Knowledge is Power

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Malala Yousafzai, activist

Malala Yousafzai, activist

Today, in the Swat region of Pakistan, a 14 year old girl was shot. Her name is Malala Yousafzai, and she was walking home from school with her friend when she was shot in the side of the head. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the shooting.

The question on all our minds is ‘Why would anyone try and kill a 14 year old girl?’.

Because Malala Yousafzai stood up for something that scares and horrifies the Taliban – she dared to speak out for girls’ right to an education.

Malala was 11 years old when she started writing about life under the Taliban – two years after they closed her school. They have since been ejected from the region, but Malala has continued to speak out, and has been nominated for a peace award for her activism.

This isn’t the first time the Taliban has stooped so low as to attack children. They have been linked to arson attacks on schools across Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as being linked to poisonings in girl’s schools.  Thousands of students have been forced to stay at home.

For the Taliban, educating women is un-Islamic and immodest. Girls over the age of eight were denied an education under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The women’s university was quickly shut down shortly after they came to power. A network of secret schools for girls was set up, but the risks if they were discovered were severe. Even after being removed from power, their influence is still visible.

It’s easy to see why the Taliban would want to restrict education.  They do so in the name of Islam, but a brand of Islam unrecognisable to the majority of Muslims worldwide. Banning women’s education has more to do with power and control than religion.

 When we are educated, we are given the potential to shape our own world. Literacy and numeracy are critical for employment, self-sufficiency and independence. It allows us to live our own lives, to think for ourselves, to develop our full potential. But without education, we have no future, no way of choosing our own direction. Without knowledge to base our own decisions on, what choice is there but to blindly follow the path that others set out for us.  The uneducated population is easily controlled.

This isn’t just an issue in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Worldwide, 75 million girls are missing out on an education. That’s one in three  girls who are being denied control over their own futures – denied the ability to escape poverty, to fulfil their potential.

Thursday is the first International Day of the Girl, and Plan are speaking out about the need for women’s education. If you believe, like Malala does, like I do, that everyone deserves an education, sign Plan’s petition, and Raise Your Hand.

Featured on Liberal Democrat Voice

 

 

It’s not for governments to decide that women are not for sale

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Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir leads an almost perfectly gender-balanced government

Iceland has been hailed as ‘the most female-friendly country in the world’. It’s almost a feminist utopia – an almost perfectly gender-balanced parliament, excellent parental leave, and no strip clubs.

In 2010, legislation was passed making it illegal for a business to profit from the nudity of its employees, making strip clubs illegal. Buying sex was already illegal as of 2009, with the selling decriminalised.

“I guess the men of Iceland will just have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale.” It’s hard not to be won over by such emotive words from Guðrún Jónsdóttir of Stígamót, an Icelandic campaigning organisation against sex work. I would love to live in a country without strip clubs, lapdancing or prostitution. I find them degrading and offensive.  The idea that bodies (often women’s) can be bought, and the culture that has sprung up around that, is deeply harmful to all women.

 Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that legislation of this nature is illiberal. Whose rights are being infringed by a cheap lapdance? Not the buyer – he’s paying for a service. If the lapdancer is providing that service willingly, and not being coerced into her work, then she’s not having her rights infringed either. There are sex workers who do it because they enjoy it – not because they are being coerced, or to pay for a drug habit.  So why should we prevent them from doing their work?

It’s not that simple, of course. People are being forced into prostitution, through trafficking and addiction and that is not acceptable. But criminalising prostitution will just push it underground, putting already vulnerable sex workers in danger.  As long as there is a demand for bought sex, there will always be someone desperate enough to supply it.

So let’s look at reducing the harms of prostitution, not at criminalising it. We need a sensible drugs policy to help people being driven to street prostitution by addiction. Let’s protect sex workers by getting them off the street and letting them work in places of safety, rather than keeping brothels illegal.

I won’t pretend that this solution addresses the issue that motivated Icelanders in the first place. Sex work degrades women, both individually and as a gender. But Liberalism means letting people make their own decisions. All we can do is ensure that those who engage in sex work do it because they want to, not because they have to. I hope that one day, I will live in a society without prostitution – not because it is illegal, but because women have decided that they are not for sale.

