By Cathy Larkman and Claire Loneragan
Police forces in the UK will tell you that they are very committed to advancing women’s rights. That they are listening to women. They’ll all quote their commitment to the international #HeForShe campaign as the main way they demonstrate this. It’s a huge part of how they evidence claims that they are improving things for women.
Should they be so confident? Should we? And what exactly is HeForShe?
Male officers fall over themselves to be a HeForShe ‘champion’ in the workplace. Some, no doubt, for their forthcoming promotion board and some (let’s be optimistic) for more genuine and aspirational reasons. Every single force is signed up to this initiative. This is from the HeForShe website.
Every police force in the UK has signed up to the initiative, with a pledge to improve gender imbalances that exist at middle management levels within policing and to address and remove the sexism and misogyny, where it exists, in police culture.
Yes, that word ‘gender’ again. Somehow it manages to move focus away from supporting and helping women to, well, anyone at all.
At first glance, it’s an admirable campaign that puts the emphasis on men worldwide to take responsibility to recognise and address inequalities between the sexes. All well and good, although we’ve had a fair few examples of male police officers who are ‘HeForShe champions’ loftily lecturing women they work with on how to do feminism properly. They're nothing if not predictable, are they? Here’s what a serving female officer told us about HeForShe:
“It’s the same old, same old. Men speaking for women and telling us what we need, when what we actually need is for them to shut up and listen to us. I spoke to a so-called ‘champion’ about this and he told me I was wrong and didn’t understand the project. Says it all!”
There’s a list of leading figures on the HeForShe website, including the national policing lead for the UK (pictured below). The observant among you will already have noted the organisation at the top right of the picture …….
Here’s the HeForShe UK policing lead, Chief Constable Jeremy Vaughan of South Wales Police talking about the initiative. Nice commitment, but your internal warning klaxons will rightly be sounding when he references ‘all genders’. What are these mysterious ‘all genders’? Men, women and what else exactly? And why is a senior police leader talking such gibberish?
Despite the frankly mad talk of ‘all genders’, the fifth annual report on how the policing service promotes HeForShe provides very helpful graphs on how internal work has improved the representation of women, compared to men, at various levels of the service. Each force has provided their own data and details of the specific work that they are undertaking. Here’s a graphic from Derbyshire.
Unfortunately, Derbyshire doesn’t appear to be improving female representation, but is this at least a clear understanding of the fact that there are two sexes and that sex matters? None of the mysterious ‘all genders’ make an appearance in the various graphics, only the two sexes; men and women. It’s almost disappointing really. We could surely have benefited from having a name put to all these genders that they think exist.
Seriously, if you are trying to engage and support women to ensure both that you improve the representation of women and their progression throughout the police force, then you need accurate data based on reality. If you don’t recognise the sex of those you are seeking to advance, then who exactly are you advancing?
Each force providing evidence to this report cites ‘good practice examples’. These examples include laudable initiatives on menopause, endometriosis, support groups, encouragement for promotion and retention. Things that actually help women. Great news. Let’s hope none of these mysterious ‘all genders’ are self-identifying into these worthwhile initiatives. Spoiler – they can.
What on earth were West Midlands police thinking here, though? Take a look at their ‘best practice example’ of how to remove issues faced by women in the force, including sexism and harassment. Recording your ‘gender identity’ will help, apparently. How can anyone take this stuff seriously? That ‘all genders’ thing has gone right to their heads.
We already knew of course that most (if not all) forces are recording notional ideas of ‘gender’ rather than actual sex now, and that it hurts women. What is less obvious is that recording ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity’ instead of sex might be unlawful – imagine that! Employers can defend recording sex because they are legally required to avoid discrimination on the basis of any of the nine protected characteristics cited by the Equality Act 2010. Knowing the sex of its employees is key to knowing whether an organisation is guilty of sex discrimination.
