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Policy Committee

Posted on Staff and committees by · June 17, 2019 2:12 PM

What is the Policy Committee?

The Policy Committee is made of the spokesperson and movement builder for each of our seven policy goals and the party in Scotland. It is chaired by the leader of the party, Mandu Reid.

The Committee helps us communicate our fantastic policies far and wide, growing our movement and representing us as spokespeople at events and in the media. 

Go straight to the policy area you're looking for:

Equal Representation 

Equal Pay and Opportunity

Equal Parenting and Caregiving

Equal Media

Equal Education

Ending Violence Against Women and Girls

Equality in Health

Equal Scotland

 

About the Policy Committee

How were the Policy Committee members chosen?

Policy Committee members have been elected by Party members. 

What do Policy Committee members do?

Individually, the spokespeople participate in public debates on their area on behalf of the Party, in consultation with the Party Leader or Chief of Staff. The movement builders reach out to organisations and individuals to build relationships with people relevant to their policy area. They are also required to monitor developments in their policy areas and update the Leader and other spokespeople on developments, as well as build alliances with organisations that share the Party’s objectives.

Can members put forward motions to update policies? 

Motions to change, update or add to our policies can be put forward by members, branches, the Party Leader and the Policy Committee, in accordance with the Party’s Constitution. Collectively, the Policy Committee reviews all policy motions to check their coherence and consistency with our mission and objectives, before they are put forward to Party Conference.

You can contact the teams for each policy area at their dedicated email addresses, given below.   

Objective: Equal Representation 

Read about the policy >>

Contact the team: [email protected]

Harini Iyengar,
Spokesperson for Equal Representation

Since Harini’s election in 2016, she has taken every opportunity to stand for public office - for Parliament, Hackney Mayor and two council seats. She is proud our London members selected her as Lead Candidate for London Assembly elections 2020.

She has given many political speeches promoting our policies in the media, including BBC and Sky news, Newsnight, Victoria Derbyshire, and by writing news articles in New Statesman, Huffington Post, and the Independent.

She has worked in partnership with the Equal Representation Movement Builders, and formed strong collaborative links with campaign groups, including 50:50 Parliament, Operation Black Vote, Green New Deal, DiEM25, and Fawcett Society, as well as other political parties and many charities.

Harini helped write our General Election and European manifestos. With Eleanor, she successfully proposed a motion to Conference.

Pamela Ritchie,
Movement Builder for Equal Representation

Pamela is passionate passionate about connecting our grassroots campaigning with communities and national organisations to bring about change.

She is also an active campaigner for proportional representation with Make Votes Matter, attending alliance building events, discussing national campaigns with cross party MPs as well as some of the leading voices in electoral reform.

Pamela joined The Women’s Equality Party in 2016 and has been actively involved with the Greenwich Branch from the start, standing in the local elections in May 2018. 
 

Objective: Equal Pay and Opportunity 

Read about the policy >>

Contact the team: [email protected]

Celine Thomas,
Spokesperson for Equal Pay and Opportunity

Celine has a proven track record: standing for Parliament and two Council seats, she has been a strong and visible advocate for the Women’s Equality Party.

She led the successful Tunbridge Wells branch for over two years while always helping others to stand and run campaigns. As their spokesperson on television, radio and the local papers, she has appeared twice on BBC TV to speak about the pay gap and new reporting rules, as well as being interviewed on BBC radio and by KentLive for a piece on the pay-gap in Kent Councils.

Celine initiated and led discussions with AXA PPP’s Finance Director and employee networks on their gapping pay inequality affecting many local women. She has sought to increase WEP’s visibility by challenging our public authorities and speaking up against pay-gap complicity.

 

Kathryn Adkins,
Movement Builder for Equal Pay and Opportunity

Kathryn is extremely passionate about tackling the Gender Pay Gap - she is a founding member of the Women’s Equality Party and co-leader of the Manchester branch. She finds it shocking that the UK still has a significant Gender Pay Gap, and many organisations still don’t believe that they need to try and close their Gap, as they believe it's due to women’s choices!

