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

Women, suffer political capture and the destruction of your rights quietly please, because resisting it might inconvenience others?

No thank you. You're trying to use that vague guilting idea using female socialisation to shame women for wanting equality and for government employees to follow the law and requirements of their post to be unbiased. With the idea that women should enable it quietly. It's a bit of an odd approach really. There are many things that cannot happen in society now because a small group of people were twats who took the piss and it had to be stopped.

And I would call it a national and massive under reaction that caused this mess in the first place. Parents not employed by the civil service seem to manage fine with attending personal interest groups in their own time, I think they will get by.

It is very much not an over-reaction to say specialist interest lobby groups should not exist within the civil service. We are meant to be a democracy where power lies with parliament.

a minority of networks experience this yet all are punished. That's an overreaction. And an overreaction that deliberately makes it harder for parents and disabled people to meet. Victory.

No, this is pulled out on women time and time again and it's wholly disingenous.
'You're over reacting, you're messing things up for other people' - it means don't look, don't be mean, sit down, shut up, hand over your rights, be a good girl.

If you're not into women's equality and rights, say so and explain why you think men's needs and political control of mens rights movements in government tax paid jobs is so very important, I'm all ears.

I'm sure those mothers will manage just as will mothers who are teachers and nurses and supermarket workers who don't expect to attend personal interest groups within their paid working day.

An event during a lunch break would still be permitted afaik

Such a small group which nonetheless has such a large sense of its own self-importance that it has felt entitled to demand that society rearranges itself for its benefit, largely at the expense of women. Whatever their inner feelings or sense of identity, trans-identified men remain male and thus have no right of admittance to women's single-sex spaces, services and sports.

Or the wild overreaction to such a small group in this case

Yes, trans activists have thoroughly fucked up many things for women.

It is still two sides of the same coin.

Exactly. I didn't mention a "leaflet. It's the wholesale removal of the language of women in maternity care, along with the illegal wedging of men into women's single sex hospital wards, changing rooms (see Fife tribunal for the grim details).

Maternity care has been a disgrace for so many years (as those of us who have experienced the poor care can attest to). Claiming that this hasn't happened simply makes posters look foolish.

There should be no "search and replace" when it comes to accurate language about maternity or any other issue relating to the female sex. On the other hand, "search and add", in the sense of saying "women and transmen/NB" where female health and maternity services are concerned, would be an excellent thing. The same should apply to male-specific health issues, with information about prostate cancer specifying both men and transwomen, but that somehow doesn't tend to happen.

Substandard maternity care is down to the misogyny of those who also demand women are reduced to body parts or erased from leaflets. These two things cannot be separated.

As substandard maternity care unfortunately predates anyone doing a search/replace on a breast feeding pamphlet, that's an absurd claim entirely unsupported by any form of causal logic.

That's a meeting which if you respect free speech is not an issue, even if you dont agree with the intent of the meeting.

There is no such thing as free speech within the work place. Your employer is totally free to direct that you must not criticise them to their customers, that you must be cordial, that you do not raise controversial topics so long as they are not discriminatory in doing so. And if you are a civil servant then the code requires you to be impartial and implement government policy. Meetings that suggest British people should feel guilty within the home office clearly breach that.

I can't but help note that this "owning the trans activists" measure now means that parent networks (read mums networks) have to meet after work at the same time as looking after children. Victory!

I sympathise - teachers and health care professionals will share many of your views. Unfortunately weak leadership in the public sector faced with aggressive political activists have shown themselves unable to implement the Nolan principles and enforce political impartiality.
This isn't the odd rogue individual - it's organisations full of gender loons bullying others into removing fundamental rights and scientific principles. It's why we've dangerous maternity services distracted from their core purpose by removing the language of women and basic biological facts from maternity care. Some schools arrogantly transitioning children in secret from their parents and others forcing teenage girls to undress alongside boys in PE changing rooms. The Ministry of Justice determined to place men claiming to be women in women's prisons - despite the SC judgment.

That's why the Civil Service has to be told to stop the activities of these political activists in work time and to focus on the day job.

systemic abuses 🤣

a group of people having lunch together once a month after returning to work having had treatment for cancer is what staff networks look like in the real world.

Jim emailing Sarah a list of resources to help her teenager following her ASD diagnosis is what really happens.

The people from within minority backgrounds agreeing to walk to the station together after work because they need to go past the hotel where people are waving flags and yelling about immigration.

its almost like this needs a sensible grown up approach and a knee jerk reaction based on a few isolated incidences reported in the gutter press had the potential to disadvantage loads of different people in loads of ways 🤔

None of that means that systemic abuses should not be investigated, though.

It’s a very privileged stance to think that a carer for a profoundly disabled child can leave that part of their life behind to just turn up and do their job day in day out.

supporting young, disadvantaged but ambitious and driven people to progress their careers and access development opportunities and provide exposure to the types of careers paths they could think about is an important facet of these types of networks. I could go on.

Perhaps we should argue that the roles filled by what are essentially peers and volunteers should be the responsibility of the employer but then we’d have people crying about wasting taxpayers money when civil and public servants should be nose to grindstone in a cell like office for the duration of their working day.

99% of people have no idea what 80% of the civil or public sector actually do. And the constant attacks from the media, from the public, from our own departments based on the anecdata from a person who once worked in one department for a couple of years and saw a lazy toad “getting away with it” does an enormous disservice to every single person in the country who relies on the civil service to support society in ways they can’t even imagine.

Agreed. I know there are many who work really hard. But there are pockets/individuals who still think they get paid the salary just to turn up /login, and doing any additional work is doing their employer a favour. And they aren't always managed out.

I managed out the one person in my team who had this attitude, the rest of the team worked really hard but we often came across people in other parts of the organisation who would try and shift their own work onto us, and who joined video calls looking like they had just been roused from a nap

There are plenty of people in the civil service who do great work for not very much money. There are more who treat it as middle class job seekers allowance and don't move the needle a millimetre.

Moving all these events out of paid work time is the right thing to do.

Careers and training things, mentioned above, should of course be in work time, they are directly work related, the others should not.

I've spent far too much time inside the civil service trying to improve their ways of working, too often they are dogmatic, myopic and wedded to doing things the same way they always have, because they always have. It's a job not a social club IMO.

In fairness having worked in the public sector some people would just trundle from random event to random event and never do any work given half a chance.

Haven’t they been told to ‘bring their whole, authentic self to work’? How about people just go to work, do their jobs, go home again, and leave their activist shenanigans to the weekend?

And there are others who benefit hugely from the support, knowledge, development and mentorship they provide. For every LGTB+ network there is also a carers network and an early careers network, a disability matters network, a parenting network and the racial inclusion network 🤷🏼‍♀️