Status of Women Committee on April 3rd, 2008

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Order, please.

Members of committee, we have on video conference, as you can see, our witnesses from the City University of New York, Professor Marilyn Rubin; the Scottish Women's Budget Group, Angela O'Hagan; the UK Women's Budget Group, Janet Veitch; and Glasgow Caledonian University, Ailsa McKay.

Now, I have to let you know that when they are talking, they'll appear on the larger screen. When they're not talking, they'll fade into the background. The Scottish Women's Group has to leave by 10 a.m. They have a prior engagement. We will start off with Angela O'Hagan and Ailsa McKay. They'll do a joint presentation. There will be half an hour of presentations, totally, because everybody will be doing 10 minutes.

There is a delayed reaction, so please do not speak fast. The chair is the only one who seems to speak fast, but please do not speak fast. Go slow, and wait for them to hear and then respond. Okay?

Welcome to all of you. Can you hear me?

[Dr. Ailsa McKay, Professor of Economics, Glasgow Caledonian University]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Welcome.

We would like to start off with Ms. O'Hagan and Ms. McKay for 10 minutes. I will do a hand signal, which you probably won't be able to see, but I will knock on the mike so that you know we are coming close to the timing. Okay?

[Angela O'Hagan, Convenor, Scottish Women's Budget Group]

Excellent. Good morning,everybody.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Go ahead.

[Angela O'Hagan]

Good morning, Madam Chair.

It's very nice to see you there in Canada, London, and New York.

Good morning, distinguished members of the committee. On behalf of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, I would like to thank the committee for this very special opportunity to address you and for the recognition of our work that this invitation represents. I would also like to commend the committee for its initiative in undertaking this current study on gender budgets. I hope that our own relevant parliamentary committees will follow your lead and that a similar study on gender budgets might be undertaken in Scotland.

I would also like to imagine a scenario where witnesses could offer such frank, open, and progressive evidence to the committees of the Scottish Parliament on the importance and benefits of gender budget analysis, as previous witnesses to this committee have done.

I look forward to the rest of the study and to hearing your final recommendations and decisions.

Madam Chair, thank you for recognizing our time pressures and that we have to leave the session, as you say, at the end of the first hour. Thank you very much for accommodating our other appointments.

I will now make some comments on the history, character, and outputs of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, which hereafter I will refer to as SWBG.

SWBG is a non-funded group of individual women with a commitment to positive change for women through analysis of resource allocation and policy in the budget process in Scotland. SWBG was formed in 1999, following the creation of newly devolved government institutions in Scotland, including the primary legislature of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive of ministers and the civil service, now known as the Scottish Government, following elections in May 2007.

SWBG membership is fairly small, with some 25 women on the list and an active core of 12 to 15 women. Our activities over our lifetime have included tracking the budgetary process in Scotland, responding to government proposals for spending plans, responding to consultations on key policy areas, giving evidence to parliamentary committees on the budget process and the incorporation of gender analysis within it, and giving evidence to committees on key policy areas such as child care, social justice, skills, and economic development strategies. Our responses are formulated collectively, drawing on the wide range of skills and policy expertise that members bring to the group.

A brief summary of the promotion of gender budget analysis in the Scottish budgetary process runs as follows. Early in its existence, the SWBG lobbied the first minister for finance in the first round of draft spending plans for the Scottish Executive. He responded positively to the initiative and lent his support. SWBG further lobbied for inclusion of a commitment to gender analysis in government spending plans and budgetary processes in the first equality strategy of the Scottish Executive. With support from the Equal Opportunities Commission, which was the statutory body for sex discrimination, which has now been subsumed within the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, SWBG lobbied for the creation of a ministerial advisory group on integrating equalities in the budget process.

There are a number of important aspects of the Scottish policy context to note at this point. The first is that the commitment to equality is enshrined in the Scotland Act and in the founding principles of the Scottish Parliament. While very positive, it is a commitment to equal opportunities, not to gender specifically. This led to the development of a broad-reaching equality strategy covering a number of strands of equalities, including race, disability, sexual orientation, age, religious belief or faith, and gender.

