ESRC Funded Seminar Series
Public Policy, Equality and Diversity in the
Context of Devolution
Seminar 3: Mainstreaming equality and diversity in
particular settings and contexts
WELCOME & INTRODUCTION
The challenges of multi-culturalism
in the UK
Peter Tatchell
Cultural tensions in the education of
Gypsies/Travellers
Gwynedd Lloyd
University of Edinburgh
Education and Gypsies/ Travellers- an
ambivalent, often hostile relationship
• Gypsies/Travellers in the UK
• Research
• Policy developments and tensions
• A complex ethical and social issue: should we
encourage participation in schooling for G/Ts?
Gypsies and Travellers
• Gypsies/Travellers
• Occupational Travellers
• New (age) Travellers
Gypsies/Travellers
• English Gypsies
• Scottish Gypsy Travellers
• Irish Travellers
• European Roma:
established communities eg Hungarian
Coppersmiths,
recent refugees from Eastern Europe
• Others
Scottish Gypsy Travellers
• Diversity of experience, opinion
• Need to acknowledge cultural difference
without stereotyping
• Issue of ethnicity
The last respectable form of racism
• Accommodation
• Health
• Widespread racist abuse and violence
Key research
• Lloyd and Stead (2000, 2001)
• Padfield and Jordan
• Padfield(2004)
• Derrington and Kendall (2003)
• Bhopal (2004)
Experience of schooling
• Many Gypsy/Traveller children attend school
and have positive experiences. Some also
participate in higher education.
• However official statistics and research still
identify major issues of: attendance, attainment,
exclusion and racist bullying.
• Institutional racism
Educational issues
• Patterns of attendance, absence
• Lack of continuity of work, interrupted learning
• Inconsistent/often inadequate support
• Problems with multiple registration
• Failure to pass on records
• Children identified inappropriately with SEN
• Resources, materials inappropriate to
Gypsy/Traveller culture
• Racist bullying, name-calling, scapegoating
• Gypsy/Traveller youth having to deny their own
cultural identity
• A curriculum that lacks relevance
• Fears of many parents about aspects of
secondary school curricula, eg sex, drug
education
• Lack of understanding by school staff of the
educational and other challenges presented by a
mobile lifestyle in the 21st century
• Fear of ‘loss’ of children
Policy/practice developments
• RRAA 2000
• DfES - guidelines; data collection
• SEED -guidance: data collection
• HMIES- self evaluation guide
Does schooling inevitably
destroy minority culture
Is education necessary to
survive?
Organisation Carescapes:
Policies, Practices and Equality in
Business
Linda McKie
Glasgow Caledonian University and Centre for
Research on Families & Relationships
Introduction
• Aim of seminar series
– How policies work in practice & ‘trade-offs’ for
different groups
• Women in food retail
– Flexible, local, low paid
• Plethora of legislation, policies & guidelines
• ‘New’ policies – ‘Old’ issues
Organisation Carescapes
• Critical examination of
– Formal policies; implementation & practices; care in /
out of companies; cultures of care
• Care
– Multi-faceted term
• Culture
– Beliefs, symbolic & practical representation through
range of activities
Organisation Carescapes (2)
• Caringscapes
– posits that people plot routes through a changing,
multi-dimensional terrain that comprises experience &
anticipation of care
• Organisation carescapes
– not static: thus planned ‘routes’ (policies and
practices) must sometimes be changed or amended
in response to shifts in public policies, the actions of
employers or, in the case of family life, personal
events such as the arrival of a first or subsequent
child.
Work-life Balance in the Scottish Food
Retail Sector
• European Social Fund
– 21 interviews & 246 questionnaire
• Part-time, 16-60+, range of caring
responsibilities
• Location, availability, flexibility
• Dynamic nature of responsibilities
Work-life Balance in the Scottish Food
Retail Sector (2)
• Sudden / unexpected demands
• Ad hoc, one to one basis, ‘not take advantage’ of
good will
• Supervisors; pivotal role in maintaining staff
levels during opening hours
• Limited knowledge of & recourse to policies
Conclusions
• Women making a trade off between poorly paid,
low skill jobs & care
– ‘Care-employment’ ceiling
• Organisation carescape
– ‘Map’ is one of immediate & short term issues take
precedence
• New policies – little impact
• Old gendered issues – still with us
Negotiating Equity in HEIs: A
Case-Study Analysis of Policies
and Staff Experiences
Louise Morley
University of Sussex
Aims
 to explore staff experiences of equity issues and
institutional equity policies.
 to conduct a critical discourse analysis of equity policies
in the six institutions
 to gather the views of senior manager-academics and
administrators on their institutional equality policies, and
how these relate to national policies.
 to identify challenges, inadequacies, examples of good
practice, and constraints/incentives in relation to equity
policies at institutional and sector level.
