One of the reasons I support current government policy on teenage pregnancy is that, for the first time, they have a strategy and a targets both to prevent unwanted teenage conceptions and also to get teenage mums back into education, rather than just shaking their heads at them and letting them get on with it. Okay, so the target is an entirely unrealistic 60% participation rate by 2010 (current rate is about 36% - haven’t got the figure to hand). But with the support that this 13 year-old mother is bound to get under this Labour programme, maybe there’s a chance for a better future for her child and for herself. That is, if the Sun doesn’t put her on the front page under a screaming headline first.

(via Ken)

Tom, on the new Liberty Central coalition:

There are two quick tests I tend to apply to people who go on about this sort of thing. One is to see whether there are any Hitler references - and to be fair, they’re doing alright on that score so far. The other is to look at what they’re talking about and what they’re not talking about. If, as is usually the case, their list of complaints doesn’t include the Mental Health Bill, I tend to think that they’re self-indulgent and not terribly serious.

Despite working for a youth charity, I’ve never been particularly engaged by the usefulness of giving 16 year-olds the vote. But this, in today’s Guardian, may just make me change my mind:

in the 2005 election, national turnout was 61%, compared with 37% among 18- to 24-year-olds, down 2% from 2001… But a more detailed examination seems to indicate that if you give young people the vote early, then their democratic engagement will increase. Treat them like citizens and they will act as such. Research by YouGov and the Social Market Foundation into how people develop voting habits has found that those who are old enough to vote while still at school are more likely to vote again than those who have to wait until their 20s for their first chance. In the 2001 election, for example, turnout among 27-year-olds was 49%, compared with 65% among 28-year-olds who had been old enough to vote in the 1992 election.

Interesting that if this trend holds, it’s lkely that my year group, born in 1979-80, are much less likely to vote than those a few months older. I was a precocious kid, which is unlikely to surprise you, and I was furious at being seven months too young to vote in 1997.

From the Washington Post, on laws about emergency contraception:

More than 60 bills have been filed in state legislatures already this year, and that follows an already busy 2005 session on emergency contraception. The resulting tug of war is creating an availability map for the pill that looks increasingly similar to the map of “red states” and “blue states” in the past two presidential elections — with increased access in the blue states and greater restrictions in the red ones.
… some bills would make it more difficult for many women to get emergency contraception, which is effective for only 72 hours after a woman experiences a contraceptive failure or unprotected sex. Legislation in New Hampshire, for instance, would require parental notification before the drug is dispensed.

Could there be a clearer demonstration that the radical right aren’t concerned with “parents’ rights” or any of that nonsense, but about stopping women getting emergency contraception?

Can’t find it online, but the paper version of the Oxford Mail says that the JCR (= undergraduate student union) at St Hilda’s, the last all-women’s college at Oxford, have voted by 55% to go for a mixed JCR and 77% to go for a mixed fellowship. The Guardian article is here. I know all the arguments, and I know I’m one to talk, not having chosen Hilda’s myself, but I still feel a bit sad. Advocates of it staying all-women have been hanging on by a thread for years, but now the undergrads have resigned themselves to going mixed, I guess it can’t be long until the college votes to do it - as I recall last time going mixed won a simple majority of the fellowship, but not the required two-thirds.

There’s also a bigger worry: on 2003-4 figures, Oxford is currently 52.7 men to 47.4 women at undergrad level. If Hilda’s does go mixed, and we assume that within three years the college is 50-50 at undergrad level, then we’re looking at 54.4 men to 45.6 women. Of course, the experience at Oxford is that formerly-women’s colleges that go mixed tend to stabilise at a level where they take more men than women, not equal numbers, despite their history.

And of course, at the moment only 8.6% of professors and 23% of lecturers at Oxford are female. That number is artificially high because of St Hilda’s; what are the university going to do to change that?

Well, it’s not like we were expecting them to actually press for them - from the membership list, the commission always looked like it had been thoroughly nobbled.

I’m just looking at the final report now - it’s just gone up on the WEU website.

The press release:

Radical programme to end decades of jobs and pay unfairness for women
Women and Work Commission say better use of women’s skills key to economic prosperity

Wide-ranging action to tackle the culture in schools and workplaces that create job segregation and leave woman lagging behind men in the pay stakes is proposed in a ground-breaking report published today.

