicit treatment of budget issues. Unlike the international CEDAW treaty adopted almost 20 years earlier, which makes no specific reference to public expenditures or revenues, CEDAW's ordinance in San Francisco specifically requires that agencies integrate the human rights principles set forth in the ordinance into local policies, programs, and budgetary decisions.
The adoption of the San Francisco CEDAW ordinance resulted from the efforts of a public-private coalition, spearheaded by the Women's Institute for Leadership Development, called WILD, and the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. Other members of the coalition included Amnesty International and the Women's Foundation of California. I'm just going to quickly tell you about these groups.
WILD is the non-profit organization primarily responsible for the introduction and subsequent adoption of the CEDAW ordinance. The founders of WILD saw the ordinance as a way to implement the Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. WILD spent 18 months building support for the ordinance among other advocacy groups, politicians, and the general public. This is critical, what WILD did.
WILD had a partner, the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. The commission was established in 1975 by a resolution of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and in 1994 was made a permanent body under the city charter. San Francisco, I should say, is both a city and a county, so San Francisco has a city council that is also the county board of supervisors.
The commission, whose seven members are appointed by the mayor, establishes policy priorities that are implemented by the city's Department on the Status of Women. The involvement of the commission in the CEDAW coalition provided what has been called “a valuable government partner with key contacts in City Hall”. So here we had women's groups, human rights groups, and the government all involved in implementing CEDAW.
Who else was involved? The Women's Foundation of California is a statewide organization focused on investing in women and girls. The foundation's strong relationships with many women's rights groups were a critical element in the coalition efforts to implement the CEDAW ordinance.
Also involved was Amnesty International, a worldwide human rights organization, with many chapters in the United States, and its western region chapter provided a membership base and a strong human rights network to the CEDAW coalition.
So this is really the background for gender budgeting in San Francisco. In addition, the board of supervisors, which is composed of 11 members, is headed by a president and is responsible for passing laws and budgets.
At the time of the CEDAW ordinance enactment, the board's president was Barbara Kaufman, a supporter of women's rights who was heavily involved in drafting the ordinance.
They also had an ally in Mayor Willie Brown, who was San Francisco's first African American mayor and was well-known for his support of human rights and CEDAW. He signed the ordinance at the conclusion of San Francisco's first mayor's summit for women.
The CEDAW ordinance specified the establishment of an 11-member task force to advise the mayor, the board of supervisors, and others, on the local implementation of CEDAW. Task force members included elected officials and representatives from a wide range of organizations: labour, government, and community advocates. There was a broad base here.
At the core of the ordinance is the requirement that the city integrate the human rights principles set forth in the treaty into local policies, programs, and budgetary decisions. To accomplish this, the ordinance required the city departments to undergo a gender analysis in three areas: budget allocation, service delivery, and employment practices.
In March 1999, consultants were hired to work with the task force to develop guidelines to help governments with the gender analysis, and there was a five-step process formulated to do this. Just quickly, the five steps were: collecting the data, analyzing the data, formulating recommendations, implementing an action plan, and monitoring the results.
For each of the five steps, the CEDAW guidelines provided information to departments as to what should be included in their gender analysis. Seven of the 50 departments in San Francisco were selected to undertake the first gender analysis.
I've just taken excerpts from the gender analyses of two of the departments to show you the challenges they said they faced in doing the budget component of their gender analysis.
The two departments I'm looking at are very different. One is the department of public works, and when they first heard about gender budgeting they said, “What is that? We're public works.” But they did find out, when they began looking at all of the different aspects of public works, that it was not gender neutral and there was an impact on men and women. They said it was difficult to conduct the gender analysis because they didn't have the data. I know our previous speaker said that shouldn't stop them--and it really didn't stop them--but they said it made it difficult. I'll come back, hopefully, during the question period to talk more about what they actually did.
The other department that was interesting was the department of adult probation. They said their budget priorities did not reflect the consideration of gender; they reflected a consideration of the needs of the total clientele, even though the department of women and others looking at this found out that there definitely is a difference between what's available for females on probation and males on probation.
The city got all this information, and it recognized that to move its gender budgeting initiative along, it had to provide assistance to departments, especially in their efforts to collect gender disaggregated data. The city then came up with a five-year strategic plan--called for in the CEDAW ordinance--to provide the structure for departments to move ahead in integrating gender into everything they did, including their budgets. The action plan was prepared by the task force I referred to earlier, which worked with the city's department on the status of women, and it was supposed to provide a road map for how departments were to move along.
