‘Miss’-ed in the fight for gender equality

Back in February, the term ‘mademoiselle’ was finally abolished from French bureaucracy. Prime Minister Fillon also took the bold move of ordering the term ‘maiden name’ or the equally ridiculous ‘spouse’s name’ be replaced with ‘family name’.

Bravo.

And about time too.

Granted the French themselves have used ‘Madame’ as a neutral and default title for women for quite some time, unless speaking to a small child, or wanting to be particularly offensive, or about 105 years old.

I know from experience that the same is the case in Germany – ‘Frau’ is the neutral term for all women regardless of marital status. The only way official forms make the differentiation is to ask what other name you were born with, if that is relevant. They also, by the way, don’t have this irritating habit of assuming you’re happy to be referred to by your forename by a complete stranger, who clearly doesn’t know you well enough to realise you actually go by a different name … but that’s for another day…

It’s really very simple.

So why is it so hard to get ‘the establishment’ to get their heads around the idea here in the UK?

Let’s look at the term ‘maiden name’ and how we address women here:

‘Maiden name’ implies the name you have until some ‘takes your maidenhead’. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m sure I’m not the only woman who would have a bit of an issue with that. I know we still have a few medieval terms in the English language but that one takes the biscuit. What is wrong with just ‘name’ or if we have to be specific ‘family name’?

Beats me.

To be referred to as ‘Miss’ grates a lot of women I’ve spoken to about this. But I am rather horrified by the lack of campaigning going on against it. Do women really not care, or is it as the woman in the bank today said, she’d never really thought about it? Time we all did. Because most women I speak to are positively irritated/annoyed/right royally hacked off by being referred to as ‘Miss’. First off it implies you’re still a child – which contrary to popular belief is never flattering, it’s just plain condescending and frankly offensive. Worse still, if you go right back to the proper meaning, implies you still belong to your father. We still refer to daughters being ‘given away’ by their fathers during the (albeit more traditional) wedding ceremony. I mean, seriously?

Some women like to take their husbands names and use ‘Mrs’ and it is indeed a woman’s right to choose – I don’t dispute that. Some amalgamate their names when they marry, it’s a matter of choice and why shouldn’t it work both ways? It’s not always practical though and certainly it should never be assumed to be fact. I have several female friends who despite being happily married, balk at the idea of being ‘Mrs X’ instead of ‘Ms Y’ (‘Y’ being the name they were born with, as opposed to their husbands name ‘X’).

Until fairly recently, (and indeed some antiquated institutions of the country, such as my bank, still do) the term ‘Ms’ could only be used if you were divorced. That is rubbish. And again, like the other terms, is an indication of marital status. Many women now use, or at least try to use ‘Ms’ as a neutral term. For example, in the States, ‘Ms’ is the neutral default for adult women, unless that woman chooses otherwise – or so according to my American female friends.

Case or not, I would argue absolutely that is how it should be. After all we are supposed to have gender equality in this country, right?

Ok, so now go through the same process for terms used to address men. I promise it will be quick:

The term ‘Mr’ is used for all men, no questions, no definition of marital status. Neutral. By default.

See the point I’m making?

There are lots of women like me who are tired of having to define themselves by their marital status instead of automatically being referred to as ‘Ms’ by default. We really shouldn’t have to ask, let alone push for it. For quite a number of decades now, women have been able to live independently from their male counterparts and we certainly don’t belong to anyone but ourselves. Because it’s not just a question of equality or even feminism, it’s also about identity.

I find it really hard to understand why I have to argue that on a near enough daily basis.

This is 2012!!

Equal rights between men and women have come a long, long way. But. Until women are no longer required to define themselves according to the men in their lives and are by default referred to by the neutral ‘Ms’ in the same way men are referred to simply as ‘Mr’, gender equality will not exist in full. It’s really quite simple.

From Catalyst to Capital

Having been one of the lucky few invited to the launch of Big Society Capital (BSC) last week and given there has certainly been a good few more who have commented/blogged on it since, it seemed a good moment to reignite my own public musings. As I’m also leading the NCVYS work on social investment and social enterprise on behalf of Catalyst, now is as good a time as any.

Wednesday 4 April 2012 at the London Stock Exchange: that the launch took place there was somewhat telling in the first instance – as Jonathan Jenkins pointed out in one of a number of the day’s Twitter flurries, we were right opposite the #Occupy site. Added to that, the room was full of investment fund and civil servant types; voluntary sector representatives were somewhat thin on the ground, which considering charities and social enterprises were hailed as the ultimate beneficiaries of BSC (closely followed by ‘society’) I found a bit bizarre to say the least. Nevertheless, with my NCVYS hat on, I felt rather honoured and a touch flattered, it has to be said, clearly we’re doing something to get ourselves noticed at this level.

