 Good morning and welcome to the sixth meeting of 2022 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. First agenda item is to agree with to take item three in private, which is consideration of today's evidence. Are we all agreed? I see everyone nodding that is agreed. The next agenda item, therefore, is to continue taking evidence on women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. The virtual round-table session will have an intersectional focus on race, and I welcome to the meeting Para Farzana, race equality main streaming officer at Seamville, Scotland. Mariam Amid, chief executive officer Amina, the Muslim Women's Resource Centre. Trish Nassing, OBE, director of Sikh Sanjong. Gioi Lewis, chief executive officer, AI employability, Sarah Mendel Jimenez, member of NASUWT equality advisory group. I refer our members to papers 1 and 2. As we have a number of witnesses today, can I please ask members to indicate which witness they are initially directing your question to, and then open the floor to other witnesses for comments? I am keen for this session to be as free-flowing as possible in this virtual format, so if other witnesses wish to respond to a question or to follow up on a point made by another witness, please can I ask them to indicate that by typing R in the chat function on blue jeans, and I'll bring you in if time permits. If you're merely agreeing with what other members are saying, there's no need to intervene to say so. Members can also use the chat function on blue jeans if they wish to intervene. At the end of the session, if any of the witnesses feel that there are outstanding points they wish to address, please follow us up in writing and the committee will take that evidence into account too. I now invite each of our witnesses to make a short opening statement starting with Farah Farzana, please. Good morning, and thank you very much for this opportunity to provide evidence on women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. I'm here on behalf of Sembo Scotland, which is a national intermediary organisation and also a strategic partner of the Scottish Government equality unit. The aim of Sembo Scotland is to build the capacity of ethnic minority voluntary sector and its communities. We have a network of over 600 ethnic minority organisations throughout Scotland to which we deliver a wide range of capacity-building support programmes. Our current programmes include providing social enterprise development support to ethnic minority groups and social entrepreneurs, providing race equality and human rights mainstreaming support to public, statutory and third sector organisations, increasing ethnic minority representation on public boards, developing and supporting a Scottish national ethnic minority women's network for peer support and influencing social policy, developing and supporting an ethnic minority environmental network to engage in climate change policy, providing employability support to ethnic minority young people and building organisational capacity to ethnic minority groups in and around Glasgow region. Through all of our areas of work, this gives us an ample opportunity to continuously engage extensively with the ethnic minority sector and gather information on the needs and concerns affecting ethnic minority communities. This, in turn, helps to inform our response to the development of national and local policies and to public consultations, such as my presence here today. I am also a member of an organisational charity, which I co-founded with my sister back in 2014, called Almasar, where we started because of a need of support to ethnic minority families within the Forth Valley area. Over the period of lockdown—this was prior to me beginning with the symbol—I was heavily involved with supporting ethnic minority families, particularly mothers, during various responsibilities that they had to undertake, including emotional support, physical support and, obviously, peer-to-peer, making sure that they felt that they were comfortable and safe, especially with declining mental health. I am the chief executive of AMNA, which is a Muslim and BME women's rights organisation. We are leading grassroots organisations, and our special services aim to fill a gap in Scotland so that women can participate fully in society without fear of discrimination. We offer a range of services from our national helpline for women in crisis, our befriending service, employability guidance, financial inclusion, violence against women campaigning, creative arts, as well as financial inclusion casework and women's rights casework. With that being said, BME women still remain the most vulnerable in our society, experiencing multiple levels of discrimination. What we find is racial inequality, intersex with gender inequality, BME women are still facing additional barriers to support of services and accessing economic resources. Being in this committee, the work that women have been doing still remains to be undervalued. A lot of BME women found that we were supporting. We are already doing what we would call the lion's share of domestic chores, looking after the children, being unpaid carers, but with the pandemic, with the restrictions, we found that existing inequalities had deepened. There were certain factors towards women facing more poverty, financial hardship, leisure time, struggling to cope, not having Wi-Fi. There was a range of things that happened in Amna that we supported. I am looking forward to providing a bit more evidence on that in today's committee hearing. Thank you for inviting us to speak at this meeting. Seek and Jog has been running for 35 years, and we are the only seek family support charity in Scotland. Our focus has always been on linking women's seek and other ethnic minorities to all the social, educational and employment opportunities. We have been bridging that gap for 35 years, and we know from our experience that there are so many women from the seek community and from other communities who are still just sitting on the fringes waiting for them to be able to access mainstream support, whether that be in employment or looking at