Why Scotland will have to depend on male MSPs to improve the lot of women
There are 55 per cent more men standing in the Scottish Parliament election than women
There are hundreds of people standing for the Scottish Parliament election next month, competing for only 129 places. Old hands like John Swinney and Fergus Ewing are joined by representatives of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland and the Workers Party, to name but two of the plethora of small parties which have emerged for this election.
A triumph of democracy, I hear you cry. Proof that Holyrood is truly the settled will of the people, that devolution, at 27 years old, has finally come of age. If only it were true, because further examination of the lists shows that the overwhelming majority of candidates are male, with women making up less than a third of the total.
The balance between the sexes will improve once the winners are declared, thanks in large part to the regional lists where women stand a better chance, but post May 7, Holyrood is going to look more like a boys’ club than a fair representation of the Scottish people.
Politics is only for men?
A quick reminder for those who forget: women are the majority, at over half of the population (51.4 per cent). But as Holyrood magazine points out, there are 55 per cent more men standing than women and there are six constituencies where there are no women standing at all: Cumbernauld and Kilsyth; East Lothian and Lammermuirs; Glasgow Anniesland; Na h-Eileanan an Iar; Renfrewshire West and Levern Valley; and Orkney. What message does that send to a 17-year-old woman voting for the first time in Haddington or Stornoway? That politics is only for men?
Does it matter that men will dominate in the new Scottish Parliament? Surely it is the quality of an MSP that matters, not his sex? And the first female First Minister, and to date the longest serving, was hardly a friend to women. Nicola Sturgeon wasted much of her last term arguing that any man could be a woman, provided he completed the correct form and used the right pronouns.
But of course it does matter. Holyrood exists to represent the entire population. A parliament that is 50-50 has more democratic legitimacy than one that has a majority of either sex. A balanced parliament has a wider range of views to inform policy-making.
And research shows that women are more likely to work across party lines to get things done, a phenomenon I have witnessed in the Scottish Parliament in recent years on issues such as sexual violence, where Tory, Labour and SNP women, with the independent MSP Ash Regan, have worked together to improve the lives of all women and girls.
Only a few weeks ago, I joined a roundtable hosted by Tess White, a Conservative, where the SNP’s Kate Forbes and Labour’s Jackie Baillie joined in. The meeting was to discuss the results of research by the Women’s Rights Network (Scotland) that exposed the scale of sexual assaults in hospitals. More than 100 people were attacked last year, including three children.
“I am horrified,” said First Minister John Swinney in parliament recently, as he ordered Scotland’s health boards to explain what they are doing to keep patients safe.
Quite apart from the fact that it was volunteer women who had painstakingly gathered this information through freedom of information requests, and not civil servants or a government-funded women’s organisation such as Engender, it was female MSPs from across the political divide, working with women campaigners, who raised this issue in parliament, forcing the First Minister to act.
The benefit of female politicians
Evidence from across the globe suggests that there is more than a casual relationship between the number of women in power and the focus on issues such as childcare, sexual violence against women, and the pay gap between men and women.
Earlier this week, the six main party leaders gathered at RBS’s Gogarburn headquarters for a hustings organised by, among others, the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors. Every picture tells a story and the photographs that emerged from this event were a throwback to the 1970s, with six blokes in suits lined up in a row, the testosterone levels sky high. Is this really the image we want of Scotland, a generation after devolution?
In a 2010 report, the Hansard Society wrote how the establishment of the Scottish Parliament was accompanied by hopes of a “new politics”, involving “among other things, significantly higher women's representation”. Progress was indeed made – the 2021 election marked a hight point with 45 per cent female representation.
But more than half the women elected then are standing down and, as the candidate list suggests, the 2026 parliament will go backwards. This is not only bad news for women and girls, it is troubling for the country.
Men may think they have all the answers, particularly when it comes to ‘tough’ issues such as the economy, but they would be wrong. According to the World Economic Forum, a 10 per cent increase in women’s parliamentary representation is associated with a 0.7 per cent increase in GDP growth.
The last parliamentary session was characterised by a row over the very definition of a woman, but that was settled a year ago, when the Supreme Court agreed with For Women Scotland that sex is based on biology, not “acquired” gender.
I had hoped that the new session would focus on the real-life issues that matter to women (and men), such as better social care, a functioning health service, a reduction in violence against women and girls, and yes, a productive economy. It now looks like we will have to depend on men to improve the lot of women. Hardly the new politics we were promised in 1999, or even five years ago.
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