Gender policy coherence: annual statement 2025

Leadership

Gender inequality is an enduring issue because institutions, systems and structures continue it. Our systems were often built by men, for men, with little thought about the needs and experiences of women and girls. Hidden discrimination can be built into these systems and drive gender inequality. To make significant and long-lasting changes, we need to rethink the way our systems work, so that the needs of women and girls are met.

The Scottish Government shares the NACWG’s vision for Scotland to be recognised as a leading nation in the pursuit of gender equality. We recognise that this ambition requires those from across the public, private and third sectors to lead by example in supporting equality and challenging organisations and practice to change. The Scottish Government is pleased to take a role in leading this change.

This section looks at progress made on the NACWG recommendations around leadership. It shows how we are making changes to the Scottish Government’s internal systems, structures and processes, to make these more gender competent. These are wide-ranging, from the way we make policy and measure success, to the way we allocate budgets. This section also shows work to change external systems, such as supporting women running for election.

We would encourage other organisations and individuals from across Scotland to consider how they, through their choices, actions and words, can lead the change to the attitudes and culture within their organisations and communities.

Create a ‘What Works?’ Institute

Recommendation: ‘Create a “What Works?” Institute to develop and test robust, evidence-led inclusive and representative approaches to changing public attitudes in Scotland to girls and women’s equality and rights.’

We funded Zero Tolerance to research potential models for the What Works Gender Institute. The report of their findings offers three models, including a recommendation that a foundation model for the Institute be adopted for at least one year to test the model in practice. We committed in the Equally Safe Delivery Plan published in 2024 to commission a grant scheme to progress this work. This grant scheme will be established in the 2025-26 financial year.

Candidate Quotas

Recommendation: ‘Legislate for local and national candidate quotas for all parties by the 2021 election.’

We are committed to achieving fair and equal political representation. We accepted the ambition behind the NACWG recommendation to legislate for local and national candidate quotas for all parties, however this power is reserved to the UK Parliament so legislation to do this could only be introduced by the UK Government This means that the Scottish Parliament cannot legislate for local and national candidate quotas for political parties.

Scottish Ministers wrote to the former UK Government in 2018 to seek a meeting to discuss women’s political representation and participation. The UK Government declined the invitation, indicating that they did not believe that quotas were required to deliver increased representation of women in politics. Scottish Ministers continue to call on the current UK Government to introduce gender quotas themselves or give Scotland the power to do so.

In the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary election, we had a historic high of 58 women elected as MSPs (46% of MSPs). This is the highest proportion of women MSPs since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. We now have two women MSPs of minority ethnic background for the first time in history and our first MSP who is a permanent wheelchair user. However, minority ethnic and disabled women are still unacceptably underrepresented. In local government elections, the percentage of women councillors in Scottish local authorities increased from 29% in 2017 to 35% in 2022. While this is welcome progress, we need to do more to get more women, from all backgrounds, into politics, on both a national and a local level.

Given that the powers to deliver this recommendation from the NACWG are reserved, we are taking action to deliver the ambition of the recommendation within the boundaries of the devolved powers we do have to increase women’s representation in politics and in leadership roles:

Creating change in elected office

• We fund Elect Her to deliver workshops, coaching and peer support for women entering politics or in office. Elect Her also offers resources designed specifically for women of colour, and for d/Deaf and disabled women. In the 2022 Scottish local authority elections, the organisation supported 54 women to stand as councillors of which 27 were elected.
• We fund Engender to progress the Equal Representation project. The project postholder works with political parties to increase the representation of diverse women and to progress a second phase of work with the Equal Representation Coalition. The Coalition have developed a Toolkit for political parties to assess their diversity and policies around inclusion.
• We published our response to the 2024 report by the Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee (SLARC) that highlighted particular barriers for women, younger people and disabled people when seeking or holding office as a councillor. These include remuneration, childcare, the reputation of politics as a whole, bullying and misogynistic behaviour within councils, personal safety (particularly on social media), and working patterns that are difficult alongside caring responsibilities. New salary levels were accepted and Scottish Ministers will lay regulations early in 2025.
• We fund a Policy Officer post to support the work of COSLA’s Barriers to Elected Office Special Interest Group (BEO SIG). The BEO SIG addresses barriers to elected office for groups currently underrepresented amongst councillors. In 2024, the group focused on delivering SLARC recommendations, disability and accessibility, caring responsibilities, rural councillors, gender, and safety.
• Retention is just as important as the number of women elected. We warmly welcome the work of the Scottish Parliament to complete a gender-sensitive audit of its rules, practices and culture. The audit, published in 2023, included 34 short, medium and longer term recommendations, focusing on the action it could take to become a gender-sensitive Parliament.

Data collection

• We are working with stakeholders to improve data on the diversity of election candidates and elected representatives in Scotland, to inform and monitor progress on diversity. For example, the Local Government Candidates Survey 2022 examined diversity data of candidates standing at the May 2022 Local Government elections. Further consideration will be given to how this project can be built upon and how a more representative set of data can be gathered in future years. We are working with partner organisations and stakeholder groups to discuss findings and consider next steps.

Women in leadership

• We delivered the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018, which sets an objective that 50% of a public board’s non-executive members are women. It also requires certain steps to be taken to achieve the objective and to encourage applications from women. In April 2021, 52% of regulated ministerial appointments were held by women. This compares with 42% in 2015. Similarly, the majority of listed public authorities subject to the 2018 Act (65%) have achieved the gender representation objective at the time of the last report.
• We fund Young Women Lead (YWL), a leadership programme for young women and non-binary people aged 16-30, delivered by the Young Women’s Movement. The 2024 cohort explored ‘democratic wellbeing’, including how to amplify political agency and remove barriers to engagement.

Thematic Gender Review of the National Performance Framework

Recommendation: ‘Carry out a thematic gender review of the new National Performance Framework as a catalyst for system analysis and change.’

The National Performance Framework (NPF) is Scotland’s wellbeing framework. It sets out the Scottish Government’s long-term vision for collective wellbeing, key outcomes people in Scotland will experience through the framework and indicators to monitor progress in delivering the outcomes. The National Outcomes actively seek to promote equality and to ensure equality groups have equal access to the realisation of the Outcomes. Periodic reviews of the NPF are required by the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 to ensure the NPF continues to drive increased wellbeing. As part of the latest Review of National Outcomes, we published a thematic gender review in October 2024, to assess how the needs of women and girls can be better represented in the NPF.

During the National Outcomes review, and Parliament inquiry stakeholders expressed concern that the existing NPF falls short in capturing gender inequality.

The Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Gaelic has committed the Scottish Government to a period of reform of the NPF. The DFM said in her response to the inquiry that the Finance and Public Administration Committee’s report provides an extremely useful contribution to the evidence base on which to build this change. No immediate changes will be made to the NPF, including the National Outcomes and National Indicators until this work concludes. As reporting has paused, the NPF website will not be updated; however, Indicator data will continue to be published. It also means that we will revisit the original proposals made following the Scottish Government’s statutory review and laid before the Scottish Parliament in May 2024.

The current 11 National Outcomes are still in operation as is the duty (Community Empowerment Act) on public bodies ‘to have regard’ to them.

Data availability and disaggregation

Data disaggregated by protected characteristic and intersectional data is needed to properly capture the diverse experiences of women and girls. The Equality Data Improvement Programme is working with analysts to improve all equality data availability. The development of this work and its applications to other intersectional elements in the NPF will be explored throughout the NPF reform project.

