 We all welcome to session 6 of the 12th meeting of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee and I have apologies this morning from Pam Gosol. The first item on our agenda is to agree whether to take item four in private, which is consideration of today's evidence. If I could ask committee members, is that agreed? I will also see you if you could just nod or thumbs up. That is great. I come to consideration of two negative instruments. I refer members to paper one. Do you have any comments on the Age of Criminal Responsibility Scotland Act 2019, supplementary provision, jurisdiction regulations 2021 or the Age of Criminal Responsibility Scotland Act 2019, places of safety regulations 2021? It's just really to note that there wasn't a children's rights and wellbeing impact assessment done on the instrument and to be keen to hear why perhaps the Government could address that at a future date. Also, given that the minimum age of criminal responsibility is going to come into force this month at 12, it's interesting that the UN has also said that 14 should be the minimum age of criminal responsibility, so I'd be keen to know the reasons why the Government has chosen a lower age. Okay, thank you for that, Pam. Those points are on the records. Is there any further comments on the orders from any members? There's no further indication. Thank you, convener. I just wanted to put on record that I welcome the negative instrument on the criminal age of responsibility. I was on the committee in the last term that took this bill through the Parliament, so it's a really, really good piece of legislation. On Pam's point earlier, there was a lot of discussion at that point that the age of criminal responsibility should be at a higher age, so I know that the Scottish Government had committed to continuing to look at that, but that was a step that they took at that point. Members should be aware that a lot of members took that legislation through including myself. We did look at the issues of making the age of criminal responsibility higher in line with other European countries, and we have an outstanding commitment from the Government that they would continue to look at that as the legislation comes into place and develops. On that basis, on the record, members agreed that we would not make any formal comments to the Parliament on those instruments. That concludes consideration of the SSIs. We now move on to the next item of our agenda, which is to continue taking evidence on our inquiry into women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. I welcome through the meeting Satwat Raman, chief executive officer of One Parent Family Scotland, Susie Fitton, policy officer of Inclusion Scotland, Katrina Melville, policy engagement and campaign officer for Age Scotland, Margaret Lance, Femus and Ethnic Minority National Resilience Network, and Dr Patricia Pickint, chief executive officer of YWCA Scotland. I welcome you all into the meeting and refer members to papers 2 and 3. As we have a number of witnesses today, please ask members to indicate which witnesses you are directing in your discussion point 2. We can then open the floor to other witnesses for comments. Other witnesses wish to respond to a question, please ask them to indicate by typing R in the chat function of blue jeans and I'll bring you in if time permits. I said question, but clearly today is a bit about our discussion, so don't feel as a question and answer. It's very much a discussion, so we're keen to hear discussion points from our witnesses too. If you're simply wanting to concur with what someone else has said, then I don't think that it's necessary to come at that point. There will be points when you'd be brought in and you could make that point at a later point in the meeting. Members can also use the chat function on blue jeans if they wish to intervene. Since we have a lot of witnesses and members present, you won't necessarily be able to see everyone on the blue jeans platform as there's only nine at any one time, but the clerk will advise if anyone loses connection. At the end of the session, if any of the witnesses feel that there are outstanding points that they want to address, please follow-up in writing and the committee will take that evidence into account. I now want to ask each of the witnesses to make a short opening statement starting with Satwat Rehman. Thank you and good morning everyone. We're very pleased to be here today because single moms faced a series of challenges as a result of the pandemic and also the restrictions to try to control the pandemic. When the pandemic began and lockdown was introduced, we quickly became aware how many single mothers were with no support and had been left in a difficult situation. During lockdown, many of our front-line staff were still supporting mothers and children directly delivering food parcels, power cards, tablets and Wi-Fi connectivity, clothes, toys for babies, activity packs for children and linking parents into food banks. We know from our work in communities that many single mothers were and still are, often worried about food, heating, rent or mortgage payments and also how to access local help. They're concerned about their children's education, social development and mental health. During lockdown, many didn't have access to a computer or a tablet or access to Wi-Fi to enable children to continue with online education or for themselves to be able to deal with job centre plus, do online shopping etc. Many single parents we work with only have pay-as-you-go mobiles with limited data packages. There's also the impact on single moms of the on-going restrictions, dealing with a non-resident parent, coping with employment when their child has been instructed to isolate at home as a precautionary measure, closed childcare being made unemployed, accessing benefits, the cost of living, worry about benefit conditionality etc. Many also lost child maintenance as the staff in the child maintenance service were transferred to deal with a huge increase in universal credit claims, which meant that the service no longer acted on the enforcement powers available to them so that children receive the payments that they're entitled to. Many of the single mothers are contacted at helpline during lockdown, experienced some form of domestic or economic abuse by a former partner, including controlling money, resources and limiting how money and resources are used. Throughout the session, I'm going to be using the experience and input of single parents and what they've told us during this time to inform our evidence. Inclusion Scotland welcomes the opportunity to submit evidence to the committee today about women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. I will be talking specifically about disabled women and women impacted by disability. That's women who care for a disabled person. Our research, our own research and evidence that we will share from the Fawcett society and others has shown that women impacted by disability and disabled women often have unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work within Households in Scotland. The provision of unpaid care is closely interlinked with systemic and harmful gender roles and the intersection with disability constrains women's lives. Those constraints have only intensified during the pandemic. Covid-19 has intensified social isolation and mental ill health for disabled women and women impacted by disability, personal and community poverty, economic and social instability and insecurity. Whilst it has also seen communities rally round to support local residents and neighbours, the impact of the pandemic and the consequences of the ensuring emergency responses have revealed inequalities in Scotland that existed for disabled women and women impacted by disability long before Covid arrived. Those inequalities have widened as economies, households and public services have locked down to contain the spread of the virus. Systemic gender roles have only been entrenched for women impacted by disability, with poor outcomes worsened by reduced access to social care support, routine healthcare and rehabilitation services, more pronounced social isolation, poorly tailored public health messaging, inadequately constructed mental health services and a lack of emergency preparedness that was inaccessible and inclusive for women who were impacted by disability. Withdrawal of social care services during the pandemic saw more and more women, including disabled women, take on additional unpaid care, with the number of carers in Scotland increasing by a third. By the early stages of the pandemic, there were an estimated 1.1 million unpaid carers in Scotland and an increase of 34 per cent as a result of the crisis. The majority of the new carers have been women and many have been disabled women or women impacted by disability. In short, I would say that disabled women and women caring for a disabled person have been harder hit by Covid-19 not only because they may be at greater risk of severe illness but equally or more so because Covid-19 has supercharged the existing inequality that they already face and has made new inequality much more likely. We will be sharing our own evidence on that and evidence from other organisations. Good morning, convener. Thank you for inviting Age Scotland to take part in this important session. We are the national charity for older people and we aim to support, inspire and empower older people over the age of 50. While the coronavirus pandemic has impacted daily life first all, it has exacerbated many pre-existing inequalities in our society. Older people have been impacted severely, whether that be due to high death rates and chances of severe illness, experiencing loneliness and social isolation and