What do women do when men riot?

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I’ve been down in Manchester over the weekend, staying with friends in their city centre flat. I’ve been thinking a lot about the riots this week – hard not to when its been all over the news and I can see the consequences out of my friends’ windows.

I can dimly remember the Brixton and Toxteth riots in the 1980s. This doesn’t feel like that at all. That was such a huge outpouring of rage over years of injustice. This feels much more like consumerism gone mad.

It has challenged my pre-conceptions over who riots too. I guess I tend to assume it is usually men who riot and women who pick up the pieces but is that in fact the case? I found it really shocking to hear young girls laughing as they described how much fun it had been. Shocking too to hear of the woman trying on shoes before deciding whether to loot them (although you might think this confirms as well as challenges prejudices!).

I read about the would-be social worker crying in her bedroom over her ruined career plans now she has a conviction for rioting and I found it hard to feel much sympathy. But the woman facing eviction in Wandsworth because her son rioted is more tricky. My liberal instinct is to find this unjust. But then I heard she’d said she wasn’t responsible for her son’s actions and what about her human rights? If parents aren’t responsible, then who is?!

While not wanting to judge when I don’t know the circumstances, it seems to me that if you sign a contract agreeing to behave in a certain way, you have limited recourse to crying foul if you break that contract. Listening to Wandsworth’s council leader explaining that if we as a society don’t follow through with consequences for anti-social behaviour, I found myself thinking of Jo Frost, the nanny with a Channel 4 series teaching children about consequences by using the naughty step.

There does seem to be a connection between MPs who fiddle expenses, bankers who trash the economy and rioters who loot because they don’t think there will be consequences. At all levels, we seem to have forgotten the responsibility we owe to others, to our community, to society. There has to be more meaning to life than just being out for what we can get.

What is unusual about these riots is how they are challenging prejudices on all sides, both for liberals whose instinct is to understand rather than condemn and for conservatives who tend to want to use the full force of the law as the answer.

But if disengagement from society is at the heart of it, then there are no easy answers. We need to teach consequences but we also need to give people, and especially our young people, hope that they too can share in society, reasons why they would want to be part of society and the tools to engage in society.

Gaming for Girls

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I spent last Friday at the Dare Protoplay event in Dundee’s Caird Hall. This is the culmination of the University of Abertay’s annual Dare to be Digital Competition in which 15 teams of 5 students spent 10 weeks developing games with mentoring from people in the industry. At the free Protoplay event, the games are judged by the public, who vote for their favourite, industry experts and teams of pre-registered judges. My 12 year old daughter has been a junior judge for the past 3 years and this event has become one of the highlights of her Summer holidays. She enjoys wearing her Junior Judge t-shirt, carrying her clipboard (or at least having her parents carry it round for her) and giving her detailed thoughts on each game. The three teams announced as the winners will compete for a BAFTA, to be announced next March.

The video games industry is extremely important to Scotland which has been a world leader. However in recent years the UK industry has fallen from 3rd to 6th in global rankings and there was an 18% contraction in jobs in Scotland in this field in 2010. Earlier this year, the Scottish Affairs Select Committee published a report on the video gaming industry in Scotland. One of the key challenges, it said, was a skills shortage:

The shortage of graduates adequately qualified to sustain the video games industry in the UK is matter of real concern, as is the unsuitability of many self-proclaimed video games courses. There needs to be more focus on the hard skills needed for the industry, such as mathematics and computer science. Other important factors necessary to ensure graduates are both trained for industry and able to find a job, are the levels of engagement between higher education institutions and industry, and the incentives for industry to take on talented graduates as trainees. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills should be able to demonstrate that it is aware of these problems and has proposals to address them effectively.

So, it’s clear that the industry needs more graduates with the right qualifications and, for me,  this provides an opportunity to deal with a huge gender imbalance which was not mentioned at all in the report. If we take this year’s Dare to be Digital teams as an example, there were only 13 women out of 75. That’s just 17%. It’s worrying when something makes the paltry representation of women in the House of Commons look good. I was shocked to see that 7 of the 15 teams were all male. Within that small number of women, most of them were artists. I was only aware of one female programmer. You would think that the next generation, my daughter’s, which has been welded to some sort of technology practically  since birth, would mean more girls would be interested in computer games. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case.

