Engender blog

Holyrood 2026 - Calling on candidates to invest in women

We’re calling on candidates to commit to taking action on three key areas for women if elected – and we need your help!

A decade of austerity policies, the pandemic, and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis have all impacted women disproportionately. Far too many women in Scotland report that their lives are increasingly impacted by financial insecurity, that the disproportionate burden of caring responsibilities they carry continues to go unrecognised and be undervalued, and that their fundamental rights increasingly feel at risk.

We’re calling on candidates to commit to policies that will transform women’s lives by raising 3 of the key asks from our manifesto, which focus on tackling women’s deep financial insecurity head-on. These are realistic steps that political parties can take to ensure that policy and public investment translate into real change for the most marginalised in our communities. 

Gender inequality is not inevitable in Scotland, and the Holyrood 2026 elections on 7th May can be a hopeful moment of change for women in Scotland, but we need parties and candidates to commit to making women’s voices heard.

We’re asking candidates to commit to making Scotland a place where…

1. Women live free from poverty and financial inequality.

We’re calling on candidates to commit to supporting the creation of a ‘Women’s Equality Fund’ designed to provide targeted crisis financial support for marginalised groups of women, with a focus on unpaid carers, women with experience of domestic abuse, women with No Recourse to Public Funds, and disabled women.

2. We value the unpaid care women provide in our communities.

We’re calling on candidates to commit to providing vital financial assistance for unpaid carers, including improving the Carers Support Payment, increasing its value and extending access for young carers, older carers, those in education and employment, and those with multiple caring roles, and to support the introduction of a well-structured pilot scheme of the ‘Minimum Income Guarantee’ by 2029, with a focus on unpaid carers, including carers from a diverse range of ages, employment and education statuses.

3. Women’s participation in the economy is valued and invested in.

We’re calling on canddiates to commit to supporting the designation of childcare and social care as crucial economic growth sectors by recognising and investing in the care economy as key infrastructure, including in Scotland’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation (NSET).

Use the tool at the top of this page to write to your local candidates and ask them to commit to investing in women and transforming our communities.

Building an intersectional feminist future for Scotland

Earlier this month, our membership came together for our Annual General Meeting and to consider our Annual Report 2025, which you can read here.

It gave us a rare opportunity to take stock of our work and what we’ve managed to achieve in the last year. 
 
We’d like to say a huge thank you to our members, followers, and everyone we’ve collaborated with. We’re grateful to the hundreds of women from across Scotland who have responded to our consultations and surveys or who joined our workshops in person. Your support and engagement enrich our work, help us understand the challenges women face, and what the priorities for change need to be - thank you.

It’s been a busy year... 

We’ve worked across issues including women’s:  

• Poverty and the impacts on unpaid carers, single mums, migrant and refugee women. 

• Health, securing phase two of the groundbreaking Women’s Health Plan and a renewed focus on mental health.  

• Reproductive Rights, launching a major partnership campaign on abortion: Lets change the Act.  

• Safety: focusing on how violence against women can be prevented using policy changes across transport, housing and planning.  

• Equal Representation in Politics, Media and Culture, publishing in-depth research on the increasing hostility and pressure women face in these spaces and what government and organisations can do to improve things. 

We’ve engaged with hundreds of women through our research, surveys and events, including in-person workshops across the country. We captured powerful personal testimony and positive feedback:  

“Diverse, respectful, and inclusive workshop space” 
“Felt heard, valued, and respected”
“Really excellent event and well run”
“Amazing, so engaging and freedom for chat”

 
We produced a wide range of briefings, evidence and analysis highlighting 14 vital areas for women’s equality in Scotland today. 

We collaborated directly with 130 different organisations.

We contributed to 22 advisory bodies, sharing our expertise and advocating for change. 

We hosted 28 in-person and online events, conferences and webinars. 

We could not do this without you, thank you. 

Guest Post: Why we need an integrated health care strategy for women

Women and girls face significant barriers to good mental and physical health in Scotland. Health issues that disproportionately affect women, or affect women differently to men, have historically lacked funding and professional focus, meaning that women’s health needs are not equally prioritised and understood across health services and more broadly.

Engender Member Linda Gask is a retired psychiatrist and feminist, living in Orkney. In this guest post, they explore the need for a coordinated approach to women’s physical and mental health.

In the Paris suburb of St. Denis, one of the more deprived parts of that city, stands a building called House of Women. Opened in 2016, by an extraordinary obstetrician and gynaecologist called Ghada Hatem-Gantzer, it now has now helped over 30,000 women.

