Chamber and committees

No, Jenny, that is really helpful. Thank you. You mentioned empathetic employment and the adaptations that employers need to think about. Inclusion is good for everybody, not just the people for whom it is designed.

Pauline, do you want to comment on the question as well? You talked earlier about the need for people to feel fulfilled and feel that they are able to do something that they want to do and not just be stuck indoors at home. How have the people you work with and you support felt through the pandemic?

Thank you—that is really helpful.

We have got a lot of work to do, and a lot of culture change to get on with. Thank you, convener; I will leave it there.

Good morning, Pauline and Jenny, and thank you very much for joining us and for your opening remarks. The statements and testimonies that you have given us are very powerful.

Jenny, I will come to you first. I am interested in exploring some of the physical and mental consequences of the pandemic for people’s wellbeing. You talked about deterioration in physical and mental wellbeing. Can you say a bit more about the health impacts that you saw in the carers whom you support?

Presiding Officer,

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.”

Those are the words of Gloria Jean Watkins—better known to us by her pen name, bell hooks—who sadly died in December last year. Her fine words provide us with an important reminder of how the structures that we live within are used to constrain, oppress and dominate.

Today is international women’s day and, perhaps more than ever, I would like to associate myself with the comments of the First Minister and many others about standing in solidarity, love and peace with the women and girls in Ukraine and those who have already fled their country. We stand in solidarity, love and peace, too, with the women and girls in Belarus, in Russia and elsewhere who have stood up, and continue to stand up, to oppressive regimes and institutionalised violence. War is an extreme form of the domination and oppression that society’s patriarchal system relies upon and sustains.

At its inception 111 years ago, international women’s day was international working women’s day—a socialist holiday that was established by the Socialist International. It is now recognised by the United Nations and celebrated around the world—in some countries as a holiday—to mark women’s contributions to society, because women have contributed and will continue to contribute to every aspect of our society and our lives. Others have spoken very eloquently about many of the different types of contributions that are made daily by women.

Today, outside the Parliament building, women have come together for a climate vigil and rally. They have gathered together because women bear the brunt of the weight of the world’s climate inaction. Incidentally, as I was talking to some of the women at lunch time, two men yelled from their vehicle, “Get back into the kitchen.”

Part of that vigil marks women who have been murdered for their community activism. Blanca Jeannette Kawas Fernández was killed for protecting the land that her community relied on. Margarita Murillo was murdered for protecting lands and rivers. Fikile Ntshangase was murdered for protesting against coal mining destroying her community’s environment. María Enriqueta Matute was killed for campaigning against logging and mining. Many more have been murdered. Today, we remember them all, and we acknowledge all those whose names we do not know.

This year, we are focusing on the theme of “break the bias” because bias—conscious and unconscious—is deeply rooted in our patriarchal society. It is systemic and deeply ingrained in each and every one of us. How many of us choose to surround ourselves with people who are just like us? How many of us judge others negatively because we have heard something unpleasant about them? How many of us value the opinion of someone more because of their age or skin colour? How many of us ignore something that a woman says only to acknowledge it when it is repeated by a man?

All of us must confront our biases. That requires active thought to challenge and break down. We must recognise how one bias can be compounded by another. Intersections of difference make for a very complex landscape of oppressions and inequalities. I thank Engender in particular for the detailed briefing that it sent for this debate, in which it clearly outlined the overlapping intersections that compound the inequalities that many women in Scotland and around the world experience on a daily basis.

We women know the consequences of those biases. We women live the consequences of those biases every day. We women die because of the consequences of those biases.

It is not for us women to address those biases alone. Everyone in the chamber and everyone in every workplace, community and home across Scotland has a responsibility to act, to change, and to challenge themselves and others to be better.

There remains a wide chasm between the aspirations that we have heard for decades about the eradication of biases that women face and the reality that affects women and girls around the world. I thank the First Minister and others for acknowledging the work and recommendations of the misogyny and criminal justice in Scotland working group. We must now act. We need real gender mainstreaming and genuine engagement with, and realisation of, the rights held within the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, as well as engagement with, and realisation of, the rights of other minority groups. Equality is for everyone.

I hope that, on this day next year, we will all be here to say that we are much further along in our struggle for a different kind of culture—one where we have broken the bias.

I thank the cabinet secretary for early sight of her statement.

We know that trans people in Scotland and in all parts of the world are at heightened risk of violence, harassment and discrimination, including human rights violations from bullying and verbal abuse to assault, rape and murder. Trans people are up to four times more likely than cis people to be a victim of violent crime.

The cabinet secretary has been clear about what the bill does and does not do. Can she reaffirm that the bill, as it progresses through Parliament, must not be used as an excuse to debate trans people’s right to exist and will she outline what we can all do to ensure that we do not undermine the safety and rights of trans people?

I thank the cabinet secretary for providing early sight of his statement and for his stated intention to keep Parliament informed and to be as transparent as possible, which I take in good faith.

Although there is clearly a place for risk assessment systems such as the LS/CMI, does the issue that we are discussing underline the case that victims, survivors and people who are convicted of crime are, first and foremost, people with individual needs and, therefore, highlight the importance of having sufficient capacity and resources to treat individuals with respect and care? Will the cabinet secretary outline what additional support he is providing to ensure that that is the case?