the resultant impact on mental health, concerns about job loss in finances or longer-term implications surrounding loss of confidence and regaining contact with others. Evidence suggests that older people from ethnic minorities, disabled older people, older people living in care homes or who live alone and older people experiencing poverty are among those impacted particularly. Another group of older people who have borne the brunt of much of the pandemic's impact are the large number of over 50s who provide unpaid care, whether that be to a spouse or partner, child or grandchild, parents, sibling, friend or neighbour, and the majority of those carers are women. In Scotland it is estimated that one third of women aged between 55 to 64 are unpaid carers, which is in the region of 130,000 women. Approximately one in five women aged between 65 to 74 are unpaid carers and one in 10 women over 75 are unpaid carers. Despite the significant contribution made by unpaid carers to our communities, we often find that many older carers do not necessarily identify as a carer and that this can act as a barrier to them accessing the support that should be available to unpaid carers. Due to our ageing population, it is likely that the number of unpaid carers who are themselves older and who may be providing care while living with their own long-term health condition or disability will rise in coming years. I thank you again for inviting HVL to attend this morning's meeting, and I look forward to participating in the discussion. Thank you. Margaret Lance, please. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, convener. I want to say thank you so much for having me. My name is Margaret Lance. I am the co-chair of the ethnic minority resilient network subgroup, and I am also the vice-chair for BIMIS. I currently work for Waverly Care as a health improvement coordinator supporting African communities in Scotland, and I am also a community activist. My contribution today will be based on what I know through my paid and voluntary work, what women have shared with me, and what partners have also shared with me. In terms of women's unpaid and domestic work. When the pandemic started, it was something like it's across the ocean, it's not going to come here. With the blink of an eye, we were in lockdown, and of course we do know that the African community and other minority communities, most of whom have no recourse to public funds, it has been very difficult and they were really hit hard. We had single parents, who some don't have English as their first language. The centres that they used to go there for support were all closed, not computer literate, or had no access to computers or the int access to the internet. What BIMIS and the ending minority resilience network did was to step in, what I would call rapid response to provide financial support in partnership with the Scottish Government. For example, the emergency sustainable grant scheme distributed up to 35,000 to around 446 referrals. That's between March and May. Of course, that included over 400 children, not a lot, but it did do something. Up to 200 adults of whom were also subject to no recourse to public funds. That places minority women and their families in the severe risk of destitution. We know that these are the issues that have been happening. Most of them find Scotland to be home, but the lockdown has actually increased their vulnerability. Also, we are looking at what I would call missing people, not hard to reach, because I don't think there's a hard to reach community, but missing people because of their circumstances, the situation that they find themselves in, they give up on themselves. We realise that mental health was at a very high risk. Suicide, drugs and alcohol are the things that place ending minority communities at a high risk and vulnerability. I will contribute in terms of what we have done and what I know and how I have been working with communities. Good morning. We at YWCA Scotland welcomed the opportunity to give evidence about women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. Systemic gender inequality is perhaps most evident in the home. Women are expected to be primary caregivers for children and family members while maintaining essential domestic work. Scotland-specific evidence shows that 72 per cent of mothers say that they do most of the housework, such as cleaning and laundry. We know that this unfair responsibility is a result of the patriarchal society in which we live, with its outdated gender roles and expectations. We also know the ripple effects of this. Women are unable to participate fully and equally in society, including in the labour market, and our current employment culture and systems do not support or enable women to progress. This year, we published our fifth annual research report in the status of young women in Scotland, where we survey and speak with women aged 16 to 30 across Scotland about the specific issues that affect them. We knew that there was one area beyond all others that we needed to investigate this year—employment in the context of the pandemic. We heard from over 220 young women about how their lives and work had been impacted by the pandemic. One in 10 young women we surveyed said that there was zero support for those with caring responsibilities in the workplace, making juggling work and care difficult and stressful. 53 per cent of young women did not feel confident to negotiate flexible working arrangements. Many support services for young carers stopped during the pandemic. The additional caring responsibilities often felt young women who were in full-time education. For some young women, being a carer also meant that they were more reluctant to apply for new opportunities for fear of being discriminated against because of their caring responsibilities. We will finish our opening statement with a quote from a research participant. In my workplace, being part-time means that I am not in line for promotions and progression. My reasons for working part-time include living with an anxiety disorder and caring responsibilities, both of which very disproportionately affect women. I think that many workplaces can create a facet of equality without truly engaging with the reality of what holds women's career progression back. Thank you and thanks everyone for your contributions. We will now open the floor to a bit of a discussion. As I said, we will try to get a mixture of views between committee members and our witnesses. I will start with Maggie Chapman. Thanks very much Joe. Good morning to everybody who is on the panel. Thank you for being with us this morning and for your opening statements. You are all referred in some ways in your opening remarks to the point that we have heard before, that the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities, whether those are inequalities of gender, because of the patriarchal society, or of race, or of age or of ability. I would like to unpick the intersections a little bit, if I may, particularly the relationship between women carers who are women of colour, ethnic minorities, the issue that Margaret raised around no recourse to public funds, and how support has just been, if not absent, very difficult to access. I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about the women and carers and others that you have direct experience with. I will ask Margaret first, and then, if I can ask Satchwhatch to come in as well. In terms of women that I have supported, or that my partners have supported, who have no recourse to public funds, having no recourse to public funds, maybe a single mother with more than one children, three to four children, it's very difficult and makes them quite vulnerable, because they cannot work. Being an asylum seeker, you cannot work. How would you tell a child in the morning that there is no food at the table? Most of them, they end up going from one food bank to another, from one organisation to another, taking support, and that shouldn't be happening. How can we support one group? We are also looking at some of the concerns that have come to us. It's about students, international students, with children as well, having no recourse to public funds. I do understand that, but how does that impact on these families and how they support their children? I don't know if I did get your question or if I gave you what you wanted. No, thank you Margaret, that's very helpful. Sartwacht, do you want to come in as well and say just a little bit about the women that you're supporting, the lone carers that you're supporting, the lone families, and how they have dealt with some of the intersections, the cross-cutting inequality that they are facing? Okay, thank you, I'll try. Quite often, many of the single moms and the families that we work with belong to, say for example, more than one priority group within the Child Poverty Act. Amongst the children in poverty, 40 per cent of children in single-parent families also have a disabled person at home. Over half, 54 per cent of the children in a family with a younger mother are also in a single-parent household. As you know, there's a particular issue with young parents and lower rates of universal credit to begin with. One of the things that we're trying to challenge for the young parent campaign. What we found was that the financial and economic impact of the lockdown, as you've said, has entrenched those pre-pandemic inequalities. I mean, there's always been the issue for single parents of that sort of dual responsibility of being the sole carer and sole breadwinner, which is a difficult challenge and balancing act at the best of times, even pre-pandemic, has really been exacerbated by the pandemic. As well as that, in terms of some of the intersections, we heard from a