Sex and Power
Scotland
2008
MISSING WOMEN
If women hope to shatter the glass ceiling and achieve
equal representation, we would need to find the women
who are missing from top positions of power in Scotland.
These include:
130 missing from public appointments
85 missing secondary school head teachers
21 missing Members of Parliament
13 missing judges of the Court of Session
11 missing senior police officers
12 missing local authority chief executives
10 missing Trade Union general secretaries
9 missing Further Education college principals
Contents
Sex and Power 2008: who runs Scotland? 2008 ........... 3
Progress ........................................................................ 4
Sex and Power 2008 Scotland Index: Women in
selected 'top jobs' over the last five years1 .................... 6
A squandering of talent ................................................. 8
Aspiration gives way to frustration ............................... 11
Ethnic minority women: the glass ceiling is low for most
and lower for some. ..................................................... 13
Not just a women’s issue ............................................. 14
Women's representation in Parliament: the international
perspective26 ............................................................... 17
Change brings wider benefits ...................................... 18
Notes ........................................................................... 21
Contact us ................................................................... 24
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Sex and Power 2008: who runs Scotland?
2008
Five years on from the first Sex and Power index, the
Equality and Human Rights Commission asks why so
little has changed.
As a new single equality body that works across gender
(including gender reassignment), race, disability, age,
religion or belief, sexual orientation and human rights,
we bring our new wider remit to the index’s analysis of
why so many women are missing from our work places
and public life. We argue that in 21st century Scotland,
we can no longer look at the index solely as a ‘women’s
issue’ that charts cracks in the ‘glass ceiling’.
While Sex and Power glaringly illustrates the way
women in particular are put at a disadvantage by the
old-fashioned, inflexible way Scotland is working, we
suggest it’s time to ask ourselves in what other ways our
failure to ‘work better’ at a time of rapid demographic
change prevents us from tapping into all the talent that
should be driving our future economy.
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Progress
The annual index of women in positions of authority and
influence in Scotland is in its fifth year. Yet the trend that
is emerging is one of reversal or stalled progress, with
only a few significant increases.
This year, in four of the 14 categories, there are fewer
women holding top posts as Members of the Scottish
Parliament, public appointments, senior police officers
and university principals.
In another six categories, the number of women remains
unchanged since 2007’s index. These are local authority
council leaders, Members of Parliament for Scottish
Constituencies, Scottish Members of the European
Parliament, Judges of the Court of Session, local
authority chief executives and health service chief
executives.
Women’s representation has increased in just four
areas, Ministers in the Scottish Parliament, head
teachers in secondary schools, further education college
principals and trade union general secretaries or
equivalent.
Looking back over the full five years Sex and Power has
been published Scotland has made slow progress and in
some cases has seen stagnation. Women’s
representation in the Scottish Parliament has declined
from39.5 per cent in 2003 to 31.3 per cent in 2008.
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Women leaders of local authority councils have
remained static at 18.8 per cent over the last five years.
This lack of progress is depressing given the aspirations
that women held for political representation in a
devolved Scotland and we wonder what it will take to
improve political representation here.
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Sex and Power 2008 Scotland Index:
Women in selected 'top jobs' over the last
five years1
%women
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007/8
Public and voluntary sectors
Women’s
average
representation 20.6%
Public appointments2
32.2 33.6
34.7
34.7 32.4
Local authority chief
9.4 12.5
12.5
12.5 12.5
executives3
Senior police officers4
6.9 7.1
7.1
10.7
7.4
Judges of the Court of
9.4 9.4
12.5
11.8 11.8
Session5
Head teachers in
17.6 17.6
21.0
23.2 25.9
secondary schools6
Further Education
college principals7
22.9 26.1
22.7
27.3 29.5
University principals8
Health service chief
executives9
Trade Union general
secretariesorequivalent10
14.3 14.3
14.3
21.4
21.4
23.8 23.8
19.0
23.8
23.8
Figures not available 18.6
20.6
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%women
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007/8
Politics
Women’s
average
representation 25.2%
Members of Parliament,
ScotlandConstituencies11
Ministers in the Scottish
Parliament12
Members of the Scottish
Parliament13
Local authority council
leaders14
Scottish Members of
European Parliament15
15.3 15.3
15.3
13.6
13.6
22.2 27.8
27.8
27.8
31.3
39.5 39.5
39.5
38.8
34.1
18.8 18.8
18.8
18.8
18.8
25.0 28.6
28.6
28.6
28.6
NB The statistics in this index have been selected to
represent positions considered to have power or
influence in Scotland. For each statistic included, the
percentage of women has either been taken directly
from the source or calculated from the actual numbers of
women and men. A summary index has also been
calculated for each of the two areas: politics and public
and voluntary sectors. The summary shows women’s
representation in each area, calculated as a simple
average of the most recent percentage figures for each
indicator within the area.
