Gender policy coherence: annual statement 2025

Definitions

Policy Coherence

Policy coherence refers to how well government policies work together to achieve desired outcomes, such as equality for women and girls. Achieving policy coherence requires potential conflicts between policies to be resolved, so that one policy does not undermine another.

Intersectionality

As set out in our 2022 evidence synthesis paper, ‘Using intersectionality to understand structural inequality in Scotland’, intersectionality can be understood in the following ways:

• A recognition that people are shaped by their simultaneous membership of multiple interconnected social categories.
• The interaction between multiple social categories occurs within a context of connected systems and structures of power (e.g. laws, policies, governments). A recognition of inequality of power is key to intersectionality.
• Structural inequality, reflected as relative disadvantage and privilege, are the outcomes of the interaction between social categories, power relations and contexts. As a result, an individual’s experiences of inequality can be chronic or transitory, creating unique lived experiences.

This definition is used when referring to intersectionality throughout this report, noting that this term has several different definitions due to growing awareness of the concept in academic and policymaking contexts.

Gender Competence

According to the NACWG’s 2019 report, gender competence ‘refers to the skills, knowledge and analytical capability to develop policy that is well-gendered, and which takes into account the socially constructed differences between men’s and women’s lives and experiences’.

Mainstreaming

Mainstreaming means putting equality and human rights at the core of our business.

In practice, this means that equality and human rights are integral to how:

• decisions are made;
• policies are designed and developed;
• services delivered, and;
• money is allocated and spent.