Innovative schemes to give girls a better understanding of the pay and prospects in the careers they choose, to boost the quality of part-time work and to provide skills training for women returners are among the recommendations.

The report “Shaping a Fairer Future” from the Women and Work Commission sets out 40 practical recommendations to tackle job segregation and the gender pay gap which still exists despite 30 years of Equal Pay legislation.

Proposals include setting up a national World of Work programme to improve vocational training, provide work taster days for primary school pupils and use work experience to encourage girls to think about non-traditional jobs as well as promote apprenticeships for women especially in sectors with skill shortages.

During the past 18 months the Commission has examined the facts about the gender pay gap, spoken to women about the challenges confronting them and met individuals and organisations making a difference.

The Commissioners found compelling evidence that the pay gap and under-use of women’s skills is bad for women and bad for Britain.

Increasing women’s employment and ending the gender segregation that blights the jobs market in which women are concentrated in the five ”c”s – the caring, cashier, clerical, cleaning and catering sectors – would benefit the economy by as much as £23 billion, worth 2 per cent of GDP.

Commission chair Margaret Prosser said: “Many women are working day-in, day-out far below their abilities and this waste of talent is an outrage at a time when the UK is facing increasing competition in the global market place and an outrage for those women personally.

“This Commission has brought together individuals from a wide range of experience and interest. We are all agreed that action is needed now to tackle the gender pay gap which leaves women working full time earning just 87p for every pound earned by men.

“We all recognise that the gender pay gap is complex and multi-faceted. There is no one solution – no magic bullet. We need action that starts from the early days in school and continues through all stages of a woman’s working life to tackle the cultures that put women at a disadvantage.”

The Commissioners call on the Government to:

- fund a £20 million package to enable women to change direction and raise skill levels, including offering free skills coaching and training programmes focused on women returners
- introduce an initiative to promote quality part-time work
- promote a localised approach to matching jobs and skills using community centres, schools and children’s centres to recruit local women, to be piloted in five areas across the country
- provide support for the development and training of equality reps.

A range of exemplar companies have been recruited to develop and deliver programmes to promote quality part-time jobs, progress women employees, as well as attract women to non-traditional occupations and school subjects less favoured by girls.

Baroness Prosser said: “We are at a crossroads – 1.3 million new jobs will be created over the next decade and 12 million vacancies will open up. If we do not make the fundamental change necessary to our school and workplace cultures those new jobs and opportunities will be filled in the same old way and women will continue to lose out.”

Last night, I was invited to give a presentation to Oxford Women in Politics (OxWiP for short), a student society who do exactly what they say on the tin. Now that I’m not a PPC, I don’t get so many invitations to speak at events, so it was a really nice opportunity to reflect on what I learned as a candidate and what I’d advise other young women thinking about getting involved in politics, at whatever level. The executive committee were kind enough to take me out to Chiang Mai afterwards, which was unexpected for a student group, and even apologised for me being the only British diner at a table of young American students! As if, with my mania for American politics, I’d turn down the opportunity to discuss the South Dakota decision, the new Supreme Court, the state of the UK and US health services, whether I should go and do a masters degree at UPenn, where American women buy underwear with no M&S and a hundred and one other vital issues over a free dinner with a bunch of expat graduate students! A really fascinating evening.

I’ve been trying recently, in between campaigning for the local elections, doing my job, having a cold and trying to get through the frankly mediocre season 4 of Buffy on DVD, to make it to a few meetings that are about political issues, rather than, as has seemed to be the case in the last year, only getting to meetings about political organising. The strategy seems to be working, as I’ve been to four this month.

Last Saturday, I went back to college to an alumnae event (yes, I know they are normally deathy!) with the two new Somervillian MPs, Nia Griffith and Helen Goodman. They’re both Labour, which is nice, and were joined on the panel by the Somervillian Labour MEP, Mary Honeyball. I thought all three were solid, if uninspiring - they’d given an undertaking not to be party-political, and in consequence it seemed from where I was sitting that their comments were rather muted and colourless, and the discussion didn’t really come alive.