While there have been specific policy initiatives directed at women and men and a considerable program of work specifically targeting violence against women, sex equality and gender policy have not been a priority area of government policy or related spending.

In policy terms particularly, for example, in social justice policy, there has been a tendency for social justice and equality to be used as interchangeable terms and for a growing absence of any gender analysis in both the policy analysis and resource allocation out-turn.

The commitment to mainstreaming, which underpins the Scottish government's equality strategy, is a commitment to mainstreaming equality, not specifically gender. The ministerial advisory group on budgets is the equality proofing budget and policy advisory group and not the gender budget group.

I should note at this point as well that the equality strategy of the Scottish Government is due to be reviewed this year, and we are hoping to see a renewed and reinvigorated commitment, and especially some action flowing from that equality strategy.

Another important point to note, and a point of distinction between the Scottish and Canadian experiences, is that the Scottish Parliament has the power to levy taxation within restricted parameters, but it has not done so. So the budget that the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are concerned with is the expression of the government's spending commitments against its policy priorities, as there is no tax collection or other fiscal activity within it. Funding for Scotland comes to the Scottish Government from the U.K. government at Westminster, and that is where tax, benefits, and other receipt functions currently and continue to reside.

This is a crucial part of what we call the devolution settlement, and subsequently one that is yet again being revisited within the whole question of how devolved government is working in Scotland.

I'll speed up through some of the things the Scottish Government's budget group has been involved in. As I've said, we consistently comment on Scottish Government spending plans and budget proposals, and these responses are available on our website at swb.org.uk. We make specific recommendations on individual and policy program proposals and more general recommendations on the core approach to adopting gender budget analysis.

Specific pieces of work have been commissioned by the Scottish Government over the period in response to targeted lobbying and analysis by the Women's Budget Group. These include “Understanding the Scottish Budget”, a research project early in the life of the Scottish Parliament, conducted by Ailsa McKay, sitting beside me, and Rona Fitzgerald, to track the newly introduced budgetary process. Subsequently there were pilot studies on gender budget analysis in smoking cessation and women's access to sport. Both of these studies are available from the Scottish Government website.

In response to SWBG pressure and focus on the budget process and documentation, several changes have come and gone from the budget documents, including equality statements within the spending plan proposals and the budget itself and a restatement by the Scottish Government in 2003 of its commitment to equality proofing in the budget process. That was in its one and only annual report on progress against the equality strategy. So in common with many gender budget initiatives and many women's lobbying groups, we seem to take one step forward and several more back are forced upon us.

As a lobby group, the Scottish Women's Budget Group seems to punch above its weight, is the phrase that is used. We are seen as an independent and authoritative credible voice. We have been consistent in the quality and approach of our analysis, and that we are independent from government or other institutions has helped protect our autonomy. However, as an unfunded, unconstituted entity relying on the entirely voluntary contributions of a small core membership, we're vulnerable. Sustaining a growing volume of work against a backdrop of receding commitment to gender equality is a significant challenge.

We have in our lifetime secured pockets of funding, and we have employed, at times, temporarily, part-time development and parliamentary liaison officers. We have produced publications and so on.

We'll conclude with a note on our international connections. One of the main levers behind the creation of the Scottish Women's Budget Group was learning from abroad. In fact, the first public event of the Scottish Women's Budget Group included representatives from the Canadian government—in 2000, I think. SWBG has retained these international links, and members are closely involved in the emerging European gender budget network.

I'll stop now and hand over to Ailsa McKay, who will present the specific activities with the equal opportunities committee of the Scottish Parliament and the challenges facing both the Scottish Women's Budget Group and the future of gender-sensitive budgeting in Scotland.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

[Dr. Ailsa McKay]

Thank you, Angela, and thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to speak to you today.

