Hansard

Thank you for the invitation to give evidence on gender issues and the budget. I am speaking on behalf of Engender and the Scottish women's budget group, which we are in the process of setting up. Engender is an information, research and networking organisation for women in Scotland.

We are best known for our annual publication of the gender audit, which documents and comments on the position of women in Scotland. We have been publishing the audit since 1993. In the introduction to the most recent copy, "Gender Audit 2000", Wendy Alexander said:

"Since 1993 the annual Gender Audit has helped to persuade commentators and policy makers that women in Scotland in general still suffer disadvantage and inequalities compared to men in general, in contrast to the common perception that women had already achieved a substantial degree of equality with men."

Engender's other main activity is the engendering change project, which provides capacity building for women's organisations to empower them to represent issues affecting women more effectively.

Building on the gender audit and engendering change, we are setting up a women's budget group which, like the gender audit, will draw on the experience of a number of individuals and organisations to comment on the impact of Government spending plans and policies. Activities to date include a submission to the consultation on Government spending plans in "Spending Plans for Scotland", organising two seminars on gender proofing of budgets—one with the Westminster women's budget group and one with the Canadian high commission—and a recent meeting with Jack McConnell.

Our work compliments the work of the Westminster women's budget group, which is mainly concerned with the impact of tax and benefits policies. It has been consulted regularly by HM Treasury on the introduction of new policies, such as the working families tax credit. We are agreed that there could be a useful link between a gender impact analysis process in the Scottish Parliament, which would focus on Scottish Executive department spending plans, and the Westminster group's focus on tax and benefits policies that affect women and men in Scotland as well.

The methodology for gender impact analysis, including that relating to spending plans, has already been developed and applied by women's organisations and Governments in South Africa, Canada, various other Commonwealth countries and Sweden, and there are opportunities to apply those lessons at the beginning of the process in Scotland. That is the case that we are making.

The aim of gender impact analysis is to examine the effectiveness of policies. By focusing on the results, we can ask whether money has been invested well. The easiest way to illustrate that is to take an example, such as women in poverty. Women are much more likely to find themselves in poverty than are men and much more likely to remain in poverty for a longer time. Poverty is a burden for all who experience it; we must stress that we are not promoting the well-being of one group at the expense of another that is also facing discrimination and poverty.

The purpose of the gender analysis of poverty would be to establish whether answers to questions about the likelihood of falling into poverty, the duration of poverty, the consequences of poverty, and policies that are designed to combat poverty, are the same for men as they are for women. Indeed, it would establish whether there are different answers for distinct groups of men and women. For example, black and ethnic minority women's needs are often overlooked and misunderstood because assumptions are made about their needs.

We welcome the budgetary consultation process that has been started by the Scottish Executive and the move away from old departments towards issue-based departments. The next step would be to get financial assistance to catch up with cross-cutting political priorities, especially equality and social inclusion. Gender impact analysis would be an effective way of achieving that.

We have not had much time to look at the report, "Investing in You", but I want to make a few brief points to illustrate the kinds of issues that might arise if a detailed gender impact analysis were carried out. I want to look briefly at four areas: children and education; communities; enterprise and lifelong learning; and transport. On children and education, we welcome the increased resources for child care and pre-school education, but we are concerned about the cost of the child-care strategy in terms of low wages for child-care workers, the overwhelming majority of whom are women.

On communities, we have a number of issues. We welcome the increase in resources for social inclusion, but we are concerned that the voluntary sector, which provides many essential services to women and children, remains relatively poorly resourced and, according to "Investing in You" is due to have its allocation reduced in 2001-02. As we know, the reality is that many voluntary organisations that provide targeted services for women are facing insecure funding and increased competition among themselves for resources. We are concerned that the social inclusion partnership monitoring guidelines issued by the Scottish Executive contain virtually no references to gender. Safeguards are needed to ensure that social inclusion partnerships take account of the needs of the whole community if they are to be effective in tackling the causes of social exclusion.

On enterprise and lifelong learning, we recommend that targets for further and higher education include the development of part-time programmes and the provision of child care to ensure wider access, particularly for women with caring responsibilities. We are concerned by the low proportion of women in business in Scotland and the gender stereotyping of Government-funded training. We recommend monitoring the gender pay gap, in other words women's full-time earnings as a percentage of men's, mainstreaming all Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise programmes and allocating funding for positive action initiatives that address gender segregation in enterprise training in the labour market. Policies and programmes need to address the needs of part-time and low-paid workers and their carers.

On transport, the Scottish Executive recently commissioned research and consultation on issues affecting women's use of various forms of transport. It found that women have much less access to cars and are more frequent users of public transport. Looking at "Investing in You", we are concerned that the proposed reduction in allocation to Strathclyde Passenger Transport Executive in 2001-02 will adversely impact on women.

In conclusion, we would like to say that gender impact assessment is a useful way of assessing the effectiveness of policies and that there is an opportunity for the Scottish Executive and the Scottish Parliament to introduce those processes at the beginning, based on methods that have been developed in countries such as South Africa. In particular, we strongly urge the Scottish Parliament and the Executive to take over the work of the gender audit. We will not be able to produce the gender audit in future due to a lack of resources—we have been doing this in a voluntary capacity for seven years—but it is the sort of audit that is a necessary first step for a gender impact assessment.

In the meeting with Jack McConnell, we suggested that the Scottish Executive second an adviser to work with finance department officers on adapting a gender impact analysis toolkit, which has been developed in Canada, for use in Scotland, because we recognise that the necessary expertise is not available at the moment. While we collectively can offer a lot of experience and expertise from the women's budget group and Engender, we are constrained by our lack of resources. We are already finding it difficult to meet the number of requests that we have had, although we welcome the fact that people are beginning to look at these issues in more detail.