85- Filia meets Wanda Wyporska

Alice: Hello and welcome to FiLiA Podcasts. I'm Alice, and with me here today is Dr Wanda Wyporska, director of the Equality Trust. Hi Wanda. 

Wanda: Hi. 

Alice: And today we're going to be talking about the Equal Pay Act and why it's not working as well as it could be. So, a bit about Wanda. She is Executive Director at the Equality Trust, which is a national charity that campaigns to reduce social and economic inequality. And she's also a visiting Research Fellow at the University of York, an experienced trade unionist, and she also sits on many other equality boards, including the ACEVO Race Advisory Panel and the Fight Inequality Alliance Steering Group. The other thing that I found out, which is like my favourite fact that I found out today, which is in a previous life you were at Oxford and you wrote a book about witchcraft in early modern Poland.

Wanda: Yes, I did. I guess I've always been interested in a range of gendered issues, so yes. Witchcraft was absolutely fascinating. 

Alice: I kind of wish we were talking about that to be honest. 

Wanda: Well, that is a whole other podcast. 

Alice: So tell us a bit, first of all, about the Equality Trust and the work that you are doing at the moment.

Wanda: I began work at the Equality Trust just under four years ago, and we were focusing very much on income inequality. We were set up by the authors of The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. So, it was really interesting because my background in equalities, and looking at protected characteristics meant that I instinctively looked at income inequality and thought, “well, these two things are inextricably linked”.

We need to be looking at gender, looking at race, looking at class as well with all of this. So, that's been really, really interesting and it's culminated in us looking at, I think, some of the issues from a slightly different perspective. So we've got two projects looking at equal pay, looking at gender pay gaps from a perspective of income inequality, as well as obviously gender inequality. But I think we've brought something a bit different to the table. 

We have a conference celebrating the 50th, can you believe it, 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act on the 29th of May, and we would welcome all your FiLiA supporters to tune into that. We've got a fantastic line-up with some really leading women and we've also, one thing I'm really proud of is a calculator we've done. So it's a potential lifetime earnings loss calculator, where women can go in, they can put in their salary a bonus if they get one, and if they work for a company that reports its gender pay gap, they can find out how much they might lose over a lifetime, or gain if indeed there is a positive pay gap, over 45 years of their working life. 

And I think we often talk about the gender pay gap and we talk about equal pay and we talk about being round about 17%, but what that looks like over a woman's working life, I think is really worth having a look at. So again, you know, I would urge people to go on our website, and have a look, and see just how much the gender pay gap is potentially damaging 

Alice: I think I already did that, and I was quite shocked at the number that came out. 

Wanda: And I think that's the benefit, isn't it, of looking at it over a working lifetime.

I mean, we've very modestly said that women will be working for 45 years, but I think unfortunately many of us are going to be working for far longer than that. 

Alice: Definitely. 

So how did the Equal Pay Act first come about then? You said it was 50 years old this year. Where did it come from? 

Wanda: Well, as all legislation didn't just happen in 1970, there's a proud history of a fight for equal pay in the UK. In 1888 Clementina Black, chair of the Women's Trade Association won a resolution on equal pay for equal work at the Trades Union Congress. But then of course, the involvement of more women in the workplace during the First World War changed perceptions of, you know, what women could do and what jobs were normally carried out by men, and, you know, proving that women could do the work just as well, as we know.

And then there was mass public campaigning in 1955. Again, you know, we had the Second World War where women were doing a lot of the jobs, working in factories, working in jobs that were previously considered to be male jobs. And in 1955, a scheme was established to secure equal rates of pay for men and women doing the same job in the non-industrial civil service. So as a result of that, women teachers were also given equal pay in 1961. 

So it's a kind of slow burner. But I think the real key turning point, and many of your listeners will be familiar with this, is the strike action undertaken by women sewing machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant. They’d been graded at a lower rate then were paid 15% less than men in the same grading.

So they walked out. Many of your listeners will have seen the film that was made as well. 

Alice: “Made in Dagenham”

Wanda: Exactly, yeah. And eventually this resulted in a halt to all car production. You know, women just locking down their sewing machines caused that. So it was a landmark win for pay equality, and it was one of the key drivers really for the passage of the Equal Pay Act.

But you know, to think that, the Equal Pay Act is older than me and we still, you know, are very far from equal pay, is really, really frustrating. It's several generations of women in the workplace that have missed out. 

