Scottish Parliament can't dodge this simple question: how many MSPs are women, 55 or 56? – Susan Dalgety
If the Scottish Parliament can’t count women MSPs for fear of causing offence, writes Susan Dalgety, will we stop counting female survivors of sexual violence too?
In 1999, when the Scottish Parliament was (re)convened, it immediately took its place as one of the world’s leading legislatures for equality of representation. Thanks largely to Scottish Labour’s system of twinning, where constituencies were paired by winnability and location and members chose one female and one male candidate, 37 per cent of the first intake of MSPs were female.
Only Sweden and Denmark had a better record. This earthquake came barely a decade after Labour’s Maria Fyfe had been the only woman out of the 72 Scottish MPs elected to Westminster in the 1987 election, and it set the tone for subsequent parliaments.
We may not always admire the women elected to Holyrood, just as we don’t rate many of the male members, yet Scotland can be proud of its record in female representation – but for how much longer? The parliament’s bureaucrats have stopped counting women.
‘A legacy system’
In the wake of the May 7 election, anyone – from curious voters to political scientists – could go onto the parliament’s website and search the new intake of MSPs by their sex. This useful function was then updated to include a non-binary option, presumably to cater for Dr Q Manivannan, the Scottish Green MSP who claims to be neither male or female.
Then, within 24 hours, the search function disappeared completely. A parliament spokesperson said that its systems and processes were being “reconsidered” as part of an Inclusive Parliament review. They added: “The online filter function on our website is a legacy system and we have taken steps to remove it. The review will also consider what personal information on members we need to publish and in what format.”
Women immediately took to social media to complain. Feminist groups wrote to the new Presiding Officer, Kenneth Gibson, demanding women MSPs be counted. Conservative MSPs Rachael Hamilton and Meghan Gallacher told Gibson that the change would make it more difficult to assess progress in female participation. Labour MSP Carol Mochan was more blunt. “Erasing women doesn’t mean we will shut up and go away,” she wrote.
READ MORE: Trans women to be banned from Scottish Parliament's female toilets after Supreme Court ruling
The importance of data
But the parliament authorities are adamant. For the foreseeable future, it will not count MSPs by their sex. It used to, of course. Its archives show that, for each of the first five sessions (1999-2021), the parliament published factsheets listing female MSPs.
And in the interests of equality, there were also lists of male members. In 2022, the then Presiding Officer, Alison Johnstone, launched a Gender Sensitive Audit to examine the “barriers to the equal participation and representation of women in parliamentary life”. An advisory group was set up in 2023, and a few weeks ago, its final report, Achieving a Parliament for All, was published.
One of its key findings was that “improved data and analysis” enables more constructive discussion of representation and participation. “Evidence supports change,” it states. Yet within days of the election, the Scottish Parliament stopped publishing evidence on how many women MSPs the people of Scotland had elected.
Why? The parliament insists it is because it’s exploring “the creation and presentation of new MSP/candidate diversity data”, but other, more cynical types, including your columnist, suggest it is because the bureaucrats didn’t know how to count two of the new Green MSPs – the aforementioned Dr Manivannan and Iris Duane, a biological man who now identifies as a woman.
Holyrood in breach of the law?
The parliament is not alone in its confusion. Engender, the national “feminist policy and advocacy” organisation, which receives funding of around £500,000 a year from the Scottish Government, sent a newsletter to its members last week declaring that there are now 56 women MSPs, a drop of two from the 2021 election.
The true number – based on the Supreme Court judgement that, for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is biological – is 55 women MSPs, three fewer than in the previous session. As political scientists and political parties will tell you, the numbers matter. Is this drop in women members merely a blip which will right itself in 2031, or the start of a trend?
There's a legal consideration too. If the parliament will not count its women representatives, it may well be breaking the law. Under the Public Sector Equality Duty, organisations are required to publish information demonstrating their compliance with equality legislation, which includes data on the protected characteristic of sex.
Only weeks before the election, Holyrood adopted new rules for its committees which, among other things, ruled out single-sex committees. As a leading women’s right campaigner, Ann Henderson, pointed out, “the idea that the rules of the parliament itself can be complied with, without clarity on the sex of its members, is unsustainable”.
The parliament – and Scotland - has come a long way since 1999, when the women ministers in Donald Dewar’s Cabinet were dubbed by some in the media as “Donald’s Dollies”. The longest-serving First Minister to date was a woman. John Swinney’s new Cabinet may be smaller than previous ones, with only eight Cabinet Secretaries, but more than half – five – are women. Scotland can be cautiously proud of the progress it has made since Maria Fyfe was our sole female representative at Westminster.
But here’s the thing. In the 1990s, women in Scottish Labour, led by such redoubtable figures as Johann Lamont and Rosina MacRae, could not have won the internal battles over female representation without being able to show how few women were in positions of power.
Nicola Sturgeon would not have been able to boast about her feminist credentials if she had been unable to count the number of women she appointed to senior posts. And if our parliament can’t count women MSPs for fear of offence, what is to prevent society from ceasing to count the number of female survivors of sexual violence? Numbers matter. Sex matters. Women matter.
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