Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 04 March 2021
Thank you. That point is well made, and I agree whole-heartedly.
As the cabinet secretary said, in many ways, it has taken a pandemic for us to recognise the brilliant women in our midst. Nurses make up 42 per cent of the national health service workforce, and almost 80 per cent of nurses are women. About 85 per cent of the social care workforce is women. Those incredible women have played a major part in Scotland’s efforts to challenge Covid-19. Their work, day in and day out, since long before the pandemic is always challenging health inequality and ensuring that each patient and person with whom they work receives the best care. We need to value them and pay them properly. Professor Linda Bauld and Professor Devi Sridhar have become household names. They have been the voices of calm expertise and reason on which we have all come to rely.
Let us choose to challenge the fact that this Parliament has a long way to go, and work to do, to properly represent the people of Scotland; challenge the lack of women here and in local government across the country; challenge the way that things are done when it means that women who have been involved in politics feel that they have to leave because they cannot spend enough time with their children and loved ones; challenge the timing of meetings when it means that those with caring duties, who are overwhelmingly women, cannot attend; challenge the fact that single parents, of whom 92 per cent are women, cannot go to the pub to do the networking that makes promotion or political selection more likely; challenge the shameful fact that we live in a country in which proof of rape is required for a woman to receive child tax credits for a third child; and challenge the discrimination, bullying and harassment that women of colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer women, disabled women and refugee women face in the workplace as well as the multiple barriers that prevent them from entering the labour market in the first place.
In many instances, women are taking on unpaid work on top of their paid employment, but too often that is not recognised, appreciated or even noticed because that type of work is not valued—it is not even viewed as work, despite the huge contribution that women’s unpaid labour makes to the economy. The term “second shift” was invented by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the 1970s to describe the household and childcare duties that follow a day’s work for women. Forty years later, we are still trying to tackle the persistent gender imbalance that sees women taking on the majority of domestic and care work. Let us choose to challenge that inequality so that we can improve the lives of the women who experience it today and prevent future generations having to fight the same battles.
I, too, thank those women who will not be standing for election again, and I wish them all the very best in all that they go on to do. I know that they will continue to make a difference wherever they are.
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