Kathryn is a qualified accountant and has several years’ experience working in senior management positions to effect organisational change. She is on the Board of a large, national charity, and is responsible for shaping strategy and ensuring good governance. She has worked with organisations on their Gender Pay Gap reporting and has run pop-up stalls educating the public on the issue.

As Movement Builder, Kathryn will work with organisations to educate them on the causes of their Gap and the steps they can take to close it. She will work with our fantastic branches to roll out a best practice guidance nationwide. 

Objective: Equal Parenting and Caregiving 

Read about the policy >>

Contact the team: [email protected]

Cheryl Clements,
Spokesperson for Equal Parenting and Caregiving

A recent member of the WEP, Cheryl was spurred to join after years of frustration and fatigue as the same old excuses and barriers blocked true equality. She is both passionate and practical and is continually dismayed by the wasted potential in the world because women are held back.

Professionally she started her career as a lawyer before moving into tech and co-founding a creative education start-up. She is now a leadership coach working with entrepreneurs and leaders who want to change the world for the better. She has a young son and understands the constant juggle between parenting, work and the good old cognitive load. Her passion for equal parenting and caregiving comes from personal and professional experience of seeing women blocked and distracted from professional success because they are carrying too much of the burden.

Idealistic, she is hopeful that we’re now at a portal where we’ll end the short-sighted and entrenched beliefs that stop all from thriving.

Objective: Equal Media 

Emma Ko,
Spokesperson for Equal Media

Emma thinks equality is not only better for everyone, but we need everyone to get this message loud and clear. She believes her media experience will help WE be part of creating this crucial narrative.

As a screenwriter and programme-maker, Emma has worked in the broadcast industry for almost twenty years. She woke up to the institutionalised sexism in the industry and became involved in campaigns to get more women’s voices on our screens, including the Writers’ Guild Equality Writes campaign, launched after a damning report with stats e.g. only 13% of primetime drama is written by women. She advocates on behalf of female BAME screenwriters for inclusion in writing rooms and has set up a film-making co-operative producing and supporting female filmmakers in the under-represented ‘genre’ creative landscape.

She holds the intersection of politics and media to be important, as a lot of regulation is done in-house, and believes it’s only when public service broadcasters like the BBC are held to account by outside auditors, within the law, that gender and equality goals will truly be met. 

Rozina Ahmed,
Movement Builder for Equal Media

Rozina has worked for the Mayor’s Office (GLA) for almost 15 years on various strategies and policies delivering key cultural festivals and events -promoting equality, diversity, inclusion and social integration to a multicultural international audience. 
 
She has also worked at the BBC in Documentaries & Investigation where she established extensive experience and knowledge of media law and key broadcasting guidelines. 
 
"I absolutely believe I will make a positive contribution to WEP and implement action that will leave a positive legacy for future generations".

 

Objective: Equal Education 

Read about the policy >>

Contact the team: [email protected]

Caroline Hunt,
Spokesperson for Equal Education

Up until 2016 Caroline was a secondary school teacher. Her specialism was A-Level Politics but like most teachers she had to teach plenty outside of her comfort zone: Psychology, Sociology, History, Geography, IT and SRE were all part of her experience.

Caroline Hunt helped to run our parliamentary campaigns in Shipley and Lewisham East. She is the former leader of the Leeds WEP branch, and helps coordinate the Northern Branches Team

Caroline is passionate about WE’s fantastic Education policies (inclusive SRE, more men in primary and early years, more women in SLT, compulsory formal sexual harassment policies, free sanitary products in schools, gender free uniform options) and wants more people to hear about them.

Guilene Marco,
Movement Builder for Equal Education

Guilene is an activist and has been organising community events and campaigning on local issues, such as fighting against budget cuts in education and joining the national campaign Fair Funding in All Schools.

