Celebrating the Equally Safe at Work pilot councils

We are delighted to announce that Aberdeen City Council, Midlothian Council, North Lanarkshire Council and Shetland Islands Council have been awarded bronze accreditation for the Equally Safe at Work pilot.

We also want to congratulate all the councils who participated in the pilot for their great work on Equally Safe at Work. All councils have received pilot accreditation which recognises their important role in gathering key learning on local government employment practice that will shape the future development of the programme.

Equally Safe at Work is an innovative employer accreditation programme that was developed by Close the Gap and piloted in seven local authorities from January 2019 until November 2020. The pilot councils were Aberdeen City, Highland, Midlothian, Perth & Kinross, Shetland Islands, North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire.

Equally Safe at Work was developed to prevent violence against women and advance women’s labour market equality in Scotland through working directly with employers to ensure that workplace policies and practice take account of women’s experiences of employment. The programme has proven to be an important lever in enabling councils to take substantive action on gender equality and demonstrate leadership on violence against women. As a result of the pilot, the early adopter councils have implemented a number of important changes to the workplace including developing initiatives to address occupational segregation, developing violence against women policies and improved data gathering systems on employee experiences of violence against women, and other aspects of gender inequality.

You can read more about the successes from the pilot here.