Subconsciously, I chose to turn up in shiny red Dr Martens and stick out like the proverbial sore and rather irritating thumb. Unfortunately for my subconscious, they did rather match the celebratory mood of the room though and I was massively upstaged by the arrival of the Prime Minister David Cameron. Sadly, he did little to quell the myth that charities and social enterprises will be able to just walk into BSC as they do their local bank and request a loan. Furthermore, while there was lots of rhetoric around social franchising and how BSC will provide the capital to expand through replication in particular, with plenty of ‘why’ BSC now exists, and how the ‘social sector’ (as the combined voluntary/third/social enterprise sectors were being referred to throughout the morning) can benefit from it, there was very little ‘how’ from the PM. As soon as he left, so did the mainstream media, which was a real shame, as later news reports went on to further perpetuate the ‘walk in off the street’ myth. Had they waited, they would have heard from the much better informed Chairman of BSC, Sir Ronald Cohen who spoke considerably more on how BSC would work through intermediaries to distribute funds to the sector.

Within minutes of getting back to the office I already had a call about who these intermediaries might be. And this is the big question now for sure. Sir Ronald Cohen talked of an estimated £20 million available to such intermediaries; one can only hope that the view from the ground isn’t lost and those pots aren’t sucked up by the major investment funds alone. Surely what an ‘intermediary’ should be is just as the name suggests: a middle person between the social investment arena and the social sector frontline organisations delivering ‘good’ to society. That is one of the reasons NCVYS feels well placed to provide such a service, both to Big Society Capital, if they’ll have us, and of course, to the youth sector, being that this is our primary area of expertise. Essentially this is what we’ve been developing on behalf of the Catalyst consortium and it was to BSC that we had originally thought to look to raise funds for our youth sector retailer – we don’t have those funds yet.

There has been a lot of criticism around BSC and the social investment debate already simmering beneath the surface of the voluntary sector has been brought to a mini boiling point since its launch. One thing has to be made clear – social investment is not the one and only answer, it’s just one of the many options that organisations can consider to ‘finance’ (or fund in ‘old’ terms) their work. Grant funding will and should still play and important part in funding innovative developmental work (e.g. Catalyst’s developmental work around social investment and social enterprise for the youth sector). It’s therefore important to make sure that these other options aren’t subsumed by the interest and excitement around social investment. I would therefore be wary of talk that implies trusts and foundations and traditional grant funders should go the whole way towards social investment models. Different financing/funding models suit different contexts and that applies to business as well as the voluntary sector so people shouldn’t let themselves be persuaded otherwise. For example, it isn’t always about bums on seats, the overwhelming priority for the charity sector is long-term social value. This is a) massively difficult to measure in financial terms and b) takes quite some time bear fruit. So when all the hype has died down and you, a VCS organisation are considering what funding model best suits your organisations and whether indeed that includes social investment, then don’t be afraid to say ‘it’s not for me’. A word of warning to investors too: a binary outcome metric, such as a young person getting a job, may well be the simple, clear-cut option, but this approach can be extremely misleading. If a project gets young people into work, as yourselves how long that job is for, did it lead to anything, or was it just a case of someone signing a form and then turning that young person away? Would you as an investor really want to pay for that or would you be more interested in ensuring that young person has more long-term chances of finding the right job, sticking to it and being a productive and positive contributor to society? Do I really have to ask that question?

So while I welcome the launch of Big Society Capital, because it provides us with another option for financing, as well as the opportunity for those in the ‘social sector’ to show those bankers what happens in the real world (*slightly mischievous face*), I strongly believe there is still a lot of work to be done. Getting both sides of the proverbial coin to understand each other’s work for one, not to mention the ever-widening gap in revenue streams that also needs plugging. There’s a long way to go yet.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 20 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Apprenticeships – the sting in the tail

As the coalition look to ‘revive’ apprenticeships a rather worrying case has come to my attention and I’d like to share it with you for two reasons: firstly this is the nasty sting in the tail of hurried programmes – no-one has thought through the consequences of pushing these schemes out so quickly and the massively negative impact it is having on already disadvantaged families; secondly, if anyone can help, it would be much appreciated. Here goes:

Jake was at Chichester College studying A-levels in Physics, Chemistry and Biology until June 2011 having got nothing but As and A*s at GCSE in 2010. As he didn’t do as well as expected after his first year (results not received until this term) and having lost his EMA, which essentially paid for his travel to and from the college, he decided to take up an apprenticeship as advised by his college, which includes a Level 3 NVQ Diploma (2357) in Electrotechnical Technology. The course has already started and Jake has been for an induction day, but because of his excellent GCSE results in the core subjects, there was little point in signing him up until January 2012 as he does not have to complete the preliminary key skills. He is therefore attending his work placement 5 days per week at the moment. Come January, the college will sign him up as an ‘Advanced Apprentice’ and he will attend college one day per week while continuing with the practical placement.

