SUBMISSION AND COMPLIANCE: risks for Stonewall Champions

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

legalfeminist.org.uk/2021/02/01/submission-and-compliance/

Someone FOId Edinburgh Uni on their submissions to Stonewall and these have been analysed, as have potential issues with companies signed up to Stonewall on general.

You have to hand it to Stonewall. It’s an astonishingly audacious, skilful and successful operation. In summary, it goes like this:

"You pay for lots of Stonewall training.
You pay for membership of a scheme that wins you the privilege of being – by turns – patronisingly congratulated and sanctimoniously nagged about how well you’ve absorbed and implemented that training.
You lavish management time on embedding that training in every aspect of your operation, from Board to suppliers, from clients or users to middle management. You pay for more Stonewall training along the way.
Stonewall set you a lengthy open-book examination on how well you’ve done that.
You spend hours and hours plodding through that examination, meekly uploading your policies, giving examples of initiatives, training sessions, social media engagement etc.
Stonewall mark your submission and give you feedback on areas on which you could improve your compliance with their every demand, very likely involving more Stonewall training.
You do the same again next year."

It's really disappointing to see charities on that list of Stonewall champions.

People are donating and fundraising to support one particular cause or charity only for it to be paid to another, to do something they might not necessarily support.

I know charities have costs and need to pay to support and develop their staff (I work for one myself) but they do need to be able to justify their spending and I think most donors would see being a Stonewall champion as a huge unnecessary expense.

Have managed to read up to page 40 of 135 of Edi uni stonewall submission. Good grief.
Feel really sorry for the person how has to complete this.
A few of the answers to 'what are your allies doing to promote this stuff' appear to involve a lot of giving out rainbow lanyards. One answer includes:
"There is not enough space to mention the work of each Ally in relation to promoting and disseminating our Rainbow Laces/Lanyards". Is that a subtle dig at the amount of detail Stonewall want!

Talking to a friend at a big law firm about this, it seems that in order for a law firm to be accepted on to a bank panel (which is essential) they must disclose their diversity policies, and as banks become Stonewall Champions, they want the firms on their panels to do the same.
Law firms are committed to this and most of the big ones have diversity departments.
Can’t see this anytime soon.
I like the suggestion an Aussie poster made further up the thread about #StonewallLawBadLaw (or something). We need to make the banks jittery about this....

It's over £150,000 pa from Welsh Government; paying Stonewall to undermine the rights of women in Wales.

Yes, they receive huge sums from the Welsh, Scottish and UK governments in addition to any Stonewall champions membership fees.

find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02412299/filing-history

In 2018/19:
FCO: Over £145,000
DfE: Over £299,000
Scottish Government: £100,000
Welsh Government: Over £157,000

Such a good analysis. And asks the critical question - are all these companies, universities, schools and organisations devoting the same resources (££ and time) to the other protected characteristics? If not, presumably they can evidence that there are zero issues relating to race, disability, sex, pregnancy etc and that all their employees / customers face zero difficulties, discrimination, glass ceilings, pay gap obstacles in relation to their characteristics?
Hopefully this will be disseminated widely. Great piece of work Naomi Cunningham.

Such a good analysis. And asks the critical question - are all these companies, universities, schools and organisations devoting the same resources (££ and time) to the other protected characteristics? If not, presumably they can evidence that there are zero issues relating to race, disability, sex, pregnancy etc and that all their employees / customers face zero difficulties, discrimination, glass ceilings, pay gap obstacles in relation to their characteristics?

Don't alot of companies also invest quite alot of time and effort and probably money into profit protection? Workshop's/regular e learning etc

Its surprising how something like this would get past them. I mean when you break it down to to the very basic terms, they don't really gain anything by it do they

Smoke and mirrors has been a wonderful part of the Trans project

Gender identity instead of sex is a gift to banks - the financial sector has the worst pay gaps.

Crone, forgive what might be an ill informed question- but if the D of E fund stonewall what then happens with the recent D of E guidelines insisting schools don’t fund any organisation that supports regressive stereotypes, are a lobby group and so on?

Aren’t the D of E contracting their own advice? Anyone know if there’s an effective way to flag that to them?

I work at a large charity and we're fully Stonewalled. It annoys me to think that our supporters' money goes to this undermining of women's rights.

