Breaking down the 1.9 million increase in employment.

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If drug users cannot be dissuaded from taking drugs, is it better to help ensure their drug-taking is as safe as possible? This is the harm-minimisation approach that Glasgow City Council is taking with its proposal to open a facility for heroin users. This safer drug consumption facility, sometimes referred to in the press as a “fixing room” would provide clean needles, safe spaces and medical supervision alongside advice, treatment referral and a number of other facilities. In some cases, where current treatments were unsuccessful, users may be offered medical-grade heroin, diamorphine.

This not uncontroversial idea is aimed at a small but vulnerable group of drug users who inject drugs in public places. Street use causes problems for the wider community, such as discarded needles, but also poses great risks to users, who face increased risk of infection, blood-borne viruses or overdose. Glasgow council’s proposal arrives following a significant increase in HIV infections and drug-related deaths among addicts.

The Glasgow proposal would be the first facility to open in the UK, although as part of a King’s College London research study, limited trials in 2007 involved giving heroin to addicts in special clinics in London, Darlington and Brighton. Drug consumption rooms have been introduced in ten other countries including Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Australia and Canada.

All are supervised by trained staff and have a number of rules and regulations about who can access them and what behaviour and practices are allowed. Often these are set up near to known drug markets, so drug users can take their recently purchased drugs in a clean, safe environment – rather than injecting in alleys, parks, stairwells or public toilets.

Drugs policy expert Professor Neil McKeganey has expressed concerns about the proposal, doubting that it would reduce rates of heroin use and heroin-related deaths. He claims there is no evidence that the facility would work. Certainly a lack of evidence was the reason successive UK governments have rejected the idea, most recently in 2006. However, the experience of countries where such facilities are allowed has shown that they have been successful in reducing HIV infections, drug overdoses and issues surrounding public injecting and discarded needles.

While there is often public opposition to drug consumption rooms, studies that have evaluated their use in other countries conclude that they are cost effective, often reach the most vulnerable drug users and lead to less public nuisance. Initial public resistance towards them was found to fall once they had opened.

For drug consumption rooms to be successful, a key group of people that must be persuaded are the drug users themselves. We conducted a study of attitudes towards safer consumption facilities among current or former injecting drug users, mainly heroin users. We found they were largely in favour and would make use of them if one were to open nearby. They were also willing to abide by the rules that using such a facility would require – such as no drug sharing.

While the respondents gave various reasons for public injecting, the majority who had injected in public places in the previous month did so out of necessity – despite only around a third being homeless – and would rather have an alternative. Some felt injecting in public was degrading, while others did not wish to be seen by children.

One aspect that drug users were not in favour of, however, were rules forbidding injecting in the neck or groin – rules common to these sorts of facilities in other countries.

Those users with a long history of injecting and who use public places are at high risk of death from overdose – and it is these high-risk users that are being targeted, as they stand to benefit most from the facilities provided by drug consumption rooms.

So studies have shown that safe consumption facilities can succeed in reaching long-term drug users who have had no previous contact with treatment services, and can be effective in getting some users of the facility into treatment programmes. A centre such as the one proposed in Glasgow, which still requires legal approval, would need to be monitored – and should be only one part of a strategy to address problem drug taking. But if it reduces the harms of public injecting, reduces HIV infection rates, overdoses and deaths among some of society’s most vulnerable people, then it may be that the time has come to trial a different approach.

Georgia Butler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

In this section Manifesto clash: EU referendums Introduction Our European Union membership is a divisive topic; it was when we entered in 1973, and has remained the case ever since the membership referendum two years later. Ironically, according to the EU’s own research in 2011, “the vast majority of Britons (82%) said that they knew […]

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The majority of employers pay arrears after receiving a formal notice of underpayment.

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The number of foreign-born people in the UK has probably passed eight million, but that's not the same as the number of non-UK nationals. Just ask Boris.

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It's true that Britain has seen a larger net increase in employment than the rest of the EU combined, and that Yorkshire has seen a larger net increase in employment than France. But a bit more context is needed to interpret this properly.

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The Lord Chief Justice spoke recently about the importance of diversity among the judges of England and Wales. We've looked into the statistics he cited.

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Most of the government’s tax revenue comes from income tax, national Insurance and VAT. In 2015/16, UK taxpayers don’t have to pay tax on the first £10,600 of your income (the tax-free allowance). After that, tax is charged at: basic rate of 20% on income up to £31,785, higher rate of 40% on income between […]

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With a woman closer than ever to the presidency of the United States, the 2016 campaign has become a fierce arena for negotiating gender perceptions – and it’s been a revealing spectacle, especially in the campaign’s final months and weeks.

Trump’s now notorious lament that Clinton has neither the right “look” nor the “stamina” of a leader implies not only that she isn’t masculine enough to be president, but in fact not male enough. Such gender-charged statements demonstrate the cultural norm that leadership is considered primarily – if not exclusively – a male role.

