The opinions expressed here represent the views of each woman.
FiLiA does not necessarily endorse or support every woman's opinion, but we uphold women's rights to freedom of belief, thought and expression.
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Who decides whether the streetlights on your walk home stay on? Whether the refuge in your town keeps its funding and provides single-sex care? Whether there’s a safe, well-lit bus stop near the community centre, or if there’s enough childcare for parents who work shifts?
Your council does. And very often, that council is short of women.
Union members have been writing to the unions to ask if they supported the recent TUC Motion 17 on the EHRC Code and Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act. FiLiA Trade Union Women’s Network suggested five key questions women should ask their unions about this and their position on women's sex-based rights. We have now received responses sent by four unions: Unison, Unite, NEU and NASUWT which we publish here. We are also sharing some replies sent back to these unions by women who are unhappy with the answers they received.
Union members have been writing to their general secretaries to ask them about their union’s position on the recent TUC Motion 17. Unions are starting to respond to these letters and we will be sharing their responses soon. However, women have told us they want to discuss the implications of this motion, and what it means for women’s rights, with other members of their unions and in their branches, so the FiLiA Trade Union Women’s Network have produced this model motion for women to take to their branch meetings.
Delegates at the Trades Union Congress this week voted to support a motion committing the organisation (and by implication its affiliate unions) to campaign against the EHRC code, which provides guidance on the Equality Act for services, organisations and associations. The motion proposes a serious and substantial change to the legal rights of women and girls and yet no mention is made of this in the motion. The FiLiA Trade Union Women’s Network has produced a short model letter for union members to send to General Secretaries, which asks five key questions. If you are a member of a union, please consider sending this letter to your General Secretary. Just copy and paste the text and send it to your General Secretary either by email or post.
The blog queries the Prime Minister’s approach to VAWG, saying we know only what he did as Mayor of Greater Manchester; he has been quiet on the subject since becoming leader. There are some promising indications from his time as Mayor but unless he gets two core issues right soon, there is little chance to make serious progress towards elimination: a realistic appreciation of how widespread is sexual violence in particular and proper follow through between domestic and international policy. The PM urgently needs to set out his thinking and his vision.
This year’s TUC Congress takes place in Brighton between 13-16th September. On the agenda is a motion submitted by the TUC LGBT+ Conference, opposing the EHRC Code of Practice. The motion raises important issues for the majority female membership of trade unions, and for lesbian and gay trade union members. In this blog we present the motion, along with some questions that TUC delegates may wish to raise at their delegation meetings or in their local branches and regional/national assemblies.
Joint Statement from Project Resist and FiLiA on the Home Office Guidance for Asylum Seekers: it’s time for this Government to target widespread misogyny, tackle the crisis of violence against women and girls and stop scapegoating migrants. The purported aim of this questionable publication is to inform asylum seekers about UK law and so-called societal norms on gender equality and public respect. However, it serves to fuel the far right’s anti-immigration agenda, which has led to widespread violence and pogroms against migrants in recent years.
We welcome Amnesty International UK's apology and its acknowledgement that FiLiA, and other women's organisations, should never have been labelled ‘anti-rights’ in their A Growing Threat: the Anti-rights Movement in the UK report. We also welcome the announcement of an independent external review. However, if the review only asks how this document was published, it will miss the point. It needs to ask why.
FiLiA’s Making Policy Work for Women campaign calls on policy makers to make policy feminist – to incorporate the differential impacts on women in the design and development of all policies and to use robust sex-disaggregated data and evidence and meaningfully engage with and involve women in policy making to identify those impacts. This article shows, using real case studies, why this is essential to make government policy more effective, efficient and equitable and to avoid the risks of legal challenges, costly redesigns and reputational damage.
FiLiA has written to Amnesty International UK, following the inclusion of FiLiA in their (now withdrawn) report A Growing Threat - the Anti-Rights Movement in the UK. Alongside many other organisations targeted in this report, we have asked for the evidence and decision-making process which led to their conclusions. Where they will find no evidence, we expect an explanation, apology and formal retraction of the statement. We have also asked for a meeting and a public commitment to cease referring to Women's rights organisations and campaigners as ‘anti-rights’.
It is over a year since we celebrated an historic victory for women in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. This blog reviews the most recent misguided attempts by Britain’s trade unions to undermine the Equality Act 2010 and argues why working-class women must ‘take back control’ of their own trade union movement.