caring services. There are not many of them to access any of the carers support groups that are out there, so we find that we are bridging that gap and working with these women. Over the years, we have developed into an organisation that has been providing holistic and intersectional services, and we are that gap between mainstream services and even policy makers, but we know from a very young age that when we are speaking about the seek community, it is not visible in any of the larger research projects that have been done on consultations, and we have found that over the past 10 years or so, it has been the role of Seek and Jog to make sure that those voices are heard. We know that, from a many very young age, Seekman has added a completely different upbringing compared to their white Scottish peers. Women are left to juggle both the domestic life work and the commitments of looking after caring for people at home, whether it be children with disabilities or elderly family members. That is something that, although it is being raised now, we know that women have been living with those issues for well over 30 or 40 years. I am looking forward to answering any questions that come up. I am pleased to be able to give evidence on behalf of Adopt an Intern, now trading as AAI employability. We started 12 years ago promoting and facilitating paid internships. We now include a variety of inclusive recruitment services, and as a social enterprise, we attract a large following of women materners and diversity in all its forms. We also work with Government through grants to support minority ethnic women into work. Our access to employers is key to the success of our programmes as it ensures networking and the breaking down of perceived barriers on both sides. Since Covid, we have delivered three such programmes, adapting them for our changed world. It is known that unfair domestic and caring responsibilities are a result of societal norms, but a study by the Fawcett society confirmed that around three quarters of minority ethnic women reported doing the majority of the housework or childcare during lockdown. Our own minority ethnic audience tends to be highly qualified women who, through no fault of their own, feel undervalued and lack confidence. The pandemic hits and they find themselves in a new country with imperfect English, no support system, children to be homeschooled in a foreign language and going out shopping holds its own fears with minority ethnic people more susceptible to Covid. Issues with digital access and no records to public funds all added to the nightmare for these women. Community support was not ready and when the third sector did manage to reach out, there was no centralised channel, which was often the place of face, which was closed. We are not a research or umbrella organisation. The evidence that I present today is based on our experience of working closely with minority ethnic women on their employment journey. Right now, we are working with 60 on the latest women returners project funded by government and the majority have an honours or doctoral degree. Minority ethnic women in work were more likely to be followed and more likely to lose their jobs in white women. The loss of financial security and the feeling of being undervalued at both work and home was exacerbated by having nowhere to go for support and guidance. The extreme loss of confidence and self-delief that followed left them open to mental health issues. Downward spiral was created, which must now be reversed, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because, fundamentally, Scotland needs this incredible talent. Oh no, don't move. Hi there. Hi, good morning. Thank you for having me here. I am sorry, I am a teacher. You will probably hear my class leaving very quietly. So, yes, I am a member of the NSUT. You can leave very quietly class. Thank you. I am a member of the NSUT and also a black members committee and worker. Thank you class. Sorry, this is what women have to do. This is a perfect example of what women have to do. We have to juggle everything. Children, other people's children. Au revoir. Bye bye class. I will start as they leave. I do not want to make them late for their next class. That is okay. Just take some time. This is a good example, but props are always allowed. This is an excellent example. I think that if I look at my life in lockdown, this was also an excellent example. My husband and I, we had a young child during lockdown before lockdown actually started and my maternity leave that I had saved for so long to just have that time with my baby was totally scrapped by lockdown. Many of us teachers were forced to come back to work earlier than we wanted to. I have some statistics here from the big survey question. This is a survey that the NSWT does. Women were far more likely to be doing at least more on-site teaching during lockdowns, 60 per cent versus 50 per cent. Women are more likely to have received criticism from parents, 30 per cent versus their 26 counterparts. We are seen as a soft target sometimes. 20 per cent of women over 15 per cent of men receive verbal abuse from parents. Women were also more likely to say that their workload had increased 60 per cent over 51 per cent. I think that overall, as women, we are seen as beings that can just take it all. We can't because 88 per cent versus 76 per cent of female teachers felt that anxiety. 