Engender blog

Gender equality and the Sustainable Development Goals

A few weeks ago, the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations asked our Policy and Parliamentary Manager, Emma Trottier, to write a short blog about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, the SDG concerning gender equality and its link to the rest of the goals. Here she sets out what needs to happen for the goal to become a reality.

For those unfamiliar, the fifth of the 17 SDGs commits member states to achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. By 2030. Or 15 years from the time the SDGs were agreed to in 2015. Ambitious, isn’t it?

Scottish Labour Party Leadership Election Q&A

With the deadline in the race for the Scottish Labour leadership approaching next week, we put some questions on women's equality issues to candidates Richard Leonard MSP and Anas Sarwar MSP. Read their answers below.

What do women want from local councils?

That’s the question that we, along with campaign group Women5050 want to answer this spring.

The decisions made by local councils have a significant impact on women’s lives, from allocating spending on education and leisure, to deciding how and where public transport runs. And yet it is in local councils that women’s underrepresentation is clearest – with only 24% of local councillors being women. Of the 1,223 local councillors in Scotland, only four are women from BME communities.

We've created activities and resources which can be used by groups across Scotland to explore what powers local councils have, and how women can have influence them. The workshops will be used to crowd-source 10 questions local councillor elected in May to ask themselves about how they are involving women in their work.

Everything you need to know about the gender commitments in the Holyrood 2016 manifestos

With Scotland going to the polls on Thursday, it is an exciting week for the political nerds amongst us. At Engender HQ we will be eagerly number crunching the proportion of women returned as MSPs and mapping the outcome in terms of pre-election commitments to women’s equality.

Of course, now that all political parties have released their manifestos, we already know what is on the table. Last week we published this detailed gender summary of promises from the main political parties, in relation to our own Gender Matters manifesto and other directly relevant issues for women.

On the whole we are pleased to see a range of gender equality issues addressed by the majority of parties. Unsurprisingly, some of our calls remain missing, especially where these are radical or structural in nature, but there are a number of notable highlights.

Gender Equality Bill

We called for a Gender Equality Bill to drive gender issues up the political agenda and create accountability in areas where the pace of change has been incredibly slow. Scottish Labour, the Scottish Greens and the Women’s Equality Party have all committed to publishing such a Bill over the course of the next parliament, with RISE including an Anti-Sexism Bill as one of its big ticket policy items.

Quotas

With relevant powers reserved to Westminster, political parties themselves are currently ‘gatekeepers’ to equal representation in Scottish politics. It’s therefore very heartening that the SNP, Labour and Greens have used their manifestos to formally back the Women 50:50 campaign. The campaign (and Engender’s manifesto) calls for measures to ensure that women are 50% of candidates in national and local elections, and 50% of public board members. Power to set gender quotas for public boards is coming to Holyrood, and both the SNP and Greens have committed to legislation that would set these at 50%.