Alice: One of my favourite songs is Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves by The Eurythmics. And there is a line in there isn't there that says something like “equal pay, hear what we say”. And I, I have no idea how old that song is. It's definitely older than me, but it always seems, kind of, so bitter to me that that's still relevant today. 

Wanda: Well, there's got to be a meme somewhere of relevant songs to a lot of the things that are happening at the moment. Thinking about Who's Zoomin Who at the moment, with George Michael and Aretha Franklin. I don’t know why nobody's taken that one up. 

But yeah, I mean, you know, it makes me think of Dolly Parton and Nine to Fiv as well. It's why it speaks to the bigger issues of exploitation and what capitalism is built on, you know, it's built on slavery, it's built on exploitation of women. And to think that in the 21st century this is still happening tells you where the value is. I think we're seeing this at the moment with COVID-19. Obviously the essential work, predominantly done by women, is the low paid work. And we're not valuing women, in the way that we traditionally have not valued women, and continue not to value women for the work that they do. And when work becomes women's work, it becomes devalued.

Alice: So I think we should talk a bit about the difference between, on one hand, unequal pay, and on the other hand what people call the gender pay gap, or kind of the cumulative pay gap between the average income of men versus the average income of women. 

Wanda: Yeah, and I think, you know, very often this, this is confused.

When we're talking about the gender pay gap, we're talking about the difference, as you said, the average difference in earnings between men and women, and that could be at any grade. It's not particularly at the same grade. There's also, don't forget, a gender bonus gap. And when we look at the gender bonus gap, as we did in our report “From Pin Money to Fat Cats”, we analysed the FTSE 100 and looked at their gender pay gap and their gender bonus gap, we found one company that had a hundred percent bonus gap, which meant that no women were receiving bonuses. So the bonus gap tends to be higher. So that's the sort of average between men and women. And people will often explain that away, by saying that obviously we have more men in managerial positions, we have more men in some of the technically well-paid positions, more men in so-called professions. But when we talk about equal pay, we're talking about equal pay for work of equal value or work that's considered of equal value. And I think a really good illustration of this is some of the numerous cases that have been taken against local councils, for example, for saying that women who we would've traditionally called dinner ladies versus men we would've traditionally called bin men, and arguing that their work is of equal value to the binman, was proven that this was work of equal value and that the pay should be the same. 

Alice: So that's a case the Equal Pay Act applies to. 

Wanda: Yes, and there have been quite a lot of these sorts of cases. I mean, at the moment there are cases being taken in supermarkets as well, and in some organisations you can see, you know, the difference between men working in warehouses, for example, and women predominantly working in the retail on the floor. And it's really comes down to a lot of how you value the jobs. When we saw teaching become predominantly a feminised occupation, relatively speaking rates go down. When we see a profession become the domain of women or predominantly feminised, then you know, we do see that it's valued in a different way. 

Alice: And do we have, at the moment, do we have the legal means to challenge that phenomenon as a whole? Or can we only use something like the Equal Pay Act when we can prove that there is a direct comparison? 

Wanda: I think one of the key problems here is transparency. Many people don't know what they're paid in comparison to their colleagues. There's a huge culture of secrecy, and obviously, you know, the English are very reticent about talking about salaries and pay, and there is a misguided belief that you cannot disclose what you are paid either. So one of the ways, it's been a very long struggle with women having to find a comparator and having to find a man who's doing a job that they think is of equal value, and then proving that. So the burden has always fallen on the woman. 

Now obviously trade unions are there and trade unions can do this at scale, so they can survey their members, and they can get the pay data, and they can take cases that way. We've also seen no win, no fee lawyers taking cases on as well. But I think one of our approaches and one of our projects at the moment is to set up a database, and set up a site where men can put their information and their details in, so that we find those comparatives for women. Because as I say, you know, up until now the onus is really on the woman, to find out all of the information and to find out what men are earning. The legislation proposed by Fawcett Society contains a “right to know” where women would have the right to know this information. And I think, you know, that would be fantastic if we could get that through. 

Alice: So the Equal Pay Act comes in, in 1970. And we get to 2020, 50 years later, and still we find that women don't have equal pay with men. And firstly, I guess the question is, like, how do we know this? Because there are a lot of unequal pay deniers out there, so people who say, “oh, you know, equal pay doesn't exist, women just take the time off to become mothers, and that's that.