Now that I've given you the background, I'll tell you what happened.
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There's a lot to cover here in the short time we have.
If I could start off with the gender equality duty, the new law, I agree, is perhaps the most important. The idea of the new law is to make it compulsory for all public bodies—not just government departments but local government, public bodies, and anyone who is performing a public service—to promote gender equality in the provision of those services and in the design and development of their policies. This follows from a similar law on race equality, which was passed in the year 2000. So the same kind of principle of a public duty to promote race equality has been extended to disability and also now to gender.
I think it says something about the political will issue that you raise, that it has taken us so long to move from the race duty to the gender duty. It's taken us nearly 10 years to do that. So that's the first thing to say. What that means is that although it's been illegal in the U.K. to discriminate against women in policy and services since about 1970 to 1975, when different laws were passed, this law now goes a step further in requiring departments to look at the impact of their policies and consider whether they promote equality between the sexes. So that's a very considerable change, and a very exciting one, I think.
The second question you asked was about the government equalities office. Lots of information is available from the usual government sources on this. But let me tell you briefly that it has been set up as a separate department in its own right. This again is an innovation for us. Our equalities units traditionally have been embedded within departments, as you suggested, within cabinet office and others. This is now set up as its own department. However, necessarily, it is quite a small department. It doesn't have a large spending budget as the other departments do. Its permanent secretary, I believe, has been appointed at a slightly lower level than other permanent secretaries. So I suppose one of our questions in the Women's Budget Group would be how much authority it will have to influence other departments, and we look forward to seeing that happen.
You asked about the gender expenditure analysis project, and I did bring the report with me, but it is also on our website, which is wgb.org.uk. This project in essence was a project we undertook in partnership with Her Majesty's Treasury, and our project manager, who works full time for the Women's Budget Group, went on secondment to Treasury for two days a week to undertake this project. Professor McKay, from whom you heard earlier, and Professor Diane Elson, one of our members who unfortunately couldn't be here with me to give evidence today, were participants in this project. They provided the academic and technical expertise to train the treasury officials and the officials from the government departments that took part in the project. We analyzed two different government programs, two different expenditure programs, to see what the gender impact was. The findings were mainly that we didn't have sufficient gender desegregated data to undertake the analysis properly. I think that was the main learning point from it.
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I would like to also say that even though the United States has not ratified CEDAW, about 20 states and more than 50 cities have passed resolutions in support of the country doing this.
In terms of what individual municipalities have done, in September 2007, Fulton County, Georgia, which is the home of Atlanta, Georgia, passed a resolution with the objective of making gender equality central to the way Fulton County government works. One of the components of the resolution includes resource and budget allocation as key elements. It's particularly notable that this was not explicitly framed within a human rights context, as it was in San Francisco. But it really is framed in terms of gender equality. I think a critical thing here is that just like in San Francisco, where the head of the board of supervisors was an advocate, the person who has been pushing this is one of the members of the Fulton County Commission, whose name is Barbara Boxer. She was the one who brought this in. So Fulton County is actually doing this.
Just yesterday I got an e-mail from a woman there, saying they are actually moving along. We did some training there in December, and there were a number of people from various departments within Fulton County who were there to learn how to do a gender analysis, how to think of gender budgeting. The people who weren't there, though, were the people from the finance office. I think they realize that for this to move along, that has to happen.
Los Angeles passed an ordinance to provide for the local implementation of CEDAW, but Los Angeles is not moving along very quickly. They're still getting their feet wet. So in terms of other places in the U.S., that's sort of it right now.
In terms of what's happened in San Francisco, I didn't mean to imply that nothing has happened. In fact, there have been a number of areas where there's been a rather large step taken, especially in the area of violence against women and also in juvenile probation. The department of juvenile probation has actually been looking at how they house their young women relative to their young men when there's a need for housing. So there have been movements, but it's just that in the budgeting area it's been very slow. One of the reasons, I believe, is that for many of these advocate organizations budgeting has not been high on their list. They know it's important, but they've been looking more at violence against women and more pressing questions, they feel, than looking at the budget issue. I think that's one of the challenges, to really get all of this coalition active again and to get them to start to realize how important budgeting is in terms of everything else that has to get done.
Some of the other challenges...to get the people from the finance department to really say, “This is what we're going to do”.