Of around 20 junior judges yesterday, only 3 were girls and this was much the same last year. I spoke to Sophia George, leader of Team Swallowtail about potential barriers to women. She’s done her dissertation on gender issues within the gaming industry and I hope to have the chance to talk to her at greater length once the competition is over. She spoke about how it annoyed her that computing and gaming magazines were displayed under “Men’s Interests” in supermarkets and bookshops. She may have a point. Socialising girls into thinking that pink princesses, cute, fluffy animals, diets, recipes and vacuous celebrity gossip is for them while the boys get to do the interesting stuff is, for me, a pernicious influence on our society.

Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson recently talked about the influence of the lack of strong female characters on children’s television. I don’t think the gaming industry provides many strong female role models and in fact some adult games feature shocking violence against women. I was told about  a scene in one game where the character gains by shooting a prostitute. Yes, it’s an 18, but if 11 year old boys are routinely accessing online pornography, we can safely assume they are also watching this kind of stuff. If there’s going to be any hope of tackling the gender imbalance within the gaming industry, and other technology, then we need to do something about it when kids are in primary school, or, at any rate, before they choose their options in 2nd year at High School. The video games industry needs people with the appropriate qualifications. Action is needed, not only to provide those skilled graduates, but to make sure that a decent proportion are women.

Reforms to Obama’s healthcare bill could hold back an entire sex

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 America has finally woken up to the importance of accessibility to healthcare, including contraception. Unfortunately, Obama’s efforts to make contraception available to everyone are being hindered by religious groups.
 

In Scotland there are no prescription charges, and in the rest of the UK, prescriptions for contraception are exempt of charges.  From schoolgirls, to married women, we have the means to control our fertility and our sex lives. We don’t have to worry about not being able to afford contraception – most modern clinics nowadays give condoms away for free anyway.

Americans can pay up to $50 per month for contraceptive pills

In America, the situation is very different. Healthcare is paid for through insurance – either privately or by co-paying into a work scheme. The cost of contraception can be prohibitive – birth control pills can cost up to $50 per month in co-payment.  Many women struggle to pay for this consistently, and unsurprisingly, this often results in unplanned pregnancy.  

Fortunately, as of 2012, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will call for health insurance providers to provide birth control without out-of-pocket cost, ie for free. and therefore consistently available. This would mean that by 2014 (when health insurance is fully reformed) contraception would be free and accessible to everyone.

Except people who work for ‘religious employers’. There is a conscience clause within the reforms, which exempts religious employers, such as schools and hospitals from having to provide contraception if it goes against their religion.

Freedom of religion is an important right, and we should protect people’s right to express their religious beliefs. But that can’t be a barrier to a woman’s right to control her fertility. Religious freedom should allow you to live your life within the boundaries of your faith. It shouldn’t allow you to impede the rights of others. The whole point of these reforms is that they mean everyone should have access to healthcare, including contraception, regardless of income, age, or employer. There can be no room for conscience clauses here.

Half of pregnancies in America are unplanned, with young women the most likely to have one. Frequently, it brings disruption and distress. It can change women’s lives, and often it can hold them back. It is difficult to plan a career, to plan the life that you want without being able to control your fertility.  Availability to contraception is crucial to women’s advancement, and these reforms in their current wording hold back an entire sex from reaching their full potential.

America is finally getting its sorry act together by helping all women have access to contraception. It must not allow the religious right to undermine those efforts.

 

 

How careers guidance helps challenge stereotypes

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Just been reading the front page of Lib Dem News (5/8/11). Delighted to see that Simon Hughes, as Advocate for Access to Education, is championing more and earlier careers advice for young people.

The previous government (aided by the Tories before 1997) systematically dismantled the careers guidance profession in England: first hiving it off into private companies, then forcing it to concentrate on those most in need but letting mainstream pupils fend for themselves, diluting the profession by making Careers Advisers become the jack of all trades Personal Advisers and finally starving it of funds to resources the service properly. It’s no wonder that pupils, parents and teachers are complaining.