lot of parents of the moms that we work with about how they were having to, in a way, have an enhanced caring role because they were managing so many anxieties and the mental health of the children and young people, their children, as well as the impact on their own mental health and wellbeing of the uncertainties. So generalised anxiety that we saw amongst the population, but added to that pressure of having to try to cope with being the only adult in lockdown at home with your children. Possibly trying to work yourself, at home, managing maybe three children, different age groups, working on different platforms, needing to do different work online at the same time. You add to that some of the things that we saw when supermarkets were turning single parents away when they turned up with their children to do their shopping because it was one person allowed per household. Single parents were not, single moms were not recognised as a group that might require additional support as a result of the lockdowns. So I think early on when we looked at all the local authority websites, there was only one or two that identified single parent families as one of the priority groups requiring the additional support. That goes back to what has been said by the other speakers earlier, but what we are talking about is entrenched systemic patriarchal attitudes that recognise families. We still work on the model of a particular type of family. All our services are built around that model. The workforce, labour markets, everything is built around that model. What single parents and single moms have been coping with generally was thrown into such sharper focus during this pandemic? They faced financial insecurity, there was no second income, the pressures like a set of balancing paid work and unpaid work. One of the previous speakers has spoken about how all local face-to-face groups stopped. Isolation was a key factor for the families that we worked with. They were much more exposed to the demands of caring for children during lockdown. There are many families, single parent families, where there is a disability, where there were other cross-cutting intersectional issues. As well as being the single mum, there were quite often the enhanced caring responsibilities that came with that. If there is anything that I do not have to answer, please let me know. That is really helpful. I think that you outlined very clearly the gross failure of society to understand different models of family, which is something that we need to think about more broadly, not just in this committee. The questions of isolation and the on-going mental health impacts that that is going to have on individuals, but also on society for significant time to come is something that we are going to need to think about how we deal with, because I am not sure that we have the systems in place just now. I will leave it there just now, convener. Thank you. I will come in later on if that is okay. I am happy for you to move on to Alexander Stewart. Thank you, convener, and good morning, members of the panel. Thank you for your very comprehensive introductions and updates. Can I look at the whole idea of isolation and loneliness and maybe talk to Katrina and Margaret? Katrina, you represent Age Scotland and we are well aware of the inequalities that elderly have faced and continue to face, but there was some real anxiety, there was loss of esteem, there was a lack of ensuring that access to healthcare was taking place. All of that seemed to be the tsunami effect that happened to older people during lockdown, and many of them, as we know, were left to their own devices. Many of them, just because of their age and responsibility to life, chose not to seek help initially but had to eventually because of the circumstances that they found themselves in. It would be good to get at a flavour from Age Scotland as to how that worked, and then, Margaret, how that impacted on the BEM community and those from ethnic minorities. Once again, the elderly population in those communities had a way of managing themselves, but it maybe was not being coordinated appropriately by the services and the policy makers. There was much more informal and your organisation identified in your opening comments that you were doing work on managing all of that within your own groups. The third sector took on a much bigger role of trying to manage those people. Between the two of you, I would like to see what you think are the ways forward here, because we are not finished with the whole process and there may be lessons to be learned as to how we move forward for the future. Thank you for that question. You are absolutely right that the pandemic has had a really profound impact on older people's physical and mental health. We know that from what older people themselves are telling us, but also from research that we have done over the course of the pandemic. In terms of loneliness and social isolation, we know that that was already the levels of that were high before the pandemic. Our big survey of 3,562 people over 50, which was carried out earlier this year, found that 53 per cent of respondents had reported that the pandemic had made them feel lonelier, which does not come as a surprise. Loneliness can have a real impact on somebody's mental health and it can be a risk factor for developing conditions such as depression. It can also have a real physical health impact as well. We are concerned that a lot of older people may have seen a deterioration in their mental health over the course of the pandemic. To pick out something from our big survey, one-third of respondents said that their mental health had got worse over the last five years. Interestingly enough, it is worth noting that people in their 50s and 60s were much more likely to say that. We think that that could possibly be because they are part of this sandwich generation, maybe dealing with the pressures of duggling, caring for children, older family members and holding it down employment. Looking to the future, I think that it is going to be really important that we have the support available to people in communities to support them in getting their confidence back if they have not been going out and about. We need that to be accessible and funding in place to allow that to happen. We are concerned that there will be a longer-term impact in terms of people's ability to be independent, be confident and go about their activities just due to the pandemic. The longer that things do not happen, the less likely it is that they are not going to happen again. I hope that that was helpful. Margaret, as I say, is identifying what you are trying to do within your own sector for the women who were really left on their own. We all know that we have heard that, before the pandemic, people were already lonely and isolated. Most organisations have been trying to see how they can work to support people who are lonely and isolated. Some of them do not have families, they are ageing, they have underlying health issues. Within the African community and other minority communities, we know that faith is at the heart of everything that they do. That is where they get their support. During the pandemic, all the churches and centres that were supporting them were all closed down. Elderly, they have never used a computer or do not know how to even set up one. They do not have access to the internet. That is something that we have been trying to help them to set it up for them so that they can join groups online, which did happen with some but not necessarily with others. We provided gadgets and dongles so that they could join groups. Of course, we also noticed that they could not access health services. Those who do not speak English will phone and ask them to call the number or press one and press this. Somebody who does not even understand the language, how do they get about pressing one or two to get access, whether it is their medication. We interviewed at that stage and this is an ongoing issue. There are those who have come here and have made Scotland home having no families. They do not have access to any support services. The organisations that are trying to support them also have no funding to do that. I think that we should look at that as a priority and continue to fund projects that are trying to support those communities. Most of them are volunteers and they are trying to pick up broken pieces. They are happy to do that. How can we encourage them by providing them with the funding that they are able to support their communities? Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us and for the evidence that you have submitted in advance, which has been incredibly helpful. I have a couple of questions initially for Susie and Katrina. I am keen to understand a bit about what the impact has been on disabled people of having to rely more on unpaid care, as well as give unpaid care. Your assessment of whether or not the budget has gone far enough to support unpaid carers and social care, given the additional pressures that are still present as a result of the pandemic. Thank you so much, Pam. Inclusion Scotland carried out an online survey on the lockdowns to find out what impact the pandemic was having on disabled people, particularly disabled women and women who were caring for a disabled child or a disabled person in the household. The key things that came back in relation to that were that disabled women had new or increased unpaid caring responsibilities. About 40 per cent were experiencing challenges with caring for children or family members. Social care support had been stopped or reduced from around 30 per cent of respondents, so both male and female and non-binary respondents to that question said that their support had either stopped completely or had been reduced. We know that over 2,000 care packages were cut in Glasgow from 20 March 2020, many with no notice and no follow-up. Many disabled people were left with no support to wash, to eat, to take medications. They were forced to rely on other family members, many of whom were at high risk of the virus. People were forced to rely on friends and neighbours for social care support, so people were thrust into caring roles that they had no training and support for. It is rarely recognised that women are the majority of those in need of social care support at around 62 per cent of those accessing services in Scotland. That disproportion increases with age, so three quarters of social care clients are aged 65 and over, and 67 per cent of that cohort are women. Women are also more likely to be disabled or have long-term health conditions than men, and there are significant geographical disparities with that. In the most deprived areas of Scotland, 44 per cent of women are disabled compared with 26 per cent of women in the least deprived areas. We had evidence to show that disabled women in their families were left in desperate situations as a result of cuts to care during lockdown. Disabled women told us that they were forced to sleep in their wheelchairs and that they were unable to get out of bed. Others told us that they were unable to wash and dress themselves and to keep up with basic household chores. One disabled woman told us that she had gone from 20 hours of care to seven of which were personal care a week to zero. She was bedbound completely because of that, and she was having to rely on neighbours to look after her children. In that context, Covid-19 displaced care away from the state and on to the household and largely women within it. That further embedded women's poverty and inequality of resources, wellbeing and participation. Women looking after disabled children went from having their children having two to one support in residential accommodation to them being sent home with no support. Women, including disabled women, often took the brunt of the new or increased caring responsibility. They were trying to juggle childcare of other children with home working, getting no statutory support to care for disabled children. Women spoke of disabled children's self-harming, displaying harmful and challenging behaviour and developing disturbed communication because of disruption to routines, social isolation and fear of the virus. They also spoke of having to bear the brunt of unpaid care and domestic housework and feeling abandoned by statutory services. One disabled respondent said that I have been abandoned, my partner is a key worker and is hardly at home and I am left to care for our two disabled children, homeschool them, care for them, do the housework, cook and clean all whilst trying to hold down a part-time job from home. It is impossible. I am literally screaming into my pillow every night. It was really stark in terms of the kind of evidence that we were getting from disabled people. People talked about the impact of losing social care support, the emotional impact of a loss of independence and a forced reliance on family and what that meant for personal relationships, balancing new or increased caring responsibilities with work commitments and managing their own health conditions while caring for others. A disabled mother-in-career told us that her youngest child not being at school is proving very difficult for her health. She was now struggling to care for her 24 hours a day. She normally got two nights rest-bikes per week and one weekend daytime rest-bikes to rest in order to help her pace and cope and keep on top of housework, but the stress and extra care activity was making her symptoms worse. As you will be very aware, women caring for disabled people in their household often rely on the vital support provided by schools, statutory services including rest-bikes services and family members to survive on a day-to-day basis. Responses showed that many families, including disabled people, lost all that support, in some cases completely overnight and suddenly with no advance notice. The kind of things that we need to see in terms of the budget, we need a recovery that recognises social care support as a fundamental basic right. We know that rising demand for social care is fast outstripping investment. We know that an approach providing little more than life and limb support to decreasing numbers of people, including disabled people, is just not sustainable. If we are to tackle gender inequality in relation to unpaid care and domestic housework at home and tackle gender roles, we need sustained public investment in the development nationwide infrastructure for social care to protect, promote and ensure human rights and tackle inequalities for disabled people, older people and carers. We need urgent reform to eligibility criteria. We need care charging to be abolished. Those practices are damaging to women's social and economic equality. Social care support is not about providing a personal care service. It is about support to live a life of equity, quality, full participative citizenship. We need social care support to be funded in a way that means that services are designed and delivered in co-production with disabled people and with women who are impacted by disability. We need to think about social care as an investment in economic infrastructure. We believe that development of the national care service provides a real opportunity to transform how social care is perceived and how it is valued. We need to mainstream equalities, impact assessments and the view of women impacted by disability must inform the design of the national care service. I could speak about this all day, so I should probably give someone else an opportunity to speak. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I could have listened to that all day. Thank you. Katrina, do you have any contributions on the impact of unpaid care on both in terms of wanting to rely on it but also having to give it? Susie has made some comprehensive points, so I will just try to be brief. I do not have too much to add on top of that. As people have been saying, it is really clear that unpaid carers have had to step in to fill the gap in public service provision, and that has obviously had a detrimental impact on their own physical and mental health. As Susie said, it is really important to be mindful that lots of older carers may themselves be living with long-term health conditions. In our experience, unpaid carers can also neglect their own health, perhaps due to a lack of time to maybe get to appointments. Although this is something that programmes like near me have had a positive impact on, or perhaps because they just can't afford to be ill because there's nobody else to step in. Being a carer can also be a really isolating experience for some people, potentially due to loss of friends and social networks. I would also echo Susie's points about social care needing more investment and priority in order to relieve the pressure on unpaid carers, particularly recruitment and retention of social care staff. Susie is absolutely right that we need to see social care as an investment in everybody's future and everybody's lives. Thank you very much for both of you for that. Thank you, convener, and good morning to everyone. I'd like to ask a question really around the job market, the labour market, and the pandemic affected a different set of industries than usual recessions would have. With significantly gender specific, women and men tend to cluster in different occupations that shake the gender implications of the pandemic. Female jobs are more at risk than male ones simply because women are disproportionately represented in sectors that are negatively affected by the Covid-19 crisis. You're all involved in addressing this dilemma within your intersectional lenses. I would like to ask what are the biggest obstacles in ending this disparity, and where can we do more for people in this position? I'd probably like to ask that first to single parents, single parent families Scotland, as it's at what? Well, thank you. I can just start off by giving you some figures from some research that the Learning and Work Institute supported by JRF did, which showed that single mothers are more likely to have lost their jobs as a result of this crisis, but nearly one in 10 are falling out of employment. One in three, that's 34 per cent of single mothers have been furloughed compared to just one in four in coupled parents. Single mothers who remained in work saw the biggest decline in hours with working hours shrinking by an average of 7.6 hours. Single mothers are more likely to say they're finding it difficult to manage their finances and that they're falling behind with their bills and couples with children. You're right, that is because so many of the single mothers who are in employment are in entry-level jobs in some of the industries and the sectors that you've spoken about, such as retail, etc., which were the hardest hit by this pandemic. We undertook a piece of work with the Jersey Foundry Foundation and another one with Oxfam to look to see what could support single parents and single mothers when we're looking to see what we can do. One of the things that was really interesting was when they spoke about support post lockdowns, the first two lockdowns, they said that anything that we do or anything in terms of support services to support us back into work needs to have mental health and wellbeing support as an integral part of it. The overwhelming message that was coming through was that we don't expect to be able to pick up from where we left off before the pandemic as a result of the additional caring responsibilities, financial