Policy with Women in Mind
FiLiA’s Making Policy Work for Women campaign is calling for the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) to be properly implemented and strengthened, particularly in England (where the duties are less robust than in Scotland and Wales), through mandatory Equality Impact Assessments (EqIAs), meaningful consultation with women and women’s organisations, and the collection and use of sex-disaggregated data.
The PSED already places a legal requirement on public bodies to have due regard to the impact of their decisions on women, but in practice this duty is inconsistently applied and rarely enforced. EqIAs are often skipped altogether, carried out too late to change anything, or treated as a tick-box exercise rather than a genuine tool of good policy making. Women’s organisations, who hold much of the evidence and expertise on how policy plays out for women, are frequently left out of consultation entirely. Women, in general, aren’t considered as a distinct and separate group (or groups) who may be impacted by policies in different ways to men. The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) response described below, dismissing any link between planning policy and women’s safety, is a telling example of this mindset in action.
As we set out below, this has to change. Women need to be understood and treated as universal stakeholders across all government policy areas. Stakeholder engagement with women at the design stage of policy development is a way to make government policy more effective, efficient and equitable.
Women’s policy is often dismissed as a discrete, specialist area. Responding to a recent call to embed women’s safety into the National Planning Policy Framework (NPFF), a spokesperson at the MHCLG is reported to have said:
‘The NPPF is a planning document. It sets out guidelines for housebuilding and planning in England. The VAWG strategy is about protecting women and girls from violence and misogyny [… It is] unclear as to why anyone would expect the two things to be combined.’
This response exemplifies the attitude that women are only stakeholders in limited areas. Yet women and girls have different needs from planning policy to men and boys, even beyond the well-established sex gap in safety in cities. Housing issues also have a stronger impact on women’s mental health than men’s mental health. Cities designed with women in mind look and feel different – with wider pavements, to be more walkable, with more play areas, better safety and lighting – to those designed from a ‘neutral’ or default male perspective.
This approach from the MHCLG is particularly disappointing at a time when the UK is planning to build a generation of new towns. These places will need to be designed to meet women’s needs as well as men’s to become well-functioning, safe and attractive places to live. To achieve this, women need to be seen as stakeholders and consulted at all stages of the policy process.
We say that:
1. Policy designed with women in mind is more effective
All policy, including in ‘technical’ areas such as economics, housing or energy, impacts both men and women. Often these impacts are different and women’s needs can’t be ignored. Not considering or involving women in the policy making process opens the risk of making ineffective policies that do not meet the needs of the whole population.
Case study: Transport
UK transport systems have historically been designed to favour car travel and to support commuter journeys. Classic commuter journeys travel into the centre of a city in the morning and back out to the suburbs at the end of the working day. Women’s travel, however, does not follow this pattern.
Women take a greater number of smaller journeys than men, known as trip-chaining. Having small children increases the number of journeys women take by 23%, and women provide nearly two and half times as much unpaid childcare than men. Women are also more likely to use public transport than men, taking 20% more bus journeys in the UK in 2024. Safety concerns are also more important for women, particularly when walking after dark.
Making transport policy without attending to the different needs of men and women leads to sexist policies that do not meet the original policy aims. Oslo’s bike-sharing scheme, for instance, had higher take-up among men than women. Analysis of the data and usage showed that there were more stations and bike lanes in the centre of the city where more men worked, and fewer in the north of the city where women worked. In Karskroga, Sweden, shifting the priority for clearing snow from commuter roads to pedestrian paths halved pedestrian injuries in the winter, saving healthcare costs. Most of those injured had been women, who used the uncleared snowy paths more than the roads.
2. Policy made with women in mind is more efficient
Ineffective policy carries risks – of legal challenges, costly redesigns, and ongoing criticism as problems emerge after implementation. Including women as universal stakeholders in policy design is a way to mitigate some of these risks, futureproofing policy against easily avoided inefficiencies.
Case study: Universal Credit
Universal Credit aimed to rationalise multiple welfare benefits into a single system, paid via a single payment per household. If men and women had equal economic standing in families and society, this might make sense as a way to make the benefit system easier to navigate.
Women and men, however, are not equal economically. Women head around 85% of lone parent households, and overall are poorer, more likely to be in low paid, part time work, or to be financially dependent on a partner than men. Women are the ‘shock absorbers’ of poverty, most likely to go without food or other basics when a family struggles financially. Women are also at greater risk of financial abuse; one in five women in the UK have experienced financial abuse, and one in four women continue to experience financial abuse after leaving an abusive partner.
The single payment in Universal Credit (UC) exacerbated many of these economic inequalities for women, reducing financial autonomy, increasing vulnerability to financial abuse and making it harder to leave an abusive partner. This has led to multiple legal challenges, parliamentary investigations and campaigns, leading in 2019 to the then pensions secretary Amber Rudd announcing changes to the system. This included encouraging claimants to pay their UC into the account of the household’s main carer.
The issues that Universal Credit caused for women were predictable, based on well-established and long-known economic realities. The Women’s Budget Group submitted evidence outlining these issues at the time. The problems in the system that have had to be corrected, and continue to be challenged, could have been avoided by taking women seriously as stakeholders when designing the policy in the first place.
3. Policy made with women in mind is more equitable
The PSED requires public authorities to have ‘due regard’ to equality when making decisions and exercising their functions. Sex is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. Paying attention to how policies will impact women is a legal duty, as well as good policy practice.
Case study: ‘Bedroom Tax’
The housing element of Universal Credit is reduced for people who have one or more spare bedrooms, known colloquially as the bedroom tax. This policy, introduced in 2013, was successfully challenged as discriminatory on the basis of both disability and sex. These cases claimed that the extra rooms were not ‘spare’ but needed. In the case of disability, to provide medical care for a severely disabled family member. In the sex discrimination case, the room was being used as a secure panic room installed as part of a ‘sanctuary scheme’ for survivors of domestic violence.
Case study: Pension auto-enrolment
In 2014, the UK Government introduced pension auto-enrolment for those earning over £10,000 per year. This policy aimed to improve the rate of saving for retirement and provide better financial security. The level at which auto-enrolment has been set has been challenged as indirectly discriminating against women. This is because women are more likely to be the lower earners in a household and take more gaps in employment due to caring responsibilities. This policy could therefore exacerbate, not improve, the pension sex gap.
These are just some of the examples that illustrate the ways that consulting women early in the policy process can help to make policy design more effective, efficient and equitable. Policy made with women in mind can make better policy, for everyone.
To find out more about our Making Policy Work for Women campaign, please visit our campaigns page: filia.org.uk/campaigns-and-policy.
FiLiA Campaigns and Policy Team
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