Wanda: I think there have been cases, obviously, where women have taken cases and we've found that out. I think it in some ways it is more complex than people think, because I think what we also have to look at is pay structures that organisations have. So coming back to that idea of how we value the jobs that women do, we see a huge difference between a secretary and someone who's an IT person, or you know, looking at the skills, looking at how this is related to the market. Now, the labour market is inherently gendered and is inherently not able to deliver equal pay or at least better pay for women, we know that. So when companies are talking about “oh, we're just paying what the market rates pay.” Then they are, in fact, incorporating and importing gender pay gaps as they exist. And there are a lot of high risk practices when we're talking about equal pay because we have things like, you know, pay bands, so if you've got large overlapping pay bands, this can be a problem. One of the ones, I think it's quite easy to get rid of, is when employers are recruiting, that they very often don't actually publish a set salary. So you could recruit somebody, and they negotiate their salary, and as we know, men generally tend to be better at negotiating a higher salary. Plus men are generally coming in with a higher salary because of the way that the labour market is constructed. 

Alice: Yeah. 

Wanda: So they can come in doing the same job but negotiate a higher start. And so, you know, some of the companies we've been talking to in the FTSE 100 recognise this and are trying to be more transparent about the way they recruit.

I mean, we've looked at lots of examples in our report, “From Pin Money to Fat Cats”, that shows companies advertising and saying, “we can talk about salary when you arrive”, more or less, or, you know, not actually advertising a salary, which I find very, very strange. 

Alice: Yeah, and I was going to ask you a bit more about your report. So the report is called “From Pin Money to Fat Cats”, and I think you published it around this time last year?

Wanda: Yes, we did. And we're just working on an update for the conference next week, in terms of the gender pay gap reporting. But unfortunately, the government has suspended gender pay gap reporting this year.

So we won't have an absolutely full record, but we will still release that in time for the conference. 

Alice: So you looked at the FTSE 100, so that's the top 100 public companies in the UK. What kind of things did you find? You've mentioned a little bit about the high risk factors for unequal pay. 

Wanda: Well, I think what's really interesting about the report is the number of household names that we all sort of interact with on a regular basis who have, you know, a ridiculously high gender pay gap, and as I mentioned, gender bonus gaps are absolutely eye watering. So we found, you know, high street banks with a gender pay gap in the sixties. We've got a range of different organisations that have split their holdings so that they more or less have men in one section and women in another company, and it's really, really interesting to see, when you read the annual reports of these companies, that they have to report on their gender pay gap and their gender bonus gap: all of them say, “but we do not have an equal pay problem”. And obviously they would do, because to breach equal pay is a breach of the law, it's unlawful, but they're very, very sure that they don't have an equal pay problem. And so that was why we wrote to all of the FTSE 100 to say, “congratulations for reporting, you know, we see that there are issues here. What are you doing about it? Do you have a plan? And, you know, have you actually conducted equal pay audits or equal pay reviews?” 

Alice: And what did they say? Did they write back to you?

Wanda: Well, I was very pleasantly surprised that about a third of the FTSE engaged with us. We've had deeper discussions with probably between eight and 10. We were hoping to have a round table to discuss this further, but obviously that's been put off for now. I do think there are companies who have a real desire to engage and really want to get this right, and I definitely think that the issue is more complex than I’d thought it was at the beginning, when we started this project. 

But then again, you know, we are seeing a trend away from pay bands and quite rigid pay structures to spot salaries, to basically paying somebody what the market says they're worth. And you know, I think that's incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

I think the other issue at the moment, of course, is that many companies are thinking about, “do they actually really need an office, do they need to have people in one place?” And when they're talking about the future of work, they're talking about expanding the range of freelancers, you know, talking about people wanting to work for more than one company, and to me that spells another big step towards a wider gig economy. And I think alarm bells really should be ringing. 

Alice: And is that a theme that you are hearing from the FTSE 100 employers? 

Wanda: I think it's not just the FTSE 100 employers. I think, to be honest, everybody is thinking about whether they need an office, those costs at the moment. But I think the future of work, there is a really interesting thing to keep an eye on because I think this move towards, well, I mean, I think it's a move back to Victorian times and piecemeal. You know, you get paid for what you produce and nothing else. You know, we've fought for over a hundred years for weekends, for sick pay, for maternity pay and paternity pay, and it looks as though all of these things are under threat. We've seen that in the gig economy already, but as we know, these are the things that affect women, most of all, and their families. 