stresses and pressures that we'll be having to deal with, as well as some of what I spoke about earlier, the attempts to try to control them by former partners, etc., and the impact that that was having on them. We feel like we've taken some steps backward and what we now need is support to look to see how we can re-enter work, but within that we can re-enter work that recognises the additional caring responsibilities of being a single mum. That brings us to the importance of the support services, such as childcare. Having a childcare infrastructure across Scotland, that's affordable, available and provides the flexibility, because what we don't yet have is the type of labour market that we want that places equal weight on home and work, which recognises the importance of being family friendly, of looking at the hours that suit the women that we're working with, the single mums and not the hours that are convenient for the employer, looking at shift patterns, etc. While we're doing some of the more structural changes, we need to look to see how we can put in place the support through childcare, through employment support, through what we can do as we're moving to a different type of economy when we're looking at a just transition. Can we make that a just transition that looks at the needs of single mothers with two young children working in entry-level jobs to ensure that we're building a fairer society and economy as we're trying to change how we do? There are big structural changes that we can do, but, in the short term, it is recognising that, for single mums, there have been additional pressures as a result of this. Many have fallen out of work as a result of this. Others have had to reduce their hours of work, and what the saying is that they will need additional support to get themselves back into work. That is work that we want to look to see how we can ensure that there is an adequate and predictable income that enables them to stabilise and to address the support that they want and their aspirations for themselves and their children. Thank you so much. I wonder if we can hear from Patricia on that point as well. Would that be okay? Absolutely. As part of our research, we focused on, as one of the key groups that we wanted to hear from, young women in precarious work. We spoke to young women in various jobs that were unpredictable or insecure, ranging from zero-hours contracts to freelance work and sex work. The overarching theme was lack of stability, not knowing what their income was going to be, and lack of support and protection through various Government schemes introduced in response to the pandemic. One group that was highlighted in that area was young women who engaged in sex work. They discussed the difficulty of having to choose between their safety and earning a living and abiding by restrictions. That experience was also challenging for those who worked in the creative sector with shorter-term contracts, being self-employed, being freelancers and with the creative sector taking a massive hit during the pandemic. One of the things that young women told us could help with all those issues other than getting rid of zero-hours contracts and having more stability and employment was flexibility in the workplace as a starting point, as a baseline, not something that is granted as a privilege. Many young women who were in precarious work and who had caring responsibilities found that it was really difficult to progress in workplaces because the only option for them was to work part-time, which was seen as being less ambitious and meant that they did not have access to the same training opportunities, for example, as those in full-time work. That is one systemic issue that should be addressed fairly quickly if we want to see young women or any women who are doing unpaid care and domestic work being able to progress equally to men in workplaces. Can I go to Fulton MacGregor, please? Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thank you for all the evidence that you have given us so far. It has been really quite thorough and interesting to hear as we take this work forward. If you do not mind, I have got three broad questions that I will just work through. They are all obviously related, but they might not flow brilliantly together, so, if witnesses just bear with me, my first is around, I think, where Karen Adam was speaking about a wee bit earlier, was about the restrictions and the impact of those on women particularly now. I think that everybody will be aware that today there is going to be a big announcement from the First Minister. We do not know what that announcement will be yet, but the likelihood seems to be suggesting that there may be an imposition of some further restrictions to contain the Omicron variant. My concern with that is, after what I have heard today and last week, and what I guess we know, is that restrictions previously, as well as the virus itself, have impacted women on equally. What would you say about how restrictions should be framed today? The sectors might need to close, but they might need to be restricted in some sort of way. The households meeting up or whatever the case is, what advice would you give to the MSPs on that today? For any of us who do have questions this afternoon in the statement, what can we ask to make sure that we do not make the same mistakes first and second in lockdown, which, where in, I have to say, mistakes of the Scottish Government feel like there are restrictions that we have seen having the same impact imposed by Governments all over the world? There was something deeply rooted about the gender inequality and the restrictions. Sorry for the long question, but I am happy for you to pick out the order. You dropped here from floating? Yeah, MDs want to come in on it. In this one, I think that it's a problem. Sorry, so Sathwine, do you want to have a go first? Okay, right. Thank you very much for that. I think that they are very difficult questions, in a way, to try to answer being in the situation where in being so unprecedented. I think that what I would say is that we need to look to see how we can provide more consistent, efficient, regular and predictable support, be that financial support, emotional support, and we look at the unequal impact of this, as you've said, which has become very apparent from all you've heard today and from all that we see around us. To see what we can do and what measures we can put in place to support with things like your saying isolation, if there is going to be measures announced around reduced social mixing, for example. How we can ensure that we are providing the means for digital access when there can't be the face-to-face access and the support and the resource to families and to those who support them to enable us to maintain some form of connection and connectivity during this period, if there's going to be further measures that are particularly going to exacerbate the isolation and loneliness that so many single-parent families spoke to us about. So many single-parent families spoke to us about even prior to the pandemic. Research we undertook, which I can send you a link to, showed 84 per cent of single-parent families spoke about feeling isolated. That was pre-pandemic and what we saw was an increase and a spike in that and the impact on them. In the first lockdown, we were in crisis, emergency, emergency terms of how we respond. By the second lockdown, we'd managed to nail some of that down and recognise there were gaps in the way that we'd responded. If there are any further restrictions announced now, it is acknowledging the unequal impact of that and therefore ensuring that, in the support measures that we're able to put in place, we're able to provide that priority support to those who we know are the most impacted, not just by the pandemic but by the measures that we have to put in place to try to manage it. So just to build on what Satwaith has said, we are looking really for the Scottish Government to really learn from the evidence that disabled people's organisations have provided about the impact of the first two lockdowns on disabled people and to really use that evidence to formulate new responses if further restrictions are likely to be announced. The key things that we would call for really are an assurance to disabled people who receive social care that their social care will not be reduced or stopped as a result of further restrictions. We know that the Scottish Government committed emergency funding to local authorities when social care support was stopped during the first lockdown, but we also are failing to know—it was very difficult to find out whether or not that funding actually found its way to social care recipients. We really want assurances that social care will be maintained if further restrictions are to be brought in. We also need to make sure that our responses are bespoke in relation to people who are at high risk of the virus and who are shielding. We need to maintain shielding support and particularly digital access for disabled people who are shielding. We really need to involve disabled people as the experts in their own lives in emergency planning in the future. That can be anything from making sure that communication about restrictions is available in accessible format and making sure that—obviously, we have had BSL interpretation for the First Minister's updates in Scotland, but the UK Government has not had BSL interpretation throughout the pandemic, which has actively excluded BSL users from hearing very important public health information. We want to make sure that involvement and participation of disabled people is part and parcel of how we live with Covid-19, as it seems that we have to do. If I could leave any one takeaway message