Gender Equality Scheme
What is South Tyneside’s Gender Equality Scheme?
We are fully committed to promoting gender equality between men and women, girls and boys. We understand that there are still gender differences in people’s life chances, what services they can access, the types of jobs they do and how well pupils achieve at school.
We recognise that gender issues cut across all the different equality strands and that a ‘one-size fits all’ approach is not the answer.
The Gender Equality Scheme covers our approach to gender equality. It is a three-year action plan outlining how we intend to meet the requirements of the Gender Equality Duty. In addition, our annual refresh will allow us to update the Scheme to reflect new areas of work and issues raised from further consultation.
Why do we need a Gender Equality Scheme?
The Gender Equality Duty is different from previous sex equality legislation in two crucial ways:
- Public authorities have to be proactive in eliminating discrimination and harassment, rather than waiting for individuals to take cases against them
- Public authorities have to be proactive in promoting equality of opportunity, and not just avoiding discrimination
The duty is intended to address the fact that, despite 30 years of individual legal rights to sex equality, there is still widespread discrimination – sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional – and persistent gender inequality. Policies and practices that seem neutral can have a significantly different effect on women and on men, often contributing to greater gender inequality and poor policy outcomes. Individual legal rights have not been enough by themselves to change this.
The duty is intended to improve this situation, both for men and for women, for boys and for girls. Gender roles and relationships structure men’s and women’s lives.
Women are frequently disadvantaged by policies and practices that do not recognise their greater caring responsibilities, the different pattern of their working lives, their more limited access to resources and their greater vulnerability to domestic violence and sexual assault.
Men are also disadvantaged by workplace cultures that do not support their family or childcare responsibilities, by family services that assume they have little or no role in parenting.
Both sexes suffer from stereotyping of their roles and needs. The duty should help the public sector, and those working with it, to identify and respond to stereotyping, sex discrimination and sexism, resulting in improvements for all.We would like to hear your views
In order to keep improving our Scheme, we would like to involve a variety of individuals, groups and organisations to shape its content. This means the people affected by the scheme will largely determine the way South Tyneside Council deals with gender equality in the future. We want to involve them in making improvements.
We want to know what you think about your local services and help us promote gender equality. What works well and what doesn’t?
Read a copy of our Gender Equality Scheme
However, if you want a copy of these documents in other formats including large print, audiotape, CD or Braille other languages please contact our Communications Team on (0191) 4247385.
See also