Alice: Yeah. And so, for the people who are listening to this thinking, “well, do you know what? There is an Equal Pay Act, and it's existed for 50 years. Why is it not currently holding these companies or these flawed practices to account, what's wrong with it? Where are employees kind of falling through the cracks?” 

Wanda: Well, I think with any legislation, you know, it's fine to have legislation, it's a moral compass, but if there isn't any enforcement, then it's a problem. And I think one of the problems with the Act, and with so many Acts and parts of the Equality Act into which this was subsumed, is that it places the burden on the individual. So it places the burden on the individual to prove discrimination, to prove that these things are happening. And you know, it's very, very difficult, because of the dynamics of power, because undoubtedly there is that dynamic between the employer and the employee, because so many contracts are short term, and you know, people are scared to rock the boat.

And it takes a great deal of courage to take a case against your employer because, you know, most of the time you will end up not going back to that employer, not having a job. It's incredibly stressful. And before the government introduced fees for employment tribunals, which were then later taken to judicial review and revoked, you could spend anything up to about two years taking a case to a tribunal.

So, you know, for all of those women who have stood up and done this, you know, I absolutely applaud them. But unfortunately for all of those women, there are hundreds and thousands of women who just haven't been able to do that due to the resource, the time, or just barely trying to survive and keep a roof over their heads.

So it really is about finding a better way to make sure that equal pay is implemented, rather than putting the burden on individual women. 

Alice: And I was reading a legal blog earlier in preparation for this, which said that another key issue in equal pay claims is the identification of a comparator, so someone who you can point to and say, “this person is being paid more than me for the same or a comparable job”. But I guess for loads of women, especially women working in smaller companies, that in itself must be really difficult. 

Wanda: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's very difficult and let's face it, a lot of companies will have hired very brilliant legal minds to ensure that they are writing job descriptions that are not the same as other job descriptions. You know, we know this, we see this time and time again, but, people's job descriptions and job titles are changed, not necessarily to reflect any difference, but because they don't want to be subject to an equal pay claim, and it's really, really difficult. It's really, really difficult for women to know. Many workplaces do not have a transparent salary structure, and then, you know, you are potentially asking, you know, the thought of asking a male in your environment what he's paid, you know, I think would send shivers down the spine of most of us. You know, it's just not something that we feel it's useful to do.

And if you're in a very small organisation, then there are all the sort of relational problems of that. I mean, as I would say to women, as I would say to anybody, join a union, because your union can help and support you to do this. 

Alice: And do you hear from a lot of women who have been affected by this issue?

Wanda: Well, to celebrate the 50th anniversary, we've been featuring 50 women for the 50th anniversary. So we've been tweeting their stories every day. And you know it's really, although as I say it's heartening to hear from women who have had the courage to do this, we know that there are so many hidden voices of women who haven't been able to do this. But I think it's really good to celebrate the women who have, and I would urge your listeners to have a look on our website because we are now featuring the stories of those women in celebration. 

Alice: I would also urge listeners to do that, and I think that one of the things, I've watched some of the videos and one of the things that really struck me actually is, not the material harm that is done to someone by earning less, even though obviously there is that material harm, but it's just the kind of, the emotional impact that that has on you. And the frustration and the feeling of not being as valued, because of the fact that you are a woman goes so much deeper than just not being paid as much.

Wanda: Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right and I think, you know, your listeners who are Black, or Asian, or disabled, or LGBT+, or any of us who've experienced discrimination or who are not the sort of default white man in a workplace, I think we always have, you know, many of us do have that feeling that we are being treated differently, that we're not good enough, then when you see the fact that these women find out that they're not being paid the same. I mean, I think we more or less take it for granted that we would be paid the same amount as somebody doing the same job, and I think it's incredibly crushing to find out that you are not valued. And coming back to the current situation, I think it's wonderful to have the “Clap for Carers”, but many NHS staff, and retail staff, and refuse collectors, and the rest of them have pointed out, it would be nice if we had that in our pay packet, because you can't pay the bills with a clap on a Thursday evening.

And I think we really need to look at how we value people, how we value women, how we value roles in our society. You know, when we look at CEO pay and we see that nurses and teachers are valued at less than 1% or paid less than 1% of the average FTSE CEO, it really tells us what we value in our society.

And I would say even looking at CEOs, when we looked at them last year, we found that the average woman CEO, and I think there were six at that point, was earning 54% of the average of their male counterparts. So even when women have reached what could possibly be described as the top, they're running a FTSE 100 company, they are still subject to a gender pay gap. 

