Meeting of the Parliament 12 March 2014
That, of course, has to be balanced—it is helpful if members listen to all of the answer—with the needs of women who are at different points in their lives and who need access to different sorts of learning and different sorts of courses to enable them on their journey back into education and back into work. It is important to remember that the majority of college places are indeed part time.
In the time that I have left, I want to focus on public life, because we also know that there is much more that we can do to encourage women to feel equipped to participate in wider public life. In our equality outcome, we aim for public boards to be more diverse and to broadly reflect the general population by 2017, and we are taking opportunities within current powers to start to make a difference.
There would be further opportunities if equalities legislation was our responsibility. My colleague Shona Robison, the Minister for Commonwealth Games and Sport, who has responsibility for equalities, wrote to Jo Swinson MP in October last year to propose that Holyrood be given legislative powers over women’s representation. Jo Swinson responded, inviting the Scottish Government to put forward its detailed proposals for how it would use those powers to improve women’s representation, and we will be pleased to do so.