Symone Clark-McGuire, PA & Communications Officer, Women’s Pioneer Housing introduces the newly formed Women’s Housing Forum.
Housing is without doubt a feminist issue. Women’s lower average incomes, additional caring responsibilities and greater experience of domestic abuse and sexual violence have a significant impact on their ability to find and keep suitable housing.
For women without a stable and secure home, accessing and succeeding in education and employment becomes all the more difficult.
The Women’s Housing Forum was set up to research and address the challenges that women face in accessing and keeping housing, raising awareness of the link between women’s housing needs and gender inequality.
We began as a group of women working in the housing sector and, having seen the inequalities women faced when accessing suitable housing, we wanted to do something about it. The forum emerged as a means to address the structural inequality that women face, aiming to influence housing providers to address women’s specific needs. The steering group of the forum comprises tenants and women working in different parts of the sector. Our vision for the forum is a place where everyone who cares about women’s housing can have an equal voice and come together to tackle these issues.
Inaugural Event – 18th Jan 2019
We are delighted to announce and invite you to our inaugural event! We are meeting on Friday 18th January, from 10.30am to 4pm at The Institution Of Structural Engineers 47-58 Bastwick Street London, EC1V 3PS
The forum is collaborative by nature, we want to share ideas and suggestions on what the forum should cover, and how. For that reason, we are running the event in a workshop format, each led by someone with lived experience of the issues raised and a housing professional.
The workshop topics we have chosen for the first forum event are:
- Women and Young Girls and Homelessness
- Domestic Abuse
- Older Women
- Women and Design
Intersectionality, which considers the overlapping contexts that women face in relation to their race, sexuality, age etc. alongside being a woman, is at the heart of the work and research the forum wants to do and will be considered at every workshop.
The event is free and open to anyone interested in women’s housing issues. Spaces will be limited though, so please drop us a message via twitter @Womens_Housing to register your interest.
This article also appears in CT Brief – 40