Now I’m not saying Scotland is perfect but we have done things a bit differently, or at least until recently. Careers Scotland (the national all age guidance service) was recognised as world class (pdf), but the SNP after 2007 decided they could do better and pushed a huge restructuring, by creating Skills Development Scotland, onto the profession. The staff at SDS, which includes all of Careers Scotland, are dedicated to improving people’s lives and helping them to achieve their full potential. But there is a danger that short term populism by politicians is distracting SDS from its crucial core function of careers information, advice, guidance.

One of the most inspiring things about the profession is how dedicated Careers Advisers are to helping young people work out what they want to do and then helping them to do it. This can mean challenging girls who say they want to be nursery nurses or hairdressers, when everything they say indicates they’d rather be engineers, or it can mean showing boys who love cooking that they don’t have to be what their parents want by ‘getting a trade’ but can aspire to be the next Andrew Fairlie or Nick Nairn. Careers Advisers are there to help you think through what you want to do, not what your mates, your parents or your older brother or sister have told you you should do. They are there to get you really thinking about why you want to be an social worker, an astronaut or a lawyer. And they are there to help you raise your aspirations and not settle only for what you know.

I get really furious when I see government ministers paying lip service to the value of careers guidance and then failing to fund the service, or turning it into a political football. If we want the next generations to aim higher, we need to help them set clear career goals and then support them to get there. We won’t do this if the profession continues to be marginalised in England or treated as a political football in Scotland.

Two cheers for what Simon Hughes is championing. That will become three cheers when I see the Westminster & Scottish governments putting their money where their mouth is and supporting Careers Advisers to do their job without political interference!

Stop patronising me and give me a beer

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Last week, yet another beer company released a beer marketed specifically at women. This is not the first excercise of it’s kind. Carlsberg, and others before them have branded products as ‘women’s beer’. But Coor’s have gone one further – and coloured it pink.

Women are still the minority of beer drinkers. According to Molson Coors, 79% of women ‘rarely or never drink beer’. You can’t blame them for wanting to exploit an massive, untapped section of the market. But surely this isn’t the way to do it. There is a massive macho culture surrounding beer drinking. Many adult women have spent decades being isolated from beer drinking by companies themselves, by targeting their products exclusively at men – is it that suprising that most women have been totally alienated?

Advertising beer with ladies in swimsuits is not a very subtle way to get through to your target audience

Personally, I like beer. I like German beer, Belgian beer, real ale, and a decent lager.  The whole reason I started drinking it in the first place was because it was not expected of me. As a teenage girl, I was expected to drink alcopops at parties, and cheap cider. I was not expected to like, or to handle, a pint. This struck me as an excellent reason to start drinking it. Years later, I still drink ale, and it still raises eyebrows occasionally.

Women don’t want a ‘special beer’. We’d rather you stopped isolating us from ‘proper beer’. Fortunately, beer-loving women may have found a friend in smaller, independent breweries. Not only do they not have the resources to launch a beer specifically aimed at women, they seem prepared to treat us like any other beer drinker. On Twitter, the Black Isle Beer company commented

“A new beer aimed at women folk? All our beers are aimed at women and we haven’t had to patronise anyone to make them that way”

I don’t need large beer companies to tell me that they’ve made a special beer ‘just for me’. I find it patronising, and it’s certainly not going to make me drink Coors. Please. I have better taste in beer than that.

 

Scottish Women Liberal Democrats Relaunch

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The May 2011 Scottish Parliament elections were not a great night for our party… but there was one bright spark: 20% of our MSPs are now women, our highest percentage ever. But no Lib Dem would advocate losing 2/3 of our MSPs as an effective future strategy!

So what are we going to do about it? That was the burning question SWLD members debate at their Discussion Forum in Glasgow on 2nd July. Willie Rennie MSP & Jo Swinson MP, Leader & Depute Leader in Scotland respectively, both stressed their total commitment to improving diversity within our Scottish party and the challenge for SWLD members is to drive this change.

Ideas came thick and fast, from improving the structures in the party, challenging stereotypical attitudes, talent spotting our future female stars to getting serious about support for female candidates.

