No, Universal Credit is not ‘gender neutral’
Any reform of the social security system should be subject to a meaningful equality impact assessment.
Report
This report explores the status of funding for the women’s sector.
This report focuses on specialist women’s organisations. With the exception of one organisation in the survey and one organisation in the qualitative interviews, all organisations who participated in this research are led by women, offering services and support targeted specifically to women. The aim of this report is to analyse how these specialist, often local organisations are faring in the current funding environment.
Local specialist women’s organisations provide life-changing services including employment training, psychological and legal support, confidence building, and emergency help for victims of domestic and sexual violence and their children.
The vast majority of women support women-only services; research shows many victims would not have accessed support spaces if they had not been restricted to women.
The Women’s Resource Centre has calculated that the social value generated by women’s services is five to 11 times greater than the amount of money invested in them.
Yet funding for women’s organisations does not currently reflect the social value they generate nor the money they save the state. Funding for women’s organisations has been negatively affected by:
Brexit may offer some opportunities to the women’s sector, namely in more advantageous VAT rules for charities and a simplified funding pot. However, these are far from guaranteed and unlikely to outweigh the negative impacts, including withdrawal of EU funds and risks associated with an economic recession.
Any reform of the social security system should be subject to a meaningful equality impact assessment.
9 December 2015: Topics covered in the debate, which lasted three hours, included the gender pay gap, benefit changes, and occupational segregation
The launch of our new report supported by the University of Bristol and Strathclyde University.
This briefing examines the distributional impact of austerity policies implemented by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government.