Ms Miriam Holt:

We thank the Chair and members for the invitation to join them today to discuss the challenges facing women accessing education, leadership and political roles. Women’s Collective Ireland, WCI, is a national women’s community development organisation advancing marginalised women’s equality through community education. We represent and work directly with women experiencing disadvantage through our 17 grassroots women’s community projects based in urban and rural communities throughout Ireland. Our input on this topic will be in the context of the grassroots women we work with.

WCI utilises women’s community education as a vital tool in tackling educational disadvantage for women as it provides a model of education, from first steps to third level, which encompasses the needs of women. It starts with the lived experience of the participants and validates those experiences and their knowledge. We recognise that adequate supports must be contained within community education programmes to ensure access for the most marginalised of women. We also recognise the need for a greater focus on integrating diverse women on the basis of areas of commonality rather than nationality or legal status. Integration should also include other minority communities.

In our experience, barriers to access include lack of adequate funding and lack of recognition in policy and decision-making arenas; lack of recognition that engagement is a longer process for marginalised women; and the need for targeted supports, including free childcare, mentoring, educational and IT equipment and specific needs-based supports. Childcare and social care responsibilities are a real and consistent barrier to women’s participation. WCI urges that sustainable budgets for education programmes include the payment of social care allowances and out-of-pocket expenses to participants undertaking community education. Flexibility in funding the delivery of community education courses is essential. WCI sees insufficient access points for entry pathways and progression routes are weak. Starting points can become staying points. Non-traditional students do not easily merge into the traditional pathways of education. Ireland still has low literacy levels and the digital divide is causing barriers. The costs and speed of technology is changing, leaving many behind.

With regard to women accessing leadership roles, WCI would like to emphasise that grassroots women are very active and visible at local level and contribute to civil society but they are not getting beyond representation on local school boards and community group volunteering roles. This is becoming a stagnant route for them. There are no next steps outside of local level activism. The six Cs - cash, childcare, confidence, culture, candidate selection procedures and cyber - are well documented as barriers for women. The women we work with have highlighted fear and impostor syndrome when considering leadership roles, saying there are not many people with their accent there or that they cannot do public speaking.

Supporting women’s access includes measures such as gender mainstreaming; ensuring political parties run women candidates in a meaningful, serious and supportive way and do not engage in tokenism; and ensuring the task force on keeping women in politics safe has input from civil society actors and organisations. The task force should not only consider women currently occupying elected roles but be expanded to include women in activism and those not yet in political spaces. We also recommend funding for organisations working with women on the ground in the area of leadership and representation. Many of our projects have been engaging in work to promote women’s leadership and representation through voter participation programmes and through our planned delivery of a women's leadership programme in 17 projects to more than 200 grassroots women across the country from participation to politics. WCI collaborates with other organisations to work towards our collective goals in this area. Currently, women around the country are feeding into and updating our WCI manifesto by naming the issues that affect grassroots women.

Community and feminist education enhances critical consciousness and awareness of power relations and increases social and political knowledge. We ask that these programmes be funded. We share a collective vision for an island with a well-educated society, not just those who can easily afford it. We recognise the need for policy to be developed to progress education for grassroots women in all their diversity. WCI is calling on the Government to implement sustainable funding, ensuring continuity of high-quality, outcome-focused community education with women that will allow for unique and flexible education and training programmes. The topics discussed today are not challenges for women; they are challenges for the State and society. We thank the committee for the opportunity to discuss these challenges.