Research Methods
 Individual (n=60) and focus group (n=25) interviews with staff
including manual, clerical, technical, secretarial and
administrative support staff, senior manager-academics and
administrators, in six contrasting institutions in the UK.
 Participants from different occupational backgrounds and
socio-cultural groups paying attention also to gender, sexual
orientation, ‘race’/ethnicity, disability, age and religion.
 Critical incident logs.
 Critical discourse analysis of equality policies (taken from the
websites of the six institutions).
Policy Context
• European Commission framework for equal treatment in
the Employment Directive of 2000.
• Mainstreaming
• Anti-discriminatory legislation in the UK e.g. RRAA 2000;
DDA, 2005.
• Project found little evidence of widespread knowledge of
the remit of current legislation and directives.
Slowness of Change
• In their study of the representation of 'ethnic minority'
groups in 53 university prospectuses in the academy,
Jewson et al. (1991) concluded that four fifths of
universities did not offer any sort of equal opportunities
statement, either explicit or implicit, in their prospectus
(Jewson, Mason et al. 1991).
• UK universities are now required by their funding bodies
to have policies on a wide range of inequalities for both
students and staff and students and the latter must also
be incorporated in wider human resource and reward
strategies.
Policy as Purposive Communication/
Performative Speech Act
• The equal opportunities policy statement constitutes the
institution’s intervention to (re)shape, regulate and
codify:
•
cultural norms
• modes of conduct
• the distribution of opportunities within the institution.
Findings from Discourse Analysis
Policy statements inhabited organisational, legal, moral and economic
discourses.
•
•
The legislative, the memorandum and the promotional genres.
•
Differential economy of attention and emphasis.
•
Disability equality often incorporated into the promotional student section.
• All
statements of the six case-study institutions are orientated towards the
future.
•
Legal underpinnings rarely invoked.
• Absence
of the lexicon of rights and entitlements
•
Concepts included inclusivity, diversity, social justice, anti-discrimination.
•
Online visibility and scope of the policies varied considerably.
•
No standard conception of what needs to be publicised.
Interview Findings
Multiple Readings
• Gulf between the views of staff in the six institutions and the
perceptions of their senior managers.
• Senior managers often focused on quantitative change i.e.
composition of the workforce.
• Staff discussed qualitative change i.e. organisational culture.
• Equity understood as redistributional and recognitional.
• Some focus on implementation strategies i.e. ‘what works’
and ‘best practice’.
• Others focus on recognitional paradigm and celebration of
differences.
Shared Visions?
• What is to be equalised when we call for
equality? (Sen, 1992)
• Who benefits from equality policies?
• Is there a collective dimension or shared
understandings of equity and diversity?
Barriers to Equality
• Myth of Meritocracy.
• Meritocracy seen as integrative and equalising.
• Universities, as liberal institutions, were
intrinsically concerned with justice and fairness.
Micropolitics
• Evidence from staff that discrimination was often subtle,
quixotic and not always reported or detected by others.
• Power relayed via everyday practices was notoriously difficult
to challenge.
• Little mention of explicit offensive behaviour and comments,
or other behaviour directly targeted at personal attributes.
• Perceived discrimination due to ethnicity, gender disability,
sexual orientation or age were likely to be perceived as
embedded in managerial/professional decisions about
recruitment, promotion, workloads and exclusions.
Power Relations
• Bullying, harassment and unfair treatment
mainly reported by support staff.
• Fears of loss of promotion prospects,
stigmatisation, uncomfortable social relations,
backlash, victimisation and protection of the
powerful.
• Power relations that offer the preconditions for
discrimination construct climate for grievances.
Formal Complaints: Danger and Loss
The problem is that all staff do not feel that they can
lodge grievance without basically threatening their own
livelihood. (Support staff trade union representative)
...we’ve got grievance procedures, harassment, all these
things come out, they all sound good, but you try and
take a grievance or … I’m ready to speak against a head
of department - it just doesn’t work, the rules are not the
same. It’s okay going down the way. If you try going up
the way to take on your head of department, you’ll find
the University will guard them. (Manual staff trade union
representative)
Policy as Codification of Values
• All 6 institutions have complaint and grievance
procedural mechanisms accessible online.
• Detailed definitions of what constitutes or might
constitute a grievance as ground for lodging a
complaint.
• The codified rules and policies on complaints
and grievances are thought by some to
constitute a deterrent to staff disposed to
engage in harassing, bullying or discriminatory
practices.