59 per cent said that flexible working hours were impossible. My employer today was very happy to give me time, but other female colleagues were ill with Covid. There was nowhere to put those children, unfortunately. Almost half, 49 per cent said that they were not aware of any policies of processes at their workplace that would help them to deal with the problem of increasing sexual harassment, both from staff and pupils. Through my work at the Scottish Trade Union Congress, the Black Members Committee, I have also become more aware of their intersectionality. It is just heartbreaking to see Muslim colleagues trying to climb the corporate ladder. They feel that the environment that we have is so male-dominated that they cannot go to the pub on a Friday afternoon and build those relationships. I, myself, with a small child and with zero interest in football, feel that I cannot have a conversation with senior management sometimes, because it is male-dominated again. There is just so much to do. I keep the faith that I really do, but sometimes when you look at the evidence, you just don't know where to start. That is all that I can say for now. Thank you very much, Hank. The boys club is something that we all need to be alert to just in daily life, because sometimes it is not a deliberate thing, but you make a good point there. I want to move on to questions from the committee members and a bit of a discussion. As I said earlier, the members will suggest who they think they want to hear from first, but if they want to respond to a particular question as well, they can put R in the chat. Good morning, everyone, and thank you to the panel members for being with us this morning. I appreciate the time that you have taken to give us evidence this morning. I have a couple of questions, if I may. We have heard that the media has reported, and many of you have mentioned this morning, the disproportionate impacts of Covid on women, particularly on BAME women. I am interested in trying to understand how BAME women experienced the disproportionate susceptibilities to Covid and the disproportionate financial burdens. Maryam talked about digital poverty and the lack of digital connectivity, therefore the knock-on consequences for that. If I can come to you, Maryam, first, could you say a little bit more about the personal experiences of some of the women that you support and that you have worked with? How did the lockdown, the restrictions placed on society as a whole, what were the women's experiences in terms of their ability to maintain any kind of work-life balance and, importantly, on their mental health? I will come to Maryam first. I think that if we can go pre-lockdown, before lockdown and everything started, we were already kind of on an unequal footing. I would say that BAME women would already say that we are already unequal within society. What does that look like once the pandemic had started? I would always say that BAME women and the women that we have supported have always done the lion's share of work when it comes to household chores. That has been a real, traditional gender role of what has been there, where, if the woman is going out to work, she is expected to come home and do all the housework, but she is adding on to homeschooling. However, a lot of women were almost like kids going to school with their trans to have a bit more leisure time or esaw classes or just trying to up-skill themselves. However, with homeschooling, how can you up-skill yourself and do homeschooling? I think that what has been really underestimated during the pandemic is a lot of women that we supported stayed within extended family households. Now what you have is your husbands working from home, your brother-in-law, your mother-in-law working from home, everyone is working from home, you are running the household, the cooking, the cleaning, the homeschooling. There is just no time for yourself. What we found was that women were really isolated. Having that kind of escapism or just up-skilling themselves, that kind of outlet was just not there. For women to say, okay, I'm going to go on to my class right now online. It wasn't there. Also what we found was that women were expected to work, but the digital inclusion part, I think, for me was really quite overwhelming. Overnight, everything was digital. We weren't allowed to come visit women or show them how to log on or even just apply for universal credit. So we were kind of having to do that or didn't have any wi-fi. Universal credit systems were saying, well, you can just apply online, it's quicker. They'd made it calling universal credit or just benefits helpline, just so inaccessible, that everything was online. If you didn't have wi-fi, that was an issue. It was great. We offered women 30 tablets and et cetera, but then there was nobody to actually show them how to set them up. We were always facing those challenges. We did find that a lot of women were experiencing a lot of financial difficulty. We had about 321 calls all during the pandemic up until December, just a woman experiencing financial difficulty. Also what we found was that women in crisis, although we're always dealing with women in crisis, a lot of the cases were a lot more complex than what they were before. So you had women staying with the perpetrator. If he was an abusive husband, extended family, but the kids are homeschooling, there was no out for women to actually phone Amina to come to classes, but to also figure out during lockdown how to escape an abusive relationship. There was a lot of that going on, but then you've still got the Department of Work and Pensions or universal credit saying you need to look for a job. The job that you're looking for is part-time. The poverty increases. We also supported a lot of women whose husbands were maybe undocumented and not declaring their work as proper. We're being unpaid or lower paid, but then their employers were not claiming furlough, so suddenly the women who had a bit of income coming in had stopped also. When they were going to universal credit or just to apply for universal credit, they just don't have those skills that are needed for jobs. Those are the issues that we came across. We did have a hardship fund as well. We set up a hardship fund during the pandemic. We paid out £20,000 over £20,000 of women in crisis and in poverty. That gives you a bit of a picture of what we were dealing with. Just severe poverty, access to wi-fi, digital, iPads, tablets—it was very difficult. It was challenging on services like ourselves. We ended up doing a lot of unpaid work, as well as our staff. We were doing things above and beyond, but it was things that we had to do in order to get women a bit of equal fitting. Thank you very much, Merym. That's really helpful and interesting. I'm especially struck by the point that was made around undocumented workers. Obviously, all the added