The Joint Forum women's group were one of four women's organisations in England to take part, and the report looks at what helps and what hinders women's views being heard by local public bodies. It demonstrates the value of women's organisations and details how women continue to experience discrimination and inequality in society, the widespread problem of violence against women and girls as a gender equality issue, and that barriers to women's engagement include gender not being on the local agenda, invisibility of the women's sector, funding problems, difficulty in finding the right people to talk to etc.
It recommends women only spaces for public engagement processes, a social justice framework to address all women's needs, and public bodies addressing women's under-representation in civic and political activity in the context of equality obligations and the Duty to Involve.
As a direct outcome of the JF women group's actions in this research, the council and Liverpool Community Network (LCN) are developing a women's network in Liverpool to enable women's groups and individual women to feed into the Local Strategic Partnership.
The work of the women's group is made possible by it being a safe women only space for women to talk about gender inequality and how it impacts on women's mental health and wellbeing. The need for public bodies' commitment and support of women only services and groups is explicit throughout the report.
The WRC has identified five key features of women's groups and organisations that contribute to their "added value" or Social Return on Investment, which the Joint Forum Women's group fulfills:
- provision of women only space
- focus on empowerment and independence
- service user involvement and high level of peer support
- integrated needs based service
- reaching 'hard to reach' women
We hope the report will be useful to Liverpool LINk members and any feedback on the report should be directed to Jackie Patiniotis at jointforum@btinternet.com who would be very happy to discuss the findings with you.