today, it would be that we need to ensure that social care support is maintained if further restrictions come in. I want to pick a couple of points around the fact that you mentioned coercion and the control that some lone mums will experience. Others have also touched on that. Tom Goswell, who sends apologies today, was interested in exploring some of the high levels of domestic abuse and violence that we know have come out through the pandemic, not only in campaign communities and ethnic minority groups, but more generally. What are your thoughts on current service provisions, whether our policies are adequate enough, whether we have the right support mechanisms in place to support people who are currently in abusive or violent situations, and what we can be doing better? I appreciate that, particularly for carers in paid and unpaid work. There will be additional vulnerabilities around domestic abuse and domestic violence, so it is really keen to hear different people's views on that. If I could ask Satwet first and then see if anybody else wants to pick this up, I am sure that Margaret will. It is such a complex question to try to answer quickly, so bear with me. I think that, in terms of current services and provisions, this is an area that could do with additional support and investment, particularly if we are looking at further restrictions coming in. What many of the single mums that we worked with lost as a result of all that was the peer support? The informal support that would enable them to have someone they could go to to say what was going on. Knowing that there was going to be greater isolation, which resulted in some of the higher levels of control and abuse that they experienced and spoke to. People do not necessarily think about single mums still experiencing ongoing domestic abuse, but that is another issue that we need to address around what people's perceptions are of the group of mothers that we support. Much of it is around economic domestic abuse as well and control, with holding payments, etc. That was particularly difficult when many of the families that we worked with did not necessarily have access to online facilities at the beginning of the pandemic to be able to get them to get the advice and support that they needed. That would be critical that the means are there for the support and that the information is available so that women know proactively where they can go and what they can do, as opposed to feeling that they are in a situation where there is really no one around who can help them. In terms of additional support, I would say that we definitely need to look at that. In terms of the policies, we need to make sure that we are being as inclusive as we can and understanding some of the complexities of the situations that women find themselves in, even after they have left an abusive partner where there are children involved and the coercion that comes around that and making sure that we are investing over this period in those front-line services that can provide the support to the women that we are talking about and that we are connected with each other so that we know exactly where to be able to support women. That is really helpful. I know that Patricia wants to come in. Patricia, you want to come in next, and then I will go to Margaret. I think that the issue with the current service provision is that all of our models are built on face-to-face support and creating physical safe spaces that women can access to get support that they need, to have that peer-to-peer sort of informal support that Satwat mentioned as well. When we moved all of our services into online delivery, I do not think that we had time or resources to really address the digital gap, to address access to technology and devices but to address the fact that, for many women in domestic abuse situations, home is free and not a safe space, and we do not know who is controlling the devices. Even if there is funding available to give them devices or to provide them with online training, we do not know who else is sitting in the room with them. If we are going into further restrictions, that is really something that we need to address because we are missing a lot of women in terms of being able to provide them with adequate support if it is not face-to-face support. That is an area that I would like to highlight. I do not have answers, just thoughts, but I think that it is something that we definitely need to concentrate our efforts on if we are looking at another year of coming in and out of lockdowns, because some women would not have any access to support in those situations that they are in. Going back to precarious work and women losing income, that is another kind of intersection that is worth exploring, trapping women in domestic abuse situations because of loss of income as a result of the pandemic and especially those who have children or are carrying responsibilities on top of that. That is a really clear outline of some of the barriers and the issues around digital replacements for face-to-face meeting spaces. We need to think a little bit more creatively and a little bit more imaginatively about that. Margaret, I am aware that minority women face additional exclusions around not only digital poverty but other sort of face spaces to meet, and there will be cultural issues as well that maybe we need to be a little bit clearer in our understanding about. What would you like to say in response? Well, thank you very much. I was just going to highlight domestic violence, which is at the brise, and there is a lot of underreporting, maybe due to the cultural and religious beliefs and the shame that that could bring on the families. Some of that underreporting could also be because women are scared that if they report, their children are going to be removed from them. However, in working with them, it is rather to reassure them about the information and the support that is in place for them, rather than threaten them—sorry, that may be the wrong word to use—if the information is clearly put out there, they would understand that there is support for me. Women are tied into a violent relationship, maybe because if they leave, their visa is going to be withdrawn or they are still dependent on their partners, they have to undergo all that without speaking to anybody. In terms of providing support, sometimes you may phone a woman who has issues and they cannot talk because of the environment in which they are. I would give an example or try to pick to somebody and I realised that the connection was not stable. I said, are you okay to talk? Are you okay to talk? Where are you? I am in the wardrobe. If somebody has something to say, they are there to provide support and they cannot talk, then there is a gap. One of the speakers highlighted that our policies are designed for face-to-face work. We also need to understand that some people cannot access the internet and not computer-lead trade. How do we work with those people to ensure that we are providing them with the right information? If the police are also going to interview families, they should also be aware of the cultural differences and the information that somebody can disclose. Sometimes they say some words, not really meaning what they are saying, is to understand them, not to take them to task for using some words because that is how they learn those words, that is how they were brought up. They are learning and they are continuing to learn every day. We need to understand some of those communities and that they have additional needs. They may have children with special needs and that impacts on their mental health and wellbeing. If you have three or four children in different classes, you become a teacher by default. Sometimes it can be overwhelming for parents and women in particular that may impact on their attitude and the relationship that they find themselves in. It is about looking at culturally sensitive ways to work with those families so that they can come up and feel free to talk with us and know that there is support there for them rather than that we are going to take your children away. It is social services that are there to support families but they also need to invest in themselves to be able to understand the people that support them. That is helpful. It is useful that you mentioned social services and other support services but it is important that you brought the police into the discussion. We need to think about some of the conversations that we can have with the police around cultural sensitivities and cultural understanding. It does not come down to a blind enforcement of a policy that there is sensitive understanding around different situations. Thank you very much for that. Thanks, Joe. I will leave it there for now. Thank you. I will go to Alexander Stewart now, please. Thank you, convener. When we are talking about the impact on physical health, there is the indication that long Covid seems to be affecting more women than men and the effects that that has with them in the labour market, it would be quite good to get an idea of what some people's views are with reference to that. Most women who work apart time that their employers have an inadequate response to how that is managed about how they are coping with long Covid, and women are more likely to be in jobs that may not entitle them to some statutory sick pay, etc. Can I ask Susie to give us a feeling of how that is being impacted and where we see that progressing? I believe that women who report having symptoms of long Covid, the evidence suggests that they outnumber men by as much as four to one. The evidence on that is obviously emerging, so there are questions being asked as to why that is. The hypothesis that I have seen most often is that long Covid is in