Engender blog

Women-only leadership: progressive or discriminatory?

A very familiar question was raised again this week: should women-only organisations, women-only services, and women-only governance and leadership be lauded as progressive or shunned as discriminatory? Several media outlets reported on the fact that Moray Women’s Aid has elected to leave the Scottish Women’s Aid network. The local women’s aid is in contravention of its network’s shared commitment to individual services being governed and staffed by women, having confirmed that is has at least one man on its board of directors, Cllr Graham Leadbitter.

“We disaffiliated ourselves because we were not prepared to discriminate blatantly,” Moray Women’s Aid’s manager, Elle Johnston, was reported as saying in the Herald. Catriona Stewart, Glasgow Women’s Aid board member and journalist, took very public aim at the policy in another piece in the Herald, describing it as “a rigid model that threatens to weaken the network and refuses to allow for evolution as society evolves.”

The notion of women-led services has been framed in much of the coverage as backwards, inflexible, and an impediment to the very equality that feminists purport to want. So is Scottish Women’s Aid’s policy discriminatory? And what is the point of women-only feminist leadership anyway?

In her piece, Stewart asks whether having men on Moray Women’s Aid has been effective: "Has it done any good, should be the test?" A paper from Moray Council suggests that the original vision for Moray Women’s Aid governance was almost as an arms-length organisation of the local authority, with two elected members as executive directors and a further three serving on the board. That plan was shelved, but unusually, Cllr Leadbitter was nominated directly by the council onto Moray’s board as it was established. According to its annual accounts, Moray Women’s Aid board was majority male or fifty-fifty between its incorporation in 2008 and 2013, which means that decision-making was possible for most of those years by an all-male quorum. While Moray Women’s Aid certainly delivered vital services during this time, its account of itself gives the impression that it lacked some of the governance that might, for example, have enabled it to meet some of the digital demands of 21^st century service delivery. Its 2015 accounts plead for a “knowledgeable computer expert” to help keep its internal systems up to date, and it doesn’t have a website. Other strategic decisions made by the board run contrary to the gendered analysis in Scotland’s bold new violence against women strategy, Equally Safe. It says that it has redesigned its logo to “encapsulate a more generic outlook, while still focusing on the needs of women and children”.

But it is on the needs of women and children that the call for feminist, women-only governance and leadership rests.

5 things you should know about the Fairer Scotland Action Plan

The long-awaited Scottish Government Fairer Scotland Action Plan was launched yesterday, following extensive engagement with the public in 2015. It commits to fulfil 50 ‘Fairness Actions’ by the end of this parliament, across 5 thematic ‘ambitions’. Here are 5 points of our own.

1. 50 actions

There are 50 actions in the 100 page document. Some of them are clear-cut and targeted towards a particular outcome, like the Domestic Abuse Bill (#25) and the Scottish Baby Box (#27). Along with many others, these have been announced previously, with much of the document repackaging a slate of commitments from the SNP manifesto for Holyrood 2016. In this sense, given the time that has elapsed since the initial exercise, much of Fairer Scotland simply (and helpfully) draws together Scottish Government policy related to social justice in one place.

Guest Post: Will 2016 be a high point for women’s representation at Holyrood?

It's polling day today for the Scottish Parliament election. Juliet Swann, Associate Consultant at McNeill & Stone, predicts what this will mean for women's representation.

Will 2016 be a high point for women’s representation at Holyrood?

The Scottish Parliament won plaudits in 1999 for electing 48 women out of the 129 MSPs, (37.2%). Since then however that percentage has fallen, indicating that the stance Labour took to balance the winnable seats between men and women in that first election was neither replicated by the other parties nor was there a consistent application of the principle of gender balance in the subsequent elections and selection processes.

Of late this complacency has been challenged. The election of Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s first woman First Minister, and her making a strong commitment to gender equality from the outset, as well as two other women leading the opposition parties, and both SNP and Labour appointing a 50:50 cabinet has caused women’s representation to become a talking point.

Equal Voice, Equal Power: the case for gender quotas in Scotland

Today we've released our report making the case for gender quotas in Scottish Politics. We are calling for the Scottish Government to push for the devolution of electoral and equalities law to the Scottish Parliament, and for political parties to make equal representation a priority.