Long post, not sorry.
Over the past few months, loads of women have been working incredibly hard making FOI requests to public sector organisations that are Stonewall Diversity Champions.
A few times in the responses I have seen the suggestion, either by Stonewall or by the participating org, that more effort should be made to introduce gender neutral language to policies, documents and communications, including removing terms such as 'woman' and 'mother'.
No, I didn't save links to these particular responses, there's just so much data it's overwhelming and nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. I believe Sex Matters are planning a database or something to crunch it all into something meaningful. When this additional hard work has been done, by more women, it may be possible to give a straightforward answer to 'how widespread is this?', whether we're talking about erasure of female terminology or any other aspect of what stonewall has done.
This will take a while. It's a lot of work, women are fitting it in around already busy lives and none of them are being paid. I believe Sex Matters are looking for volunteers to help with this if you're interested.
In the meantime, here's what I've done for you, Pumper, to help you get started on your own research:
--------
Here's Stonewall's top 100 in their Workplace Equality Index:
www.stonewall.org.uk/full-list-top-100-employers-2020
We can safely assume that all these organisations are also signed up members of the Diversity Champions racket. If you doubt this you are free to cross-check them all, I'm not doing that work for you. The full list is here:
sex-matters.org/stonewall-champions-list/
We can also safely assume that the higher up an organisation comes in this list, the more they have done to meet stonewall's requirements. That's just common sense, isn't it? If you doubt this, you will have a wonderful opportunity to gather evidence against this assumption in the course of your research.
So if we just look at the organisation at #100 and see what they're doing, we can assume that #'s 1-99 are doing even more, yes? See above for what to do if you have doubts about this.
The organisation at #100 is Public Health Wales, who unfortunately are playing silly fuckers with their FOI request:
www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/information_about_your_dealings_330#incoming-1771014
So I've been on their website and spent rather a lot of time trawling around, seeing what they're up to. This is what their public page on cervical screening says:
Who should have cervical screening?
If you are aged 25 to 64 and you have a cervix, you can have cervical screening. We will invite you for cervical screening if you are aged 25-64 and you are registered as female or unspecified with a GP surgery.
If you have a cervix but are registered as male, we will not be able to invite you for screening due to the current limitations of our database. You will need to arrange to have cervical screening with your GP or clinic
If we are told that you should not have screening, because you do not have a cervix, we will not invite you. This might be because you have had a hysterectomy, or because you are transgender.
phw.nhs.wales/services-and-teams/cervical-screening-wales/what-is-cervical-screening/
I refer you to the numerous posters upthread who have pointed out the issues this kind of obfuscatory language raises for people with learning disabilities, people who are not fluent in English and people with low levels of literacy.
This is a work in progress. We know this because Public Health Wales's Annual Equality Report for 2019-20 says:
6.5.2 Transgender Public Information Review
The Screening Engagement Team is leading a review of the screening based transgender information resources. An engagement review is being undertaken with people from the transgender community. The new resource development will be available in late 2020.
6.5.3 Cervical Screening Wales information review
Cervical Screening Wales has undertaken a review of its invitation information to ensure it’s inclusive of people who identify as non-binary and of people who have undergone gender reassignment. We are working towards removing gender specific references, replacing with gender neutral terminology by defining eligibility criteria as anyone with a cervix.
phw.nhs.wales/news/annual-equality-report-2019-20/
The info leaflets on this page still refer to women and girls:
phw.nhs.wales/services-and-teams/cervical-screening-wales/information-resources/information-leaflets-posters-downloads-and-accessible-information/
And of course you'll still be able to find references to women, girls and mothers in other places on the website. As if that's the fucking point. To their credit, Public Health Wales do appear to put a lot of effort into accessibility. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the meetings where they discuss how to make their easy-read smear test leaflet stonewall compliant.
Their transitioning at work guidance is something else. It says:
3.1.4 Non-Binary people in law
Currently, neither the Equality Act nor the Gender Recognition Act cover non-binary people and those who do not identify with the gender binary of male and female. This policy and other related Public Health Wales policies are designed to go beyond the legal requirements and to be inclusive of non-binary people. (my bold)
and -
3.6.5 Use of facilities
Non-binary employees or those transitioning at work are entitled to use the facilities that align with their gender identity from the first day that they present in that gender. Employees cannot be asked to use alternative facilities, such as the disabled toilet, but they may decide themselves that they wish to do so. (my bolds)
phw.nhs.wales/about-us/policies-and-procedures/policies-and-procedures-documents/human-resources-policies/
Note the lack of an equality impact assessment, when they seem reasonably good at providing this for other policies.
And for the avoidance of doubt, Public Health Wales are really proud of their involvement with Stonewall. Here's what they said in their 2019-20 Quality Statement:
Stonewall Index
We took part in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index (WEI) benchmarking exercise again this year. The WEI is the standard employers use to measure their progress on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender inclusion in the workplace.
We were delighted to learn that we were placed 100th out of 502 organisations that took part. Since we started to take part in the Stonewall WEI we have made great improvements every year. In 2017 we were placed 338th, then in 2018 we jumped to 173. Our latest result means we are entering the Stonewall Top 100 Employers list for the first time.
This a clear indication of how we are becoming a more inclusive organisation and making big improvements every year. Although the WEI looks at how inclusive we are for LGBT+ staff, making further improvements means we can improve equality and inclusion across the business so we can continue to be more inclusive.
My bolds.
phw.nhs.wales/about-us/annual-report/
They claim that Stonewall's WEI is 'the standard' that employers use to measure LGBT workplace inclusion.
They claim that 'making further improvements' to meet Stonewall's demands means that they are improving equality and inclusion generally. If you want to demand evidence of every single claim Pumper, then demand evidence from Public Health Wales, because they don't seem to have done an equality impact assessment to back up this assertion.
---------
That's enough unpaid work from me.
If you doubt this is widespread then you can do your own similar research on the other 99 organisations that score even higher on the stonewall index than PHW. It's great you're interested in gathering evidence and please do come back and share your findings. We need all hands on deck.
At a quick glance around half the organisations on the list are public bodies. There are around 200 more public bodies who have paid to be part of Stonewall Diversity Champions but who have not made the list.
FOIs have been submitted to the vast majority of these. If you want to find out more then go to www.whatdotheyknow.com and search for:
'Information about your dealings with Stonewall [Extraneous material removed]'
There's a lot of data there to keep you busy but not all organisations have provided a sensible response so it's sometimes necessary to trawl deep into policy documents to get an idea of what an organisation has done and what they have planned. Even then, there will be a lot of material that is not publicly available.
Screenshotting random pages that still use words like 'woman' and 'mother' is not research. It looks lazy and facetious and the aim appears to be to tie women up in busy-work, running all over the internet to provide evidence in response to your demands.
Nobody's buying it. Help or get out of the way.