essence an autoimmune response to the virus—it is an autoimmune disorder, if you like—and 80 per cent of all autoimmune disorders are experienced by women. Aside from Covid and the symptoms of long Covid, I have seen some of the discussions from autoimmune specialists and virologists about that. That is what people are thinking, that women are more likely to experience an autoimmune disorder. We know in terms of the impact on the labour market that women who experience ill health and disabled people are at risk in relation to their employment, particularly women in part-time employment. We know that employers may well be struggling or not have sufficient guidance and advice to know how to respond to employees who have long Covid. We have had anecdotal evidence from disabled people that they are finding it very difficult to get support from GPs about the symptoms of long Covid and that they are finding it difficult to find support networks and peer support networks. The evidence around disabled people's employment in relation to previous economic downturns suggests that the activity rates for disabled people increased during emergency situations and wage gaps widened. That is a significant issue for disabled people and for people with long Covid. We know that disabled workers—and that could potentially include people with long Covid—are at substantially high risk of being made redundant or having their hours reduced. I think that there are obvious issues here and there are obvious gender issues here with long Covid. We will be really keeping an eye on that and seeing how it develops. Thank you, convener. Can I go to Pam Duncan Clancy, please? Thank you, convener, and thank you again for everyone's responses. In the first instance, the increase in unpaid work could impact on Government plans for the no-one-life-behind approach in employment and the aims to reduce the employment gap of disabled people by half. For us, the work to tackle the disability employment gap really needs to shift in focus. Employability support for disabled people has been really concentrated on trying to upskill disabled people themselves. In employment, as with many areas of everyday life, Scots disabled people went into this pandemic worse off than non-disabled people. We know that the employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people of working age is higher in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK. We know that disabled people are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as non-disabled people. We know that the Scottish Government has committed to halving the employment gap by 2038, with interim milestones, which mean that the employment rate needs to increase by around 1 per cent each every year. By 2023, the employment rate should stand at 50 per cent, and by 2030 it should be 60 per cent for disabled people. When that target was set in 2018, we considered that a target of 20 years for only halving the disability employment gap, we felt that it showed a distinct lack of ambition, but we are obviously very concerned that, as a result of the pandemic, those targets will not be met. Many disabled people in work already have to leave their jobs when they acquire an impairment or when their condition worsens and they do not get the support or workplace adjustments that they need. We know that the loss of employment opportunities contributes to disabled people living in poverty, and we know that unemployment results in demoralising rejection, increased pessimism, under confidence and poor mental health for disabled people. We also know that the barriers that disabled people face in getting ready for and getting into and staying in and getting on in work are many, varied and quite complicated. They include stigma, poor attitudes, inaccessible application processes and discriminatory practices, including a lack of opportunities for promotion and development, retention and sick leave policies that actively discriminate against disabled people. We know that inaccessible transport and workplaces and a lack of accessible housing could also play a part in preventing disabled people finding or progressing at work. The overriding message for us is that, for too long, support services and national and local strategies have focused on what people think are disabled people's employability issues. In other words, what needs to change about us as disabled people and what support we need. Support for employment is often targeted at addressing disabled people's perceived lack of skills, education or the difficulty that we have with managing our health conditions or our perceived lack of confidence or motivation. In other words, it is disabled people who are expected to change and improve in order to be better suited to the existing world of work. We believe that there is a deeply skewed allocation of responsibility for addressing the disability employment gap with much higher demands on disabled people than are presently put on employers and other organisations. For example, it is disabled people who are penalised when they are not able to gain or retain employment, but employers continue to be largely unaccountable if they do not create inclusive workplaces. Just to give you an example of that, disabled people are over 60 times more likely than employers to face sanctions for non-compliance with requirements in relation to work-related benefit. In 2015-16, disabled people were sanctioned almost 70,000 times for missing appointments or infringing work-related conditions of benefit payment with resulting reductions in benefit. Employers in the same year were in effect sanctioned only around 1,000 times when disability discrimination cases were either settled or won by a disabled person at an employment tribunal. What I am saying and what the pandemic has highlighted is that we have systemic inequality when it comes to disabled people's employment. We really need a shift in focus to think about, rather than thinking about employability, what can employers do to support disabled people? What can they do to create inclusive workplaces? What advice and guidance do they need? What support with HR? What support with providing reasonable adjustments in the workplace? What support with accessing access to work do they need? How can we make our workplaces in Scotland much more accessible to disabled people? Thank you. I will just say all of the above in terms of what Susie has just said. I thought that that was a fantastic summary of what some of the issues are and that many of them are specific groups that we are here to talk about and experience collectively and generally. Pam, going back to your question, I think that in terms of no one left behind and the employment gap, we need to look at some of the support services that we need in place for single parents throughout. Every time we speak to single parents about what the biggest issue is around this, whether it comes back to childcare support, family-friendly working practices, and how, like I said, the labour market is structured. In terms of no one left behind, I agree with what Susie said that at the moment there is a deficit model in terms of how we look to see what the range of issues are that single moms need supported with. Instead of turning it around in terms of the assets that they have that they can bring into the labour market and how we support them through how we can restructure that. I do think that there is still a need for tailored specific support. One of the big things that we hear time and again is that they want a job that will fit in with their family. Family comes first. Caring responsibilities are critically important but undervalued, as we have spoken about, or not valued or recognised before. The employer attitudes and how we can support employers to understand the benefits of being more flexible and family-friendly is critical. I mean, we had some parents spoke about it. My supervisor does not understand. They will say, well, I have got kids and I work, but what they do not realise is that they might have support. They might have family that can help. I do not have that. I have seen what it is like. They tell you that they are flexible, but they mean that you need to be flexible for them. It should go both ways. You worry when you ask about flexibility or time-off for your kids, you know that they will just replace you. There is that fear that keeps many of the moms that we work with in low-paid precarious work in which they are underemployed because of the fear factor of moving somewhere else and losing whatever flexibility they might have gained through the length of service that they have had. The other thing that I want to say is that, in order to be able to support the women that we work with to move beyond entry-level jobs, we need to look at how we create a pathway that recognises the importance of qualifications, supporting women to be able to study and have financial security and stability when doing so in order to be able to progress in the workplace in terms of progression to different jobs, increasing the hours of work and looking to see how we can support with that. It does, of course, come back to having a comprehensive social care and childcare infrastructure to support women and families. It is very overwhelming everything that you have been talking to us about this morning. It is very clear that there were many inequalities already there and, as has been said, really highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Those are things that perhaps women and intersectionally have been shouting about trying to get the message across for generations. It is fantastic that we are discussing this today and we are hearing from ourselves today. What can we do to make a massive shift here? We have heard about patriarchal