The U.K. Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) has released a report titled, Inspiring Women Leaders: Advancing Gender Equality in Jewish Communal Life.
According to the report’s executive summary, “At the heart of the recommendations is a recognition that change needs to come from women themselves, both individually and collectively; from the Jewish community’s organisations and institutions and also, from schools and youth organisations. Before change can take place in organisations, they need to recognise where and when there is indeed a problem.”
The report stopped short of recommending the introduction of controversial quotas and targets despite the considerable support these measures received in its consultation survey earlier this year. Instead, the report proposes the establishment of an award ‘which recognises, through varying levels of achievement, organisations that move towards gender equality.’ The Award for Gender Equality will measure progress through a range of criteria, including recruitment policies for lay and professional roles and policies which ‘aim to accommodate the challenges faced by women in the workplace’.
You can download the complete report here.
For more, read Miriam Shaviv’s, You’ve come a long way, baby? Not if you’re a Jewish woman in the UK.
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The report lists the role of tradition/halakhah as one of the barriers to women’s advancement, but none of the recommendations specifically address this issue. Many UK Jews are non-observant, but the vast majority of the affiliated choose to join Orthodox congregations, thus tacitly accepting the associated leadership limitations imposed on women, including the ban on women serving as chairs of synagogue boards. With one or two notable exceptions, there are no women rabbis of national stature. The lack of role models and the commitment to a conservative interpretation of halakhah should be explicity addressed by the recommendations.