This all sounds good so far, but there is a catch. Jake turned 18 last month; he still lives at home, not surprisingly, but comes from what could loosely be termed as a ‘disadvantaged family’. With one parent registered disabled and the other a full-time carer, the family are largely dependent on benefits. As a family of four, their income is a little over a thousand per month (so a long way off this £500 per week cap government are proposing for families on benefit); as a result of Jake taking up this apprenticeship the family are losing 25% of that income. Vince Cable I’d like to see you support your family on a little over £750 per month.

On the face of it, this seems to be a simple case of definition – is an apprenticeship ‘employment’ or ‘education’? If it is ‘employment’ then Jake should be on minimum wage and expecting the same rights as an employee. However, the minimum an employer can give an apprentice is £2.60 per hour – this is what Jake is getting along with no basic employee rights; this is also what Jake is expected to support his family on, because the powers that be consider his apprenticeship to be employment and as a result have slashed the benefits his parents receive.

Some of the losses have occurred because the family are no longer considered eligible for the ‘child elements’ for Jake, although they would have been had he stayed in traditional full-time education until the age of 20. The following have made cuts to their allowance on this basis as they consider Jake to now be earning a ‘wage’ and therefore contributing to the family income:

• Arun District Council with regards to their Council Tax
• The DWP with regards to the Carers Allowance his mother receives
• HMRC with regards to Child Benefit stopped 9 September 2011, which is the date they consider his full-time education to have stopped (though ironically, not when considering Tax Credits, see below)

The biggest loss however has come courtesy of the HMRC Tax Credits which have now been halved. Just to rub salt into that wound, the family have been told to actually pay back what they have received from the date of Jake’s last exam (6 June 2011) despite the fact that he had every intention of continuing his A levels until he received his results and went back to college in September. Isn’t this discriminatory? How can they possibly have known that he wouldn’t have got his predicted grades for A1? Worse still HMRC consider his apprenticeship to be employment, and the paltry amount he receives, a wage enough to support his family – this does not seem right at any level. Added to that, the fact that HMRC appear to consider the dates at which Jake ‘left full-time education’ at their discretion is frankly quite farcical especially when no-one owns a crystal ball.

The reason the HMRC give for no longer paying tax credits is because according to them, the government are no longer paying for Jake’s education. This is also a bit of a grey area it seems as the employer is actually getting the government incentive Cable and his cronies have been touting to take Jake on as an apprentice, so in actual fact, government are still paying for Jake’s education – interesting too that in this instance, HRMC used the word ‘education’.

Jake and his family feel penalised for his taking up this apprenticeship and quite rightly so. The college did not actually give him much choice – despite not failing A1 outright, they did not consider his grades to be good enough for A2. Had he stayed in traditional class-room education, he would have been entitled to whatever replacement EMA for ‘disadvantaged’ students government decided to introduce and keep his Saturday job without having to hand any cash over to his mother at the end of the month. Because he’s taken up an apprenticeship he essentially gets nothing because his ‘earnings’ are considered enough to compensate for the 25% loss of income his family have suffered as a result of him not continuing with his A-Levels, despite staying on and studying – ‘earnings’ which by the way are just 50p per hour more than I got in my Saturday job 25 years ago ..

Apparently the only people who have considered the actual level of Jake’s ‘earnings’ is the local council, for everyone else it seems to be a simple case of ‘he has a job therefore we cut benefits to the rest of the family’. The fact that it’s an apprenticeship and not a full-time job paid at minimum wage, appears to have been ignored by all concerned, which is just wrong.

Personally I feel that if an apprenticeship is offered as an alternative route to ‘traditional’ full-time education and given the minimum £2.60 per hour instead of the minimum wage and full employee rights, then it should still be classed as education of the vocational kind, and NOT employment.

Here is a lad who has done really well academically and is determined to carry on with training and gain his qualifications – he and his family would however be better off if he signed on at the job centre, how us that an incentive? Is this just a case of confusion over definition in one area of the country or are there others this has happened to? Please forward this and help ensure other families don’t have to suffer this kind of injustice.