complexities or the cracks that they fall through anyway, and then you have the pandemic on top of it, and it's magnified and exacerbated. Sarah, you talked about women as being seen as a soft touch, and I'm wondering how much of that was magnified during the pandemic. I know that I see in the chat that there are a couple of other people who want to come in. Sarah, do you want to say just a little bit more about part and answer to my original question as well, but also that soft touch element that you spoke about in your opening comments? Yes, I think that we're both seen as a soft touch and a soft target. I've noticed that, again, from anecdotal evidence from my colleagues and other teachers of colour, that often we are seen as the people who can take extra work. We call it the black tax, that some colleagues that are white may be expected to do less and do things that are more in line with our job descriptions. Teachers of colours are given extra work and women even more. That's one thing. The other thing is that there's this cultural imbalance, these power strokes between men and women, and men, especially men in a position of power, they still expect women to take on more. Women sometimes are actually the ones that perpetuate this myth of, like, I had it hard, but you think you have it hard. I've had it way harder. An example of this was in a boys' school that I used to work at. My colleagues have been there 20 years, and they were treated terribly by their male counterpart 30 years ago or whatever. They made a point of making your life hard to see if you were made of the right stuff. It's easier to tell a female teacher off than a male teacher, I think, because male teachers will just say, no, I disagree. Whereas a female teacher, I don't know if it's something the way we are, because we are genetically made to consider others, and we immediately take blame on ourselves, or maybe it's the way I'm doing things, and then you realise, no, this is not the way. As you get older, you become more confident. Going back to your initial question, I think a lot of it was space poverty. Especially if you were living in cities, there was no sofa, and my other half was working on the kitchen table because there were some was napping. Neither of us could work from the other room. Also, wi-fi difficulties, of course. Again, if you had a big family and suddenly you had to go from two devices to five, how on earth do you do that? Often, even at home, even though my other half is very happy to cook and clean and everything else, when it comes to devices, I have to share my device with my son. My other half is a bit too worried that something might happen to his device if my son plays with it. Little things like that, and of course bigger things like what the other ladies have said, the lion's share of course, cooking, cleaning, all of that predominantly falls on women's steel. I think that we are seen as a soft target, as an easy target, both for giving extra work for any kind of reprimand, and like I said, anecdotally, from other female teachers. They are just seen to be doing a lot more, taking more on. When we shouldn't, we are a unionized profession, and we should say that is not part of my job description. If you want me to do this as part of personal development, there should be a target, rather than just saying yes in the hope to climb the corporate ladder. That is me, but I know that Farah, Trisha and I enjoy wanting to come in. Okay, but if Farah comes in… Farah, do you want to say something about that? Yes, thank you very much. Falling on from what my colleagues have been saying about, this is a question that I have been nitpicking at, getting right to the root of understanding. We talk about gender roles with the ethnic minority families, and one thing was in preparation of coming to today's committee, one thing that I was asking colleagues and friends, etc., was when we were trying to explain what cultural barriers ethnic minority women face that are different from non-ethnic minority women, how would you describe that? That should be taken into consideration as where we are coming from. Why do minority women take on the lion's share of the work? It is pretty much the way that we have been brought up generationally as our culture. We are having grained within us the family hierarchy in that we are brought up to serve our elders to give respect, etiquette. As women, we have traditionally been trained to serve others and to do domestic work, and at any point, if we do not fulfil those expectations, there is an emotional backlash in the sense that you are being made to feel that you are not good enough, or perhaps you are ungrateful for things that you have been given. I know that that sounds horrible in a sense, but on the flipside of that is because we make that effort to have close family relations. It also means that we tend to be emotionally and physically reliant on each other, especially when we think about a parent and child relationship. That needs to depend on either grandparents or aunts and uncles to have that family support system. That is just in a typical traditional format. If you are coming into Scotland and you do not have that family support system, that impacts you in various ways. Obviously, that includes being an unpaid carer. The whole notion of being an unpaid carer is still quite new, and it is still something that seems very alien. We are told that taking care of our families and our children is an obligation, and it is not an option. That is something that we have to do, and we just have to get on with it. However, if we ever seek outside help, that is seen as a form of weakness. Those are the pressures that we talk about within a family structure and within a household structure. Imagine that, obviously, if you are a single parent, you still have all those expectations to be able to do absolutely everything, plus take on the role of a father or the other spouse. On top of maintaining the hierarchy. That is only family. I have not even touched the impact of community and society because of the unrealistic expectations that we have of perfection. Again, those are ingrained with any