Mine was pretty similar (aside from one teacher telling us that an orgasm was like a really good sneeze… no, I don’t know either). Relationships and feelings and other relevant things weren’t discussed, and neither was abortion, despite the girl I sat next to in design tech having had one just the year before.

The A Word

In a way, I am relieved. Because I have seen some of the materials used to discuss abortion in schools all over the country, and they make my blood run cold. Most of it is little better than anti-choice propaganda, and much of it is simply untrue. Abortion makes you infertile, abortion gives you breast cancer… These lies are imparted to young people at the hands of abortion ‘experts’ who are invited into schools, often by well-meaning teachers desperate for guidance on how best to handle ‘the A word’. Young people deserve better than this.

The problem goes far deeper than the curriculum, of course. Abortion happens, whether it is legal or not, safe or not, all over the world. Globally, about 1 in 5 pregnancies end in abortion (some global and local stats). Reluctance to discuss abortion openly and truthfully in the media and in popular culture is doing untold damage to individuals and to women’s precious right to choose. How are teachers and youth workers meant to offer unbiased information and support if they themselves have never had the chance to have an open discussion? To hear the facts?

Secrets and lies

Refusing to tackle the subject of abortion allows stigma to flourish, putting young people facing unplanned pregnancy in a position where they may not even feel able to ask for help. Scaring young women into carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term benefits no one.

But no matter, right? There’s plenty of information freely available, and countless support and counselling services. So here’s a fun game: why not google ‘pregnancy counselling’ and let me know how many of those first page results you reckon are really offering unbiased information? If you find any really choice quotes please comment and share!

Freedom to choose

I’m not assuming all BadRep’s readers are pro-choice, but I’m sure there are some of you. Perhaps, like me, you’ve waved a placard or shouted into a megaphone for a woman’s right to choose and to control her own body.

Standing up for safe, legal abortion is vital, as there are plenty of people who will take any opportunity they can to turn the clock back on reproductive freedom. Some of them are sitting in Westminster right now, deciding your future. (That’s a nice thought, isn’t it?)

But the war is also being waged quietly and efficiently on another front, in our classrooms and in a host of so-called counselling clinics. It’s up to us to expose the propagandists and arm young people with the facts so that they can make their own decisions.

Yes! But how?

Well… *puts on charity trustee hat* Education for Choice are the first line of defence. They are the only UK-based educational charity dedicated to enabling young people to make informed choices about pregnancy and abortion.

With their mighty army of four staff they do heroic battle against the forces of misinformation on a shoestring budget. Times are hard for everyone right now, but in order for EFC to continue working in schools, with youth workers and health professionals, they urgently need your help.

Please:

• Donate £5, £10, or whatever you can spare to their emergency fund
• Pledge your support for the A Word campaign

Help EFC put abortion in the spotlight and make sure that young people’s right to unbiased information is at the top of the agenda.

What else can I do?

• Teach PSHE or know someone who does? Check out these resources.

• Have some time to spare? Become a Champion for Choice.

• Under 21? Have your say on the Youth Advisory Group.

• Have children of your own? Talk to them.

The government’s point of view was that it was time to make big decisions about priorities.

BBC article, 15 November 2010

In cutting legal aid for nearly all areas affecting the family sphere, the government has made it very clear where their priorities lie, and it is not with the most vulnerable members of society. The cuts are all over the place – family law, immigration, employment – and it is difficult to decide which of these is going to disadvantage women the most.

Even looking at a single area – family law – yields some very interesting data. Legal aid is not available for uncontested divorces, it can only be applied for where the other party contests the petition. Of the divorces granted in 2008 in England and Wales, 67% were granted to the wife. For all of the divorces granted, unreasonable behaviour was the most common reason for divorce. Of the contested divorces initiated, women were more likely to be granted Legal Aid as they are more likely to have no income of their own.

Taking Legal Aid away from contested divorce cases, therefore, is likely to result in far fewer cases being brought before the court, as the main instigators of divorce proceedings will not be able to afford to do so. So what are the alternatives if you’re stuck in a marriage and you want out?

Mediation isn't possible for everyone. Image captured by rsepulveda on Flickr.

The problem with mediation

Well, there’s mediation, which only works if the two individuals can agree on an amicable arrangement. I’m thinking that most people wouldn’t want to go through the court process if an amicable arrangement was possible. Even setting aside the thorny issue of child custody, solicitors claim that 4 out of 5 men try to hide wealth in divorce settlements. Going to court can prevent this through the agreement of a “consent order” deciding how property and assets are to be split. If the parties do not follow the order, the court can then enforce it. I find it laughable that those men would volunteer their hidden wealth because they’re around a mediation table rather than in a court room. Net result: wives lose out in a settlement, and have no recourse if the other party reneges on the agreement.