I want to say a little bit more about some of the other activity that's been happening in Scotland around gender budget analysis that perhaps isn't directly to do with the activities of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, although indirectly it is.

I'll start off being a bit pessimistic, saying that, yes, after nine years of sustained activity, which Angela has eloquently detailed, and evidence of political will in Scotland to progress with a gender budget initiative, no gender sensitive budget is yet in place in Scotland. In fact, we can find no evidence of any concrete policy shifts arising from our activity over the past nine years. However, that's as pessimistic as I want to be. I would now like to be optimistic.

In Scotland we do have a gender budget initiative, and that gender budget initiative is ongoing. I'll take the next five to 10 minutes to say how and why I think that is. Angela has covered the work of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, and suffice it to say, I think that activity is sustained and it's ongoing. All I can say is, watch this space with regard to future activity.

The second aspect I'd like to cover, which may be of particular interest to the committee and its members, is the more recent activity at a parliamentary level in Scotland. As you may be aware, we had an election last May, and that brought about significant political change for us here in Scotland. We have a new minority government. We have a whole set of new committees and we have a significant number of new members of Parliament following that election.

As a direct result of the lobbying conducted by the Scottish Women's Budget Group, our new equal opportunities committee—we previously had an equal opportunities committee—following the election took the decision to appoint a specialist advisor with reference to the budget process. Although the committee had the capacity to appoint an advisor previously, they had never availed themselves of that opportunity. This year they took the opportunity to appoint an advisor, I think directly due to the lobbying activities of the Scottish Women's Budget Group.

The budget process this year in Scotland was truncated. It took place over a period of eight weeks. That was because of a delayed announcement of the spending review at the U.K. level because of the U.K. elections and the change of prime minister. So we had to wait until we knew how much money we were getting from the U.K. before we could conduct our own budget. It meant our budget process took place over a period of eight to 10 weeks.

Bearing in mind what I said about a new government, a new committee, and new members, my feeling is the committee felt better placed to appoint an advisor to assist them with the scrutiny process, given the newness of the situation and the very short time period available to them.

The advisor was appointed on the basis of open competition. A few names were put into the hat and I was subsequently appointed as advisor for that period, November, December, and early January. My subsequent remit was advise on prospective witnesses the committee may want to call to give evidence with regard to the contents of the Scottish budget; to provide the committee members with guidance on the appropriate line of questioning of those witnesses; to brief the committee members on the contents of the budget with a specific focus on where equality considerations were evident or, in many situations, where equality considerations were not evident; and, finally, to have input into the equal opportunities committee's written response to the finance committee of the Scottish Parliament, which is part of the formal scrutiny process.

We went on to have two evidence sessions. One involved the minister with the remit for equalities, and we also had a meeting of all the advisors for all the committees across the Scottish Parliament. My understanding is this was the first year that every single parliamentary committee of the Scottish Parliament appointed a budget advisor. Previously, only a handful of committees had appointed budget advisors, and the finance committee has been the only committee that's had a regular advisor throughout the lifetime of the Scottish Parliament.

The outputs from my role as advisor with the committee were the briefing on the budget with a focus on equalities, and the final report, which was submitted to the finance committee. I believe those outputs contributed to the scrutiny process in a very positive way by bringing gender concerns and broader equality concerns to the fore, albeit, I would say with a word of caution, at a marginal level. I don't think any significant change happened. However, I think there was a significant amount of awareness raising amongst committee members with regard to making the link between their equalities remit and the budget.

So for me the experience of working with the committee indicated the value of a specialist advisor. It may have been the first time in Scotland, but I firmly believe that it won't be the last. I think all members and the committee collectively recognized the value added of appointing a specialist budget advisor and will continue to do so in the future. In fact, we have a meeting scheduled for April 18 of all the specialist advisors to all the committees to consider how effective the process actually was.