This is not speculation; statistics illustrate how gender bias affects leader appointments across sectors. A gender gap in positions of power endures in business and politics, despite evidence that the gender of individual corporate officers makes no difference to the financial performance of major companies, but including women on boards improves performance, and that leaders’ individual behaviour differs only minimally between the genders.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than three times as many women with college degrees in the labor force as there were in 1970 – and yet the number of women in the most powerful (and top earning) executive ranks has remained low. According to the non-profit organisation Catalyst, in 2011 women occupied only 14.1% of executive officer positions, 16.1% of board seats, 7.6% of top earner positions and 3.8% of CEO positions.

The picture is marginally better but nonetheless similar when it comes to political leadership. Women currently hold 20 of 100 seats in the US Senate, and 84 of 435 in the US House of Representatives. The disproportional underrepresentation of women in these ranks is further evidence of the enduring power of unconscious gender bias and an unwillingness among the wider public to acknowledge the systemic nature of the glass ceiling.

Indeed the Clinton–Trump election has forced the issue of gender in leadership and stirred up heated opinions. Many onlookers are now questioning why these symbolic systems endure.

Mistaken assumptions

One rather oversimplified way to explore this question is to look at the traits attributed to women and men through gender socialization. An example is the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), a tool developed by Sandra Lipsitz Bem in the 1970s to measure “androgyny”, or the balance of masculine and female traits. It assesses subjects against traits classified as stereotypically feminine, masculine, or neutral. While the BSRI has some serious theoretical and psychometric flaws, it’s still widely used to measure gender traits as defined by our predominant cultural expectations.

Traits the BSRI assigns as measures of masculinity help demonstrate how the choices in language used by the media in fact reinforces gender expectations, and how this sort of talk helps perpetuate the gendered perceptions of leadership that keep women lower down the ladder.

Two of the items the BSRI assigns to the masculine category are “acts as a leader” and “has leadership abilities”. Further items include traits such as ambitious, assertive, autonomous, bold, charismatic, competitive, confident, decisive, independent, influential and resilient.

Any female candidate who adopts these qualities would be breaching gender expectations, meaning she may be widely rejected as a leader, even though her behaviour matched expectations of good leadership. Her deviating from traditionally feminine attributed behavior means voters might well be subconsciously put off by the incongruence.

Conversely, any candidate (female or male) described with BSRI items associated with femininity – affectionate, childlike, gentle, gullible, romantic, sensitive, shy, or yielding – would certainly not fit the trait expectations of a president.

Clinton has long been attacked for being not feminine enough (unlikeable) and simultaneously too feminine (shrill), not masculine enough (too cautious) and simultaneously too masculine (provocative). Trump has been criticised mainly for his supposedly hypermasculine qualities – for being ruthless, bullying, dastardly, macho, even misogynistic.

But encouragingly, the potential for change is there.

In the more than 100 interviews they cite in their book The Athena Doctrine, John Gerzema and Michael D'Antonio explored which socially desirable traits of femininity and masculinity were most strongly associated with leadership.

They found that ten of the top leadership-related attributes were considered feminine, six masculine, and one gender-neutral. On the feminine side, a leader should be, for example: expressive, reasonable, loyal, flexible, patient, passionate, empathetic, and selfless, and on the masculine side decisive, resilient, analytic, independent, aggressive, proud.

Both womanly and manly

One of the major problems with these trait approaches is the implication that, once attributes have been labelled as either feminine or masculine, they become mutually exclusive. This is wrongheaded; the point should be that if expectations of female and male leaders are really going to change, both women and men need to develop a balanced approach to leadership, one that combines and integrates “feminine” and “masculine” behaviors.

In my own research, I talk about to the phenomenon of “gender-integrative leadership behaviour”. My theory is that leaders who can authentically integrate traditionally “feminine” and “masculine” leader behaviors are perceived as the most competent and desirable, regardless of their gender. Communication expert Sabrina Pasztor agrees, arguing that effective leaders must switch between feminine and masculine styles of communicating.

Some of the reporting of Clinton and Trump’s debate performances shows this “blending” of attributes at work. Much of the media praised Clinton for her “appropriately feminine” comportment: patience, empathy, composure. But she also won some praise for displaying some “masculine” traits – she was “resilient”, “brave”, “tough and disciplined”.

The language used to evaluate Trump, on the other hand, tended far more towards the masculine end of the spectrum, with sympathetic reviews lauding his boldness and assertiveness – and critical ones condemning his aggressiveness.

Trump with his over-the-top masculinity and over-emotionality (overly feminine!) has given a voice to many voters’ deep anger at their presumably corrupt, entrenched government. Clinton, with her tempered femininity, has attempted to meld the caring reasoning of an involved government with the assertive strength of a world power. Although she has received scant credit and still faces quite damning accusations, this integrative style will serve her well should she be elected, whereas Trump’s hypermasculine style could alienate him.

Whichever candidate becomes the most powerful person in the world will inevitably be measured against predominantly masculine expectations. But there are also signs that we are slowly starting to accept the idea that leadership is not the automatic province of men – and that some traditionally “feminine” qualities might make our leaders a lot better.

Kae Reynolds does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The government has been criticised by health minister Liz Kendall for not meeting a promise on GP opening hours.

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