structures. Just hearing the evidence that 80 per cent of people with autoimmune diseases are women, but women are less likely to take time off to go to the doctor or take time off for childcare because of perceptions. Is there a deeper underlying cause here on top of the practical and policy changes that we need to do? That is a more general, higher-level question, but I am really interested to get your feedback on that. I would like to open it to anybody who would like to come in. I think that that is a really complicated question to answer, but I will do my best to give you some thoughts. It is essential for us to place more importance on the role that is provided by unpaid carers by looking at workplace issues. It is not as valued as it should be. If somebody has a gap in their CV trying to explain that, I was providing unpaid care whether that would be childcare to an older relative. There just is not the recognition by employers that that is a really important contribution that somebody has made. There are probably more practical measures in support for carers, which we could put in place in the workplace, which would help with those things. Specifically, employability strategies focusing on carers, either while they are in work or maybe after a gap in caring to help them to get back into work. Obviously, there are things such as the carer positive accreditation scheme, which are really positive. However, just doing more to embed that practical recognition and support for carers, giving carers access to resources so that they can pursue training opportunities to help them with their caring role and to help them beyond their caring role are also really important. Just making sure that any carer who is potentially at risk of redundancy due to the sort of caring role that they are provided so that they have the support that they need. Practical measures to support carers, hopefully. It is such a big question, but I will try to unpack some of the issues. It requires an entire systemic overhaul when it comes to our approach to employment. Starting with the application process, which is something that Katrina touched upon. It is very difficult to explain gaps in employment and maybe we need to think about different application process, different recruitment process. We need more education and training for young women, embedding confidence building, skills recognition and skills recognition for those who are doing unpaid care and recognising that as an employment, as a form of employment, as a form of gaining skills and an employee is recognising that as well as something that is extremely valuable. As I said before, we need more flexibility. Flexibility should be the baseline. It shouldn't be a privilege that people need to ask for and that they might be rejected. I think that the last two years have proven to all of us that we can work more flexibly. It must be very difficult for people who had those previous requests for flexible working rejected, now seeing that our entire companies and our entire economy adapted to a more flexible way of working. I think that we shouldn't be even thinking about going back to the way that we used to work. We need increased opportunities for women, for women with caring responsibilities, for women who are returning to work, support and training, and just a wider societal change, societal shift overhauling our current system, tackling existing power structures that keep women in lower, paid and lesser value employment. There is definitely something around what sort of value we attach to certain forms of employment and how little value we attach to employment that is dominated by women. That is ensuring that women remain dependent on men both financially and as power holders in terms of our careers and experiences in the workplace. I am so many things to tackle, but I am happy that we are at least one silver lining of the last two years that we are now looking at those things seriously and we are starting to have those wider, deeper conversations that those in our sector were having for many years previously. I am just going to mention two specific things that might help. I think that one of the critical things that we need to build in to everything that we are doing is ensuring that the women that we are all working with, with the direct experience at the centre of the conversations to design what we need to do as we continue to live with the crisis and when we begin to emerge out of it and recognise the diversity of families, including single-parent families, and when implementing policy and designing services in response to Covid-19 having that the centre, those who have experienced this most acutely and what we can do to develop and to build onwards from here in a way that does not entrench the inequalities that we have seen in so exacerbated. One of the things that we at One Parent Families Scotland have done is support Oxfam Scotland's campaign to add a national outcome on care, Scotland's national performance framework. We want recognition that the Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced the crucial importance of care paid and unpaid, most of it carried out by women, to all our lives, and to often caring for someone, be it an adult or a child, results in significant personal and economic costs for the individual and the family. We would support making Scotland one of the first countries in the world to include such an explicit cost-cutting and comprehensive commitment care and the role of carers within their performance framework. I will echo the points that Satwata has made. If the Scottish Government is serious about an economic recovery and a social recovery and renewal from Covid-19 that really centres equality and sustainability and tackling gender roles, it needs to embed women's equality in the redesign of social care. That needs to be a key principle in founding the national care service, so quality care must be universally accessible and free at the point of need. Social care support must be universally accessible. There must be minimum standards of support in a system that allows women to have control and flexibility. As we look towards how we are going to live with Covid-19, we need to adequately resolve social care support and we need to recognise its wider role in enabling women's quality of life and their participation and their contribution. Just to reiterate what Satwata has so passionately advocated for, we need to involve women who are impacted by disability. Disabled women and those caring for a disabled person must be listened to and involved in emergency planning. Our participation as disabled women needs to be front and centre of policy and decision making as we work out how to manage and live with Covid-19, not just for things that are specifically about disabled people but in all decisions that affect us. For that to happen, policy and decision makers and service providers need to understand that our lives are complicated. We are not just women or disabled people, we are employers, we are employees, we are learners, we are parents and we live in different parts of the country. As disabled people, we are more likely to be living in poverty and we are more likely to have higher costs. Those things need to be taken into account when working out what we do next. I wonder if, Margaret, you want to come in on this point? Although the previous speakers have read my script, which is great, it makes it easy for me. What I am going to echo here is about understanding the community that we serve. We cannot provide support to anyone without understanding where they are and where they want to be. In terms of paid work, I have realised within the BME community that most women get trapped in zero-hour contracts because the one word that is going to be sent out around their children is that they do not want to work. If you employ them and say, I want you to work Monday to Friday, they cannot do that because they need to be there for their children. If they are going to leave their children, then social services will come and take my children. Most of these women want to contribute. Child care is an issue to participation. If we want to involve women, then we need to be flexible. We need to understand the circumstances in which they find themselves. If we are going to find more restrictions coming again, that is causing a lot of anxiety, a lot of uncertainty, stress, and that leads to depression, which also impacts on the mothers and their children. If you do not have a family here, you want to work. We need to consider volunteering as a job. We call them paid staff. They do the same, but we also need to recognise the aspect and provide them the support that they need to upskill themselves. Some come here with degrees, but they cannot get a job. When they apply for jobs, they say that they have no experience. How can they have the experience when they do not have this opportunity to show what they have got? We need to look at how we support them to upgrade skills. It should be flexible and inclusive. I will stop there. Thank you very much, everyone. That brings us to the end of the time that we have for that session. We have gone over time by quite a bit, but we could have kept discussing those topics. We are so important and I am sure that the committee will come back to some of the issues in future work that we do. A huge thank you to all of our witnesses for attending today. That brings the public part of our meeting to a close. Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, the 11th of January. It will be a fully virtual meeting. It will begin our stage 1 oral evidence of the minor strike part in Scotland bill. We will now close the public part of this meeting and move into private for our final items of the agenda. Thank you all.