Women must be properly counted amid sex data jumble

Susan Smith (left) and Marion Calder (right) co-directors of For Women Scotland outside the Supreme Court in London following the historic ruling on the legal definition of a woman.Photo: Lucy North/PA Wire | Local Library

We now know that data on the sex breakdown of the 2026 parliament was removed from Holyrood’s website. Why would a parliament that cherishes its progressive credentials do such a thing?

The presiding officer, Kenneth Gibson MSP, responded to this question by referring to a ‘gender sensitive audit’ published by the Scottish Parliament in 2023. Yet the 2023 audit highlighted the importance of data collection on underrepresented groups. An aspiration to increase the political representation of women was at the heart of the report. How could this be used to justify erasing data on the sex of MSPs?

The 2026 intake of MSPs includes two transgender people, Iris Duane and Q Manivannan. Both of them are male. Duane was initially recorded in the parliamentary data as female. Manivannan, who identifies as non-binary, a-gender, trans and queer, was also excluded from the male category, and was provided with his own non-binary classification instead.

READ MORE: Scottish Parliament removes ‘sex’ category from website following election of two trans MSPs

Professor Alice Sullivan of the UCL Social Research Institute | Geoff Pugh for the Telegraph

After people complained about the inaccuracy of reducing the count of male MSPs by two, the sex data disappeared from the website.

What changed between the 2023 ‘gender audit’ and 2026? The 2025 For Women Scotland (FWS) judgment on the meaning of sex is the 2010 Equality Act made clear that data on sex meant just that. The judges said that including some males in the female category and vice versa “cuts across and fragments both biological sex and gender reassignment into heterogenous groupings which may have little in common.”

Jumbling different groups of people together defeats the object of data collection and equalities monitoring. Public bodies cannot ignore this ruling. Yet it looks as though the Scottish Parliament may have responded to greater legal clarity that sex should not be muddled with gender identity by refusing to count sex at all.

READ MORE: Why gender ideology could have ‘fatal consequences’ for trans people

This can only stoke confusion. The Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER) celebrated the ‘fact’ that 63% of newly elected black and minority MSPs were female. The true figure was 37%. Frontline magazine pointed out that CRER’s figure was inflated by the inclusion of both Duane and Manivannan as women.

Women and data scientists have been arguing for the importance of accurate data on sex and against muddling sex and transgender identities for some years now. My government-commissioned Independent review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender showed that there has been a systematic loss of accurate data on sex across the UK, escalating from the 2010s.

In Scotland, the former Chief Statistician, Roger Halliday, issued guidance for public bodies in 2021 which grudgingly allowed that data on sex might occasionally be collected, but only on a case-by-case basis and in highly restricted contexts such as the investigation of a sexual offence. This guidance was always irrational and looks even more detached from reality in 2026.

Data on transgender representation is important. The fact that there are two transgender MSPs means that they make up 1.6% of the parliament, compared to 0.4% of people who said they were transgender in the 2022 Scottish Census. There is no reason why data on transgender status cannot be collected alongside sex. We do not need to choose between the two.

Women’s rights are hard won and can never be taken for granted. It is time for the powers that be to acknowledge the importance of data collection on sex, in parliament and beyond.

-Professor Alice Sullivan is from the UCL Social Research Institute