Policy as New Managerialist Noise
• Informants reported how equality was becoming:
• depoliticised/ neutralised
• enforced by people with no value commitment or activist
experience
• associated not with radical social movements, but with
neo-liberal modes of control and governance.
Performing Equality
•
I can give you an example of somebody that was given a post of equal
opportunities officer for a School who was the biggest bully in the school.
She could have people in tears. And yet she was an equal opportunities
officer. And that’s the kind of thing … you know there’s no monitoring of
who it is that’s taking on these roles (Member of support staff).
•
They have an occupational health advisor who has brought two people with
disabilities to tears in the last six months. She doesn’t understand disability
basically (Academic)
•
Now on sex equality last year there was a round of promotions to principal
lecturer and, it was noted that I think the proportion of women who applied,
as compared to the proportion of women employed, and the proportion of
women I think, was one out of six appointees. And the personnel office
simply in their report noted the numbers. But we tried to push them to think
about what might they do about it but they were quite content to just note
the disparity between the number of women employed in the academic role
and the outcome of this round (Academic trade union representative).
Quality and Equality
• Quality discourses and practices often overlook equality.
• Some convergence around student services/ customer
care.
• Student opinion is used as a performance indicator.
• Student evaluations are now in the public domain.
• RAE concerns over-ride equal opportunities.
• Tension: how to monitor equality without subsuming it
into the audit culture.
Students, not staff
• Perception from staff that policies had only been
applied to students.
• The audit culture seen as main policy driver.
• Equity and Diversity constructed as marketing
devices.
• Depoliticisation of the staff equality agenda in
higher education.
Equality as Defensive Delivery
They’re organising all these equality policies to cover
their backs because they’ve got people’s kids here as
students and they need to have all these policies in
place. They don’t give a toss about the staff. The
policies are nothing to do with us, they don’t think
that we need to be equal, they’re doing equalities for
the students (Technician).
Equality as Risk Reduction
• Complex interplay between:
• social inclusion
• risk reduction
• notion of HEIs having a contract with students.
Disability
• SENDA perceived as by informants as that students with
disabilities may receive more help and support than staff
with a declared disability.
• The University welcomes applications from students with
disabilities and dyslexia and has been actively working to
improve access and support since 1990. If you have a
disability, a special need or dyslexia this Statement is
intended to help you decide if we offer the support you need
to study here successfully (Extract from a HEI equality
policy)
Policy Paradoxes
• Policies set up to challenge one group's disadvantages
can sometimes paradoxically reinforce discrimination
against another group.
• Different structures of inequality are rarely intersected.
• Contradictory forms of recognition politics.
• The legal framework does not provide for cases where
conflicting validity claims require that the law come
down, at least in theory, on one or the other side of the
fence.
Family- friendly policies reinforcing
heteronormativity.
A lesbian professor notes:
Instead of talking about family friendly policies you
talk about creating a working environment that
respects all of people's care commitments, whether
their care commitments are for children, for husbands,
wives or same sex sexual partners or friends, or
elderly relatives or, you know, dogs or cats or
whatever but that respect for diverse experiences, and
I think that can be promoted and that needs to be done
by universities, but actually the problem is much wider
than universities.
Irreconcilable Politics?
(As) a committed evangelical Christian …(I) have views about the
appropriateness of certain forms of sexual behaviour, within exactly the
same department as me, we were based in the same room, a very large
room, so lots of people within the office, (she) was an openly practising
lesbian … When the member of staff in question came back from
paternity leave … she was terribly excited and she wanted to do exactly
what any (other) colleague in a heterosexual relationship would want to
do, go and talk about it. She did so within the context of our open office
and her conversation made me feel excruciatingly uncomfortable
because I didn’t know how to respond, however if I had in any way
represented my concerns and my difficulty she would have then felt
excruciatingly uncomfortable because she would have felt that this was
something she wanted to share with her colleagues and she couldn’t
(Member of support staff).
Equality as Cultural Diversity
• I became a Reader in 2003 and so I'm very young to
be at that senior position. I'm a woman, I'm a black
woman, so I'm an acceptable and a very impressive
kind of public face for the university. So I'm
frequently approached by the vice chancellor
explicitly to represent the university for media
purposes...I think I'm not so naive to not be aware of,
for television, how symbolically forceful it would be
to have my face kind of representing. (Academic)
Summary
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Equality for staff as compared with students is not a priority for higher
education’s management.
Trade unions cited poor policy implementation and policy symbolism.
Policies and strategies are more focused on recognitional and cultural
approaches to inequality than redistributional and material approaches.
Equality was frequently interpreted as having a more culturally diverse staff.
Concept of mainstreaming equal opportunities is not well understood in UK
HEIs.
