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The Scottish and UK governments have many policies to reduce gender and racial inequalities.

The Equality Act of 2010

The most important piece of legislation in recent years to reduce discrimination was the Equality Act of 2010.

This piece of UK legislation brought all nine previous laws relating to unfair treatment and discrimination together, and extended these to other groups as well as women and people from ethnic minority groups.

The Equality Act continues to enforce equal pay (and equality of contractual terms such as holiday entitlement, bonuses and pension payments) and ban all forms of gender and race discrimination.

Policies and programmes tackling gender and race inequalities

There are also several other policies or programme to tackle gender and race inequalities in Scotland and the UK including:

• The Public Sector Equality Duty (part of the Equality Act 2010) – which places a responsibility on public authorities to promote equality of opportunity for all disadvantaged groups, including women and people from an ethnic minority background (Source: GOV.uk)
• Flexible working hours – every employee now has the right to request flexible working hours, after the government extended the right previously reserved for carers and those looking after children
• In 2022, legislation was passed in the UK which mandated (required) employers of companies with more than 250 employees to report on any gender pay data.
• The Race Equality Framework for Scotland 2016 to 2030, sets out our approach to promoting race equality and tackling racism and inequality

Effectiveness of measures taken to tackle gender and racial inequalities

There are many ways to measure whether policies to reduce gender and racial inequality are effective.

The gender pay gap has been falling over many years. Although the pay gap for full time employees rose marginally from 7.6% to 7.7% in 2023, this is down from around 10% in 2013.

The pay gap is only falling very slowly and some reports estimate it will take many more years (possibly to 2051), at the current rate of decline to eliminate the pay gap altogether.

Engender’s 2023 Sex and Power Report found that only 36% of Scotland’s ‘positions of power’ were held by women and only 7% of women were CEOs in Scotland’s top businesses. The report stated there had been evidence of an improvement in women in important positions but this rate was very poor.

There is no legal requirement for companies to disclose wage information related to the ‘ethnic pay gap’. Simon Wooley, a former senior government advisor on race disparity, believes it would help reduce the ethnic pay gap. (Source: 91�ȱ� News)

According to the Chartered Insurance Institute Group, the median ethnic pay gap fell to 9.9% in 2022, down from 14.1% the previous years.