The second main issue I'd like to raise with regard to the activity that's not directly associated with the Scottish Women's Budget Group is where I put on my academic hat and talk specifically about how we can relate our gender budget activity to the academic work in the field of feminist economics. In Scotland we've been acutely aware of the lack of understanding of gender budget analysis, in fact of gender as a concept within the resource allocation process, or rather its limited significance within the resource allocation process. In recognition of this, in 2004, with funding from the Equal Opportunities Commission, I and a number of colleagues initiated a pilot study, which we called Economics For Equality—not economics of equality. The focus was on understanding the economics of the gender pay gap, and we invited a number of community activists to a number of sessions to explore the economists' understanding of the gender pay gap and the policy responses that followed from that.

That pilot was pretty successful, and we've since secured funding from Oxfam to run a subsequent pilot with a focus on the national budget process. The purpose of this next stage of this program of work is twofold. One is to engage local community activists with the budget, but also, second, to engage policy makers with the equality and gender issues as they relate to the budget. So what we're trying to do with this pilot is bring feminist economic analysis out of the classroom, in an applied sense, and to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Now the Scottish Women's Budget Group has been heavily involved in these pilots in informing the work through their outputs and also participating in the work.

Finally, I'd like to say that this combination of activity represents for us a really well-thought-out response to the challenges we identified way back in 1999 about how we would progress with a gender budget analysis in Scotland. Those challenges remain for us nine years later, and I'd just like to briefly say what they are.

First is political change. I think we're all very aware of the significance of political change and the subsequent dynamics of the budget process and how we can keep abreast of that. I think we have done that in Scotland through the sustained activities of the Scottish Women's Budget Group and through our Parliament work. Our relationship with the equal opportunities committee of Parliament has been crucial in that.

Second, our biggest challenge I think has been the lack of understanding of gender and where gender sits within the policy process. I think our most recent activity in terms of the work I've been doing with the parliamentary committee has been crucial in raising awareness of that.

Thirdly, a significant challenge has been to try to ensure buy-in from across the wider community with regard to the concept of gender budgeting. I think we're getting somewhere in Scotland with that, with our economics for equality program.

I'd like to finish there and open it up to any questions the committee might have for Angela and me.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

I would like the indulgence of the committee. Since the Scottish representatives have to leave the teleconference by 10 o'clock, could we please do a five-minute round with them only, and then continue on with other witnesses? That way, you will have at least one round for the witnesses. As well, there will be some committee business, such as the work plan, to be dealt with in the last five minutes.

We'll begin the first round with Mr. Pearson, for five minutes, and I'll be very mindful of the time.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

It's a pleasure to have you here today. I was born and raised in Scotland, so it's wonderful to see you here.

I understand what you're saying about the political change. We have that problem here as well. As different governments come along, things tend to go up and down.

But you say there's a lack of understanding of gender and where it sits in the parliamentary process. I wonder if you could expand on that as to what that means. Here, we try to do similar things. We have champions and we try to get it into the process, but sometimes the outcomes aren't what we had hoped for. So could you explain that to us a bit?

[Dr. Ailsa McKay]

Sure.

The best way for me to explain it—and Angela may want to add something—is to give you a practical example of where I think we misunderstand gender in terms of the policy process.

There appears to be, in Scotland, a practice of viewing gender as synonymous with women and viewing gender issues or dealing with gender issues as dealing with women's issues. Understanding that, yes, there are a lot of issues that we need to deal with that are focused on women, as we all know that's not what we mean by gender-sensitive analysis.

The example I'd like to give to you relates to some work we've been doing around one of our skills training programs for young people in Scotland. We call it the modern apprenticeships program. I don't know if you have anything similar in Canada, but it's a government-funded training program that supports young people at an entry level into the labour market to gain skills that give them a trade.

We noticed early on, through the work of the Scottish Women's Budget Group, that the program seemed to be dominated by young men. There may be reasons for that, and maybe very good reasons, but we campaigned on it and indicated to the government that their spending may be allocated or may be benefiting young men predominantly and there may be a problem there.

