Gender Matters at Westminster

Engender is Scotland’s feminist policy organisation. We have a vision for a Scotland in which women and men have equal opportunities in life, equal access to resources and power, and are equally safe and secure from harm.

In the run up to the General Election on June 8th, we're focusing on women's rights, equality and women's representation on politics. Here you can find information on our priorities, our summary of what the party manifestos mean for women in Scotland and information on our blog series featuring women involved in political campaigning around the General Election.

Our Key Priorities:

After the snap General Election was announced, we sat down to draft our key asks to protect and advance women’s rights and equality. Given cuts to social security and the risks to women’s equality and human rights stemming from Brexit, it didn’t take us long to put together our three key priorities.

Our priorities cover social security, including abolishing the 'family cap' and its accompanying 'rape clause', ensuring that women’s equality and human rights are part of the Brexit negotiations, and protecting our existing equality and human rights legislation. You can see the full list, with more detailed information, here.

We asked parties to include commitments to these priorities in their manifestos, and you can read our manifesto summary below.

What the manifestos mean for women in Scotland:

Our policy team have been hard at work looking through the various party manifestos to see what commitments are being made to advance women's equality in Scotland.

In our gender summary of the manifestos we've looked at whether parties committed to any (or all) of our three priorities outlined above. We've also looked at what the manifestos say about other key issues that affect women in Scotland, like social security, care and childcare, immigration and more. You can read and download our full summary here.

Women's representation in politics:

It's hard to overstate the importance of women's representation in politics. Gender balance in parliament, local government and around decision making tables has an influence on both the focus and outcomes of discussions. Only 33.9% of Scottish MPs elected in the last Westminster General Election were women, and only 29% of councillors elected in the recent Scottish local council elections are women.

Ahead of the General Election on 8th June, we're hosting a series of blogs from women involved in political campaigning for various political parties to showcase why women's representation is important across the political spectrum. You can find all of our blog coverage on the 2017 General Election so far here.