Scottish Women Won’t Wheesht
We are very happy to announce that our next event, on Monday 11 April at 7pm, will see us host the wonderful Professor Sarah Pedersen, Liberal Voice for Women’s inaugural speaker last March, together with the tireless Susan Smith from For Women Scotland, for an update on the state of women’s rights in Scotland.
Please register here.
The Scottish government is under the spotlight for their treatment of women. The recent appeal judgement against their "Gender Representation on Public Boards act" found the legislators had wrongly conflated sex and gender identity. The current bill to amend the GRA to provide self-ID for 16 year olds upwards has set grassroots women's groups their greatest challenge so far.
Join us to hear two expert campaigners explain what's at stake in Scotland - and the effects this Bill may have across the UK. Professor Sarah Pedersen, of Robert Gordon's University Aberdeen, currently Visiting Professor at the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary University London, and Susan Smith from the campaign group For Women Scotland will be in conversation with our inimitable events chair, Cllr Alison Jenner. Don't miss it!
PROFILES
Sarah Pedersen is a Professor of Communication and Media at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Her research focuses on women's engagement with the media for political purposes, including historical and contemporary source material.
Her book The Scottish Suffragettes and the Press was published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan. The same year she was awarded funding by the Heritage Lottery Fund to produce an edition of the correspondence of Aberdeen suffragette and journalist Caroline Phillips. She was the Director of the Rise Up Quines! festival in Aberdeen in 2018 which both celebrated the centenary of (some) women achieving the Parliamentary vote and aimed to encourage women and girls to become more involved in political leadership. Her work on the Scottish suffrage campaign has been praised in a motion to the Scottish Parliament.
Sarah also researches women's use of social media, including blogs, Twitter and online forums. Her book, The Politicization of Mumsnet, was published in 2020. She is currently undertaking a project investigating the creation of a women’s cooperative constellation in Scottish politics.
For Women Scotland is a grassroots women’s group founded in June 2018 amid growing unease about how women’s rights would be affected by the Scottish Government’s plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow for self-declaration of sex.
We therefore oppose the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill (introduced on 02 March 2022) which seeks to remove any requirement for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria for applicants wishing to change their legal sex as well as lowering the age limit to 16.
We also challenge the ongoing push from Government-funded lobby groups to overwrite sex-based rights in legislation and public policy with the undefined and unscientific concept of gender identity. We work to highlight the devastating impact such policies have already had on the lives of ordinary women and girls in Scotland – in hospitals, schools, prisons, sports, public spaces and especially in women’s sector organisations such as Rape Crisis or Women’s Aid. Our work is informed by the experiences of frontline workers in these services and by the women and girls they provide for.
Who we are:
For Women Scotland registered as a not-for-profit company in July 2020 (Company number: SC669393). We do not receive any public money and are not aligned to any political party. We are all volunteers.