Civil Service staff networks to only meet outside working hours and have all events signed off by senior managers

I think they're equally bad to be honest.
One implies that women are unmentionable, and the other that we're just a state of mind.

I actually agree with you, but in the captured state of today's NHS, my suggestion surely has to be preferable to the suggested removal of any reference to women. You can't honestly prefer a reference to "everyone with a cervix" or "anyone who menstruates" - or the Bristol Council's new preferred term "people with ovaries" - or can you?

They could use their lunch breaks.
None of these 'networks' should ever have been meeting in worktime, because it's not part of the job they're being paid to do.

When the NHS uses this language it gives authority to the idea that women who identify as 'transmen' or 'non-binary' are not women, and that having such an identity is something that society should recognise and accord respect, rather than treating it as a symptom of a mental health problem.

This in turn encourages distressed and vulnerable young people to seek cosmetic body modifications that will permanently damage their health, rather than the psychological therapy that might actually help them.

The NHS should not be supporting this nonsensical and damaging ideology in any way at all.

Some of us use modern slang too, Goody Pete. 😁

This thread ate and left no crumbs, eh? Slay, fam.

Spicy = lots of hot takes, strong criticism, and arguments.

This is a much spicer thread that the other one!

The people running IT determine how data is recorded - including recording Gender rather than sex, and requests for ‘preferred pronouns’. Once these things are baked into the data system it is very difficult to get the system to consider sex or eg single sex spaces of for equality monitoring purposes.

These groups are also lobbying senior civil servants and embedding their belief through training which goes against the law. Or the insert information into reports or codes of practice that hugely impact services such as ‘Appendix B’ that removed single sex wards, or the Bench Book that required rape victims to refer their male rapists as ‘she’ (and get recorded as such in the IT system).

As for going against government directives - we see this constantly. Just look how few organisations have implemented the Supreme Court judgement.

Do the people running the IT infrastructure of the department of health and social care determine the services we receive? No. Or maybe those who study various nasty things at UKHSA? Again, no.

Only the SCS have some influence and even then they can't go against government directives, which is why we left the EU even though most CS were remain.

Attending events outside of working hours just means putting the time down to “break” instead of logging it as work on the system. Unless my bit of the CS is unusual most of these events are Teams meetings now.

If the event isn’t really significantly work related I don’t see how the CS can justify using tax payers money for essentially personal support groups.

It is correct that it is recognised it is wrong to have lobby groups within the civil service and they absolutely do need to be removed. The problem is many of those lobbyists have trained staff and embedded their ideas into management and now SEEN are on the scene the networks are being removed without the counterbalancing argument being presented.

I’m pro SEEN, but disappointed to see the feminism board celebrating a move that will put paid to any real gains achieved by Women’s Networks. The reality is many women simply aren’t able to attend events outside of working hours. Same goes for eg Disabled Staff Network, Carers Network, etc.

Apologies, I think we’re at cross purposes. I absolutely believe that the civil service should be held to a higher standard of impartiality, what I wasn’t understanding was the previous poster’s argument that simply because they’re the civil service, they need these activists groups, which makes no sense to me, as I would think that in order to be impartial they definitely shouldn’t have them.

You are right that most people manage to keep work and home separate. The civil service is different from other jobs precisely because you could influence public services in your favour. Doing so is effectively embezzlement - enriching yourself through granting yourself access to money, resources or services you would not otherwise be entitled to. Men granting themselves access to women’s spaces being an obvious one. It is for this reason civil servants must be held to a high standard of impartiality - which they have not been,

As the mother of a disabled child I’ve managed to keep my personal life separate from my working life, I’m not sure why the civil service should be any different.

My DIL is ex civil service so I am probably more aware than most of how it operates. Most of us go to work and then we go home, please explain why the civil service is different from that.

There is being a good employer who considers the needs of all employees and does not discriminate. But it is not true that Making reasonable adjustments is a legitimate workplace expectation.. I think people have heard the phrase from the Equality Act and assume it applies more broadly to whatever they want.

It has a specific meaning and duty in the Equality Act when it's used regarding provision for disability, but it also has a reasonable, practical meaning as a phrase in many contexts, and there are many areas in which it's a very good idea.

’Reasonable adjustment’ under the equality act only applies to the protected characteristic of disability.

For 24 years, from the early 70s to the later 90s, I was a public servant, not in the civil service, but in local government. Since reading this thread I've been trying to imagine the reaction I'd have got from management if I'd suggested we could use work time now and then to discuss matters of personal relevance, but unrelated to the job we were employed to do. It's no good. I simply can't. How the world has changed, and not necessarily for the better.

You can call it punishing. The rest of society understands it's about implementing the requirement for the CS to be politically neutral. It's setting boundaries. Prioritising the workplace rather than the political playground.

No group should be diverting work time to getting their own personal needs met. Making reasonable adjustments is a legitimate workplace expectation. Using the workplace to showcase your own political demands - particularly when they involve removing the rights of other groups - is unacceptable.