We are also working to improve the quality of data on women and girls, to support evidence-informed policy making. Scotland’s Gender Index (GEI) was developed in 2020 and updated in 2023. The purpose of the GEI is to allow tracking over time and identify trends in the issues facing women and girls in Scotland. The GEI presents gender equality numerically with a score of 1 indicating no gender equality and a score of 100 indicating full gender equality. It covers six domains, developed with stakeholders: work, money, time, knowledge, power and health. Like the NPF, the GEI uses indicators from a range of sources to measure equality.

Create a Culture of Gender Equality Policy-making

Recommendation: ‘Creating a culture of gender equality policy-making in the Scottish Government:

• The creation of a standalone Equalities Directorate along with the establishment of “Centres of Expertise” created in all Scottish Government Directorates, on intersectional gender competence.
• The creation of a senior officials and leaders group.
• The creation of “Policy-makers National Standards” to support quality standards and accountability on intersectional gender competence in policymaking, with a requirement that all policy and analytical staff will adhere to it.’

Equalities Directorate and ‘Centres of Expertise’

We established the Directorate for Equality, Inclusion and Human Rights which focuses on rights and equality for all of Scotland’s people, particularly those with specific protected characteristics, such as women. In May 2022, a Centre of Expertise in Equality and Human Rights was established in Directorate General for Economy. The Centre was an action in the National Strategy for Economic Transformation and responds to similar recommendations from both the Advisory Group on Economic Recovery and the NACWG. Our learning from this will help us set up further Centres of Expertise across the Scottish Government.

The DG Economy Centre of Expertise in Equality and Human Rights helps build capability in economic policy officials, including increasing gender competence. In 2022 and 2023, over 220 officials attended foundation training on equality, human rights and the Fairer Scotland Duty. The Centre also hosted training on intersectional gender competence, delivered by the Women in Scotland’s Economy (WISE) Centre for Economic Justice at Glasgow Caledonian University in Autumn 2023. The Centre has created a network of economy officials and representatives of the enterprise agencies for peer-to-peer support and sharing of good practice. Future capability building sessions are intended to focus on disabled people, racial equality and intersectionality.

Senior Officials and Leaders Group

We established the Equality and Human Rights Senior Leadership Group (SLG) with senior officials at Director level, chaired by the Director General Communities. The SLG reports on its progress to the Executive Team.

The SLG focuses on addressing systemic and structural barriers to gender competent policy making and delivery. We are developing a plan to identify actions and resources needed to include equality and human rights across all policy and delivery, and identify the specific actions that relate to women’s equality.

To ensure that the SLG is guided by robust external expertise and operates in collaboration with key stakeholders, we engaged a range of experts, including the NACWG Co-Chairs, the Co-Chairs of the Anti-Racism Interim Governance Group, and representatives from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The group drew on the contributions of subject matter experts such as Professor Angela O’Hagan. Additionally, a dedicated session with the Minister for Equalities focused on an in-depth discussion around setting PSED-related equality outcomes, which informed the new suite of Equality Outcomes published on 25 April 2025.

Policy-makers National Standards

We are building equality and human rights into our training and standards for policy professionals. ‘Professions’ are a way we organise and manage specific skills within Scottish Government. ‘Professions’ help define job types, encourage skill development and career progression, set standards, and support workforce planning. We include equality in our policy profession standards and training opportunities. This will ensure that equality is threaded throughout the policy making process. The Director of Equality, Inclusion and Human Rights sits on the Policy Profession Steering Group to provide senior leadership on equality and human rights in this work.

We have also taken the following steps to make sure that Scottish Government staff understand equality and human rights and how this should be applied to their work:

1.All Scottish Government staff create diversity and inclusion objectives as part of their performance management.

2.In February 2025 the Equality, Inclusion, and Human Rights Directorate hosted a Development Academy Week for SG staff. Sessions were designed to empower the organisation with the knowledge and tools to make a real difference in the workplace and beyond. There were over 1,000 attendees across the week.

3.We have improved our Equality Impact Assessment training and updated our digital learning content with gender competence resources and tools.