Alice: That is amazing, isn't it? I mean, I guess even when we get to a stage, if we ever get to a stage, where women at the top are being paid the same as men at the top, is that really what we're looking for here? Because I kind of feel like it's sort of the same argument as people who say, you've got a female prime minister now, or you've had a female prime minister now, therefore there's no such thing as gender inequality anymore.

Wanda: That I would say, you know, that is clearly ludicrous when you think of the number of prime ministers we've had. Two out of that number is really not, it's not gender equality is it? 

And I think, yes, there is that point that we shouldn't be focused on boardrooms, on getting women in boardrooms, getting women to be FTSE CEO 100 leaders, et cetera. I think it's important to have women in positions of power because with power comes the ability to change some of these structures. I'm not saying that as soon as you get a woman in power, they change the structures, because clearly we've seen that's not the case. So I do think we do need to have more women in power, obviously, but, I think my priority really is the poorly paid women. The women who are doing two or three jobs, the women who are, you know, paying extortion amounts in childcare, and trying to scrape together enough money to put food on the table or heat their flats or just keep going.

I think the burden on mental health, and on health itself, for women at the sharp end of inequality is absolutely huge. And we know in particular for families headed by women as single parent families, that this is really acute. So, you know, my emphasis really is on raising incomes for those women and indeed for men at that point, you know. Because we know that wages have stagnated for the longest period since the Napoleonic Wars. That as the rich grow richer, the poorer get poorer. And you know, that is clearly related. So we want to see people who are working not having to go to food banks because they're working for their poverty. We want to see a society where we don't have over 4 million children in poverty, which is set to rocket to 5 million. So there's a really a lot of work to do. 

Alice: And I guess in a way, guaranteeing equal pay for work of equal value is kind of just one piece of that jigsaw. But how do we improve just that aspect of it? How do we build on the Equal Pay Act or the Equality Act to make sure that women and men in future have the same earning power?

Wanda: Well, I think some of the things that we need to push for, I mean, we need to raise the profile of this issue because, you know, it is something that, as we say, even is confused with the gender pay gap, and people seem to think they've got the gender pay gap sorted because companies are reporting. Well, that's great. Companies are reporting if they have over 250 employees, but what they're not having to do is set out a roadmap or a plan for how they're going to close the gap. So, you know, when a gender pay gap reporting comes out, they have a bit of stick in the media and then they go on back to business as normal.

I think in terms of the Equal Pay Act, supporting the Fawcett Society's right-to-know policy, and the Bill that they are working with politicians on is really important. I think looking at, where people do have the privilege of being able to choose where they work, looking at the data. and questioning their high risk practices, I think is, is really useful as well.

And also looking at some of the work that we're doing, encouraging a culture of transparency, because I think we need to know what pay scales are in companies. We need to have a culture of transparency and that's a huge job. 

Alice: And just to go back to the Fawcett’s right-to-know policy, I think this is worth looking into if you are interested in this sort of thing because it's a really comprehensive, well-written policy.

I think the really crucial thing about it is, that what it's not is pointing at one other member of staff at the place where you work, and saying, “I want to know what he earns”. It's a right to an anonymised, two different employees’ salaries, so that you can have the comparator, and you can know whether or not you're being paid fairly.

It's a really, really good policy. 

Wanda: Yep, absolutely, and I think it's really, really great and I really commend the work that Fawcett is doing. They're doing a great piece of work at the moment as well with the Runnymede Trust. Because also, you know, one of the things we haven't really talked about here is the intersectionality of women's experiences. So, the multiple pay gaps that are experienced, Black and Asian women, by disabled women. This is all compounding, because in society we have to look at inequality altogether. We have to look at the effects of income inequality and who is at the bottom. So the Equality Trust’s message really is that in countries with high levels of inequality, such as the UK and the US, you know, we’re the poster children for inequality, if you like, we also see higher levels of poor mental health and poor physical health, and we see higher levels of drug and alcohol addiction, of incarceration, of violent crime. We see lower levels of social mobility and lower levels of educational attainment. So even looking at equal pay, which is a small part of income inequality, but it's part of that picture, it says that, you know, we are really damaging our society by having these inequalities and that everybody suffers from inequality, not just those at the sharp end. 

Alice: Yeah, absolutely. I was actually recently reading Michael Marmot's book, which is called The Health Gap. I don’t know if you've read it. That's something that I thought was really interesting about it, is that basically he shows that there is a direct relationship between your income and your health.

