Renewing our commitment to equality on International Women’s Day
by The SNP Scottish Government is working hard to ensure that future generations of women and girls grow up in a truly equal society.
Today we’re celebrating International Women’s Day by reaffirming our commitment to upholding, protecting and advancing the rights of all women and girls.
We’re taking action to advance gender equality. Here’s how:
• We’re investing significant levels of funding in front line services and bringing forward new legislation to tackle violence against women.
• We’re implementing Equally Safe, Scotland’s strategy to prevent and eradicate all forms of violence against women and girls.
• We recently announced a Delivering Equally Safe Fund of £13m for services to protect women and girls from gender-based violence, giving frontline services an extra £1 million a year.
• We’ve introduced ground-breaking legislation that criminalises psychological domestic abuse and launched a range of initiatives to support gender equality in schools, universities, colleges and workplaces.
Here’s just some of what we’ve achieved in the past year alone:
• We introduced a bill on FGM to provide further protection and improve forensic medical services for victims of sexual assault and those women and girls at risk.
• We’ve set up a taskforce on human rights leadership that will consider incorporating the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, into Scots Law, and we’ve set up a new commission to advance equality in education.
And we’re taking action to make workplaces fairer.
• The Scottish Government aims to embed a culture of fair work and fair work practices within all workplaces across Scotland.
• We’ve committed to Scotland becoming a Fair Work Nation by 2025 and have published an Action Plan to drive progress on this, using the powers available to us.
• We’ve published ‘A Fairer Scotland for Women: Gender Pay Gap Action Plan’, which includes actions on tackling sexual harassment and violence against girls and women.
• We’re funding Close the Gap to develop an employer accreditation scheme ‘Equally Safe at Work’ which has been piloted in several local authority areas.
• The SNP Scottish Government’s £800,000 workplace equality fund aims to remove workplace barriers for certain priority groups, including those experiencing gender based violence.