#BAD11 Food for thought

I have an odd relationship with Food; I am rather fond of it but as one of those women perpetually trying to lose weight, I find it a bit of a curse too. Today I decided to write a piece for Blog Action Day, which meant I had to sit down and really think about Food and to be honest that doesn’t happen often. As a result, I am reminded that my relationship with Food is a massive privilege and my standpoint a hugely selfish one.

For example, I love a good dinner, but am put off by fancy restaurants, partly because I like to know who is cooking my Food, but mostly because I like it fresh and simple (I have never understood why people get so excited about French cuisine); my idea of heaven is a bowl of spaghetti tossed in fresh spinach and tomatoes (again fresh, not the tinned things) cooked in several cloves of garlic and topped with enough parmesan (fresh, of course) to cover the plate twice over. I am a vegetarian who has never eaten fish, partly because I could never get my head around eating something that lived in the sea in which I swam, but mostly because it smells disgusting; I haven’t eaten meat in well over a decade having only ever picked at it before, again because I couldn’t get my head around eating something that had once breathed the same air as me and frankly if it hadn’t been for sausages and living too long in Germany, meat would have been off the menu a lot earlier. I don’t really care whether you choose to eat meat in front of me or not, I’m not going to get all Morrissey about it, but I do tend to think that if you can’t kill it, you shouldn’t be eating it.

I’ve always maintained that with the exception of my aversion to eating flesh, I’m not a fussy eater. On reading the above however, I sound like a spoilt brat. And as far as Food is concerned, I am. There are plenty of people on this planet who would find my Food preferences abhorrent – not because of what I choose to eat, but for the simple fact that I am able to choose. I spent way too much time taking that privilege for granted.

I have spent a large portion of this weekend in the garden, preparing my tiny piece of green space for the autumn and coming winter months. Today it was about pulling up the last of the root vegetables and cutting back the last raspberry canes along with the shrubs that have now finally stopped flowering. Every time I’m in the garden I have a little robin that follows me about – the compost heap is a treasure trove of Food for him and while he was twittering away at me today I tried to negotiate a deal whereby he has access to all the worms in my compost heap today so long as he eats all of next year’s snails – we’ll see how that went next June. All very Disney I must say.

I live in a terrace house in East London and all the houses along my street have gardens; I get quite upset by people who don’t use theirs arguing that having a garden in London, albeit a small one, is indeed a privilege and not one that should be wasted. That being upset is more about green space though, it’s not about having space to grow Food. For certain people on this planet, having as much land as I do, fertile land at that, would feed their family all year round and some. I hadn’t really sat down and thought about that until today and I feel utterly ashamed.

I use my garden for a variety of things, from roses to beetroot, from lavender to tomatoes and all the herbs you can imagine. The thing is, if my beetroot fails, I can just pop up to the supermarket and buy some more. If Food I’ve grown goes off before I have had a chance to eat it, then it goes on the compost heap, that way I can feel all good about myself for not wasting anything. Growing vegetables for me is a bit of a hobby – the fact that it is a hobby and not a necessity makes it a huge luxury. The fact that my tomato crop this year has been a bit of a disappointment is not going to do any more than disappoint me, I can still feed myself.

Perhaps it’s time to put things into perspective; I am one of the luckiest people on this planet, I don’t have to think about Food that often, but maybe I will from now on.

It’s all in the stories

This weekend saw MIPJunior kick off the Mipcom week in Cannes and many of my former colleagues will either be trying to flog their latest cartoon creations for children or watching countless brightly coloured characters of various shapes and sizes whizz across their screens. This sounds like a dream occupation to some but believe me, when it’s hot and sunny (as it invariably is in Cannes) the last place you want to be is in the bunker looking at yet another purple dinosaur while you can only imagine the sound of the sea lapping the shore outside. So why the fuss? Well somewhere in the plethora of crash bang wallops will be a story for all to treasure, one that children everywhere will hold fond and remember for the rest of their lives and that’s what you’re looking for. But it will only be one – if that – because a really good story is as rare as a new and original style of music and for much the same reasons. Furthermore, children’s television has become as much about merchandise (and in some cases more) as it is good story-telling.

And I have to admit, this shift is one of the reasons I fell out of love with the business of animation: I am a great believer in good story-telling and all it does to feed a child’s imagination while nurturing its creativity and expanding its vocabulary and appreciation of language (do I need to go on?); but I am not a believer in pink sparkly things that do nothing but encourage worn-out stereotypes.

