Bob Spink: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government whether consideration has been given to applying gender responsive budgeting to her Department's budget.What in the name of God is "gender responsive budgeting"? Someone elucidate me.
4 comments:
Dizzy
There's a whole f****g United Nations web site dedicated to the subject http://www.gender-budgets.org/
To lift one quote:
WHAT IS GRB?
"Gender responsive budgeting (GRB) is about ensuring that government budgets and the policies and programs that underlie them address the needs and interests of individuals that belong to different social groups. Thus, GRB looks at biases that can arise because a person is male or female, but at the same time considers disadvantage suffered as a result of ethnicity, caste, class or poverty status, location and age. GRB is not about separate budgets for women or men nor about budgets divided equally. It is about determining where the needs of men and women are the same, and where they differ. Where the needs are different, allocations should be different."
Debbie Budlender 2006
Jesus wept.
So 'gender' now encompasses "ethnicity, caste, class or poverty status, location and age." Hardly surprising, really. I once participated in a survey for Transport for London which included the question:
"What is your gender?" to which the alternatives were "Male" or "Female".
Next question was "What is your sex?" to which there were NINE alternatives. Can you guess which the NINE sexes are? Let me tell you:
Hetrosexual male (their spelling)
Homosexual male
Bisexual male
Transgendered male
Heterosexual female
Lesbian
Bisexual female
Transgendered femail
and the ninth was "Other (Please specify)"
I wrote back to say that the only 'others' I could think of were necrophiliac, paedophile and bestialist, all of which I understood to be illegal. I asked them if they could tell me which 'others' they had in mind. They did not enlighten me.
I also asked what possible relevance this could have for transport planning other than, especially in the case of those recently transgendered, as it affected their ability to sit down. Again, no reply.
VOTE BORIS! If you think what I have told you is in any way risible.
The Women's Budget Group are actually pretty sane.
Post a Comment