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A squandering of talent
So, five years on from the first Sex and Power report,
does it matter if women still aren’t in top posts? If it
does, then why? And what will help accelerate the pace
of change?
It matters because it means Scotland is failing to get
talented women into these positions – and losing out on
their contribution to Scotland’s social and political life
and our economy.
Girls’ attainment is higher than boys’ at S5 and S6
levels16 and 57 per cent of all university students
arewomen.17 In Scotland 83 per cent of working age
men are economically active in 2008 compared to 77
per cent of working agewomen.18
Since 1982, the gap between male and female activity
rates has reduced as a result of increasing female
participation and static male activity rates.
In short, women no longer work for ‘pin money’. They
are essential to our country’s economic success and in
many families share the responsibility for bringing in
enough money to make ends meet.
Against this back drop, we might expect to find women
taking on more responsibility and rising through the
ranks. So what is happening? In some workplaces
discrimination still occurs and stereotypes hold women
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back. In other cases, young women are pointed towards
traditionally female occupations at the expense of
opening up a variety of opportunities. But a fair portion
of the blame must also be attributed to our rigid,
inflexible approach to work.
Workplaces, political systems and other parts of society
– forged in an era of ‘stay at home mums’ and
‘breadwinner dads’ – have failed to keep pace with the
reality of modern women’s and men’s lives.
For women at every level of work, this failure leads to a
squandering of talent, the most glaring example of which
is the lack of women in positions of power.
Before the arrival of children, 85 per cent of working
women are full-time. That falls to just 34 per cent of
working mothers with preschool children.19 A 2004
survey of part-time workers showed that just over half
had had previous jobs in which they used higher
qualifications or skills or had more
management/supervisory responsibility.20
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not saying all women have to
work outside the home. For some, being full-time
mothers for part or all of the time their children are under
or of school age is a genuine choice.
But for too many, moving to part time work or leaving the
labour market altogether is the result of limited choices.
Often, women experience a draining combination of out
dated working practices and a long hours culture
alongside the absence of appropriate, high quality,
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affordable childcare or social care. Similar situations
arise when a family member’s age or disability requires
more time and energy to ensure they are receiving
appropriate care. The final straw can be the expectation
that primary responsibility for the well-being of other
family members and the running of the household rests
with one person – mum. It all becomes too much and
the solution for many women is to take a less
challenging role or leave employment altogether.
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Aspiration gives way to frustration
Scottish women are ambitious, well qualified and skilled
for work – they are not short on aspiration. Over the past
10 years, women have been far more likely than men to
participate in higher education. The Age Participation
Index (API) for women increased from49.4 per cent in
1996–97 to 52.9 per cent in 2006–07, whilst the API for
men increased from 38.9 per cent to 41.2 per cent over
the same period. The gap between the API for young
women and the API for young men increased from10.5
percentage points in 1996–97 to 12.5 percentage points
in 2005–0621 before falling back to 11.7 percentage
points in 2006–07.
Yet women wanting careers and a family are too often
sidelined. Though many employers increasingly
embrace the benefits of flexible working, others offer
time off for raising a family and flexibility linked to
childcare and caring grudgingly, as concessions that are
a burden to business and those who seek them as not
committed to the company.
Given women’s experience, it is not surprising that
fathers –who increasingly want to spend more time with
their children than was typical 40 or even 20 years ago –
are reluctant to take paternity leave or longer parental
leave or to seek flexibility, because of the career penalty
or career death that may result. This means that,
whatever a couple want to do, greater responsibility
ends up being left to mothers, who in turn experience
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more of a penalty at work. With a reluctance to embrace
flexibility – despite the fact that in the hands of the most
innovative employers this has been shown to support
modern ‘24/7’ business – employers are relying more
and more on long hours working. Even though men want
to spend time with their children, they end up working
longer hours, not shorter. This perpetuates a model of
work that is almost impossible for women to see as
allowing them to combine a full-time job with family life –
and comes at a real cost for fathers.
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Ethnic minority women: the glass ceiling is
low for most and lower for some.
Ethnic minority women experience greater barriers in the
work place and are almost completely absent from
positions of power.22 However 7 per cent of Scotland’s
ethnic minority population are full-time students
compared with 4 per cent of the total Scottish population
and ethnic minority women are entering higher
education in growing numbers. Ethnic minority women in
Scotland are employed at a rate of 32 per cent
compared with 53 per cent of white women.
Unemployment rates for ethnic minority women are
between two and three times higher than that of white
groups. Pakistani and Bangladeshi women have
particularly high unemployment rates of between 10 and
14 per cent. Despite higher rates of unemployment,
ethnic minority women in Scotland do have higher rates
of working in professional occupations, 15 per cent
compared with 10 per cent of white women.