Three years later, when we looked at the program again, a lot of work was done to encourage young women into the program. We looked at the figures, and yes, young women had increased their participation rates by 211% over three years as a result of direct action by the government to encourage young women.

The government used that as a mechanism to say that they had done gender or had considered gender. However, when we looked at the allocation or the nature of the participation of young men and women, we found that young men were participating in the program in the four-year-long funded training programs—plumbing, construction, etc.—and therefore were benefiting from quite a significant degree of spending and were gaining access to good trades when they finished. Young women, however, were participating in six-month-long training programs in hairdressing, child care, and the retail industry and were not benefiting from well-paid jobs or good career-oriented jobs at the end.

Therefore, there was a significant difference in terms of the nature of participation. However, the Scottish government viewed the head count aspect of gender issues—that is, they had increased the numbers of women, therefore they had addressed that gender inequality.

For me, that stems from a lack of understanding of what gender issues are. Merely adding women into the scenario and increasing the numbers of women does not mean you've dealt with gender inequalities.

I think that's quite a useful example to illustrate how gender is misunderstood in the policy process.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Ms. O'Hagan.

[Angela O'Hagan]

I'd like to follow up on Ailsa's comment about number counting. I think this is a problem we have in a mainstreaming approach. While we argue for the importance of quality data, there is a problem around how the data are utilized. It has to do with interpretation rather than statistics, simply counting numbers. This is one of the problems in the analysis of the modern apprenticeship scheme that Ailsa referred to.

In my introductory remarks, I made a comment about the backdrop against which we try to promote gender-aware policy. In Scotland, the U.K., and across Europe, we are increasingly in a policy context that wishes to talk about equalities from a broad perspective. Driving this are a range of groups pushing for increased legislative and rights protection under policy recognition. One of the more negative consequences of this is the assumption that women “have been done”, that women are no longer relevant to policy or legislative development, that it's old hat, unnecessary, and unprogressive to focus on women.

I don't think I'm overstating the case. I think it is one of the key challenges we face and one of the key reasons why the Scottish Women’s Budget Group is called what we are. That is, in a sense, our focus. It's difficult to conduct a gender analysis that breaks the policy-speak cycle. If you talk about women, then you have to talk about men in equivalent terms, and that is neither women-focused analysis nor gender analysis.

That's what we mean when we say there's a lack of understanding in gender. More broadly, as a student of public policy, I think the public policy process itself does not regard gender as a core variable. This is demonstrated by our various countries' attempts to follow Beijing in implementing gender mainstreaming. The public policy process continues to treat gender as an external variable relegated to the literature on women's networks.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Ms. Demers, you have five minutes.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Good morning, mesdames. Thank you for being here this morning. Like my colleague, I have Scottish ancestors. They were from the Cameron clan. So it's all the more important for me to speak with you this morning.

Mesdames, some of us had the privilege this week of meeting the new speaker and a few other members of your Parliament. They told us that you had managed to elect enough women members to reach 30% of the total representation. Do you think the fact that more than 30% of members elected to the Parliament of Scotland are women, including all political parties, will help establish gender budgeting? As is the case in Scotland, our governments have been minority governments for a few years now. What do you think would be the most appropriate political measures to ensure that gender budgets are taken into consideration and that women benefit as a result?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Go ahead.

[Angela O'Hagan]

Thank you, Madame Demers.

I'd like to start with your question on women's representation. In 1999 we celebrated grandly when 37% of the Scottish Parliament members were women in the new institution, very much part of the new politics of Scotland that had been a core feature of the campaign for devolution itself. The 50-50 campaign that was run by the trade unions and some of the political parties was very much in that spirit of new politics. We had high hopes that not just the physical presence of women but that an apparently more open attitude to gender politics would come to prevail in the Parliament.