On 21st May, Bridget Phillipson finally laid the EHRC Code of Practice before Parliament, after a delay of more than eight months. Since then, several unions, along with the Trades Union Congress and Scottish Trades Union Congress, have doubled down on their opposition to the Supreme Court ruling and issued statements to that effect.
The exposure of widespread drugging and rape within intimate relationships has shattered a comforting myth: that sexual violence is primarily committed by strangers, predators lurking outside the home or a small number of ‘monsters’ unlike the rest of society. Cases such as Gisèle Pelicot forced public attention on to a far more disturbing reality: that ordinary, socially-integrated men can – and do – commit extreme violence against women, often with the support, encouragement or silent complicity of other men.
Asbestos is killing more women every year. But evidence shows that many still aren’t aware of the disease and how it can be acquired at work. This blog is based on a speech given by Susan Aitouaziz for the FiLiA Trade Union Women’s Network Health & Safety is a Women’s Issue webinar. Held on 26th March 2026, in preparation for International Workers’ Memorial Day on 26th April 2026.
If you want to understand what real change looks like in practice, this account from Paris is a powerful place to start. It brings together survivor voices, political leadership and frontline activism to show how the Equality Model can shift both law and culture, holding men accountable while supporting women to exit prostitution. More than a reflection, it is an urgent reminder that abolition is not just possible but already happening, and that the UK has much to learn from it.
The labour movement sees itself as the champion of women’s rights but continues to be complicit in our oppression. Women’s participation is constrained and subject to conditions that other oppressed groups do not face. By tackling the sex and misogyny in its midst, it would not only demonstrate its commitment to women's rights but build its own strength. The labour movement needs women: without us it will fail. This is the text of a speech made by Kiri Tunks for FiLiA Trade Union Women’s Network, as part of a women-only panel, at the Morning Star Conference '1926 to 2026 – Organised Labour 100 Years from the General Strike'.
On 17th March, Hannah Shead, FiLiA Women First project Lead, was invited to talk on behalf of FiLiA Women First at the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, chaired by Tonia Antoniazzi MP, with secretariat support provided by UK Feminista. This blog is about this meeting, where Hannah spoke about how prostitution is male violence.
Written by Hannah Shead, FiLiA Women First Project Lead, this blog reflects on the Unbuyable debate that took place in Scottish Parliament and is a summary of the key issues and outcome. We call on local authorities to work with us to use our Women First audit tool. We call on policy makers to listen to the voices of survivors of the sex trade, not just those with the loudest platforms.
When women age we become increasingly invisible in our culture, and this applies even more so to lesbians. This was a short speech given as part of the lesbian stream of workshops and events at FiLiA 2025. It speaks about our identities as older lesbians, some of the issues we are confronted by and the importance of lesbian community and of consciousness-raising groups as a way of exploring the issues of old age and the sisterhood we need to support one another through the difficulties and the joys.
FiLiA has a lengthy history in highlighting the harms of surrogacy and egg donation on women and children, and also in supporting action and activism to address this violation of women's human rights. The FiLiA Women's Assembly, a growing network of women across the UK, recently arranged a focus group in order to respond to a new consultation on surrogacy. A consultation which signalled that the threat of surrogacy law reform, with a potential relaxation in the laws which govern this exploitative practice, persists. There is, however, a powerful, grassroots movement of women in FiLiA Women's Assembly mobilising resistance.
The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the 16 Days of Activism are not symbolic hashtags or polite reminders. They are part of a long feminist tradition of refusing silence, refusing minimisation and refusing the global indifference that too often greets male violence against women and girls (MVAWG). These moments matter because they amplify the truth that patriarchy works overtime to obscure: that MVAWG is not natural, inevitable or random, it is political.
The FiLiA Campaigns and Policy team are pleased to have formally launched the FiLiA Women's Assembly (FWA) and our new report, Making Policy Work for Women, with an event in Parliament on Wednesday 19th November 2025. We are very grateful to Tonia Antoniazzi MP for being our Parliamentary sponsor for this event. She, Fran, a member of the FiLiA Women’s Assembly, and Kruti, FiLiA’s Director of Policy, all gave short speeches at the event and we are proud to share them here.
Rahila Gupta and Beatrix Campbell, two feminist titans whose activism and writing spans a century between them, have written an urgent dispatch from the frontlines of a war, one seemingly without end. The US radical feminist, Kate Millett, once wrote: ‘Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.’ (Sexual Politics, 1970). As much as feminists have disputed the naturalisation of that oppression, we have to contend with its persistence.
