Meeting of the Parliament 05 June 2014
Okay. I say, just to finish the point, that if we could have 50 per cent of the funding for women under 25 at the childcare academy and 50 per cent for those over 25, that would serve the needs of my constituents.
Willie Rennie spoke about STEM subjects. I will not repeat all the points about that but, through the Royal Society of Edinburgh report, we know that women with science, technology and engineering skills are among Scotland’s untapped resources. That report focused on people with the skills who were not entering work, but the bigger problem lies with women often not going into those areas of work at all, which leads to the whole issue of occupational segregation.
That issue was so helpfully and constructively covered by Sir Ian Wood in his report, which came out this week. Like other members, I assumed that that would be the topic of this debate. It is not, but it is still relevant to the debate. For example, Sir Ian has a recommendation:
“Support networks should be developed for young people entering Modern Apprenticeships in occupations which are currently heavily gender segregated.”
That relates to some of the other recommendations, which we will come to in a moment.
I was going to talk about how gender stereotyping starts in the early years, but I have no time for that. I will therefore focus on the particular subject of the debate: enterprise. Surely occupational segregation and gender stereotyping are relevant to the stark facts that only 21 per cent of Scotland’s 339,000 small and medium-sized enterprises are led by women, and that men are still twice as likely to start businesses compared with women.
If women-led businesses were equal to those of men, we are told, Scotland’s gross value added—GVA—would increase by a staggering £7.6 billion. That reinforces, if anything does, the general point that Jenny Marra made about gender equality and the economy.
I did not think that the Scotland can do report had a great deal of focus on gender, but it is fair to say that the “Women in Enterprise” follow-up document did. Some of the recommendations in that document have already been commended today. They include mentoring, network and peer group support, role model projects and female ambassadors, and the cabinet secretary gave some examples. Other good examples can be given, such as the women in renewable energy network.
A further recommendation is to
“explore the creation of a ‘soft-loan-fund’”.
That leads to the general point that there are a lot of suggestions in the reports and we need to know whether and how they are being implemented and how effective they have been. That leads, in turn, to Jenny Marra’s point about the banking recommendation: an excellent recommendation for gender-specific support for bank staff in order for them to help develop female customers’ businesses. As Jenny Marra said, let us have a report back about how effective that has been.
The recommendations in the Government’s “Women in Enterprise” report were matched by a lot of the suggestions in the “Survey of Women-Owned Businesses in Scotland 2012”, which was carried out by the Hunter centre for entrepreneurship. The priorities that were identified in the Hunter centre report included access to finance, which is relevant to the banking recommendation that I mentioned a moment ago. Access to networking, contacts and mentoring are also mentioned. That reinforces the points that have been made in the Government’s report.
I am almost out of time. There are lots of quotes in the Hunter centre report, and I was wanting to—