minority girls at such a young age, and that impact on self-confidence, on our mental health and on our ability to see ourselves. That is the very root and foundation of what the cultural barriers are that we are working so hard to overcome. The points that I am making are important to help to understand what the barriers are to put yourself in our shoes, to understand better. Obviously, as we are at the committee today, we are sitting here with policy makers. There is nothing about us without us. I want to take an opportunity and be grateful for being here and being able to provide that insight. Thanks very much for that, Farrah. Krishna, you wanted to come in on this. Yes, thank you. I am completely agree with what both speakers have already said, so I do not want to go over that. One of the main things for me is for people to understand that people like Farrah and Amina, we are also talking about women who are second, third, fourth, even fifth generation born and brought up in Scotland. They are still juggling, and women are mentally juggling two cultures. That has a huge impact on your mental health, especially when you know that you are part of the Scottish community. We are citizens of Scotland, and all those things are still going on underneath that layer. The main thing for me is that, in our organisation, normally, on a weekly basis, we would have had 25 to 30 women dropping in by, but once the pandemic hit, we were contacted by over 100 women every week for a whole range of issues that came out from having an autistic child at home, and before that child was able to go to some play group or whatever and that gave them a wee bit of space, but to be at home and not have any access to anybody and again, as Farrah just said before me, the fact of having everybody at home and some of those people were the perpetrators of domestic violence. If you are actually living where you have no space to go out and what the pandemic has done is actually brought everything out into the open. A lot of those things weren't happening and people were seeing them and people were talking about them, but nothing was actually being done. For me, the most significant thing has been the fact that the mainstream services are there for people from the white Scottish community, and then you have a layer of the third sector services for the white Scottish community. However, if you look at the ethnic communities, every service that is there to bridge that gap is voluntary sector, is third sector. That needs to be addressed because, when it comes to employment and mental health issues, and somebody said earlier about helping people to fill in forms for the universal credit, a lot of those women, even though English is their first language, have never been online, so they could not. We had our outreach staff on the phone for three hours at a time helping somebody to fill in a universal credit form. Covid has also raised many issues for education at school for children at home. Everybody was doing homeschooling, but for a lot of the women from our communities who had left school when they were really young, homework was a completely different level. In some ways, Joy highlighted the other side of the scale of women who are highly educated and are struggling for work. We have worked with a whole mix of women, and we are at the other end where women had just started getting their freedoms, started getting money in that was theirs that they could spend when they wanted. All of that has gone because a lot of them worked in the low-paid sector, which was home care, working in shops with zero contract hours. You can imagine that that little bit of freedom that they had was completely taken away by Covid. We do not know how that is going to look now. We have just produced the very first ever research for Sikh women in Scotland. We launched it in December at the Parliament. I will put it in the chat and you will see what you need to get on our website. There are many issues that are cut across all the AMU communities, but there are some areas where people are just not visible. I know that one of my colleagues will probably want to come in on that later. Thank you. I look forward to talking about the employment aspects of this later, but I was wonderful to hear so many personal stories and first-hand knowledge. We saw that during a project that we created from the Government's wellbeing fund. We found that cultural integration was nigh on impossible for those who were obviously new to the country. Our most well-received advice for parents is literally how they could maintain discipline of their child, play with them as well as teach them without outside influence of any kind. The programme that we developed focused on resilience and mindset. We really couldn't talk about much else. We did go on to do finances and employability, but first of all we needed to look at family life, on getting them stronger and putting back a bit of confidence before we could talk about employability before we go on to sort their finances out. That resilience piece with the coaches who are trained in that was absolutely key at this stage. Getting that resilience up enabled them to absorb further information. We also note that lack of confidence worsens when women can't meet others in their situation. Whether that was through lack of digital awareness or just not being able to go out and socialise, and we have Facebook groups for our cohorts of minority ethnic women. They cite discussions with women in the same boat as them as extraordinarily impactful and helpful. Trying to get them together was key for us so that they could hear they weren't the only ones in this unfortunate situation. What we are left with now is a lack of awareness of what the rules are going back after long lockdowns. Many minority ethnic women who are looking for work, which is commensurate to their skillset, now doubt whether they have the ability to get out there again. That is another mindset and confidence issue that needs to be addressed. I will hand back to you, Joe, and I will leave it there. As I said, I was hoping to come back in. Do not hesitate to try to make your point