Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 04 March 2021
In a year when we have had precious little to celebrate, I am delighted to have the opportunity to recognise the amazing achievements of women across Scotland.
We all owe an incredible debt of gratitude to our health and social care workforce, the majority of whom are women. They have been on the front line in our battle against Covid-19, and they are leading our recovery, administering the first dose of the vaccine to 1,688,808 people as of today. They have worked tirelessly and under intense pressure to provide the best possible care. Their efforts are nothing short of heroic. That is why we have allocated £5 million to enhance wellbeing support services for health and social care staff, and we have also provided a thank you payment of £500 to health and social care staff to recognise their extraordinary work.
I want to express my appreciation of the women across Scotland who have had to juggle childcare commitments with other responsibilities, as schools and childcare settings were shut to control the spread of the virus. That is not to say that men have not had to do that too, but we know that caring roles still predominantly fall to women. According to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in different gender couples women do considerably more childcare than their partners. During the first lockdown, mums were doing childcare for more than 10 hours each day, on average, along with four hours of housework.
I have heard from women about the guilt they felt as they struggled with home schooling, maintaining a happy healthy family and holding down paid work, when possible. In fact, that probably sums up my experience of much of the past year.
Our mental health is just as important as our physical health, and we all have to be kind to ourselves and others regarding what we can do in these extraordinary times, although I admit that I am not that great at following that advice myself.
From one mother to many other mums across the chamber and beyond, I want to say thank you and tell you that what you have been doing is amazing, but hard. We are dealing with unprecedented circumstances, but we hope that those times will soon come to an end.
While I extend my sincere thanks to women across Scotland for their essential efforts, I want to recognise the inherent unfairness of the fact that women have had to bear the majority of the impacts. The pandemic has shone a harsh light on existing gender inequality in our country and on how deep-rooted gender biases restrict opportunities for women.
The extra caring responsibilities that women are undertaking are having a profound impact on their ability to take on paid work. When combined with the pandemic’s impact on areas of the economy with a mainly female workforce, such as tourism and hospitality, Covid-19 threatens to undo much of the progress that we have made towards women’s workplace equality. We must take action to mitigate that, as we are. We have prioritised the reopening of early learning and childcare, because of the crucial role that it plays in supporting children and families. We remain committed to the roll-out of 1,140 hours of free, high-quality childcare for all three and four-year-olds and have provided councils with £567 million of additional funding in the draft budget to support that.
We are reviewing the actions within our “A Fairer Scotland for Women: Gender Pay Gap Action Plan” to ensure that they remain fit for purpose and support women through the economic recovery from Covid-19. In November last year, we launched a new women returners programme and an updated workplace equality fund. The women returners programme will support women who have had a career break back into work, and the workplace equality fund will encourage employers to invest in advancing their diversity and inclusion practices.
The Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Local Government and I established the social renewal advisory board to consider how we can emerge from the pandemic a fairer and more prosperous Scotland. The board brought together equality experts, third sector stakeholders and local government to provide advice to the Scottish Government on putting equality and human rights at the heart of our recovery.
That work is essential to ensure that when we emerge from the pandemic we have not lost any of the gains that we have made. We need to do more to end the inequality that caused the problems to exist in the first place. I thank the members of the board for all their hard work. We are considering their recommendations carefully and Ms Campbell and I will respond to the report in due course.