4.We have engaged with stakeholders across Scotland. We consulted on the Mainstreaming strategy to explore further options to improve capability and capacity of public sector staff to ensure equality and human rights are a fundamental aspect of policy making and operational delivery. The strategy will be launched later in 2025, along with the Action Plan and Mainstreaming toolkit.

Intersectional Gender Budget Analysis

Recommendation: ‘We call on the Scottish Government to integrate intersectional gender budget analysis into the Scottish Budget process, and to give this a statutory footing.’

We have made notable progress over the past two years to integrate intersectional budget analysis (the process of considering how budget decisions might impact different groups) into the Scottish Budget process over the past two years. We sought the support of the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group (EHRBAG) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to help identify opportunities to go further.

A key part of our work is the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement (EFSBS), published alongside the Scottish Budget. The Scottish Government has produced an equality statement alongside the budget every year since 2009, and latterly an Equality and Fairer Scotland Statement. It responds to our legal duties to assess the Equality and Fairer Scotland impacts of budget decisions. It requires every portfolio to examine the impact of their budget on women and men under the protected characteristic of sex as set out under the Equality Act 2010 as well as assessing the cumulative impact of budget decisions (see Annex A of the EFSBS).

This year’s EFSBS focused on the impact of eight key decisions and case studies to show how equality and socioeconomic evidence fed into budget decisions, and how budgets are delivered. It also explored the distributional impacts of key budget measures, including some areas of public spending as well as tax and benefits, on households. We used six key questions for policy makers to structure the case studies. These questions were developed in collaboration with the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group (EHRBAG).

We also commissioned the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to conduct a review of our approach to gender budgeting, and support an internal pilot to learn from international best practice on intersectional gender budgeting. The findings of an evaluation of the pilot and a summary of the OECD’s review was published alongside the Budget in December. The OECD found strong political commitment to addressing inequalities and the supporting role of organisations like the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group (EHRBAG) and the National advisory Council Women and Girls (NACWG).

The pilot evaluation identified two current impediments to rolling out the gender budgeting approach more widely in the near future:

• the lack of strategic over-arching gender goals and;
• the need to move away from the current portfolio based budget model and towards a more performance-oriented approach. This would require a more comprehensive and longer-term reform programme.

The report also cautions, however, that the OECD’s recommended approach will need to be adapted in order to ensure the suitability of any new approach to the country-specific context.

In response to a Call to Action from the NACWG report published in 2024, we have committed to co-designing Scotland’s first Equality Strategy for Women and Girls with gender equality stakeholders and diverse women and girls. This ambitious strategy will include gender goals which will be applied in gender budgeting as recommended by the OECD.

As part of continuing this work, we are now exploring options to test other gender budgeting methodologies. This includes running a further pilot to develop ‘gender budget tagging’ for the upcoming budget. Until gender goals are available, this will look at a cross-cutting policy area which includes a focus on improving outcomes for women, such as child poverty.

We commissioned the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to run pilots to learn from international best practice on intersectional gender budgeting. The goal is to help us improve our capacity to use the budget process as an effective and impactful tool to reduce gender inequality. The project will include training for officials and support in piloting a strengthened approach to gender budgeting, potentially within two Scottish Government Directorates.

Devolution of Equality Legislation and Policy-making

Recommendation: ‘We call for Scottish Government to advocate for the full devolution of equality legislation and policy-making to the Scottish Parliament.’

We have long called for further devolution of powers to Scotland including on equality legislation.

The Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government wrote to the former UK Government’s Minister for Women and Equalities (Liz Truss MP) in December 2021 drawing her attention to this recommendation and seeking further dialogue on the devolution of equal opportunities. A follow up letter was sent in February. We received a response in March 2022 from Kemi Badenoch, MP and Minister for Levelling Up and Equalities, making clear their position that no further powers relating to equality would be devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

We have continued to advocate to the current UK Government the full devolution of equality legislation to the Scottish Parliament to enable us to enact progressive and inclusive Scottish values.