International Women's Day: SNP has its work cut out to close gender pay gap – Martyn McLaughlin

At the weekend, as she addressed the Scottish Women’s Convention for the last time as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon recalled how from the very first day she entered Scotland’s highest office, she consciously put women’s rights at the heart of her ambitions for government.

She told of how her niece, then aged just eight, was watching on from the Holyrood gallery as she addressed MSPs. “In that speech, I expressed my hope that by the time she became a young woman, things like the gender pay gap, under-representation, the other barriers that women face would have been consigned to the dustbin of history,” she explained.

Fast forward more than eight years, and Ms Sturgeon was the first to admit that, as she prepares to leave office, gender equality remains an “unwon cause”, one that would have to be waged by the next generation. She rightly pointed to hard-won gains made under her watch, such as the introduction of the Scottish Child Payment, and the fact that the gap between men and women’s employment rates has more than halved. But across other issues referenced in her speech, the progress has stalled, and in some cases, reversed.

She spoke, for example, of how the gender pay gap had reduced, which, if you assess the long-term trend, is true. In the year the Scottish Parliament was re-established, the gap stood at a dire 24.6 per cent. When Ms Sturgeon became First Minister seven years later, it had been whittled down to 17.6 per cent. Today, it has been reduced even further, standing at 12.2 per cent. It is a welcome trend. Unfortunately, there are clear signs that progress has stalled.

The median gender pay gap for all employees in Scotland has increased for the past two consecutive years. Having been lowered to 11.1 per cent in 2020, it crept up to 11.2 per cent in 2021, before jumping to its current rate. It marks the first time there have been two consecutive increases in the gap since 2007, the year the SNP came to power. There is a similar lack of progress among full-time employees; between 2020 and 2021, the gender gap remained stuck at three per cent, only to rise to 3.7 per cent last year.

These are concerning statistics, although they should not be used as a brickbat. The gender pay gap is a structural issue many countries are struggling to close, and with women over-represented in many jobs and sectors where low pay is endemic, there will be pauses and missteps along the way. As Ms Sturgeon observed at the weekend, progress has been made, and that must inspire all of us to believe that there can be more.

At the same time, there are legitimate questions over why the gap is widening yet again, and what the government is doing to try and halt those retrograde steps. That rings especially true when so many public sector organisations – several of them under the government’s umbrella – are so slow to embrace gender pay parity.

Take the Scottish Children’s Reporters Administration. It has a median hourly pay gap of 27.9 per cent, meaning that women employed by the executive non-departmental public body of the government earn just 72 pence for every £1 that men earn. It has reported the same gap for two years in a row. It is not alone. The Scottish Prison Service, a government executive agency, has a gap of 15.6 per cent, while sportscotland’s stands at 11.6 per cent.

The Scottish Government wants to lead by example on the gender pay gap, but it has much work to do (Picture: Adobe)

There are also serious challenges for the government in the form of the newly nationalised ScotRail, where women hold just eight per cent of the best-paid jobs, and there is a median gap of 26.1 per cent. Anyone presuming that such problems will be solved by ending private ownership would be advised to look at Glasgow Prestwick Airport. Nearly ten years after it was taken over by ministers, its median gap stands at 12.7 per cent.

For the women paid less than their male counterparts across these organisations, such figures are frustrating. But they raise wider questions. For a decade now, the vast majority of public bodies in Scotland have been duty-bound to publish gender pay gap information under Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties) (Scotland) Regulations 2012. While that affords a degree of transparency around who is being paid what, the requirement on its own is not spurring progress. At least, not at a meaningful rate.

Indeed, few public bodies set out measurable performance targets in relation to their gender pay gaps, and only last month, Audit Scotland warned that not all of them are clear about how they should calculate and present the pay gap data itself, with a lack of breakdowns or detailed analysis. Less than half of those public bodies sampled by auditors showed evidence of action planning.

This flies in the face of good practice. The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership has pointed out that reporting the data in itself is not sufficient, and argues that employers should be mandated to create time-bound targets to redress pay gaps, and set out “clear and measurable” goals alongside the raw numbers.

So will Scottish public bodies up their game? Don’t hold your breath. A key target identified in the government’s refreshed fair work action plan, published in December, is to simply “reduce the gender pay gap by the end of this parliamentary term”. There is no specific target, and no detail of how the government aims to achieve its lowly goal.

Today, the Holyrood chamber will host a government debate to coincide with International Women’s Day. Its title? “Embrace Equity”. It promises to be a timely discussion, and in the interests of fairness, it might be worth asking what more the government itself could do to lead by example.