I associate myself with the comments that have been made about broadcasters reporting on and in Ukraine.

I will focus on an issue that I think is fundamental to any public service broadcaster. Underpinning any functioning democracy is information—good-quality information—and the effects of communicating that information. The public service element in those communications is vital. A healthy democracy is an informed democracy.

However, a central pillar of the effectiveness of communication is trust. People need to be able to trust the information that they receive, especially the information that comes through mass media channels. Therefore, they need to be able to trust the channels that communicate information. It follows that we, as a society, need to create the conditions in which trust in communications channels can be developed and sustained.

There are different elements to that. Independence is vital: public service broadcasters need to be independent of governmental and corporate influence and lobbying. Linked to that, broadcasters need to ensure that they understand, and communicate effectively, that different approaches might have different levels of trustworthiness. Information that is based on science or human rights is of a different quality to information that comes from a lobbying group. Broadcasters need to ask difficult questions, even if doing so threatens their own interests.

Being trustworthy means broadcasters must also reflect the reality that people live and the identities that make up our communities. In Scotland, I think that that means acknowledging the different languages that we speak as well as many other things. Gaelic media deserve the same status in statute as Welsh broadcasting and I hope that any legislation relating to broadcasting in Westminster—until broadcasting is devolved, of course—will seek to address that and ensure that indigenous minority language media are protected, including in the digital sphere.

Being trustworthy means that broadcasters must communicate in ways that are accessible but do not involve the watering down of content. They must not say one thing to one audience and something else to a different one. Audiences should be treated with respect and dignity and without pretending that complex issues are beyond people’s comprehension. Broadcasters must also understand the power of their media and the ways that information and ideas can be distorted, deliberately or otherwise, leading to exclusion, prejudice and even tragedy. People who have the privilege of being able to say whatever they like and courting deliberate controversy need to bear it in mind that there may be consequences from what they say and that it will be someone else who pays the price.

In short, trustworthy media should always be reaching up and out, not punching down; speaking truth to power, not propaganda to the powerless; and it should not be immune from criticism. It is that point that means that, although I agree with much in the Labour amendment, we cannot support it. A public broadcaster must be scrutinised, and criticised where appropriate, to ensure that it continues to serve the public interest, and it needs to be properly funded. I am sorry that Labour chose to remove the important point about fair funding for Scotland’s public broadcasting.

Presiding Officer,

“i want to apologize to all the women i have called beautiful
before i’ve called them intelligent or brave
i am sorry i made it sound as though
something as simple as what you’re born with
is all you have to be proud of
when you have broken mountains with your wit
from now on i will say things like
you are resilient, or you are extraordinary
not because i don’t think you’re beautiful
but because i need you to know
you are more than that”

Those are the words of Rupi Kaur, a Canadian poet, author, illustrator and photographer, and I think that they capture something of the essence of this year’s theme for international women’s day.

Bias—conscious and unconscious—is deeply rooted in our patriarchal society. It is right that we come together to recognise that and identify what we need to do to challenge and dismantle the structures and cultures that perpetuate inequality. I thank Michelle Thomson for lodging her motion and giving us that opportunity. I also thank the organisations and companies that sent briefings and information about their work. I, too, hold the women of Ukraine in the forefront of my mind.

Bias is systemic and deeply ingrained in each of us. It requires active thought to challenge it and break it down. One bias can be compounded by another. Intersections of difference make for a complex landscape of oppressions and inequalities. We have only to look at pandemic statistics to realise how older women were more likely to be furloughed than younger women and men and to realise how women of colour were more likely to face increased isolation, discrimination and abuse during lockdown, as we heard so eloquently stated in the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee this week. More broadly, we also know how disabled and poorer women suffer more in times of war than others.

Intersectionality matters and biases are not fixed. That is at the core of my intersectional feminism. The fight to tackle gender stereotyping and discrimination must recognise the multiple and overlapping impacts of other characteristics, such as race, disability and gender identity.

It is abundantly clear to me that tackling inequalities, wherever and whatever they are, is good for everybody. It is good for women, girls and men. Each and every one of us in the Parliament has a part to play in that collective struggle. We must recognise that the struggles that we fight in Scotland are connected to the struggles that are being fought by women and girls all over the world, as we have heard eloquently stated.

Perhaps it is especially poignant that I end as I started with the words of a woman of colour. Roxane Gay, an academic and writer, challenges us all:

“Women of color, queer women, and transgender women need to be better included in the feminist project. Women from these groups have been shamefully abandoned by Capital-F Feminism, time and again. This is a hard, painful truth. This is where a lot of people run into resisting feminism, trying to create distance between the movement and where they stand ... But ... Feminism’s failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.”

We have come far, but the road is long ahead of us.

I do not disagree with that point, but that is not how the Labour amendment reads.

I will say one final thing about the value of trustworthy public service broadcasting. In addition to being a cornerstone of a healthy democracy, it is a linchpin of a society’s cultural identity. I look forward to enjoying many more broadcasts from Scotland’s public broadcasters, Screen Scotland and the wonderfully talented and creative artists, journalists, writers, musicians, technicians, and everyone else who makes public broadcasting possible. Long may it continue.