One more minute.
Evidence of meeting #25 for Status of Women in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was scottish.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #25 for Status of Women in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was scottish.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:45 a.m.
NDP
Irene Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
Professor McKay, you mentioned the challenge of buy-in with stakeholders across government in regard to gender-based analysis. I'm wondering whether there has been the necessary buy-in. You seem to be optimistic, and you said that you were getting somewhere. I wonder if you could describe that. Has the gender disaggregated data been available to pursue that?
9:45 a.m.
Professor of Economics, Glasgow Caledonian University
I think I can be very brief in answering those questions and say that no one knows.
To expand slightly with regard to buy-in, it comes and goes. This is what I mean by one of the challenges we face in terms of responding to political change. Some of our political champions, and our previous first minister, have bought in. As we know, first ministers and justice ministers and equality ministers and the makeup of committees come and go. But through the activities of Scottish Women’s Budget Group, as Angela said, we continue to ensure that there's buy-in across the policy-making community. If that means saying the same thing over and over and over again, we're quite happy to do that—well, maybe “happy” is too strong a word.
On your second point, the gender disaggregated data, we don't have sufficient gender disaggregated data in place yet. But that's not a reason to say we can't do this. We regularly come across that as a reason, saying we can't do gender budget analysis because we don't have the required data to do the analysis. That in itself is doing gender budget analysis: discovering where you don't have the data, the gaps in the data, and to go about collecting them for the next budget round. I don't think it's sufficient to say we don't have the data, therefore we can't start. We start by saying we don't have the data, so let's collect it, and let's ensure we fill those gaps.
9:45 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you.
Before we let you go and start with the next round of witnesses, Dr. McKay, we have been grappling with fine-tuning our gender budgeting. You mentioned that you went from the theoretical to the practical. If you have any tools you would like to share with us, we would appreciate you sending them to us.
We thank you very much.
9:50 a.m.
Professor of Economics, Glasgow Caledonian University
We would be happy to do that.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you very much. You can stay on video conferencing.
We would like to go to our next round of witnesses, with Janet Veitch from UK Women's Budget Group.
Thank you, Ms. Veitch.
9:50 a.m.
Co-Chair, UK Women's Budget Group
I understand you don't have this presentation in front of you yet, but I think it will be provided to you shortly.
9:50 a.m.
Co-Chair, UK Women's Budget Group
I will go through it.
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.
10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Mrs. Veitch, we have one minute within which you need to wrap up. What the clerk tells me is that the presentation they received hasn't been translated, but they will submit it to the committee on Tuesday of next week.
If you could wrap up, it would be appreciated.
Thanks.
10 a.m.
Co-Chair, UK Women's Budget Group
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.
10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you very much.
We will now go to Professor Rubin. We have your presentation before us. You have 10 minutes, please.
10 a.m.
Professor Marilyn Rubin Professor of Public Administration and Economics, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
Thank you for this invitation.
I would like to also say hello to Janet. I haven't seen her since we were in Korea.
Hello, Janet.
10 a.m.
Prof. Marilyn Rubin
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.
10:10 a.m.
Prof. Marilyn Rubin
Okay.
The commission approved the strategic plan. There was one thing on budgeting in there that specifically said they had to integrate gender into every city department to achieve full equality, but nothing has happened yet. The strategies to operationalize this goal have never been implemented. However, the city did begin to examine the incorporation of gender into its budget decisions in preparation for an anticipated budget cut.
In 2003, there was going to be a very large cut in the budget, and the board passed a resolution urging the city departments to analyze the impact of these cuts. Sixteen departments actually looked at this; most of them said there was no specific impact by gender. However, the budget cuts never really were put in place, so there was never any effort made to see what would happen because nothing happened.
My last comment is that the new mayor and the new board of supervisors in San Francisco are actually saying they would like to work on having an analysis done of the impacts of the cuts in state aid to the city. There are steps being taken to implement gender into the budget, but it's happening very slowly.
April 3rd, 2008 / 10:10 a.m.
Liberal
Maria Minna Liberal Beaches—East York, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thanks to both our guests.
It was interesting to listen to you, especially with the different perspectives—one was national, the other was more local. It's encouraging to see that there was a great deal of commitment to follow-up.
My first question is to Madam Janet Veitch. You referred to an all-equality agenda, for which a minister is responsible. Can you expand on that? What would be the difference between a minister for the status of women and what you call an all-equality agenda?
You also mentioned that a government equality office has been set up. Is that within the Prime Minister's office, the finance department, the Privy Council Office, or where? Could you give us the results on the expenditure of the treasury project and how it works?
The new law intrigued me very much. Could you give us the parameters of the new law and when it was put forward? Was there any opposition? How is it being received by the various departments? Is there sufficient political will to make sure it's adhered to?
10:15 a.m.
Co-Chair, UK Women's Budget Group
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.
10:20 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Ms. Minna, you have one minute if you want to ask one last question.
10:20 a.m.
Liberal
Maria Minna Liberal Beaches—East York, ON
Thank you. That's very good.
One quick clarification. When you mention the new law, do I understand you correctly to say it covers local governments as well as the national and regional governments?
10:20 a.m.
Co-Chair, UK Women's Budget Group
Yes, it does. Any organization fulfilling a public service, carrying out a public service--