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Not just a women’s issue
The one thing the newly-created Equality and Human
Rights Commission would like to make clear – the first
year it publishes Sex and Power, produced previously
by the Equal Opportunities Commission – is that this is
not just a ‘women’s issue’. The Commission believes
that while the absence of women in these powerful
positions is important in itself, it is also an example of a
wider failure. We have to ask ourselves in what other
ways are the old-fashioned, inflexible ways we’re
working preventing us from tapping into talent?
How we can work better is the subject of a current
investigation by the Commission. The fact is, the world
of work – and the range of skills we’ll need to tap into to
power our economy – is changing and it’s time for
employers to catch up.
 The number of jobs in Scotland has risen
from2.3million in 1982 to 2.6million in 2007. This trend
is expected to continue in the future, with total
employment in Scotland projected to increase by
84,000 by 2017 23
 The fastest job growth will be in part-time employment,
with the number of part -time jobs growing
from779,000 in 2007 to 861,000 in 2017 24
 People over 50 have seen the greatest increase in
economic activity in the last decade – rising from64 per
cent in 1995 to 71 per cent in 2005, this trend is
expected to continue in Scotland. 25
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This has significant implications for the way Scotland
works, but our workplaces and the way people make it
to the top posts in the index have not caught up with this
reality. Our out dated model makes assumptions about
whether people can or cannot do particular jobs, based
on assumptions surrounding demographic
characteristics such as gender, age, disability, ethnicity,
religion and belief and sexual orientation. Some groups
are especially disadvantaged by this stereotyping, such
as women of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and AfricanCaribbean origin.
And to be frank, our public policies sometimes make
assumptions about who does the caring and who should
pay the ‘price’. For example, there has been a dramatic
change in leave for new mothers in recent years and the
Commission welcomes that. But the exclusive focus on
increasing maternity leave without more leave for fathers
in their own right, or the right to parental leave, that
gives parents real choice about who does the caring
may well have an unfortunate unintended consequence
of entrenching the view that only mothers look after
children. It has also, in some cases, made women an
easy target for more unscrupulous employers who steer
clear of hiring women of childbearing age.
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This is not about filling quotas or positive discrimination
– appointing people just because of the group they
belong to. The Commission wants to see people
appointed to top jobs on merit. But merit and talent are
not the exclusive preserve of one section of the
population or another. Instead, we are failing to adapt
the way we work to the realities of people’s lives and
ignoring the talent that exists within the population.
By contrast, genuine equality of opportunity looks
beyond the stereotype and asks what someone is good
at. It also removes unnecessary barriers to participation,
for example, through changes to working practices such
as reasonable adjustments for disabled people and
flexible working to enable everyone to combine their
paid work with life outside.
Alongside this, good childcare and social care policies
and services are essential if both women and men are to
have a genuine choice about the extent to which they
can be parents or carers as well as paid workers.
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Women's representation in Parliament: the
international perspective26
The UK Parliament currently ranks 70th and is
outperformed by Rwanda, Afghanistan and Iraq in
terms of women’s representation.
 UK: 70th, 19.3%
 Canada: 59th, 21.3%
 USA: 83rd, 16.8%
 Argentina: 5th, 40.0%
 Rwanda: 1st, 48.8%
 Sweden: 2nd, 47.0%
 Russian Federation: 97th, 14.0%
 Afghanistan: 29th, 27.7%
 China: 59th, 21.3%
 Iraq: 35th, 25.5%
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Change brings wider benefits
Changing the way work is organised would not only
enable women to continue in their chosen career after
having children, but also fulfil the aspirations of:
 fathers to be active parents
 disabled people to have careers
 workers to combine education and work to gain new
skills, and
 older workers to remain in work of their choice longer.
Government policy and business practice are gradually
acknowledging the positive impact of innovative working
arrangements, both on business performance and on
the ability of individuals and families to fit their work and
the rest of their lives together. But British business is
often stubbornly traditional and the change of pace is
slow. And the laws of unintended consequences have
meant public policy has not always hastened the social
revolution in our workplaces.
The danger is that we simply overlook or waste talent
from our economic, cultural and political life. Instead,
Scotland’s employers and politicians need to make a
determined effort to ‘work better’.
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We have to make sure that:
 our political institutions and workplaces reflect the
reality of the modern workforce – whether workers are
parents, disabled people, younger or older – by looking
at ways to challenge the inflexible, long hours culture
of far too many workplaces and encouraging both men
and women to take up this opportunity
 we look at what people can do, rather than making
assumptions about what they can or cannot do based
on a stereotype or aspect of identity. Both employers
and politicians should show more leadership and be
innovative in providing flexible, work-based solutions.