I work at a large charity and we're fully Stonewalled. It annoys me to think that our supporters' money goes to this undermining of women's rights

It would be interesting if there was someway of cross referencing companies/work places where perhaps staff have less than sanitary conditions to work in/change in/eat in, where resources and adaptations fir other protected characteristics aren't up to scratch etc with those who pay to have stonewall training. See if there are matches and whether budgets are seemingly missing fir one set of needs and are diverted to another

It would be interesting if there was someway of cross referencing companies/work places where perhaps staff have less than sanitary conditions to work in/change in/eat in, where resources and adaptations fir other protected characteristics aren't up to scratch etc with those who pay to have stonewall training. See if there are matches and whether budgets are seemingly missing fir one set of needs and are diverted to another

I don't have stats but I believe they are.

@NiceGerbil

I have heard a fair few employers are ditching the stonewall champion thing because the paperwork involved is so very onerous.

Good

Thank you, Old Crone.

@SqueakyCarrots

Crone, forgive what might be an ill informed question- but if the D of E fund stonewall what then happens with the recent D of E guidelines insisting schools don’t fund any organisation that supports regressive stereotypes, are a lobby group and so on?

Aren’t the D of E contracting their own advice? Anyone know if there’s an effective way to flag that to them?

Squeaky, I think there's only been a recent understanding of the havoc that these charities have wreaked in schools and for children. There have been a couple of new appointments in the civil service recently with at least one very senior Stonewall cheerleader and recipient of Stonewall awards having been booted out (on the back of the exam debacle). I suspect there will be a quiet withdrawal of much of the funding but they'll try to avoid headlines about a bigoted government failing to fundthegravytrain prioritise LGBT resources over all the other education priorities. But given how deeply all these lobby groups are embedded in all our institutions, minimising their influence will be a real challenge. Parent power will be an important lever in all this.

New post encouraging feminists to make FOI requests to public sector organisations who are involved with Stonewall:

legalfeminist.org.uk/2021/02/04/shining-a-light-on-stonewalls-activities/?_thumbnail_id=451

Just bumping this. It is so incredibly easy to make one of these FOI requests. Details of how to do it on Legal feminist page, it takes 5 minutes to do one.
Please get involved.

legalfeminist.org.uk/2021/02/04/shining-a-light-on-stonewalls-activities/?_thumbnail_id=451

It's an excellent idea. There are already 100 requests up.

www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/%23DontSubmitToStonewall/all

As the list is getting quite long, it's probably easier to check on the page of the authority you want to send the request to whether they have already been asked, rather than looking through all the results in the link above. Type #DontSubmitToStonewall in the keyword search box on their page.

Someone has done this already for the council I work for.

My (primary) school has Stonewall awards and all staff have completed Mermaids training. The head has today announced we are going in for the Rainbow Flag award which I have to admit I don't know much about yet.
It's very worrying and I'm glad the school my children attend is not doing the same (yet).

Great initiative. We'll get on to it tomorrow.

Apart from Welsh Gov, 7 of our councils, a pile of health boards, and many of our universities are paying out money to do Stonewall's bidding - along with most of the women's organisations here.

Hence a ''Deeds not Words' report on 'Advancing Gender Equality in Wales' which only mentions 'sex' once, in passing.

It is really very easy to do. Takes less than 5 minutes to do. The website is excellent and easy to follow. Whoever made it needs a

I have become very interested in F O I requests - they are fascinating

It's such a brilliant initiative .. far better than screaming into the void on twitter .. thousands of FOI requests and they will start listening.

They are mounting up

If you're making a request, make sure you give a valid name. If you are concerned about privacy, you don't have to use your full name. "J. Smith" or "Ms Smith" are valid names, but J.S. is not. You can use a pseudonym but you may not then be able to go to the ICO if you don't get a reply, since the ICO will ask for your real name and address.

There is more advice on the What Do They Know site about names here:

www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/privacy#real_name

Someone has made loads of these requests using just an initial. They are now getting responses asking for their name before the authority will proceed with the request. They will have to reply to all of these. This obviously slows everything down.

www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/information_about_your_dealings_138#incoming-1718765

Does anyone know is there a plan to collate all the FOI findings eventually by Legal Feminist?