Why do we need to know about this now, in Scotland? Because the House of Women isn’t only a place where women receive reproductive healthcare. It’s an amazing one-stop shop where women who have experienced gendered violence and everything that goes with that: poverty, abuse, racism, injury and illness, contact with the criminal justice system, mental ill-health, can get help in one place. Under one roof. There is nowhere like it in Scotland, or anywhere else in the United Kingdom. If we need help, we must seek out different professionals across our towns and cities. Our minds and bodies are treated as though they too are in separate places.

Women’s Centres can provide some of this holistic support but accessing help for problems that can cause serious harm to both minds and bodies, in one single place like the House of Women, is nigh on impossible. Why?

It’s because our health policymakers are not thinking enough about what women want and need to recover, but instead about ‘disorders’ and where, how and by whom they should be treated.

Yet women’s physical and mental health are closely intertwined.

When we have persistent, horrible pelvic pain, it gets us down and may even make us severely depressed. The leading cause of death for women between a month and a year after childbirth continues to be suicide. Not only our lives but our hormones drive us crazy at times. We now know that perimenopause and menopause is a time of risk for women’s mental health. That the mean age for the menopause is 50, and historically the peak suicide rate for women in Scotland has been between 45 and 54 is unlikely to be a coincidence.  

Domestic violence doesn’t only cause physical harm to women, but also psychological trauma too and is finally being recognised as a major cause of suicide. Dementia, which affects both our minds and bodies, is more common in women than men, though we still don’t understand why, because the research hasn’t been done. Women are the ones more likely to be those caring for people with dementia too.

Both poor physical and mental health are closely related to living in poverty, and women are more likely to experience that in our society and suffer the ill-effects. Dr Hatem-Gantzer recognised that her patients who have experienced gendered violence needed much more than just a gynaecologist, so she set about getting everything they needed together in one welcoming space.

Women’s health is still too often thought of as being about childbearing and its consequences, even though, despite what some politicians may think, we are so much more than wombs. It is pleasing to see that the second phase of the Scottish Women’s Health Plan has a broader perspective than this, covering not only gynaecology but also thinking about women’s brain health – dementia, and other physical health problems such as cardiovascular disease and bone health including risk factors for osteoporosis. However, once again, the specific needs of women’s mental health will be addressed in a separate mental health strategy to be published later in the year. There is a real risk we’ll be overlooked once again by a ‘gender neutral’ approach that fails to consider our real needs including better care for the problems that are so much more common in women – anxiety and depression.

We want faster access to therapies in the community, more investment for eating disorders and the right help for the psychological consequences of early abuse, domestic violence, rape and sexual assault. Too many of us are still ending up with a diagnosis of personality disorder after experiencing violence and abuse. And all of these would benefit from more joined up thinking with physical health. For example, anorexia nervosa is a risk factor for osteoporosis and depression makes it harder to manage your chronic health problems such as diabetes.

Everything is connected.

What we need is a strategy that thinks about us in the whole – not as separate minds and bodies. Australia has produced a plan just for women – which addresses women’s health across the life course, the factors that contribute to health and health outcomes for women and girls, improving health equity, and the needs of ethnic minority and gender diverse populations. It also talks about getting organisations and professionals to work together more effectively – something that doesn’t always happen here either. There are women’s health centres emerging there which address physical and mental health - something we desperately need.

Dr Hatem-Gantzer’s model for the House of Women is now being copied across France. We could do with an integrated approach to women’s health in Scotland too. We just can’t afford to keep splitting off women’s minds and bodies. It makes no sense.

Engender Member Linda Gask is a retired psychiatrist and feminist, living in Orkney, Scotland. Their latest and award-winning book Out of Her Mind: How We Are Failing Women’s Mental Health and What Must Change is available for purchase. They also regularly blog here.

Guest posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Engender, and all language used is the author’s own. Bloggers may have received some editorial support from Engender, and may have received a fee from our commissioning pot. We aim for our blog to reflect a range of feminist viewpoints, and offer a commissioning pot to ensure that women do not have to offer their time or words for free.

Interested in writing for the Engender blog? Find out more here.

Free International Women’s Day Print

Our Free Feminist Artwork is back for 2026!

We’ve got a treat for Engender members and supporters this International Women’s Day.

We’ve got a limited number of stunning A6 prints available for Engender members and supporters to claim, created by incredible local illustrator, Heedayah Lockman.

We’ve got 250 prints to give away to Engender members, and another 100 up for grabs, so be quick to secure this excellent addition to your feminist art collection.

How to claim yours

It couldn’t be easier - just complete the form below with your details, and we’ll pop one in the post!