Setting up women only networking in civil service

[Flippettyflip]

Hiya, I work in a specialist technical area in the civil service (software/IT/coding type stuff) . I'd like to set up a networking/mentoring/support group for women in my area - women are underrepresented in this area across the industry and in the CS and I think we need a separate space to discuss and help each other out. It's not a safety thing, it would be virtual, but from previous experience, it changes the dynamic to have people who are male but say they are women joining and defeats the object. Plus I have no shared experience with trans women, so I don't think it would be appropriate for me to set up a support group to help them.

There are a bunch of vaguely related networks, all based on "Gender". Think women's network renamed gender equality network type of thing. (I've joined it because they apparently okayed an entire article about cervical cancer that didn't feature the word "woman" and I'd like to try to change things from within).

Anyone done similar and got advice? What are my chances of setting up a support group on the basis of sex rather than "anyone who says they are"? Am I going to get shouted at by diversity champions? Of course if trans women feel they need their own group in the same area I'd happily support that but I'm not a trans woman so I wouldn't join it.

Good luck.
maybe call it a female network group rather than women’s?

Have you considered who you wold have as your sponsor from the senior management? They could advise you in this, too.

There was a thread last week about a new feminist network in the Civil Service for women and their rights - it was called something like SEEN, as far as I can recall. S for sex, E for equality, N for network? Yes, it's about sex. Yes, it's for women.
It may have been in this sub forum or on AIBU.

Have you seen this Flippetty?
www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4674002-sex-equality-and-equity-network-gender-crit-network-for-civil-servants

Good luck with this - it appears that the civil service is full of some very anti-women staff so there may be push back?

Good luk, @Flippettyflip It could be a long process!

The suggestion to ask SEEN for their advice is a good one. They seem well organised and they achieved official recognition after jumping through all the necessary hoops. You might also want to contact Sall Grover, CEO of Giggle, which is a women-only platform. She has a lot of experience of software which excludes males. She is Australian and is on Twitter.

And do call it a women's/women-only network. That is what adult human females are known as.

I think it's mixed sex - it's a gender critical network.

I think there are a couple of things here:

• needing a useful bunch of unfashionable feminists who have your back from an EqA perspective - that'll be SEEN.

• setting up some sort of women's networking/mentoring within your technical profession. I think trying to set the rules around this as 'female sex only' would be fraught with difficulties, perhaps reasonably so, but that doesn't have to mean you need to go all 'gender equality network' about it and shove women to the periphery. Women in Economics for example sets up peer mentoring groups which can be women-only or "mixed gender". I genuinely do think this fits your purpose.

There's a women's network for security in government so it can be done, no doubt includes those who "identify" as women though. My department only has a "gender equality" network though so I haven't joined.

Thanks all! Yes, I applied to join SEEN when it appeared here, but apart from the automated email reponse nothing yet.

Maybe I'll just go with "women in [specialism]" and avoid the issue? I'm not entirely sure how I'm supposed to handle having a different definition of women than "anyone who says they are a woman" though....

I worked in the CS for a while, went to women's network events and so many speakers were men. They had useful things to say but I'm sure that spot would have been better filled by someone with a better chance of resonating with their audience.

A question, how would you stop trans women joining? Would it be sufficient for them to join but never mention their biological background?

Regarding keeping it women-only, that was why I suggested contacting Sall Grover.
And bear in mind it is entirely legal to have a single sex network.

Good question @DoodlePug. I don't think we could or should stop anyone joining. I expect I wouldn't be allowed to say its a female only thing.

Maybe it's about having a clear process in place to avoid anyone derailing the conversation/agenda, which is a risk in any group of people.

Sall Grover is great but she's in Oz.

@timoteigirl good point re senior sponsor. I don't know how GC other more senior women are. Hmm.

I would be amazed if you can find any woman in the SCS willing to put her name to this network if you restrict it to natal women.

And I'm really not convinced it needs to be - numbers wise I imagine you'll have few if any TW wanting/eligible to join, and if they do I don't think it'd make a real difference. It's not as if it's open to the general population (so no opportunity to organise the kind of malevolent takeover seen at eg Michfest), and it's not the kind of sensitive situation where IMO single sex exemptions really ought to come into play (women's refuges, sport, changing rooms etc). I'm sure some people here will argue that pretending to believe TWAW ever is the thin end of the wedge and there's some degree of a point there, but I also think the issue is so small and tangential here that I would drop it.

Be a women's network. Focus unapologetically on women. Book female speakers. But I would just entirely swerve the question of 'what is a woman?', and because it's internal to work and 'recruits' from a closed pool, I don't think the issue will even arise. And if it does, then you can work out how to deal with it then, having already established aims, purpose, activity and reputation which is about women and not about trans.