And you would assume that people who are unfortunately the very poorest in society, have the lowest levels of health, and that's true. But the thing is, is that even as you get to people who would consider themselves to be middle class, or even people who would consider themselves to be quite well off, they're still less healthy than people who are really, really wealthy.

And it just shows that it's all interrelated and that it's so important to solve these problems. 

Wanda: Absolutely. And you know, that comes back to the very genesis and the heart of the Equality Trust because we were set up over 10 years ago now by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, when they released their bestselling and groundbreaking book, The Spirit Level, which, you know, looked at this in the round and said, these are the problems that are related to inequality. 

And so we've had really high levels of inequality in this country for at least the last four decades, and with a decade of cuts. We know that with cuts to public services, they affect women most of all. And so coming into this awful pandemic, and by the way, it didn't have to be this, it could really have been any other sort of disaster, either economic or health-wise, that has really shown the effect of inequality. Whether we're looking at the fact that more Black and Asian people are dying, that people in the deprived areas, more of them are dying. You know, where we are looking at the fact that we have had this cumulative effect of inequality, a cumulative effect of cuts to public services. And so the social security net, the social security blanket that we thought we had, is completely threadbare. And it shows you what happens when you don't have provision for that in a society. 

Alice: So that was going to be my last question actually, which is that we are in these times suddenly talking a lot more about the need to value work differently, and we're seeing a society that suddenly realizes how valuable care workers, how valuable essential workers, like shop assistants, are.

And of course, as you said, a majority of these workers are women and a majority of them, the people on the frontline, also are BME people. I'm wondering, with or without a stronger Equal Pay Act, do you think that this is the beginning of a shift towards valuing women's work more?

Wanda: I would really love to think that, and I would really love to think that a year from now, two years from now, we've completely changed our pay structures, our, you know, how women are paid, where jobs are valued.

And at the beginning of this, I really did think that this would be the catalyst for changing our society, for making a genuinely kinder, more tolerant society, where we did value things in a different way. I'm scared that we are actually going to go back to that normal that was so damaging, and I think we are going to go back to a situation where many of the people who've been furloughed are made redundant, where we have a lot of job losses, and I think this is going to take a long time to recover from. 

And I'm afraid that when we are in times of recession, I think Paul Johnson from the IFS said we are beyond recession, and we're only a couple of months in. Then we know that it's women's jobs, it's Black people's jobs, it's Asian people's jobs. It's those sorts of jobs that go, in lots of areas of society. 

And I think we're going to have a huge reconfiguring of our society and the labour market. But I wouldn't like to make any predictions that it will be for the better.

Alice: That's a really sombre note to end it on. 

Wanda: Yeah, I think it's easy to be pessimistic and I think, you know, just like sort of days in this so-called lockdown, you know, some days are better than others. Some days I think we're full of hope, the community spirit that we've seen and other days, you know, we feel quite depressed about what's happening in the world.

And I think there are two beacons of hope for me. We've been working with young people, and their determination to get involved with activism, to use their agency and to change their parts of the world, I think has been really heartening for me. And I think this will carry on, because once they realize they have the power to change things, then you don't put that genie back in the bottle too easily.

And I think the other thing is here at the Equality Trust, we have about 20 local groups who work on inequality in their area, and what we've seen is a determination to keep going, and they've turned to, sort of, digital means now to hold meetings, or to get involved or to lobby their councils.

And so I would say to people, if you are wanting to join up with different groups locally, we're always happy to facilitate that. And if there isn't an Equality Trust group near you, then, you know, get in touch with us and we can support you in starting one up. I think what's been really great is being at meetings where we've had lots of different local counsellors, and people from different groups in the area coming together to say, we need to work together now. 

And I think this is the key part, you know, whether we're working in mental health, whether we're working in domestic violence and abuse, whether we're working in education, whether we're working on the economic side of it, whether we're working in youth violence, we all need to come together to say that if we don't tackle inequality, we're just going to carry on with more of the same.

So we need to decisively reconfigure how we look at society. And it's a long haul, but I do believe it can be done, because inequality isn't inevitable. 

Alice: Wanda, thank you very much. 

Wanda: Thank you. 

Alice: Thank you. And listeners, if you look below the podcast, you can find links to the Equality Trust and a link to the from the “From Pin Money to Fat Cats” report.