Board Members
Janet Veitch
Chair
Janet Veitch works as a consultant in the UK and internationally on women’s rights and gender responsive budgeting, having worked for ten years for the UK Ministers for Women, first as head of gender mainstreaming and then as Director of the UK Women’s National Commission. She was a research assistant in the House of Lords and a specialist adviser to the Women and Equalities Select Committee. She is a founder member of the End Violence Against Women Coalition. She has previously served as Vice-Chair of Equally Ours, Chair of the Happy Baby Community for refugee mums, and as an associate adviser on gender for the British Council. She was awarded the OBE for services to women’s rights in 2011.
Ruth Pearson
Co-Chair for Strategy and Fundraising
Ruth is Emeritus Professor of International Development at the University of Leeds, development economist and founder scholar and activist in the field of Gender and Development. Ruth’s research interests are focussed on women’s productive and reproductive work in the global economy, migration, ethnicity and labour organisation in Latin America, South East Asia and the UK. She also writes on social care and gendered economic policy and has extensive experience of working with international and UK women’s organisations and NGOs in the global South and North.
Denise Fahmy
Denise Fahmy is co-founder of Freedom in the Arts, a new organisation promoting freedom of speech and expression in the UK cultural sector. She has worked for 30 years in the arts with a specialism in visual arts. Denise worked for Arts Council England for 15 years, managing a portfolio of diverse arts organisations, from galleries to commissioning agencies.
Angela O'Hagan
Angela is a Reader in Equalities and Public Policy at Glasgow Caledonian University and currently independent Chair of the Scottish Government’s Equality and Budgets Advisory Group (EBAG). She was a member of the UKWBG Commission for a Gender Equal Economy and is also a Trustee of the Scottish Women’s Budget Group. She has been engaged in the process of securing equality analysis in the Scottish Budget process since its inception in 1999/2000) and regularly gives evidence to committees of the Scottish Parliament – and elsewhere – on improvements in gender analysis of budget processes.
Elizabeth Law
Liz is a member of the Northern Ireland Women’s Budget Group. She has worked as a research associate with the Ulster University research project on gender budgeting and, before that, worked in social care, community development and policy for statutory social services, in a range of areas with NGOs including NICVA, AIDS Helpline and Carrickfergus Community Forum and in policy work with the Equality Commission. As a member of Women’s Platform Liz was UK Board Member to the European Women’s Lobby, serving as treasurer on the EWL Executive.
Jules Allen
Jules is currently completing an ESRC-funded PhD in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies at Cambridge, researching social norms and fathers’ use of parental leave in comparative context. Her research interests comprise gender, equality, social policy, care, social reproduction and feminist theory and she co-convenes the Gender and Working Lives research cluster (@genderworkgroup). Prior to undertaking the PhD Jules worked in funding and has 11 years’ experience in fundraising for social care, international development and higher education projects.