Now this post could go one of several ways. I could tell you a story or two of my own about my childhood relationship with books – the Puffin Club and sponsored reads, that strange time zone called Foyles where I discovered that days could disappear (a get-out clause I still use today) – just to demonstrate the concept of why it’s important to keep libraries open, especially for kids. It would not be too difficult to conjure up some blarney about the rebellious teenager who despite everything still found solace in a library full of musty old books. However, I would like to think that if you’re intelligent enough to be reading this, you’re intelligent enough to know why closing libraries is a ridiculous idea.

I could also ride the campaign to maintain a level of quality on children’s television because I do believe television should not be one long advertisement for brightly coloured plastic and can and indeed when it’s done well, is an educative tool. I would suggest if you want to know more about that, then visit my friends at Save Kids’ TV who say it much better than I ever could.

This post is neither of these things. I simply wanted to share a light bulb moment with you: while on the way home the other day, with my head buried in a novel as usual, this time The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, I came across the following:

“Human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches”.

He was talking about fables and religious texts – and I’m not going to go into that whole different ball game – but it did get me thinking that this is actually true of life overall. The most effective campaigns, whatever they’re about, are effective because they tell a story. We the audience are then able to relate it back to our own lives and are therefore more likely to buy it (in all senses of the word).

And why was this a light bulb moment? Well it was a bit like finding the tagline to a concept I always knew had legs. I’ve always known that to sell something, I had to get a tagline – a sentence that told the story in summary (‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ is probably the most famous). Whether you’re selling a film, a charity campaign, a social enterprise or even a religious cult, the concept is the same: you have to get that message right, you need a narrative and that has to speak to everyone in the same way the first line of a book has to make people want to read on. Maybe it’s just that we humans have more capacity to remember things, when we’re told a story, than we do when we’re lectured at; I guess before parchment the only way to remember things was through stories and as a result we’ve evolved to hold those for longer …

Which is where I shall end. Just remember that the stories we tell our kids are the ones they hold for a long time, so be careful what you let them read / watch. But finally, remember this: the next campaign you write, tell it like a story and if my theory is right, you’ll be remembered …

Can we all be entrepreneurs?

In a word, no. I don’t think entrepreneurialism can be learnt in the same way you can learn the periodic table; you can learn about business, finance, economics and all the text book stuff, but things get a bit trickier when it comes to taking on risk or having ideas. It’s a bit like art; you can learn to play things, make things, paint things even write things but you can’t learn creativity. To be brilliant at anything, you need to have more than the ability to master a few skills.

This presents two problems. The first one being that not everyone has the requisite talent to be a successful entrepreneur, so the current trend for social enterprise is never going to be a catch-all answer for a resource depleted voluntary sector, it’s simply one of many options. Let’s look at it from a sensible level: if entrepreneurialism were easily taught and we could all grasp it’s concept within a matter of hours, then we’d all be successful business people in whatever field we felt a passion and there’d never be any unemployment. I think that’s nothing more than a good analogy for the difference between idealism and realism.

If however you do possess a large dose of creativity, you’re never going to be bored but are likely to encounter the second problem: focus. I’m sure many of us changed our minds on a near daily basis when we were little people and were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up; I’m also sure there are just as many who decided they couldn’t decide definitively so decided trying everything was a good compromise. For some that all stops when they finally settle into something and accept that life will be a certain way until the end of days. For others it never stops, for some life will just never be long enough to cram all the things they want to do into it and half the battle is prioritising what order to do it in.

The latter are the kind of people who make good entrepreneurs and I’ve met a few recently who have made very simple ideas into successful enterprises. The common tale seems to be one of many ideas and not just the one. For example, someone told me that she started with a general ‘I want to do something for young people’; it took a long while to narrow that down to the core of what she does now. From what I’ve been told by those who’ve done it, the reason their ventures work is because time was taken to whittle down all the ideas into something simple and concise; it seems no-one ever comes up with that simple idea to begin with, it’s the result of a long and arduous journey.

Which is kind of reassuring. When NCVYS began its own journey into social enterprise we had what we thought was a fairly simple idea – to act as an incubator of ideas from the sector. How that might work though was pretty complex and it’s taken us some time to hone that down into a clearly structured product. The more we pondered, the more complex it got and to be honest, there have been many times when I thought I was just being plain stupid. To hear the experts say it takes time to find what’s right, is very comforting.

So I guess the moral is, if you’re one of those with a head rattling away, full of things to do, don’t try and do them all at once or you’ll get nothing done at all. If you’re not the crazy ideas person, you’re likely to be the voice of reason and I’d be surprised if every entrepreneur hasn’t needed one of those at some time or another!