Hansard

Thank you, Presiding Officer, and happy international women’s day to everyone here.

International women’s day is a moment of celebration, but it is also a moment of reflection. We rejoice in the achievements of women and women’s organisations here in Scotland and across the world. We mark progress towards gender equality, but, on this day, we also remind ourselves of how much more still needs to be done.

Of course, this is the last international women’s day that I will mark as First Minister. I recall speaking in this chamber on the day that I became First Minister, with my eight-year-old niece looking on from the public gallery. I said then that I hoped that my election, as the first woman to hold the office of First Minister, would help to open the door to greater opportunity for all women and that it would also help leaders to reach a point when girls no longer even question the fact that a woman can hold the highest political office in the land. We have a way still to go to achieve true gender equality, but we have also come a long way in these past eight years.

One of my first acts as First Minister was to appoint a Cabinet that was gender balanced. I got lots of emails in the days after that asking how I knew that all the women in my Cabinet were there on merit. I was struck by the fact that I did not get a single email asking me how I knew that all the men in my Cabinet were there on merit. [Applause.]

At the time, the Scottish Cabinet was one of just three gender-balanced Cabinets in the world. There are many more now. I take this opportunity to say that I hope that future First Ministers will continue that practice. Unless we believe that women are somehow less qualified than men, it stands to reason that any Cabinet that is not gender balanced is not properly reflective of all the talents at our country’s disposal.

Alongside many others, I have campaigned throughout my life for equal representation more generally—not least here, in our national Parliament. We are not quite there yet, but we are closer than ever. As of now, 46 per cent of us elected to this chamber are women. In addition, and perhaps partly because of that greater representation, this Parliament has taken important steps to protect, promote and improve women’s rights.

We were the first Parliament in the world to legislate for provision of free period products. We have ensured gender equality on public sector boards and we have passed vital legislation to give better and stronger protection to victims of domestic abuse. We will soon consider further measures to safeguard the right of women to access abortion services—in other words, to access healthcare—free from harassment and intimidation.

Before I leave office, I will say more about forced adoptions, and I hope that we will, in the interests of building a better future, continue to address and help to heal the past injustices that women have suffered.

We have also made childcare and support for families integral to our economic and social policies with policies including the baby box, the expansion of childcare, extra support for carers and the Scottish child payment—the policy of which I am perhaps most proud. Clearly, those policies do not benefit only women, but they benefit women disproportionately. They are achievements that our Parliament as a whole can be proud of—achievements to which all parties across the chamber have contributed.

Some of our policies to support families are made necessary by United Kingdom Government policies that do not have the interests of women at their heart. For example, we are ensuring that no one loses out financially as a result of the two-child benefits cap and the abhorrent rape clause that is part of it.

Too often, there are steps, including improvement of parental leave or addressing the injustice that is being suffered by WASPI women—women against state pension inequality—that we cannot take because we, in this Parliament, do not yet have the powers to do so. Indeed, the power to improve the rights and the lives of women, and to promote equality more generally, are among the many reasons why I support Scotland—and this Parliament—becoming independent.

That said, I truly believe that the record of the Parliament is one to be proud of—but we must build on it in the years to come. That is why my focus today is on the future rather than on the past. In particular, I will highlight two policy areas—enterprise and criminal justice—in which we now, I believe, have an opportunity, indeed a responsibility, to make more progress.

Two weeks ago, I visited the Roslin Institute with Ana Stewart, the entrepreneur and investor who is the author of a landmark report on women in enterprise. That report lays bare the reality that although women make up more than half of our population, only one in five businesses in Scotland right now is founded by and led by women. That inequality is unjustifiable—first and foremost from the perspective of fairness and equal opportunity. As the review says, the current position represents a

“denial of opportunity on, literally, an industrial scale.”

That inequality is also economically counterproductive. If women are supported to set up businesses at the same rate—or anything like it—as men already do, the benefits to our economy will be immense. The report therefore calls for better integration of entrepreneurial education across our system. It recommends that Scotland should create new sources of support for women-led businesses at the start-up stage, and again at the point at which they seek private funding. It makes the case for establishing Scotland as a leader in femtech, which is technology that is designed to address women’s health issues. It is an area that is of enormous economic and scientific potential that represents a particular opportunity for women entrepreneurs.

The report recommends that business support and incubation services should be available closer to nurseries, schools, supermarkets and general practitioner surgeries, so that primary carers—who are more likely to be women—find them easier to use. Those are powerful recommendations, and I look forward to seeing their implementation.

One of the interesting and important truths underpinning the recommendations is that the gender gap—whether it is in enterprise or elsewhere—is a consequence as well as a cause of the deep-rooted and often systemic sexism and inequality that still exist across our society. That is why the review report places a strong emphasis on education.

It is also why—perhaps unexpectedly in a report about enterprise—the report supports the creation of new criminal offences to tackle misogyny, which continues to constrain the ability of too many women to contribute fully to the economy, politics and wider society, and, sometimes, even just to live our lives without fear. That is something that is particularly true in the toxic online culture that we unfortunately live in, which too often spills over into our daily lives.

That brings me to the second issue that I want to touch on. A year ago today, on international women’s day, Baroness Helena Kennedy’s report, which had been commissioned by the Scottish Government, was published. It recommended new criminal offences for misogyny. Today, we have published a consultation paper on draft legislation to implement the recommendations of that report. The reforms will entail five new laws to give police and prosecutors new powers to tackle the pernicious impact of misogyny. I strongly encourage everyone with an interest to read and respond to the consultation.

That draft legislation is just one of a series of forthcoming changes that are designed to make the criminal justice system work more effectively for women and, by helping to free women from the scourge of misogyny, ensure that more of us can reach our full potential.

In recent years, the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 and action to improve access to forensic medical examination have made a difference. However, despite real progress, there is still too much evidence that the criminal justice system is failing too many victims of sexual crime—most of whom are women.