Domestic violence cases

Suppose that it’s worse, and that the woman is in an abusive relationship. Currently, if a woman wishes to keep her address secret, she can apply to use her solicitor’s address instead of her own. Most importantly for violent cases, it is recognised that mediation, which is voluntary, is inappropriate where there is a fear of violence by either party. Ah, I hear you cry, but funding will continue for family law cases involving domestic violence.

The thing is, “domestic violence” comes under section (b) of the Act, “unreasonable behaviour”. This doesn’t need to include the particulars of any violence experienced, but can be something much milder. In fact, unless the husband has a string of convictions for violence, it’s actually easier in some ways to have a divorce granted by citing milder grounds, as the other party is less likely to contest the petition. With domestic violence cases under-reported, it is difficult to estimate how many mild petitions for “unreasonable behaviour” hide battery and abuse. 77% of domestic violence victims are women, 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, and on average a victim will experience 35 assaults before calling the police. An inadequate avenue of escape previously partly available to thousands of women across the UK is now being firmly barred.

The cost of being single. Image captured by CascadeAndSTAN on Flickr.

The cost of being single

So why even get married? Surely it’s safer for all women to apply for divorce now, and to refuse to enter matrimony in the future. Why not simply opt for that? Put simply: money.

Women’s access to income through employment will be significantly curtailed as public sector jobs are shed, and their access to government assistance and benefits will be cut. The cuts will hit women twice as hard as men, and the poorest 13 times harder than the richest. I guess it’s a good thing that the number of women already below the poverty line is negligible… oh wait, one third of women earn less than £100 a week. A working lone parent with two children will suffer cuts of 10.4% of their income, compared to a two-parent, two-child family on a modest income’s drop of 6.2%. To give you an idea of what this means, in London, 9 out of 10 lone parent households are headed by women.

What am I supposed to do about it?

Taken individually, any of the above measures are regressive. Put together, and they are positively draconian. The only saving grace is that these changes have not yet been confirmed, and are still subject to a public consultation (ending 14 February 2011). Make sure your voice is heard, by completing the online form. Unless we speak out now, it may cost us far too dearly in the future.

As a third sector worker, I have spent the last two years trying to recruit high-flying management positions. Of course, before I could recruit anyone, I first had to be trained in the very latest in interviewing techniques. Recruitment specialists took me through the entire process, from sitting down with the applications to sending out the offer letter. One tangent in the discussion – as usual, initiated by me, because I can’t quite let go of my responsibility to be Outraged By Everything^TM – was about job adverts, especially ones designed to attract more female candidates (something we had specifically tried to do for the shiniest, most well-paying jobs, with limited success). There were two issues that quickly reared their ugly heads:

1. Job adverts that want to attract more female candidates will usually include something to the effect of, “Organisation X is committed to diversity and equality, and particularly welcomes applications from women and members of ethnic minorities for this position.” These words tend to be included only on some ads for that organisation, and not on all ads for all vacancies.
2. Those ads also tend to stress the maternity leave, childcare vouchers and other family-friendly policies of the organisation, whereas your typical ad will focus more on performance-related pay and the opportunity of overseas travel.

“Women candidates are highly encouraged to apply.”

UNDP, vacancy notice for Liberia Project Assistant position

So, where does that leave the female candidate?

When a candidate first decides to job-hunt, the desired salary level is one of the main factors influencing their choice of whether or not they should bother applying. If you feel that you’re at about £35K, for instance, you’ll feel over-qualified for jobs at £20K and under-qualified for jobs at £60K in the same field. The trouble is, according to investigations such as this one, women have a self-assessment of their worth that is considerably lower than men’s. Recent studies looking at the wage gap have also shown that women tend to submit bids for lower wages when bargaining, and also tend to self-promote a lot less than men. What these two studies indicate is that where salary negotiations are in place, this means women end up with lower salaries than their male counterparts. They also indicate that, anticipating a lower salary as a result of negotiations, women are more likely to turn to fixed-salary jobs, rather than highly competetive, negotiable ones.

Even in the fixed-salary (or salary bracket jobs) there are complications. If a women self-promotes a lot less than her male counterpart, and if her self-assessment of her worth is lower than his, then she would have a reasonable expectation of being paid less than he is. When looking for a job to match both her skills and her salary expectations, she will look for a job that requires her skillset, but has a lower salary than the one a qualified male candidate would expect. For fixed salary brackets, then, the issue is at the application stage rather than the negotiation stage: qualified women are simply not applying for well-paying jobs in their respective industries.

