Pillar Five - Strategic Influencing and Awareness Raising

The WETF wanted to achieve visibility and confidence in women’s enterprise as a key to UK productivity and growth. The statistics and data from Pillar One (gender-disaggregated data) helped the WETF to achieve this by demonstrating the economic case and potential for women’s enterprise in the UK.

The Task Force is proud to have met with the Prime Minister and to have then seen women's enterprise play a prominent role in Government's Enterprise Strategy of 2008.

Equality Bill

The Government, particularly Minister for Women Harriet Harman, has been pushing for a single Equality Act for Great Britain, bringing disability, sex, race and other grounds of discrimination within one piece of legislation. Even though the proposals in this Bill mainly pertain to major changes to disability discrimination law, the impact of having one Act will affect gender-related policy and activity. Equality Bill proposal highlights include:

a single equality duty on public bodies, embracing grounds such as sexual orientation and religious belief as well as race, disability and gender;
greater transparency, including an obligation on public authorities to report on disability employment, and a 'kite-mark' on equality for the private sector;
strengthening the requirement for public bodies to tackle discrimination through their purchasing functions;
extending the scope for positive action, enabling employers to make their workforce more diverse when choosing between two job candidates of equal merit.

For more details, see here: http://www.equalities.gov.uk/equality_bill.aspx

WETF position statement

Women-owned businesses could significantly benefit from better access to both public and private sector procurement chains. Although 15% of all UK companies are owned by women, just 3% of all corporate and public sector contracts are awarded to women-owned businesses. The Women’s Enterprise Task Force welcomed the reinforced focus on equalities, especially the renewed and strengthened emphasis on actively promoting equality through procurement and therefore supplier diversity in the public sector (WETF Pillar 4). However, the focus on supporting women’s enterprise should not be diluted amongst this broadening of the agenda. The WETF was committed to making sure the economic case for women’s enterprise (currently estimated to contribute £130 bn p.a. to the UK economy) is fully understood and embraced across all Government departments.