Objective: Ending Violence Against Women and Girls 

Read about the policy >>

Contact the team: [email protected]

Tabitha Morton,
Spokesperson for Ending Violence Against Women and Girls

Tabitha believes ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) is the most important of our 7 core objectives. While it’s still acceptable for women to be raped and killed, none of us will be free. We must end this epidemic of violence to achieve true equality.

Tabitha currently leads WEP’s work to end VAWG:
• She has implemented an end VAWG strategy with the Metro Mayor of      Liverpool.
• She is working with the branch in Manchester to do the same.
• She has introduced a campaign model for branches that takes activists on a journey to becoming experts on ending VAWG in their area.

Alongside the elected Movement Builder she wants to continue this work so we have a UK-wide team who are committed to ending VAWG.

Tabitha has a strong track record of both press and broadcast interviews for WEP and am often requested to comment both locally and nationally on VAWG matters, as well as receiving invitations to speak publicly at conferences and events.

Christine Dean,
Movement Builder for Ending Violence Against Women and Girls

Christine is Waltham Forest Branch Leader, a List Candidate for GLA 2020 elections and a member of the BAME caucus. She is a former family lawyer with over 20 years’ experience representing women and young girls who were subject to domestic violence and abuse.

Her experience gives her a unique insight into the current problems and failings in the protection available for women and young girls today. Christine wants to play a part in shaping more effective and female-focused violence prevention policies. She has an excellent working knowledge of the party's policies on VAWG.

She is a confident networker, adept at building positive relationships with stakeholders, change-makers and service providers. Christine is keen to work with local branches; she wants to learn from their knowledge and experience and bring their ideas to the policy team. She believe WEP policies should be current, develop and evolve. She wants to work on the party’s manifestos and briefings, as her experience in drafting legal advice and opinions will be useful in carrying out these tasks.

Objective: Equality in Health

Read about the policy >>

Contact the team: [email protected]

Rebecca Manson Jones,
Spokesperson for Equality in Health

Rebecca is a founder-member of WEP and member of the Policy Committee since 2018 as Equality in Health Spokesperson. She is  also a  WEP Candidate for the London Assembly  in 2021 following two of our most successful local council campaigns in 2018 and 2016 when she was WEP's first-ever local council candidate.

She is the Artistic Director and co-CEO of Spare Tyre Theatre, one of the UK's first feminist theatre companies, featuring work made with by and for women who have experience of violence or abuse, championing learning disabled and neuro divergent artists and pioneering the role of arts in elder care, especially dementia. Her previous work has been cited by Arts Council England as a model of good practice for diversity and inclusion. Her innovative work including gender-swapping classic plays has received international recognition. During Covid, Rebecca has maintained links with her audiences and has campaigned for freelances sponsoring the Freelance TaskForce.

In her private life Rebecca has been unpaid carer at the end of life for her parents and right now is in recovery - sort of - with Long Covid.

 

Objective: Equality in Scotland

e-mail [email protected]

Ruth Wilkinson,
Spokesperson for Scotland

Ruth has lived in Scotland for over twenty years and as a founder member of WEP has been active in the Glasgow branch since its early days. After many years as a musician, often touring the country as a pianist with Scottish Opera, she is now mid-career change and doing an MSc in Applied Gender Studies at Strathclyde University. Her research is focused on two main areas: poverty, and particularly why Universal Basic Income would benefit women; and political representation, looking at what the political parties are doing to promote gender equality in the Scottish Parliament, and researching how ageism affects women in politics.

Scotland’s not a bad place to be campaigning for women’s equality - having a First Minister who is not just female but avowedly feminist certainly helps. As Scotland spokesperson Ruth is working with Movement Builder Suzanne to grow WEP’s membership north of the border and make the Women’s Equality Party a force to be reckoned with in the 2021 Holyrood election.

Suz Martin,
Movement Builder for Scotland

As a public affairs professional for a national mental health charity, Suz can be found in the Scottish Parliament and in constituency offices on a regular basis, in addition to the many meetings with civil servants, promoting carefully developed policy positions. 
She has experience in a myriad of policy areas, from planning and environmental regulation, right through to healthcare, social care, and social security.
 

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