Guidance

How to make Feminist Open Government tangible - reflections on the UK’s first FOGO workshop

Published 3 April 2019

In 2019, Open Government Partnership is focusing on gender and inclusion as key priorities. During Open Government Week, DCMS and Open Heroines gathered a group of civil society members, government officials, and private sector representatives to share ideas and discuss how to make the Feminist Open Government Initiative (FOGO) more specific and tangible.

What is Feminist Open Government?

According to the Open Government Partnership who coined the term, FOGO aims to bring research and action to encourage governments and civil society to champion initiatives leading to gender advancements in open government. Another key element of FOGO approach is establishing an international coalition of partners to drive and maintain this focus on gender and inclusion.

The overarching goal of FOGO by the end of 2019 is for at least 30% of OGP country and civil society partners to take concrete gender actions, such as more ambitious gender commitments in their national action plans more inclusive co-creation processes. This could be achieved through deepening evidence around a gender-centric approach to open government and its impact on public service delivery, addressing corruption, and opening up civic space. Simultaneously, governments should be encouraged to design and implement gender-aware OGP commitments by developing model commitments, collecting best practices, and offering direct technical support.

However, this broad definition makes it challenging to conceptualise what FOGO really is. Where and how can governments commit to doing more to advance women? How can we create those commitments using open government and national action plans as levers? It’s easy to use data as one of the main action points for FOGO, since gender data is lacking everywhere. While gender data is needed in the UK to support gender policies, we wanted to think beyond data collection and publication. This is why for the Open Government Week 2019 we designed a workshop aiming to unpack what FOGO means on the ground in the UK and translate this agenda into a set of practical actions.

First, we asked the participants what FOGO means to them. The responses we received could be put together into a more detailed, crowdsourced definition of FOGO as “the intersection of open government and gender issues that aims to ensure that the feminist data perspective is integrated into how we build our governments and their policies and services so it addresses the socioeconomic inequalities stemming from centuries of gender data and pay gaps. This could be achieved through adding feminist lens and voice to discussions and research on seemingly unrelated topics, for example, corruption, healthcare, open contracts and creating spaces for women in the open government, open data, tech, and other related communities”.

Having established what FOGO means for our workshop participants, we then began to map challenges in pursuing this initiative. The overarching challenge that emerged in this exercise was creating a lasting, sustainable movement to implement the values and ethos of FOGO not only in the next few years or at its peak of popularity but as a systematic review. Skill and experience gaps have been identified as the biggest issue related to capabilities and avoiding gender washing as a key challenge on a conceptual level. Other issues that emerged in this phase of the workshop were considering how FOGO would work in other countries/cultures to make it a truly global movement, and the fact that due to having ‘feminist’ in the name, it is a highly political issue.

What do we need to do to make FOGO work?

We then moved to brainstorm on the actions that we could take in order to introduce the FOGO approach in our everyday working lives. The first set of actions could be implemented by the governments and employers from other sectors; the second set of actions looks at the policymaking sphere specifically.

In governments/ workplaces:

• Including women’s groups to make governments dynamic more equal

• Ensuring more equal representation in parliament and government

• When recruiting, having a framework for roles that exemplify what ‘good’ looks like in a gender-neutral manner

• Encouraging political participation at all levels

• Creating skills pathways for female leadership

• Providing equal duration paternity leave paid by the state

• Offering flexible, part-time work schedules

• Providing access to legal aid provision for discrimination cases

In the policymaking sphere FOGO could be advanced by the following actions:

• Having a legal obligation for new policies to: 1) Be evidence based; 2) Have a review protocol; 3) Have an impact assessment with the emphasis on gender/intersectional analysis on all policies Adding gender lens to all OGP commitments

• Being transparent about who participates in policy consultation

• Encouraging participation in local governance processes when developing develop policy

• Creating policies that protect the idea of FOGO and people in this space

• Stressing the importance of policy around gender across all sectors and parties

• Creating legislation against unfair employment practices for all genders and ensuring that flexible hours and paternity leave are available for men as well

Overall, for FOGO to be successful we need to:

• Address all, the social and workplace-based, aspects of gender-based discrimination

• Have a system of values coupled to the FOGO movement and exemplify the benefits of the movement

With FOGO deriving from the open government movement that is based on open data, it is instrumental to ask what kind of data do we need to support FOGO?

The proposed datasets are as follows (some of them are already partially available):

• Gender disaggregated data on procurement

• Transparency and data on airtime of genders on TV

• Data portraying gendered salary breakdown by bands across sectors

• Transparency and data on the financial impact that having children has on women

• Disaggregated data on health, e.g. mortality during childbirth, including BAME mortality; childbirth overview data

• Data on vulnerable groups that are currently underreported, e.g. definition of homelessness doesn’t encompass people who don’t have a fixed address despite not living on the streets, thus excluding them from getting any support - this group tend to be women, often single mothers

• Data on social care performed by adults

• Data on disabled persons

Actions that could improve the FOGO data are:

• Maintaining gender intersectionality in data collection

• Gender disaggregation of algorithms in private and public sectors

This workshop helped us think of FOGO beyond research and provided us with some tangible actions we can take going forward. Nevertheless,these are still small steps and we have a lot of work to do. We will continue to feed into this research with a perspective of building a FOGO roadmap that could be implemented by other governments to fully utilise open government as a tool for enhancing gender equality. If you have any ideas or comments or you would like to co-create the FOGO agenda, please get in touch with natalia.domagala@culture.gov.uk.

Collated by Natalia Domagala and Mor Rubinstein (Open Heroines) following an Open Government Week workshop. This is an open discussion led by DCMS and our civil society partners, not an official statement of policy.