The same is NOT true of ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity’. There is no requirement to record or manage employee career progression on this basis, so employers have no right to record or even know this information. Anything that looks like compulsion to provide it would likely be a GDPR breach. They must have a valid reason for gathering this data, but if they can’t even name the gender identities, and if employees don’t have a consistent definition for them, it won’t be possible to report anything meaningful.
Worse still, if the police are recording ‘gender’ and/or ‘gender identity’ instead of sex, the door to sex discrimination is left wide open.
And what is the purpose of recording ANYTHING around improvements for women, if you don’t even know which of your employees ARE women? The graphs provided are meaningless and all the triumphant improvements and progress for ‘women’ are null and void. Because they may not actually BE women.
This madness came to a head in a survey sent around all UK police forces last year. The purpose of the survey was to ask staff and officers about their experience of sexual harassment in the workplace. Of course, the sex of the protagonists and the victims is certainly very important here and would surely be captured. Ermm, no. The survey asked those completing it for their ‘gender identity’. This is a feature, not a bug, in policing now. The survey was designed by an academic and was the initiative of the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC). 🤦♀️
If you’d like to look at your own force’s contribution to HeForShe, the document is here.
But what is influencing this gender madness in HeForShe? Of course, it is a UNWomen initiative. Groan. Yes, the same organisation that rolled out Munroe Bergdorf as their first ‘UK Champion’, perhaps taking ‘un-woman’ quite literally. Here’s the magnificent Julie Burchill holding forth on his qualifications:
“Bergdorf gives the phrase ‘failing up’ a whole new dimension, also having been stripped of their role as ambassador for Childline after Janice Turner of the Times questioned the advisability of putting ‘a porn model’ in such a role. They are the Eddie the Eagle of cross-dressing. So why on earth did the UN think this appointment was a good idea? So far as I know, Bergdorf has no record in campaigning against forced marriage, underage marriage, maternal morbidity and all those boring, uncool things which affect the lives of actual underprivileged people of the female persuasion.
It’s because the point is to mock women by giving Bergdorf a job most women – having grown up as girls rather than boys, as Bergdorf did – could do much better. Bergdorf’s UN appointment aims to diss the girls and make them cry, or at least howl with indignation, as a whopping 17 women’s rights organisations have”.
The very same UNWomen who recently proclaimed that “Trans women have the same right to protection from violence and discrimination as everyone else, both as women and based on their gender identity, as emphasised by numerous UN agencies and human rights experts”.
We do however, learn where the ludicrous ‘all genders’ posturing of UK police leaders comes from;
They were also responsible for this offensive poster, making its own particular contribution to rape culture;
Of course, UNWomen don’t particularly like women who don’t accept the erasure of their sex or want to ensure that they still have access to single sex spaces and services;
“State and non-state actors in many countries are attempting to roll back hard-won progress and further entrench stigma, endangering the rights and lives of LGBTIQ+ people. These movements use hateful propaganda and disinformation to target and attempt to delegitimize people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics”.
The UN is still a highly respected organisation by most governments throughout the western world, though. And as a result, this entirely unevidenced hostile attitude towards sex realism and characterisation of gender critical women as being somehow ‘anti rights’ encourages the UK police service to gleefully and uncritically align itself with gender identity ideology as a ‘pro rights’ position. Far from defending them, it seems intent on destroying the rights of women. And the baleful influence of Stonewall and others on police leaders hasn’t helped either!
Following its recent capitulation to the Taliban’s demands to not allow Afghan women to be present or even have a voice at an event on Afghanistan, you might be forgiven for wondering if the UN cares at all about women’s rights. Perhaps those horrendously oppressed Afghan women and girls should take a leaf from UNWomen and the HeForShe initiative and just ‘identify’ as men instead.
We have a serious message for UK policing: HeForShe is not the great win you think it is.
If you really want to support ‘she’ then you really need to recognise that only adult human females are women and get the nonsense that is gender identity ideology out of your organisation and policies. Until then, you have about as much feminist credibility as UNWomen and Munroe Bergdorf.
Believe us, that is not a compliment.
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