Gender policy coherence: annual statement 2025

Next Steps

An equal future for women in Scotland

This annual statement on gender policy coherence provides a summary of some of the wide ranging work we are taking forward to make Scotland a place where women and girls have equality with men and boys. We know there is more to do and things we can and must do better.

The progress towards equality for women and girls has been painfully slow and hard won. More challenging still, we are seeing efforts to further erode the rights of marginalised communities and undermine the important and brave work of feminist activists. The current political headwinds feel particularly hostile to advancing equality and human rights, including for women and girls.

The Scottish Government remains fully, defiantly committed to advancing equality and rights for women and girls.

That being said, we know that as a government we need to go further faster. In response we have established new internal processes and structures to redouble and refocus efforts to deliver. We call this a ‘programmatic approach’.

Programmatic approaches are common in government and other organisations to deliver large and complex projects or groups of projects. The programmatic approach for the delivery of the NACWG recommendations has been agreed by Cabinet Secretaries and will report directly to the First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice. The commitment to this work by Cabinet Secretaries and oversight from the First Minister reflects the priority placed on this work and provides the cross-government leadership required to deliver the ambitious and cross-cutting recommendations.

We are working with the NACWG to build external expertise and scrutiny into our programmatic approach. The model for external expertise and scrutiny in the programmatic approach is still in development but it is our intention that the it will provide a mechanism for greater transparency and an more effective scrutiny of our work to advance equality for women and girls.

In their 2019 report the NACWG called for greater policy coherence towards gender equality so that all policies and organisations were working towards the same goals. It was in that report that they recommended that this annual statement be provided to parliament to scrutinise our progress so far. In their 2024 report the NACWG again asserted that people and policies needed to align and reenforce each other to deliver greater equality for women and girls. They recommended that we develop a national gender strategy that builds on the recommendations that they have already made and takes a holistic approach to tackling gender inequality.

On 26 February 2025, the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice committed to developing a strategy in response to the NACWG recommendation. The Cabinet Secretary confirmed that the Strategy would be co-designed the NACWG and the EWP and with wider groups of women with diverse lived experience and the organisations that represent them. Equality is everyone’s responsibility and we will ensure that senior leaders in Scotland are involved in the development of the strategy from the outset to explore opportunities to work in partnership to deliver tangible improvements for women and girls.

The strategy will include gender equality goals that will provide greater clarity and direction on what policies across the public sector should be aligning to achieve. One way in which we will do this is by embedding the goals in Scottish Government processes such as in the development of the budget and in future annual statements. Additionally, the goals will form the basis of a measurement framework – also recommended by the NACWG – to monitor progress in delivering the strategy and by extension on equality for women and girls.

This annual statement will act as a baseline for the strategy by setting out the range of work already underway in the Scottish Government. Once the goals for the strategy have been developed we will work with the NACWG, EWP, public sector leaders and with wider groups of women with diverse lived experience and the organisations that represent them to examine at what we are doing in these areas and what more needs done to see the change women and girls deserve. This will allow us to build on the whole systems approach taken by the NACWG and ensuring a lasting legacy for the progress they have already achieved.

Gender inequality is intrenched, intransigent and deeply harmful. It can feel insurmountable at times. But it is not. The bold and ambitious work of the NACWG, all the wide and varied work set out in this annual statement, the future work of the programmatic approach and even the gender equality strategy will not solve gender inequality. However, they are the next steps in a long line of steps made by inspiring women over centuries on our journey towards gender equality.