This article draws on primary research undertaken in the North East of England to explore the way in which inequalities in access to transport resources impact on women's opportunities to enter the public domain of paid work. It advances the idea of spatiality as a social construction and, building on previous studies, it explores the way in which a gender division of transport operating in the home and at work limits women's access to temporal, financial and personal and geographic travel resources; ultimately constraining women's mobility and restricting their employment opportunities. Finally, the article will argue that, although some women can achieve 'masculine' levels of transport resources, the majority of women are stuck in the slow lane and their mobility deprivation often confines them to the private world of the family, or alternatively, to part-time, low paid work on the periphery of the labour market. This leads to the conclusion that there is an urgent need to provide women with a range of mobility choices which enhance their access to the labour market and to challenge the socially constructed processes which underpin the discrimination women face when accessing the world of paid employment.
The importance of engaging communities is increasingly recognized within area-base d regeneration programmes. There is also an acceptance within evaluation theory and the wider policy making and practitioner community that local people's involvement in the process of identifying and researching community needs and aspirations offers the potential to generate meaningful data while also facilitating a subsequent increase in community capacity and capital. However, there are a number of dif culties involved in negotiating a participatory approach which relate to the constraints of national policy, tensions in partnership structures, levels of commitment to community empowerment and community capacity. This paper explores the extent to which these barriers can be addressed by drawing on a number of projects undertaken in the Tyneside conurbation in north-east England which sought to encourage community involvement in evaluation by employing, training and supporting local residents to carry out a range of baseline and impact surveys. It shows that a model of participation can be developed which allows local people to play a successful role in the research process, while also delivering a range of data that will assist partnerships in the planning and analysis of services to meet local needs and facilitate regeneration. It is a model which is underpinned by a concern to facilitate empowerment, to foster inclusivity, and to ensure exibility in research design and feedback to communities. It also has the potential to impact on institutional capacity within area-based partnerships, structures and environments, and as such it will be of interest to policy makers, practitioners and communities with a genuine commitment to adapting the principles of local people's participation in the process of change.
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Wedded to the car: women, employment and the importance of private transport Lynn DobbsThis paper draws on primary research undertaken in the North East of England (NE) to explore the importance of private transport in allowing women to access employment. It outlines the evidence base which exists to consider the impact of mobility on social exclusion. It then analyses the links between women, transport and the labour market, women's transport choices, and the relationship between women's access to private transport and their employment position. It concludes by arguing that access to private transport is a key factor in determining women's economic inclusion, and that the development of sustainable transport systems may have serious gender implications. q
Over a number of decades academics have sought to devise categorisations of the roles that councillors perform. The advent of new political management arrangements has challenged these categorisations, with some academics -and practitioners -proposing the emergence of a new
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