In turn, we at the Equality and Human Rights
Commission will listen to real people, using innovative
techniques and new technology to drive a 21st century
consultation that tells us what people really want and
what will make a difference for them. We will listen to
experts, and look at what we can learn from other places
around the world. We will do all we can to encourage
employers and politicians and to provide practical advice
and guidance on how to achieve these changes. And –
finally –we will map out our vision for the future with the
publication of a major report in the New Year, looking at
how we can all ‘work better’. Scotland cannot as an
economy afford to go on asking people to fit their
families around the demands of ever-more intense ‘24/7’
global competition, and marginalising or rejecting
workers who fail to fit into traditional and inflexible
working arrangements.
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Only when we get this right will we see women as well
as men making it into positions of power and only then
will we create an ambitious, fair and confident Scotland.
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Notes
1 Please see earlier editions of Sex and Power: who
runs Scotland? For additional information on sources for
earlier indicators.
2 Scottish Government (2008) Public appointments in
Scotland at 1st January 2008, accessed 15 April 2008.
3 COSLA website (2008) Scottish Local Government
Council Chief Executives list, accessed 16 April 2008.
4 Scottish Police Forces websites, accessed 29 July
2008.Data for 2003–06 from The Scottish Government
website, accessed 27 June 2008.
5 Scottish Courts website (2008) Judges of the Court of
Session, accessed 7 April 2008.
6 Scottish Government website (2008) Teachers in
Scotland 2007, accessed 16 April 2008.
7 Association of Scotland's Colleges (2008) College's
contact information, accessed 15 April 2008.
8 Universities UK website (2008) List of UK University
heads, accessed 7 April 2008.
9Websites of NHS Boards and Special NHS Boards,
accessed April 2008.
10Websites of STUC member unions, accessed April
2008.
11 UK Parliament website (2008) Members by area,
accessed 15 April 2008.
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12 Scottish Parliament website (2008)Ministers and law
officers, accessed 15 April 2008.Data for 2003–06 from
Scottish Parliament (2007) List of Ministers, Law
officers and Parliamentary aides, by Cabinet: session 2,
Scottish Parliament Factsheet 23 November 2007.
13 Scottish Parliament (2008) Female MSPs: session 3,
Scottish Parliament Factsheet 10 January 2008;
Scottish Parliament (2008) List of male MSPs: session
3, Scottish Parliament Factsheet 10 January 2008.
14 COSLA website (2008) Scottish Local Government
Council Leaders list, accessed 7 April 2008.
15 European Parliament (2004) Members of the
European Parliament (MEPs) for Scotland 2004–2009.
16 Scottish Government (2008) SQA Attainment and
School Leaver Qualifications in Scotland: 2006/07.
17 Scottish Executive (2006)High Level Summary of
Equality Statistics: Key Trends for Scotland.
18Office for National Statistics (2008) Labour Market
Statistics May 2008: Scotland.
19 Paull, G. (2008) ‘Children and women's hours of
work’, The Economic Journal, February 2008.
20 Darton, D. and Hurrell, K. (2005) People working
part-time below their potential, Manchester: Equal
Opportunities Commission.
21 The Scottish Government (2008) The age
participation index for Scotland 2006–07.
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22 Equal Opportunities Commission (2006)Moving on
Up? Visible Minority Ethnic Women at Work. A summary
of the first phase of research for Scotland. Glasgow:
Equal Opportunities Commission Scotland.
23 Future Skills Scotland (2007) Labour Market
Projections 2007 to 2017.
24 Future Skills Scotland (2007) Labour Market
Projections 2007 to 2017.
25 Future Skills Scotland (2007) Labour Market
Projections 2007 to 2017.
26 Inter-Parliamentary Union (2008)Women in national
parliaments as of 31 July 2008.
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Contact us
The Equality and Human Rights Commission aims to
reduce inequality, eliminate discrimination, strengthen
good relations between people, and promote and protect
human rights.
You can find out more or get in touch with us via our
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contacting one of our helplines below. If you require this
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please contact the relevant helpline to discuss your
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Equality and Human Rights
Commission helpline – Scotland
Telephone: 08456 045 510
Textphone: 08456 045 520
Fax: 08456 045 530
9am–5pm,Monday to Friday, except Wednesday 9am–
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Equality and Human Rights
Commission helpline – England
Telephone: 08456 046 610
Textphone: 08456 046 620
Fax: 08456 046 630
9am–5pm,Monday to Friday, except Wednesday 9am–
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Equality and Human Rights
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Telephone: 08456 048 810
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Fax: 08456 048 830
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©Equality and Human Rights Commission
www.equalityhumanrights.com
Published September 2008
ISBN 978 1 84206 066 7
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