Certainly in structural terms some changes did occur. The working areas of the Parliament are structured around school hours and school term times, and there is a crèche and child care facility in the Parliament, which unsurprisingly has come under regular threat of closure as it's not seen as an integral part.

However, nine years on from devolution, the number of women in the Scottish Parliament has fallen in successive elections. It's now just over 35%. We have seen an erosion of commitment among the individual political parties to 50-50 or women-only short lists or various other mechanisms that were used to promote women. Now the governing party in minority, the Scottish National Party, does have a number of women MSPs, and a number of those women are in the cabinet, which of course is to be welcomed even at the superficial level perhaps, all popular recognition of women in government. The SNP certainly would score highly there, and certainly more highly than on their selection processes and the promotion of women in the party. But that's a separate point.

As to whether women's presence makes a difference, I think that's a moot point in the experience of the Scottish Parliament. There has been a clear contribution by women MSPs. I personally believe some policy agendas would not have been so prominent had it not been for the women there—or domestic violence and child care. A number of individual women and men have made a significant difference to the promotion of domestic violence policy and prevention strategies in Scotland.

In terms of how we try to secure measures for gender budget analysis and women moving forward and how we try to introduce some unshakeable and structural provisions, we do have a number of levers we continue to use. The founding principles of the Scottish Parliament are enormously important. They state that equal opportunities and equal access to the Parliament—participation, openness, and accountability as principles of the Parliament—all add power from the outside to those of us who are looking to use the Parliament in that way. They can be very effective measures to hold the Parliament to account. There is a statute in our mandate to the equal opportunities committee of the Parliament, so there are some structural levers there.

The Scottish Women's Budget Group has found that the measures we have sought to embed in the budgetary process have been eroded as the budget process itself has evolved and changed in shape and timing. The equality statements that were secured have disappeared. The new legislation we have across gender budgeting, the public duty to promote gender equality, requires all public authorities to produce a gender equality scheme and to assess all policies for their impact on equality.

That approach is very new, and at the moment it's showing very mixed results, both in terms of the coverage and how deeply and practised those requirements are, but also the quality of the scheme is coming out and the quality of impact assessments. One of our major complaints to the new government is that in addition to the very strange language they use around equality and an erosion there apparently of commitments to equality is the lack of an equality impact assessment of this year's budget and the lack of any apparent equality impact assessments that went into the process of creating the budget. But as Ailsa referred to, this year was an extremely truncated process, with eight weeks to formulate the budget.

There was a lot of running around by civil servants, but I don't think that's good enough. It is a legal requirement to conduct an equality impact assessment and a stated commitment in the equality strategy to equality-proof the spending plans.

I mentioned earlier that that equality strategy is to be reviewed this year. The Scottish Women's Budget Group would wish to see a robust and deliverable commitment to effective gender equality scrutiny going forward. Measures to set targets, to pick specific policy and program areas, to apply gender budget analysis to those areas, to build on situations falling under the scrutiny of parliamentary committees year on year, to call to account the civil servants, and to incorporate these mechanisms—all these are key aspects of building in gender budget analysis.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Mr. Wallace.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair. They didn't pick me just because my last name is Wallace, but you can't get much more Scottish than that.

Thank you for joining us today. I have a few questions. I am actually not on this committee regularly. I am on the finance committee for the Government of Canada, and I have some financial process questions for you.

Is it McKay?

[Dr. Ailsa McKay]

Yes, McKay.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

I want to focus in on your role as a special advisor. Can you give me a brief description of your academic background? I know you're a Ph.D, but what is your area of expertise?

[Dr. Ailsa McKay]

My full-time job is an academic economist. I work in a division of public policy and I teach economics. There's a group of economists, political scientists, people who operate within a business school and a university in Glasgow.

I've been an academic economist for longer than I can remember, and I'm an active member of the International Association for Feminist Economists.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Thank you.

[Dr. Ailsa McKay]

So gender budgeting is a research interest of mine.