later if I do not have time to bring you back in just now, which I do not. I will now go to Pam Duncan-Glancy, please. Thank you, convener, and thank you very much to the panel this morning for your opening statements and also for the testimony that you have already given. I have been furiously trying to take notes as I have been listening. It has been really helpful. I also want to say thank you for everything that you have done during the past couple of years and beyond. It has been a significantly more difficult two years for the people that you represent than many of us in Scotland. I just want to say thank you for everything that you did for that. I have a couple of areas of questions. My first question is about the financial security of the women that you support. Of course, the risk that women's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work could get worse, and that was identified during the budget process. Perhaps Farah and possibly Joy and Miriam might want to answer. Has the ability to find paid work and income been seriously put at risk during the pandemic? You have already touched on some of that, but what is the current picture of the financial situation of the families that you represent? Thank you very much, Pam, for that. In terms of financial security, if we are talking about women who have children, for example, that has pretty much been zero to none because it has revolved around childcare. The role of women in their gender role has been the primary care take-out. If you are relying on extended family or friends to look after children or even after school care, because of lockdown, all that had been removed, there were restrictions going on, so it was really difficult for women to find paid work. One of the things that I have heard is that, especially if you think about families who have no recourse to public funds, they do not have the option of furlough. If you think about it as a woman who is at home with children, they do not have access to public funds, so universal credit is not an option. How are they going to provide support for their families? If the male is the breadwinner of the family and they are having to either stop working or reduce working and they do not have the option of furlough or, again, racial discrimination in the workplace causes people to leave their jobs or they get forced to leave. It has been very difficult in terms of that financial security. We know of certain cases where we are trying to help some women to fill out the Scottish welfare fund applications. If not being rallying around just within the community to be able to help and support, there were lots of funding. There was ample opportunity. I am saying this from the grassroots perspective, the work that I had done with our charity. We did get funding for helping women, but that is quite restrictive on what you can do. With that, for example, even something simple such as getting a gig card from ASDA, that is something that we had done in this last Omicron lockdown. That was very well received. In terms of the ability to find paid work that is flexible, not only do you have to juggle childcare but your own home life, language barriers and the knowledge as well as the accessibility of information. You are competing with the attention between children and other family members, as well as caring responsibilities of other family members, so whether parents are in love with you or children with additional support needs, it has been very hard to find paid work, especially if you are a woman and you are self-employed. For example, there were one of the first services to have been affected through lockdown because they had to cut down all their services. I am just wondering if any of the other colleagues would like to come in on that. The thing is that, as I said, everything that has already been said applies across the board to vast majority of ethnic minority women. We know from our own experience the biggest stigma that is still around, even though the pandemic is it. People are at the end of everything, at the end of their road mentally and physically, with trying to keep things going. That is the biggest thing that still stops women from coming forward. That is something that needs to be acknowledged and recognised. All of the evidence that we give might sound across as anecdotal, but somewhere along the line, the anecdotal thing needs to change. We need to have some kind of way of creating—our research that we did, the Seek Women's Feek Report, because there was nothing about Seek Women at all in any manner or form in Scotland. That is a first step, but for me, going forward, there needs to be more in-depth research on those areas. It should be across the board, because not one size fits all. Some of the work that people like Farrah have been doing through SEMFO, we might be doing that, but it will be in a different way, because the needs and the mental health of women from different communities are affected differently. Some women have been doing the same thing for so long, they have internalised it and they think that that is just normal. On the other hand, when you are trying to explain to them that that is not normal, you need to have a life, you need to acknowledge that you are a human being as well. It is very, very difficult, and it is really difficult to explain that. It is difficult to put it down on paper to make a report out of it, so that you say that the statistics are what is happening out there. We have women who are completely traumatised by the fact that the small job that they had can no longer access that. Like was said before, where the man is the main breadwinner and if he is unemployed at home, that is making it doubly worse for them. Even if they were able to go out and get a job, the stigma of the women working and the man not is still very, very rife in the communities. I am going to quote the foresets society again, but over fifth the BME women in a study they did, 21 per cent felt that they were unfairly selected for furlough because of their race sex age disability or health condition compared to just one per cent of white women. Money was often an issue