Engender blog

GUEST POST: Looking Deeper: Black and Minority Ethnic Women in the Scottish Parliament

Today we're publishing the next blog in a series from the current student placements Engender is hosting from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course.

Mary Galloway concludes her blog series in this third post, which focuses more deeply on the discussions of Black and minority ethnic women in the Scottish Parliament, and the importance of Parliament understanding the distinct ways that racialised and gendered oppression take shape for different communities. You can read Mary's first post here and second post here.

In this final blog, I will carry out a more focused analysis of the results produced by my research into the representation of women facing multiple discriminations in the Scottish Parliament. I have so far talked about 'women with multiple protected characteristics' quite abstractly. It is important to think about who these women actually are and why it matters that the multiplicity of their marginalisation is acknowledged. Black and minority ethnic (BME) women face both gendered and racial oppression, providing them with experiences that are distinct from white women and Black men. For example, Black and minority ethnic women were some of the worst affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, it is crucial that the Scottish Parliament is attentive to the specific needs of this group.

In my search of the content of Scottish Parliamentary business during its 5^th session, I used search terms of 'Black women', 'Asian women', 'women of colour', 'BME women' and 'Black and minority ethnic women'. The search term that produced the majority of results for this category of women was the latter term of Black and minority ethnic women. Though this term is importantly inclusive of the diverse ethnicities of women in Scotland, its domination in the results also displays a degree of homogenisation. The needs of Asian women and Black women are not necessarily symmetrical; for example, forced marriage and 'honour’-based violence are forms of abuse that particularly affect Asian women. Consequently, although Black and minority ethnic women all face racialised and gendered oppression, it is important that the distinct way that these take shape for different communities is discussed and understood in Parliament.

A number of BME women's issues were covered in the various areas of parliamentary business. For example, there was recognition of the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on Black and minority ethnic women and the prevalence of workplace harassment and discrimination against them. Upon comparing the content of the remarks made by MSPs versus witnesses in the Official Report, there was a notable difference. Witnesses' mentions of Black and minority ethnic women tended to be highly detailed and substantive, whereas MSPs' references tended to go no further than a nod to the difficulty of BME women's lives and calls for more diverse representation generally. MSPs' discussions of BME women were largely quite shallow despite the richness of witnesses' evidence. Furthermore, often when BME women were mentioned by MSPs, they were listed alongside a number of other marginalised women. For example, in a Meeting of the Parliament on International Women's Day 2020, Alison Johnstone of the Scottish Greens said that Parliament should tackle the harassment of women of colour, LBT (lesbian, bisexual, transgender) women, disabled women and refugee women in the workplace. Although this is a very important problem facing women with multiple protected characteristics worthy of discussion, it does not pay attention to the specific discrimination of BME women that is both racialised and gendered. This illustrates a lack of engagement with the fundamental notion that underpins intersectionality, whereupon the needs of communities with multiple protected characteristics are specific and in need of concentrated attention. It is consequently important for MSPs to make the most of the information provided to them by witnesses and their constituents about the reality of BME women's lives in order to affect change in their favour.

This focused look at the case of BME women has provided an insight into the details behind the numbers provided in previous blogs. Such an examination is vital as it uncovers not just how often women with multiple protected characteristics are being mentioned but what is actually being said in these instances. The discussion of Black and minority ethnic women must not be a tick-box exercise, and neither should the discussion of any women facing multiple discriminations.

GUEST POST: Who are the conversation starters in the Scottish Parliament when it comes to marginalised women?

Today we're publishing the next blog in a series from the current student placements Engender is hosting from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course.

In Mary Galloway's second post, she builds on her research into how often multiply marginalised women are mentioned in the Scottish Parliament. Here, she looks more closely at who is starting these conversations and why this further calls for more diverse representation in Parliament. You can read Mary's first post here and third post here.

GUEST POST: Which women are visible in the Scottish Parliament?

Today we're publishing the next blog in a series from the current student placements Engender is hosting from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course.

Following the local elections last week, it is clear that diverse representation is needed at all levels. Mary Galloway's research focuses on representation in the Scottish Parliament, and for her first post Mary maps out her research into the visibility of women with multiple marginalised identities, as well as discussing gender audits, and why an intersectional approach is needed in order to fully assess the representation and participation of all women in the Scottish Parliament. You can read Mary's second post here and third post here.

GUEST POST: Precedented inequalities in unprecedented times

Here we've published the next in a series of blogs from the current student placements Engender is hosting from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course.

In this post, Kirsty Rorrison discusses the COVID-19 pandemic, from it's impact on women and minoritised communities to it's representation in the media, and introduces research specifically focusing on how gender bias in political news reporting has operated during the pandemic. You can read Kirsty's second post here.

With the COVID-19 pandemic recently passing its two year anniversary, I’m sure many of us have been reflecting on the ways in which life has changed since the coronavirus first became a mainstream issue. We have all been impacted by the pandemic in one way or another - circumstances have changed personally, socially, politically and economically all across the world. However, while it may seem like everything in our society has fundamentally shifted, its underlying social structures have remained practically untouched. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as something of a magnifying glass for the oppressive social institutions forming the bedrock of modern society. In these "unprecedented times,” some things have reflected the precedent more than ever.

As a poem written at the height of the pandemic says, “we are in the same storm, but not in the same boat.” Far from being an equaliser, COVID-19 has instead emphasised the multitude of divisions within our society. For instance, those within ethnic minority groups were met with a much higher risk of infection and death from the virus than their white counterparts. Racism against people of East and Southeast Asian descent became particularly prominent in response to the hypothesised origins of the novel virus. Women have faced unique challenges balancing increased caring responsibilities with the rest of their lives, and were also put at risk by skyrocketing rates of domestic abuse during the pandemic. Low income children often struggled to access online learning, while wealthier pupils made the transition to remote education relatively easily. While we have all been living through a public health crisis, our situations have been very different; hardship has been discriminatory and disproportionate, often impacting those who were already struggling before COVID-19. The pandemic has been front page news for over two years now, and in a time where the public has relied so heavily on news reporting, and so much has been written about the pandemic, the oppressive structures which have compounded the hardships of COVID-19 were bound to be reflected in news coverage itself.

As a placement student with Engender, I have been given the opportunity to investigate the gendered dimensions of the pandemic, specifically in relation to its coverage in the media. COVID-19 has dominated the news cycle for the past two years, and this massive quantity of reporting offers extremely valuable insights into what life has been like during the pandemic. Work has already been undertaken which exposes biases in news coverage; for instance, it has been shown that reporting on the pandemic tends to over-represent the voices and interests of people who are white, middle class, and often male. I have been carrying out a content analysis on COVID-19 news coverage from some of Scotland’s most popular newspapers, hoping to understand how gender is manifested in reporting on the coronavirus. While I expect to encounter a huge amount of data regarding gender, media and COVID-19, I intend to primarily focus on the ways in which representations of politicians in the news have been gendered.

It has already been established that the pandemic has amplified existing inequalities in Scotland. It has also been proven that women in politics faced gender bias in news coverage prior to the pandemic. I am hoping to find the convergence in these two facts by investigating how gender bias in political news reporting has functioned during the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, I will be considering how the precedent of gender bias in political news reporting has persisted despite these unprecedented times. My next two blog posts will detail my findings and consider the implications of the data this project produces. For now, I ask what the magnifying glass of COVID-19 may reveal about politics, gender and media.