Back then research revealed that :
When looked at through the lens of equality, the reality of who runs Scotland becomes clearer; not so diverse, a tad pale, dominated by suits and imbued with good old Presbyterianism. WASPs.Who runs Scotland is more than just a question of who sets the strategic direction for the public bodies and who holds senior paid staff to account for their performance in delivering - or not - the strategic goals set for each public body and its staff. Board members, appointed by government ministers, are also crucial to how the culture and values of public bodies can be made to change and evolve to embrace equality diversity or, in some cases, remain WASPish in outlook and continue to develop and deliver services focused primarily on the needs of PLUs [people like us, WASPs].
Eliminating discrimination requires a complex, multi-faceted approach to changing how society works, and the composition of Board members is a small but critical element in ensuring the culture and values of public sector organisations are receptive to the changes required to eliminate discrimination.
Several decades have passed since the Equal Pay Act of 1970 first prodded organisations to start closing the equal pay gap. Research from 2015 shows that in Scotland's NHS, the equal pay gap, averaged across all the 22 Boards, was 18.85%. Research from 2014 on the equality profile of public sector boards, including Scotland's 22 health boards, showed that women held just 35% of board seats and even less, 19%, of the positions of Chairperson of these boards. Men in the majority across public sector boards are unlikely to push the senior staff reporting to them into making faster, permanent changes to the cultures and working practices which underpin an equal pay gap in our NHS of nearly 19%. Ensuring a proportionate share of board seats, 51% of them would do it, are occupied by women should help accelerate the pitifully slow pace at which the equal pay gap is being closed.
More recent research has looked, two years on, at what has changed since the original research on the equality profiles of public sector boards. In terms of overall share, progress has been made with women now taking 42% of seats. Sadly, the same kind of progress is not being made in those who act as Chairperson of all the boards. Women have moved from having 19% of these in 2014, to having just 22% of these now - leaving men with 77% of the Chairperson roles.
In 2016, the overall picture developed from government’s own data suggests WASP males continue to
dominate the boards which have strategic control over deciding the shape,
nature and culture of what we call public services. The presence of disabled
people has declined in numerical terms across all boards while they have made
some very modest progress in leading boards as Board Chairperson. Overall, the disability equality gap on
boards remains in significant deficit.
The race equality gap of BME
people in place across boards in Scotland is such that government struggles to find
data which shows it is achieving anything more than simply making up the
numbers.
In sexual orientation, LGB
people continue to be a community of people who, proportionately, have enjoyed
more success than other communities in gaining a share of the power sharing
arrangements through taking some of the 631 seats across Scotland’s public sector.
In Scotland’s long struggle
with acknowledging sectarianism exists outwith football grounds, government’s
data on Catholic people occupying the 631 public sector board seats does show
there is a marked gap in favour of Protestant people, and
that Protestants also take a disproportionate majority of places as Board Chairperson in
the 79 Chairperson’s in place at September 2016.
If
the cultural and institutional discrimination which is all too obviously present in Scotland’s
public sector, and which shapes the daily experiences of people accessing all public
sector services, is to be eliminated, then the make-up of the boards of
Scotland’s public sector needs to offer witness to a lead by example from
government itself in eliminating discrimination in how they appoint people to
those boards. Until the death-like grip exerted by WASPs on the levers of power in the public sector is removed, equality remains a vague, never to be delivered, promise and instead the grim reality continues where the golden showers continue to fall with deliberate and conscious discrimination on the already excluded and marginalised.