when a minority ethnic woman was put on furlough clearly. Their contribution to the household became less important and her value came under scrutiny. There is definitely a gender imbalance in the perception of the value of work. Loss of employment opportunities led to the loss of financial security and an increase in low-value work. A zero-hour contract, for example, reinforced a decreased self-belief and confidence. We heard a lot. It is all I am worthy of, no one else wants me. That is horrible to hear. Lower value jobs lead to decreased confidence, and it is a downward spiral. Many of our cohort of women have taken low-skill jobs just to get some money in. We know that they could do more than that. The pandemic has affected their decision capabilities and it is not their confidence, as I keep saying, but fear of going for a job, concerned that it will affect much-needed benefits. There is also a fear of taking something else on and not being able to cope with it. I have some thoughts on that, but I will keep them for when we talk more about employment. I do not want to reiterate the points that are already being made. One thing that I would say is that no-recoach to public funds has been quite a big impact on women. My background is in violence against women, so that is the kind of specialism that I had. Even while I was the chief executive and I am still doing domestic abuse case work, one thing that I did find was that services improved for a lot of BME women with no-recoach to public funds in the sense that a lot of local authorities automatically gave women hotels to stay in rather than questioning and making them desaturate. However, what we did find was that women were just given those hotels in a basic food package. There was really nothing else with that, so that was quite difficult. When it comes to looking at employability and employability options, there are two groups of women. One group of women that are British born understand the system, and they know how to apply for jobs. However, there is a lot of racial inequality. You can feel like, am I getting passed up about these jobs because of my name or whatever? That systemic racism is always quite difficult to prove, but we have also got and supported a lot of women that were going for what we would call a lot of the low-paid jobs. However, digital inclusion was a big issue. Even for warehouse jobs, it was upload your CV online and send that to us and apply for the job online. Everything, including pay slips, were online. We had women that were managing to get a few of those low-paid employments, but they were finding them difficult to maintain. They did not know how to access their pay slips and how to access any of those systems. Again, there was really nobody with that isolation and the fact that they needed part-time work. Can I have universal credit putting that kind of pressure on you to say that, look, you need to get a job? You need to get one ASAP or else there might be sanctions, but at the same time when you are looking for employment, you are looking for part-time. I still think that the benefit system does not take into question that kind of pressure that women have for childcare. I wanted to add two things on employment, which has come across a lot. There was a historical closing. The gap is still not visible. It was talking about how, again, with the cultures that we come from, we put service and family above most things. Unfortunately, that does not work to our favour when we come to interviews. The star approach interviews that are customary in Scotland and the UK benefit those that have grown up here, those that went to nursery and started from a very young age to present and talk and boast about their achievements. We are not educated that way, and unfortunately that is why we miss out. In this study, it was really interesting to see that feedback. Whenever we get feedback, especially as women, we get told that we are not quite the right personality. Even though we might have the same skillset and a similar experience as a white counterpart, we do not seem to sell ourselves as much. Of course, it is a vicious circle. The longer you stay out of employment, the longer it is to get back. Another really important thing that seems to be coming across through stock and the Black Workers Committee is the quality act. In principle, most things, like colour-blindness, are all equal, but the problem is that it is going back to what everybody else has said. That does not take the nuances and does not treat everybody like they need to be treated. Another big thing about the protect characteristics is that, if you ever feel that you are the victim of injustice at work, if you do not have a union, it is really hard to navigate how on earth the first thing that you go to Google, it talks about an employment trip. How on earth do you do that without actually facing being fired and not having that income that you need? In addition to that, I think that this would be a great thing for—my knowledge of laws and Parliament is not good enough, unfortunately. At the moment, the burden of proof lays on the victim, so we all have to be the ones that, despite not having a job, despite not having the right conditions, despite having all these things to do at home, it still comes to us to actually fix the problem and provide evidence. A lot of it is verbal evidence. How do you prove that? How do we prove that somebody gave us some nasty comments or unfair comments in a feedback? How do we prove that we did not get the job because people think that we might have another kid very soon because we are in that age? I am likely to have another kid soon. Actually, no, we do not want to give Sarah that much responsibility because then we have to get a maternity leave cover. How do we prove these things? I think that the law needs to change. It needs to make it easier. Just how the law for rape is changing is just like that. It just needs to change. Another thing is that Police Scotland—part of my job at work with Police Scotland—talk about employment. For the very first time ever, 11 of its BME applicants officers passed the assessment centre and