13 Jane Anger on the need for vigilance in today's 'tick-based' culture

Transcript:

In these days where the prevalent discourse is that we’ve achieved it all, when evidently from the stats we know we haven’t – the research is there – there’s still a need for it and the importance of, I think, of this kind of project is that we need to remind people what the issues are, and actually they need to be challenged.  You can’t just sit back, you know, and accept that we have such pay inequality.  And, you know, what’s happened in this recession is just disgraceful the way women have been put out of work and the way women have lost wages and careers.  Yet despite the legislation that’s been passed on impact assessment and how you assess impact on women in different groups, it’s just not done.  And I think there is not the forum, there is not the sense of campaigning that there was.  Partly because it’s more difficult because a lot of this stuff has been co-opted.  Quite rightly, we wanted it mainstreamed, but I think what we didn’t expect was that that mainstreaming would be tick-box: that they have some training sessions,  that they do certain things,  that they have an appraisal system – it doesn’t mean that’s it’s a good system, it means they have it – that kind of thing.

It’s very difficult to find a focus nowadays for protesting and to articulate exactly what you mean, because so much of it has become, ‘Well, we are an equal opportunity employer’, they’ll say. And they’re clearly not, they’re clearly not.