Strong women inWales who prove we can flourish together
SPENDING an evening with women who are doing great things – sometimes against the odds, often with less fanfare and pay than men – is always a life-affirming experience.
When it’s accompanied by good food, music and dance, so much the better.
If you want to go to an awards ceremony, make sure it’s organised by a busy woman, known, as they are, to do everything better.
Meena Upadhyaya, who came to Wales as a teenage bride and is now a renowned professor of medical genetics with an OBE, founded the Welsh Asian Women Achievement Awards in 2011 and has now expanded it into the Ethnic Minority Welsh Women Achievement Association (EMWWAA) Award.
She wants to champion the work of ethnic minority women – pointing out that they are overlooked on two counts. You only need to look at pay and job statistics for women to see there is still a long way to go for all of us.
For those still burying their heads in the sand dunes of wilful denial and claiming feminism and equality have been achieved, a quick scan of the data is needed. Britain’s gender pay gap for full-time male and female employees stands at 9.4% – barely budging since the 10.5% gap five years ago.
Figures this week revealed an even bigger gap of between 13% and 15% in wages for women and men in the same jobs, even at Wales’ top universities.
But that gap in all jobs becomes a yawning gulf for some women from ethnic minorities. Figures compiled by the Fawcett Society in March show Pakistani and Bangladeshi women see the biggest overall gender pay gap at 26%, while Black African women experience the largest full-time gender pay gap at 19.6%.
And women are still not being appointed to the top jobs in significant numbers.
Less than a quarter of FTSE 100 boardroom recruits in the six months to March 2016 were women, the lowest level since 2011, according to the Female FTSE Board Report. So far, so depressing. And yet, women – and ethnic minority women – are making their mark in Wales and elsewhere as the EMWWAA last week shows.
Winners included Cardiff University Honorary Professor and former Cardiff GP Professor Kamila Hawthorne, who won the science technology and medicine category.
Uzo Iwobi, chief executive officer of Race Council Cymru, who founded the African Community Centre in Wales and served with the Police National Diversity Team, was also honoured.
Leanne Rahman, who works at the Arts Council of Wales, was recognised for co-ordinating Black History Month Wales; and Cardiff voluntary worker Fateha Ahmed, who came to Wales as an unaccompanied child, won an achievement award for her work with Sure Start, Barnado’s, and The Carers’ Centre.
Fateha volunteers to help ethnic minority families with children with special needs, organises inter-faith forums and runs a weekly radio show on Radio Cardiff.
This is as diverse an array of awards for a huge tapestry of work as you could wish for.
It wasn’t a night only for those who had gained high office and qualifications, although there were plenty of those included. It was also a night to champion women who have overcome obstacles including violence, genital mutilation and trafficking to go on and achieve.
Here in one room sat women professors, leaders of business, doctors and councillors, being awarded for their work alongside those being awarded for work we don’t always see.
Community engagement is a phrase that does too little to explain the ripples that fan out from the efforts of women like Norma Glass promoting race equality in schools over many years, or of Omonigho Idegun, who was trafficked from Nigeria and now runs activities for special needs and disabled children.
Some events of the last year have left a lot of communities feeling fractured and bruised. The EMWWAA is evidence that Wales is a place where people from all backgrounds can and do flourish together. We need to celebrate this more in the ever-shifting landscape.