Women Bishops and #womenleaders - Equalities, Inclusion and the Millenium Development Goals

 

 This week-end and coming week in York, London, Geneva, Vienna and Brazil – conversation is turning on issues around #WomeninLeadership, women in sport, women in the church and women on boards. This blog is highlighting an up coming event in St Pauls - on wednesday 16th July - by which time the outcomes of what is now taking place as I write in York will have been decided one way or another.

In York the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York will be on high alert - awaiting the outcomes of the voting of the General Synod – (this is the Church of England’s equivalent to the Houses of Westminster – it is an established church after all!).   In November 2012 the House of Laity failed to get through (they required a 2/3 majority – not just a first past the post vote) a critical YES vote for women bishops which would have belatedly brought the Church into the late twentieth century (such is the time lapse of many religious institutions) with the incorporation of women into the episcopacy.  

The Most Revd Archbishop Justin Welby
on the steps of St Paul's May 2014 with
over 700 ordained women priests who
have waited for over 20 years
for fuller employment rights - the
freedom to be appointed Bishops

This time according to a report in yesterday’s Guardian the 2 Archbishops have plan C in their back pocket to drive through legislation to allow women bishops even if it is rejected by the church's governing body, the General Synod.

Options under consideration are said to include an immediate dissolution of the synod with fresh elections called.  This then  could produce a sufficient majority for a special Synod convened in November. There could even be a special sharp shooting move by the bishops in the House of Lords – which would introduce the legislation without synodical approval. A dramatic sidewinder coming left field and without precedent in modern Church History – to set Ecclesiastical lawyers feet atapping.

Over the Archbishops' shoulders looms the potential that parliament might be so frustrated by the foot dragging attempts by the established church, to bring itself into congruence with late modernity and the spirit of equality in the UK, that Westminster would move in and remove the church’s current exemption from equality legislation.  

This exemption enables the church to foreclose full incorporation of  Issues in Human Sexuality (1991).

gay and lesbian people into its leadership functions – from the humble cleric in some dioceses, to prince bishop thrones in others – and multiple levels in between. The discussions on how it manages to achieve this travesty of contemporary understandings of Employment Law are worthy of several treatises of their own – but effectively the casuistry at present closes off gay/lesbian marriage and intrudes into the sexual life of same sex partnerships in a way unheard of for that of straight married clergy – in the now notorious script

 

#womenleaders  What Needs to Change
St Paul's Cathedral
 (http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/womeninleadership)

Meanwhile in London next week (16^th July) St Paul’s Institute is holding an evening conference on #WomenLeaders – exploring with Shami Chakrabarti for Liberty, Ceri Goddard Director of  Gender at the Young Foundation, Frances O’Grady General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress and including one of the few black clerics in the Church of England the Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin – Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons in its line up. http://www.stpaulsinstitute.org.uk/Events/Women-in-Leadership-What-Needs-to-Change

The Fourth World Conference on Women 1995 setting the
agenda for a great deal of the  international changes on the
rights and place of women in society today.

They will be exploring how one of the key United Nations' Millennium Development Goals of creating greater opportunities for  female empowerment has been responded to by politicians, business and faith environments – in particular that of the church.  And exploring what institutional, organisational or societal cultural barriers continue to undermine the will to realise the aspiration of the seventies to see equality of the sexes in employment, domestic reproduction, political life, faith bodies, sports, business and international development.  The platform for action was set at the Fourth world conference on Women in Beijing just short of twenty years ago in 1995. (You can catch up on this here.) The corporate, ecclesial, political, business, and legislative worlds move slowly - but moving they surely are. What women and women who aspire to leadership require most fundamentally is resilience, perserverance, some sponsors on the way and longevity - in order to see the benefit of some of the changes in their own lives, and not simply their daughters, neices or the generation which follows.

Which brings me to Brazil, Vienna and Geneva – but that must wait for another blog on what we have been finding out about the parlous representation of women on the sports boards of our national and international sporting bodies – ranging from Olympic Committees at national and international levels, FIFA, and indeed the Commonwealth Games soon to open in Glasgow.

Meantime share the love and the power of inclusion, and if you’re in London see you at stpaulsInstitute at 6.30pm for 7.00pm 16^th July – by which time the Church of England may have opened the slate for its first Women Bishops to be appointed.  

More on the implications of that and the things which every woman in leadership really ought to know in the IbixInsight series on Key Coaching tips for women in their time of Organisational Change in August.