I was asked to speak at another event last week as well, a meeting about pro-choice issues for the Labour club and OUSU women’s campaign. They had titled it something like “Moving beyond a debate on time-limits to a campaign for free publicly-funded abortion on demand”. It wasn’t clear to me why I was invited to speak, so, with the luxury of not having to represent anyone but myself, I was able to talk freely. I’m strongly of the opinion that, whether we want it to or not, a debate about time limits on abortion provision is coming to bite us on the bottom - it’s only as far away as Ann Widdecombe or David Amess winning the private members’ ballot - but I’m not sure that’s what the organisers wanted to hear. I also don’t think they wanted to hear me tell them to stop calling for “abortion on demand”, but to find a more concilatory way to express the concept; or to suggest using the agenda around choice in public services to the benefit of pro-choice campaigning; or to suggest that the pro-choice movement should run a campaign not targeted exclusively at Guardian readers. Oh well.

The week before I attended the Oxford Child Poverty Action Group’s meeting about poverty and educational underachievement, which I meant to write up at the time. The speakers who made the most impression were the head of one of the primary schools on Blackbird Leys, a large estate in the south-east of Oxford, who really nailed the myth that Oxfordshire is entirely made up of affluent middle-class kids with fantastic support from home, and Tim Brighouse, who I believe directs the London Challenge programme, talking about the impact that “butterflies” can have - small ideas that once implemented in schools, have an impact disproportionate to their expense.

Finally, this month, I also went to a speaker meeting with a wholly-unimpressive representative of the International Union of Sex Workers. I should say that, thanks to the nagging from Chris and others and to the spectacle of the GMB winning their first sex worker employment tribunal, I’ve come round to the idea of unionising workers in the broader sex industry. However the speaker seemed to assume that all sex workers, including women prosititutes on the streets, chose to do what they do, were rarely victims of abuse or trafficking and were not selling sex through desperation. She rejected out of hand the government’s proposals around prostitution, and called for outright legalisation and for toleration zones. It was interesting to listen to her, but I was disappointed in the audience, who seemed to be unwilling to pick up on the contradictions of what she was saying - calling at one point for legalisation of prostitution, and then a few minutes later saying that the way that magazines such as Nuts and Zoo depict women feeds into a culture that doesn’t value women’s autonomy.

So that was the month that was, for me anyway. One of the reasons I like living in Oxford is because there are opportunities to go to really interesting events like this pretty regularly, not that I’ve always used them. It just feels good to talk about policies as well as process sometimes.

Update: one of the other interesting things about living in Oxford is the ongoing debate - and increasingly tiresome protests from the antis - about the new Oxford animal research laboratory. Tomorrow, there will be the first ever pro-research demo in Oxford, as I flagged up a few days ago. Unfortunately I can’t be there, as I have a longstanding committment to be somewhere else. I’ll say this for Evan Harris, despite being wrong on many things, he’s sound on this issue.

From the BBC:

A US state legislature has approved a bill to ban most abortions, in a move aimed to force the US Supreme Court to reconsider its key ruling on the issue.
The South Dakota draft law - which needs approval by the governor, known to be against abortion - seeks jail for doctors who perform terminations.
Exceptions will be made if a woman’s life is at risk, but not for rape.

Got to be the first of many, I would have thought. Here’s what happens next: Planned Parenthood or NARAL pro-choice America or someone challenges the validity of this law at the State Supreme Court. No matter their decision, it will go to the federal circuit court of appeals, and probably to the Supreme Court. So the tax dollars of the good people of South Dakota will be spent funding a politically-motivated challenge to established law in a bid to close the ONE clinic that performs abortions in the entire state. I hope they’re happy with that.

The Guardian is reporting that there is going to be one. One the one hand I’m sceptical, as it sounds a bit of a gimmick; but on the other hand, if it ends the nonsense of answers to parliamentary questions about child poverty (for example) being thrown back at the questioner with a curt “ending child poverty is the responsibility of the department of work and pensions”, it might be useful in terms of adding clout to the agenda across Whitehall.

They’re continuing to fall, despite what the newspapers would have us believe.

Between 2003 and 2004, the under 18 conception rate fell by 1.4%. The total fall in teenage pregnancies between 1998 and 2004 is now 11.1%, and the total fall in conceptions for under 16s since 1998 is 15.2%.

Unlike ministers, I don’t believe that becoming a teenage mum makes you a failure, but reducing unwanted teenage conceptions is a really good thing, and I’m pleased that the strategy of increasing sex and relationships education, access to contraceptive services and advertising about safer sex are having an effect.

Update: The Telegraph misses the point entirely, hanging its entire doom and gloom piece on seven - SEVEN - more pregnancies amongst under 14s in 2004 than 2003.