Northwest Development Agency: Developing a Gender Equality Scheme

Equality Works were commissioned to work with the NWDA to develop their Gender Equality Scheme to meet the legal deadline of 30 April 2007.

The scheme drew upon the Regional Economic Strategy (RES), Race Equality Scheme and Disability Equality Scheme. It also involved gathering evidence from a wide range of sources, including external reports and research, monitoring data and internal and external consultation.

The resulting draft scheme set out the Agency’s commitment to Gender Equality (reflecting on issues for women and men, including trans people) and includes concrete priorities and actions.

We met with Executive Directors to shape the objectives for the action plan. We drew on a range of resources to plan for questions and actions for each Executive Director. This included the external consultation and areas of work which link into the RES (e.g Leadership Academy, Worklessness Programme) so that the actions we recommended had a strategic fit. We also reflected on actions from the DES, which the NWDA has already committed to as areas to be addressed. Finally, we asked Directors for any other issues related to gender equality which we needed to consider.

Executive Directors were sometimes able to establish objectives within the course of the meeting, and sometimes referred us to other members of staff who gave us more detail regarding the work of the NWDA which impacts on gender and other equality issues. We were also able to identify a range of good practice which we have included in the main body of the scheme as ‘NWDA work on Gender’.

These meetings and interviews allowed us to identify objectives and actions which were sent to Executive Directors for approval for inclusion in the plan.

We also met with members of the Social Inclusion & Health Sub Committee of the Board as well as talking on a one to one basis with other key people. A total of 18 members of staff were consulted through one to one interviews/email and focus groups. Staff members were invited to attend women-only, men-only and mixed focus groups.

We reviewed several sources of information relating to the Agency workforce in the preparation of the Gender Equality Scheme. This included a range of workforce monitoring data describing the gender profile of Agency employees at different grades and in relation to different working patterns; together with summary statistics from the Best Companies Survey and data from the recent Equal Pay Audit.

Our analysis of the data provided showed a number of patterns where employment experience was different between women and men across different parts of the agency, and identified a number of themes and areas for improvement.

The recommendations have also been translated into actions which are included in the HR, Organisational Change and Development section of the Gender Equality Scheme Action Plan.