TMP Online

The final report of Different Women Different Places, the study of ethnic minority women working in different leadership positions across Europe carried out by the Diversity Practice and Katalytic, has just been published.

DWDP was born out of the belief that being a black or Asian woman meant different things to different people but there was a lack of research, few role models and barely any work that did not talk solely about problems and barriers for black and Asian women, according to the study’s authors.  The study evolved from the discussions and experiences of a small network of successful women into a wide ranging online survey.

Commenting on the final report, Zohra Moosa, Senior Policy Officer of the Fawcett Society, said:
“This important report demonstrates what a contribution ethnic minority women leaders can make in the workplace when they are able to tap into all of their talents.”
“The study confirms what Fawcett’s Seeing Double project on ethnic minority women has found – that organisations are not served well by identikit workers. The ‘cultural barriers’ that ethnic minority women face are often not their own, but that of organisations that maintain outdated stereotypes of what a successful worker looks like.”
“Government and employers need to do much more to enable all ethnic minority women to excel.”

The DWDP study is the result of a partnership between the Diversity Practice, which works with organisations across the private, public and voluntary sectors to leverage the potential inherent in the diversity of their employees, and Katalytik, an organisation working for inclusion and engagement in science and technology education and employment.

In March 2002, London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone (below), and Hackney North MP, Diane Abbott (left), established the first London Schools and the Black Child Conference to highlight the continuing crisis in educational attainment for African-Caribbean heritage children in London.

This Saturday 8 December 2007 they will be holding the fifth such conference at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster. The conference will be opened by the Mayor and speakers will include Lord Andrew Adonis, Minister for Schools and Learners, Diane Abbott, government speakers and special guests from the worlds of education and the media.

London Schools and the Black Child is a key Mayoral educational initiative in London and takes as its focus concerns around the underachievement of African-Caribbean heritage children in London, and boys in particular. It is a central element in the Mayor’s ongoing dialogue with London’s African-Caribbean community, providing a unique platform for discussion of one of the most critical issues facing London’s education system and has succeeded in placing the issue at the heart of the government’s education agenda.

In the five years since the first conference, the tide has begun to turn for African-Caribbean heritage children in London’s schools, with indications that the achievement gap is narrowing and that black children are making progress. More black teachers are being recruited, helping London’s teaching workforce to look more like the communities they are there to serve, while more resources than ever before are being allocated to raising African-Caribbean achievement in our schools.

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The Government’s strategy against poverty and social exclusion, pursued since the late 1990s, has lost momentum and is in urgent need of a major rethink. This is the conclusion of the authors of the tenth annual Monitoring poverty and social exclusion report from the New Policy Institute, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation since 1998.

Covering 50 indicators of poverty and social exclusion, the report records a worsening in the last year in nine of them, mainly in the key areas of income and work. These have been offset by improvements in seven, chiefly to do with primary education, premature death and homelessness.

The most serious setback is the increase of 200,000 children living in poverty in 2005/06 (3.8 million children) compared to the year before. As a result, there has been no sustained progress on child poverty in three years.

The number of children living in poverty has fallen by 600,000 since the Government made its pledge to end child poverty in 1999. But this still leaves the Government 500,000 short of the target it should have reached in 2004/05.

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