Tackling child poverty - progress report 2024-2025: annex b - focus report on gender and poverty

Conclusions

Understanding progress on poverty rates by gender is complex. Most income data is collected at a household level, with limited consideration on how resources may be shared within the household. This means that no single source can tell us the whole story. Instead, there is a need to collate, and interpret, statistics alongside other wider evidence, across the drivers of poverty, to deepen the understanding of the gendered poverty issue.

What does the evidence say about the relationship between poverty and gender?

The evidence is clear that gender and poverty are intrinsically linked. Specifically, women’s poverty and children’s poverty. This is primarily due to the disproportionate role of women as the primary caregivers for children and the unpaid carers for disabled and older family members.

Societal and structural norms impact women’s ability to access, and remain in, the labour market which often limits their earning potential throughout their lives.

Improvements in gender equality across all aspects of women’s lives will not only impact the wider economy positively, but will also support the child poverty agenda. This will require an explicit focus on gendered outcomes and progress as part of policy development, implementation and reviews.

What do we know about progress across the three drivers of poverty by gender?

There has been positive progress for women across the three drivers of poverty. However, significant inequalities still remain.

In terms of income from employment, evidence shows gendered impacts with women more likely to live in poverty despite working. This comes back to the intrinsic nature of women’s and children’s poverty whereby the uneven distribution of household responsibilities, with women traditionally taking on a greater role in unpaid work, limits a women’s ability to work and progress their careers. These are deeply embedded gender norms and stereotypes found across business and broader societal structures. Policies like shared parental leave can help to address this gender imbalance from the start of a child’s life.

Findings show a gendered dimension to the cost of living, particularly around housing and financial resilience. Intersecting characteristics, such as ethnicity or disability, can increase inequality, but can also be a buffer to further disadvantage.

There has been progress for women through increasing income from social security and benefits in kind. This is primarily attributable to the Scottish social security system and the introduction of the Five Family Payments (Scottish Child Payment, the three payments part of Best Start Grant, and Best Start Foods).

How are Best Start, Bright Futures policies taking a gender lens in their design and implementation?

Gender is considered across all Best Start, Bright Futures policies reviewed as part of this exercise. The extent to which gender is reflected across policy documents varies, resulting in inconsistency in how gender and intersecting characteristics are represented across policymaking.

No one policy will tackle gender and intersectional inequalities. Instead, it is a systemic issue requiring wide-ranging policy efforts to challenge cultural norms and societal structures which have led to, and embedded, gender disparities and inequalities.