Nicola Sturgeon is one of many women shaping Scotland’s future

With female leaders for the main parties and a freshly galvanised electorate, women are stepping up at Holyrood

- Libby Brooks
- theguardian.com, Wednesday 15 October 2014 13.06 EDT
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The front page splash of this morning’s Scottish Sun – “First Mini Stur: Nicola’s baby hopes revealed” – was a timely reminder for Scotswomen everywhere that, regardless of the political heights they scale, their reproductive organs remain the most interesting thing about them.

Notwithstanding, the confirmation today that Nicola Sturgeon will be elected unopposed as leader of the SNP at next month’s party conference means that, bar a few parliamentary formalities, this country, still convulsed with the aftershocks of September’s independence referendum, will soon have its first female first minister.

The visibility of women in the upper echelons of Scottish politics has never been greater, nor the contrast with Westminster more pungent. The SNP, Scottish Labour and the Conservatives are led by Sturgeon, Joanne Lamont and Ruth Davidson, all state-educated, ranging in age from 35 to 57, with significant professional backgrounds in law, teaching and journalism respectively. Compared with the identikit CVs of David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, this looks little short of a genderquake.

When I interviewed Davidson this summer, she told me a charming story about hearing, as a teenager, that John Major was succeeding Margaret Thatcher, and asking a friend’s mother: “Can a man even be prime minister?”

Visibility of women in top jobs is necessary, of course, but it is never sufficient.

Dig a little deeper and there is a sense among many Scottish feminists that this phenomenon, welcome as it is, has occurred more by accident than design.

While Holyrood set the bar on gender balance in 1999, its inaugural year, with almost 40% of the newly appointed MSPs being women, initial enthusiasm resulted in one-off or inconsistently applied gender policies, with only Labour implementing strong quota measures in all Scottish parliamentary elections since.

The Holyrood backbenches remain male dominated, and a recent survey by the Guardian found that the SNP had among the weakest strategies in place on gender equality of all five parties at Holyrood.

When the Guardian asked outgoing first minister Alex Salmond about female leadership at the Scottish TUC conference this morning, he pointed to the latest employment figures showing a record number of women in the Scottish workplace, saying: “We’re moving towards Scandinavian levels of women’s participation in the workforce, so it’s entirely appropriate that we have three female leaders in the Scottish parliament.”

But this has not been accompanied by Scandinavian levels of, for example, childcare provision. Childcare was central to the Scottish government’s independence prospectus – one of Sturgeon’s early challenges will be to translate this commitment into the devo-whatever landscape. Likewise, the SNP’s pre-referendum pledges of 40% representation in boardrooms and public bodies need not be put on pause for interminable EVEL (English votes for English laws) negotiations.

Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale is spearheading a cross-party campaign for legal quotas to ensure 50/50 representation of women at Holyrood and across Scottish public life, though concerns have been raised that such quotas in effect boost the options of middle-class women while failing to address underlying structural inequalities.

Some women’s organisations are calling on the Smith commission to devolve control over equality legislation to the Scottish parliament, while others point to the massive technocratic headache involved and question how useful this would be in effecting real change without the necessary economic levers.

Beyond the intricacies of what can and can’t be done for women in Scotland pre- and post-Smith, this new leadership landscape is the result of a referendum campaign that gave women a public and political voice, often for the first time in their lives.

It was the case that women remained harder to convince of the benefits of independence to their own day-to-day living: one criticism of Nicola Sturgeon’s position as the most visible woman on the yes side is that she failed to close the gap in support for independence among female voters. This also pleasingly overturns the implication that women will simply support a particular politician because they also have a vagina.

But the yes movement did reach many women – in particular, the non-aligned group Women for Independence, which welcomed more than a thousand newly active women to its post-referendum conference in Perth at the start of the month. What was notable about this gathering, as well as last weekend’s Green party conference, was the significant number of women in their mid-40s to late 60s, women with experience, perhaps free from previous caring responsibilities, and freshly galvanised.

“We attracted women who are otherwise invisible,” Kate Higgins, co-founder of Women for Independence, told me. “These are women who don’t realise their power, and when they got together you could feel the tremors.”

In these shifting and uncertain times, it may well be women like these who shape the future of Scottish politics as much as the admirable triumvirate at the forefront of Holyrood.