Mainstreaming equality
Do not change channel! This is not a buzz-word. It's a real business-word, and it means a lot of good stuff (if it's done well).
Mainstreaming equality has three branches.
1. Making your policies real.
An organisation can have the most beautifully-written policies, policies that win prizes, but they are of no use at all if they sit on a shelf in the documents store, or in a corner of the corporate file-server that no-one even knows how to reach.
If a department of children's services has a fantastic corporate equal-ops policy about combating homophobia and transphobia and delivering services equally to young LGB/T people---and then a youth-worker runs a sexual-health session that's only about avoiding teenage pregnancies, the policy has failed. It probably failed because the youth-worker hasn't even heard of it. If a young LGB/T person asks why LGB/T young people aren't getting appropriate sexual-health education, and the youth-worker points to a Youth Service policy that doesn't mention LGB/T people at all, then the corporate policy has failed again: whoever wrote the Youth Services policy ought to have started from the corporate policy (but had probably never heard of it, see above).
Mainstreaming equality is about creating good procedures---the working machinery that can make policies come true. It starts by:
- making sure all the policies fit together, and then
- making sure everyone has read them, and then
- getting each service-area to turn them into practical procedures, and then
- helping each employee work out how these procedures help them do their job successfully.
And every hour, every minute, spent doing this is worth while. (At least if the policies are good to start with.)
(The alternative --- not doing any of this --- is to trot down the road towards corporate failure, and possible harm to service-users, and (now) a very real possibility of legal challenge, so let's not even think about not doing it, eh?)
2. Covering all the bases. Joined up thinking all the way from A to Z.
If an organisation (say a hospital trust) spends two months getting its Gender Equality Scheme right, and writes a really good one,and mainstreams it carefully through every service area (wonderful! all credit to them)...
...and completely fails to notice that some women are lesbians, and that parts of their obstetrics, gynaecology and maternity departments have got serious problems with institutional homophobia, then how much has the hospital trust actualy achieved? The policy that was meant to make things more fair for women hasn't actually done much to help a lot of the women it was aimed at.
Mainstreaming equality doesn't mean "working hard at the bits that come within a senior manager's comfort zone". It means getting equality right for everyone, all the way from A to Z.
3. Checking. Making sure it works.
You've got your good policies and procedures in place, and each employee has been properly trained, and knows what all this means for them in practice. Now check that it's actually happening on the ground.