With a new committee, a clear focus and a re-energised team of activists, SWLD is determined to make waves in the coming year at 3 levels:
1. To increase female representation at all levels within the party
2. To increase female elected members at all levels within Scotland
3. To increase female influence on policy at all levels

We are currently drafting 2 motions for autumn conference that should start to tackle the first two. We have a big opportunity to get more women involved NOW because all the party committees are up for re-election soon. So we are on the hunt for women members who want to help run the party (Scottish Executive), propose policy (Policy Committee, where there is currently only 1 woman and 14 men!), organise conference (Conference Committee) or work on candidate support (Campaigns & Candidates Committee).

We also plan to bring some of the excellent training on offer at Federal Conference north of the border, running sessions for elected members, potential candidates and new members. We also want to get networking with a vengeance: encouraging new female talent to join the party and bringing on our future stars onto the party’s radar. I’ve already started working with Sophie Bridger, President of Liberal Youth Scotland, to recruit & support younger members.

To do all this, we will of course need money! That comes from attracting new members, but also from fundraising events. So look out for our new look SWLD stand at Scottish conference (in October & March). Even better, book a date in your diary for a major SWLD Reception on the Friday of spring conference, with high profile guest speaker…

What Liberal Democrat is not ashamed to see even the Tories doing better in female
representation than us? Well if you feel that way, join SWLD and help us top the party tables in 2016 for female MSPs!

We all live in a gender-balanced submarine

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On both sides of the Atlantic, women are finally being permitted to have a job that has always been off limits to them. The Royal Navy and the US Navy have both announced this month that they are lifting the ban on women serving in submarines. The ban was supposedly to protect pregnant women from harmful radiation inside nuclear submarines.

It’s great to see that our Navy is opening doors for 3,400 female Navy personnel. Unfortunately, they’re not the last bastion of male-only roles in the armed forces.

In 2002, Captain Philippa Tattersall became the first woman to earn a prestigious Green Beret from the Royal Marines. But because she is Philippa, and not Philip, she may not serve as a Commando. She is limited to 3 Commando Brigade, where she may work in a supportive role.

This exemption from discrimination legislation applies to roles within the forces where the main aim is “to close with and kill the enemy”, and was reviewed by the MOD only last year. The Navy’s website attempts to justify this by claiming that the inclusion of women is not permitted on “grounds of medical or combat effectiveness/team cohesion”. “Medical or combat effectiveness” is a wonderful euphemism, and covers all manner of sins. I will resist the temptation to vigorously defend Captain Tattersall evident ‘combat effectiveness’.

The MOD also express a concern that allowing women into small teams for close combat will endanger troops by undermining the cohesion of the group. I fail to see why the presence of women in a team needs to be disruptive. If it were the potential for romantic feelings, that presumably these teams would also exclude gay men. They don’t, thankfully. There are plenty of examples of men and women working together in high stress situations – both within and outwith the armed forces. Surgeons work together within an operating room, police officers respond to emergencies. These are a world away, but the theme – men and women working together under pressure – remains.

In the words of the MOD themselves, “The contribution of Servicewomen to the combat effectiveness of the Armed Forces is essential.” That doesn’t just go for the Logistics Corps, or the Intelligence Corps – it should go for every part of the armed forces. Women have proved themselves to be capable of being everything the armed forces has allowed them to do – despite ‘being girls’. And now, we’d like the opportunity to prove that we can be part of an effective close-combat team.  This ban only stands because of an inconclusive review. Surely it’s time to give our soldiers – men and women – the opportunity to rise to the challenge.

Are You Born to Be Wild?

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I guess the first thing to say is WELCOME to our new SWLD blog. Or should I
say WILDS: Women in the Liberal Democrats in Scotland.

I’ve only been Scottish Convenor of SWLD since 2nd July and I want you all to be
wild: wild about the appallingly low number of Lib Dem women MPs, wild about
dropping to 1 female MSP in May but wild with enthusiasm to achieve our 3
objectives before another century goes by!

I hope you will use this site as a kind of Lib Dem marketplace, where we can
share ideas about how to get more women MPs & MSPs, have heated debates
on issues such as quotas and job sharing for politicians and where we can
consider what difference women can make in policy terms.

I also intend to use this site as a noticeboard for SWLD activities. We have
a ‘grand plan’ and it starts here with the relaunch of SWLD and the creation of
this site.

If you like what you see on this site, please tell your friends, join us and get
involved…