Micropolitical activity undermines macro and meso-level policy
interventions.
Gender and ethnicity were most frequently mentioned in relation to staff.
Disability usually only applied to students.
Discrimination on the grounds of age, sexual orientation and religion were
only mentioned by people who had experienced it.
Limited awareness of equality research and legislation.
Danger of equality being subsumed into managerialst cultures.
TRANSCENDENCE OVER
DIVERSITY: BLACK AND
MINORITY ETHNIC WOMEN IN THE
ACADEMY
Professor Heidi Safia Mirza
Middlesex University
Indian Suffragettes -1911 Women’s
Coronation Procession
Cornelia Sorabji first woman ever to study
law in a British University- Somerville
College Oxford 1889
Ethnic Minority women in HE
Staff
Students
• 2.5 ethnic minority/ 1.6%
female
• mainly new universities
• part time fixed term contract
• low grade /less senior posts
• younger
• more harassment and
discrimination
( HESA Moodood shiner 1999)
• 15 % ethnic minority/ 8 %
female
• mainly new universities
• mainly part-time
• highest participation rates of
any group
• older (mature 24+)
• health, education and social
sciences
(National audit office 2002)
Diversity in Higher Education
“Diversity is widely agreed to be a desirable
feature in Higher Education”
“It is vital for the continuing health of the higher
education sector that it should recruit from a wide
and diverse human resource pool . This is not
only on the grounds of equity, but equally sound
for business reasons” ( HEFCE 2002/ Equality
Challenge UUK 2003 )
“Outsider within”
“ young black women set off into the white
world carrying expectations of mythic
proportions...their odysseys, they believe
will transform their lives ...but separated
from their cultural communities these
young women's passages turn out to be
isolated individual journeys ..’into the heart
of whiteness’ ’’ ( Casey 1993:132 )
Politics of containment
“Whereas racial segregation was designed to keep
blacks as a group or class outside centres of
power, surveillance now aims to control black
individuals inside centres of power when they
enter the white spaces of the public and private
spheres “. ( Hill Collins:20 1998)”
Relocating the self
“Marginality is a central location for the
production of a counter hegemonic discourse
- it is found in the words, habits and the way
one lives…..It is a site one clings to even
when moving to the centre...it nourishes our
capacity to resist... It is an inclusive space
where we recover ourselves, where we move
in solidarity to erase the category
coloniser/colonised.” (hooks 1990:150)
The other story
• Black female educational urgency
• Black female educators as transformative
agents for social change
• A new ( radical educational) social
movement?
“In a racist society …to become educated is
to contradict the whole system of racist
signification …to succeed in studying white
knowledge is to undo the the system itself ...to
refute its reproduction of black inferiority
materially and symbolically”
Katheleen Casey I Answer With My Life
( 1993 Routledge )
Some Lessons on Equality from the
Americans with Disabilities Act
Robert L. Burgdorf Jr,
University of the District of Columbia, David A. Clarke
School of Law
1. A primary function of a disability equality
law is to serve as a statement of societal
moral imperative proclaiming that
discriminating against people because of
physical or mental disabilities is wrong and
that good people should refrain from doing it.
2. There is considerable value in the legal
enforceability of a disability equality law.
3. Disability equality laws address the plight of
a seriously disadvantaged, isolated segment of
society.
4. Disability equality yields an economic benefit
to society; enabling some citizens to escape
circumstances of inactivity and dependency
allows them to participate more actively in the
job and consumer marketplaces.
5. Eligibility for disability equality protection
should not be defined narrowly.
6. Individuals or groups whose conditions are
unpopular or not understood should not be
excluded from eligibility for disability equality
protection.
7. A key aspect of disability equality is
accessibility of buildings and facilities.
8. Accessible transportation is another principal
component of disability equality.
9. Communication access is a critical element of
disability equality.
10. Disability equality cannot be achieved in the
absence of effective social programs to provide
necessary services, such as health care,
personal care assistance, rehabilitation, and
housing alternatives.
11. To eliminate pervasive discrimination on the
basis of disability, a disability equality law needs
to cover as many spheres of society as possible.
12. A "reasonable accommodation" requirement
is a central element of a disability equality
mandate and should not be considered a
"special benefit."
13. In addition to absolute, yes-or-no prohibitions
of discrimination, disability equality laws can
impose intermediate, relative degrees of
obligations.
14. A disability equality measure needs to
address the significant problems that are posed
by pre-employment disability inquiries and
medical exams.
15. A disability equality law such as the ADA can
have a substantial positive impact.
16. A disability equality law is not a cure-all.
Close
Sheila Riddell
University of Edinburgh