A COUPLE of weeks ago, three women got settlements totalling £15,500 for cases of sexual discrimination related to their pregnant status.
This included complaints about pregnancy being discussed at a job interview, failure to adjust circumstances to accommodate the physical stress of pregnancy, and precluding a permanent job opportunity from a woman on maternity leave.
In the past twelve months, a private sector finance manager was awarded £50,000 in settlement when made redundant after having a baby, and a public sector settlement of £11,250 was made to a worker for mistreatment after her maternity leave.
These are not isolated examples of one-off discrimination. Complaints of sex discrimination account for over one quarter of all equality complaints here annually, surpassed only by disability.
One of the cruellest consequences can be the corrosion of women’s confidence in themselves – sometimes permanently.
Mistreatment of women in these circumstances today cannot be divorced from the wider ethos of public policy decision-making in the north.
The abuse of an individual woman – in any circumstance – is conditioned by a patriarchal social agenda where high profile men (and some women) are often happy to do the soft talking of progress but not the hard walking of change.
The problem with the ‘hard walking’ is that it forces challenging choices, primarily about whether elite men will humbly acknowledge personal or institutional complicity before surrendering real social power for common good.
Writing in the current edition of Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, Ulster University legal academic Michelle Rouse strongly challenges this culture of embedded gender inequality within the north’s polity.
Noting that the 1998 Good Friday Agreement specifically involved women in its development and content, Ms Rouse observes that this initial promise has not been delivered.
Ms Rouse’s important article concludes that the “attrition of inclusivity” challenges the “legitimacy” traits of a peace process agenda which has not been gender-inclusive.
She comments that “women’s demand for equality of status” in the north’s political transformation “has been largely side-lined” by a process dictated by power issues between groups led mainly by male protagonists.
Ms Rouse comments: “Ongoing default in respect of the key equality and human rights provisions has not, of itself, been regarded as sufficiently important to precipitate a crisis within the Stormont body politic... Eighteen years on from 1998, the (Agreement’s) promise of the ‘full and equal participation of women’ may now be even more elusive than it ever was.”
Ms Rouse’s conclusion should serve as a reality check for decision-makers across the north’s political and public policy landscape.
Equality and human rights obligations are not tactics for talk-shows. They are edicts for transformation. They are requirements of social change which should be embraced – and understood – with an deeply informed vision, not a cosmetic commitment.
Many will say that gender discrimination happens everywhere. Sadly, that is true. The difference in the north is that we’re a tiny population of 1.8 million people in a territory the size of Yorkshire.
And, over the last 20 years, we have undergone some of the most significant structural and legal transformations of any region in Europe.
Change should therefore have been delivered further, finer and faster than the accepted norms of elsewhere.
In this small place, transformational change on a mainstream equality agenda should have been streets ahead of the pack. Not so.
Gender discrimination and inequality are still seen here by some as ‘normal’, and routinely to be legally defended.
That reality means we’re actually worse off in relative terms. It means we have to work even harder to redress the decisive moment that’s been lost in our recent history.
And it means we have to face the gendered consequences of our male-dominated brutal conflict – through from civic society to the civil service, from politics to policing, and more.
Those negative consequences continue to permeate every sector, right now, today. Leaders need to be open and honest about the individual and collective legacy of gendered abuses of power.
The people with greatest power must understand the relationship between cases of discrimination, misogyny and chauvinism, and structures of institutionalised gender inequality which they filter downwards through their own (often conservative) male psyches.
It demands a huge cultural shift. Only then, can any effort to promote substantive gender equality be fully successful.
In the interim, our society is privileged to have women, supported by some men, who possess the courage and the skills to fight strongly for their rights.