@Flippettyflip

IANAL, but I think you are allowed to have a women-only network, for all the reasons you give why you wanted to set one up. It might be an idea to take advice from Sex Matters or the Legal Feminist if you are worried about its legality.
Sall Grover has experience in using software to exclude men which I'm sure she'd be willing to share. I don't think it makes any difference where she herself lives, surely?

Thanks @dandelionthistle , good advice. I think I'm feeling overly defensive at the outset from some bad experiences in other "women's" groups, but there's no reason to expect similar in a professional environment. And yes, it's not sport!

@BellaAmorosa yeah my reservation re Sall was that she's under a different legal regime.

(and defensive from a bad experience within CS having to have an argument that perhaps the word "woman" should appear at least once on a cervical cancer awareness campaign promoted internally, having been approved by the gender network! )

I'd have to disagree with pretty much all of this. My CS office has a women's network and it was deliberately targeted by those who wanted to 'test' whether TW could join. If you start any group that has woman in the name, you'll get people deliberately seeking to join just to prove a point.
My Department currently offers ZERO single sex facilities as their policy is to allow trans colleagues to access opposite sex facilities from the first day they come to work as their new identity. We have gender neutral toilets and other facilities pretty much everywhere in our offices now, but trans colleagues are not directed to use them, they are granted access to the opposite sex facilities as they choose. I'd say that's a pretty big issue and one that I hope SEEN and other local departmental groups will challenge.

Your Department's failure to provide single sex facilities is crap, but it's a separate point to the discussion of a professional network for women in a male-dominated profession.

As I say, my reference point is the CS Women in Economics network. I suspect WE is "trans-inclusive", I vaguely recall their newsletter once saying something 'intersectional' about TW or NB or something; but they also discuss Caroline C-P and motherhood and whatever so tbh I don't feel it's a big issue. I have no clue whether WE has a disproportionately large number of TW members or for that matter any TW members. The women I have met through it are women, the panels of their talks I've attended have been female. In my personal experience over some years now, they have been a female-centric professional network and I think that's what they need to be. I genuinely don't see that it matters if a small number are men who identify as women.

@dandelionthistle I guess I am looking at it more from the perspective of those running the groups rather than those participating in them. I doubt any of the members of the women's group that I am thinking of (which is regional for a particular department rather than focused on a specific profession) would necessarily be aware of the impact that certain individuals have had on the running of the group and how their attempts to shift its focus away from the women it was established to support, but the steering group running it most certainly are.
There is probably also a difference in experience where a group is specific to a profession (as you describe) rather than just a general 'women's group' like the one I'm thinking of.

NB If you aren't planning to explicitly exclude TW from joining the group, I can't see why you would struggle to find an SCS sponsor? Why not just ask the SCS women you know in your specialism? If it is a heavily male dominated profession then it would surely make sense to have a group that actively promotes women's development in that profession?
Once you have senior level support, you should be able to get guidance from HR about how to set up as a network. If you want it to be cross CS rather than just for your Department that is probably more work, but setting up a Departmental staff network is relatively straightforward (in my Dept at least).

I'm part of the civil service and work in a similar ish field, you know full well you can't set up a group and say it's "women only" you can call it a women's group but it has to be open to everyone like any of the other networks/groups they have, they can't be seen to exclude or discriminate anyone.

@HolidaysAreComin well I didn't know that otherwise I wouldn't have asked! I'm q junior & only been in CS for a few yrs so maybe no one's ever explicitly told me.

What about CS menopause support groups? Are they really open to anyone regardless of sex? I'm not yet affected but not sure I'd look forward to joining one for mutual support then finding out I'm supposed to talk about personal health issues with/in front of men!

@emsyj37 your experience sounds tricky :(. How did you deal with the point-provers? Sounds like I need to find a bunch of more senior women to help!

Yes - that's why WE is the group I'm holding up as an example here - it seems a pretty close comparator for what OP is looking to establish.

You're right that I won't be aware of what pressures or bad faith crap the steering committee might have been subject to. I do think that the tightly-defined parameters (other than womanhood...) does hugely reduce the opportunity for that though, vis-a-vis a more general women's network.

Sorry, I'm not personally involved with running the group, I just have friends and colleagues who are - they tell me their frustrations. The worst infiltrators are actually women, just women who want to expand the definition of woman! All you can do is as @dandelionthistle suggests and have a narrow focus and try to stick to it. Hopefully that will be easier to do in the context of a group that has a technical/professional purpose rather than a generic 'women's issues' one.
Definitely worth getting senior buy in though- and I can't imagine you'd struggle to secure it.