Take a hypothetical female applicant on a salary of £30k, which we have already established is likely to be at least a little below her equally qualified male counterpart, who receives £35k, for the sake of argument. This female candidate would therefore reasonably expect to look for positions offering £30k-£35k, whereas her male counterpart would be looking for £35k-£40k. Both of these candidates are equally qualified, and they are looking at the same job advert – but if the studies above are correct, a woman looking at two identical ads for two identical jobs,one of which matches the male applicant’s expectation of salary (the higher) and one of which matches hers (the lower), she will be more likely to apply for the job ad with the lower salary.

I’m going to pause here for a second and let you think about how perverse that is. Internalising a lower value for their work, women will actively look for the lower-paying jobs that require their skills, on the assumption that the higher-paying jobs are somehow out of their reach. “It’s too big a jump in salary” is a frequent one I’ve heard among my friends when discussing why they can’t apply for a managerial position, as if extra money is in some way a barrier to applying. When reviewing candidates, I’ve found it helpful to ignore previous salary details (especially for internal candidates, where salary is tied in to a ‘grade’ that is somehow supposed to be linked to the complexity and skill requirements of the role) as they can give you a biased impression of whether the candidate is pitching ‘at the right level’.

This tendency by women to self-deselect based on salary expectations is somewhat lowered by ads that include the words ‘women are especially encouraged to apply’. Positive discrimination is illegal in the UK; no-one is going to be more likely to hire you just because you are a woman. However, what this tendency highlights is the understanding that negative discrimination is still alive and well: that a woman is less likely to be hired for a position that does not include the words ‘women are especially encouraged to apply’ relative to one that does.

The practical implications of this are:

• Within a single organisation, the understanding therefore becomes that if the organisation would particularly like female applicants, it will add the words. If it would not particularly like female applicants, it will say nothing. In essence, the use of those words singles out some jobs as suitable for women, and other jobs as suitable for a default candidate – and the default, of course, is always male. Career progression for potentially sterling female candidates is therefore implicitly discouraged.
• This notion is reinforced by the sorts of packages offered to women to attract them to some points, conflating ‘woman candidate’ with ‘future mother’. Therefore a female job-hunter primarily interested in a high-flying job with overseas travel and performance-related pay finds herself in what seems to be very hostile territory. If female-friendly=mother-friendly, and this job isn’t very mother-friendly, then it must follow that it isn’t very female-friendly. (And neither are you, you harlot; why are you looking for a job with a bonus instead of one with a good maternity package?)
• In the third sector at large, organisations tend to find a large number of women applying for entry-level jobs, and practically none for the high-placed positions. This is partly because many women have taken the economic ‘hit’ of having a family, which means they take longer to accrue seniority, but partly because the ads for the top jobs never highlight maternity leave etc (the shorthand identified in b) as referring to female candidates), but instead focus on bonuses – which, from many years in the workforce, a working woman comes to understand as the default code for ‘male, white, middle-class’. Therefore many good candidates never bother applying, anticipating discrimination even where none might exist in the selection process.

Putting pen to paper, captured by gtmcknight on Flickr.

So what should organisations do?

1. Stop using those words for some adverts. You want to diversity your workforce? Good for you. Either change the nature of the ad to include common concerns (and this can be done in more neutral ways by highlighting paternal and maternal leave, travel opportunities, a commitment to equality, a particular interest in people with language skills or overseas experience, etc) and skip the words entirely, or add the words to every ad. If you want to increase the number of female candidates, surely you want them to apply for all jobs, rather than just one or two? Add them to every ad, and see the applications for your jobs increase relative to those received by your competitors.
2. In my experience, women tend to be put off requirements that sound vague, such as ‘experience in…’ rather than the more specific ‘5 years of experience in…’, as many will assume they do not have the required experience. Such age-specific requirements, however, are discriminatory for different reasons. So what can be done? Well, identifying what precisely you are looking for (such as through competency-based criteria) helps considerably, as does tightening up the other specifications. It will assist people in mapping across their skill sets on to the job profile.
3. As for women being less likely to apply for jobs that pay more? Well, that one’s easy – all you need to do is pay them more! A woman on £35k pa is a lot less likely to go for a job that pays £30k than a woman who has the same job but earns £25k pa. I appreciate that this is a chicken and egg scenario, but an organisation that identifies internal talent and promotes from within is more likely to foster confidence and ambition in all its workes, instead of just the male ones.

And, you know, not penalising a woman if she does decide to have a child (and in this way help the economy and pay your pension twenty years down the line) wouldn’t kill you either.