they passed it because Police Scotland said, we are doing it wrong, we need to do it right. Now what they do, they go rid of the colourblind list, they have a positive action team, they call any applicant from a BME or a protected characteristic and they call them and they ask them about their life, what are you doing, why are you applying. Sometimes they have to postpone applications, but for the first time 11 out of 11 have come through. I am hopeful that things can change. I love the fact that we are invited here to give testimony of what we have, but I do not have evidence, just like Trisha said, that we need to come into something solid. Thank you very much. I am not hearing Pam, so I am going to move on to Pam. Sorry, convener, would it be possible? Do I have time to ask another question, or do you want to come back to me, Ian? I will come back to you, but I will take it slightly longer. Pam Gossel Thank you, convener, and thank you to the panel for their opening statements and sharing their personal experience in the work that they have done. I would also personally, just like my colleague Pam said, like to thank all the work that you have done for the BAME community and women throughout the Covid and before that. My question is around the fact that we heard in our last calls of evidence and today we have heard that as well. The restrictions of the pandemic put many women in a vulnerable position in terms of relying on the partner's income and further interacting with support services that we have heard today. I seek women's aid report through attention to specific characteristics on domestic violence in the BAME community. The ethnic minority resilience network made recommendations that there should be investment in bespoke multilingual and multicultural mental health services, which we heard today from Trishna when she spoke about not one size fits all. Do you think that, in light of those findings, there should be more investment to provide bespoke services in the third sector organisations specific to capacity to reach out to BAME women, subject to domestic violence? My question goes out to first if Farah can come on and then if it is okay, Trishna, and if there is anybody else. Thank you. Thank you very much, Pam, for that question. My background is a little bit supporting women as well through lived experience, who have survived and have supported women of domestic violence as well during the pandemic. I believe—not me, sorry—that there is a general—I am trying to find the right way to articulate this. Money does not need to go into third sector organisations for bespoke services. Money needs to get put into the public services to be able to provide the basic human rights of any women going through domestic violence. Women that we have supported through domestic violence during lockdown, there needs to be more cultured awareness within front-link police officers, for example, because, at the end of the day, when we were in lockdown, Greece was the first point of contact in any of those kinds of situations. The fact that they are not aware of the cultural difficulties speaks volumes in itself. It is not just about third sector, it is about public services. When we talk about mental health, it has to come from public services. Why should it be down to voluntary and third sector organisations to fill the gaps? When the data and the evidence, when everything is there to say that this is a real problem, the fix is there. It is not going to be the perfect fix, but it is a beginning, and it should not be on the legs of myself, for example, who also suffers from mental health issues. To support other women who are going through the same issue, in short, not to third sector organisations solely, but public services desperately need that training. That is a lot of the work that we are doing through Simple Scotland from the Racial and Mainstreaming programme. It is to instill cultural awareness to those services from a leadership perspective. It comes back down to when we look at public sector leaders, what diversity do we see there? If we do not see that diversity, that empathy, that sympathy is not there. Therefore, equality, especially looking at women in domestic violence situations, is always going to be an arms-length issue. It is not going to be something that hits home. That would be my request to the committee today to certainly look at what and how effective is the implementation of race equality in front-line services, and how would that be measured? Thank you, Farrah. Again, whatever Farrah has raised, I do not want to repeat it, but I think that the issue of mainstreaming services being inclusive is a long, long journey that has been known for a very, very long time, hence the reason that our organisation and other organisations that work with the BME communities are still around, because we have been bridging that gap. About cultural awareness to staff of mental health services, we and others have been doing that for many, many years. However, the fact of the matter is that if it is not embedded in the culture of those organisations, it does not happen. It happens as a piece of work, and then it is moved on to the next piece of work. All the groundwork that has been done with one organisation or one service provider is never handed on. If those things had happened, and I do not want to go on into raising that there have been so many reports and consultations over the years, and some amazing pieces of work done over three-year periods to discuss the issues and ask what the barriers are and be given the recommendations, but nothing has changed. I think that that is what the pandemic has brought out, that disparity is still there and it continues to be there. It will not change until the internal structures change. There is a huge issue here that people need to acknowledge, and we need to move on, but it is about funding, because that is what it comes down to. If we are a small organisation and if we do not have funding to even bridge that gap or be able to provide the cultural awareness to the mainstream services, how is that going to happen? There needs to be a real acknowledgement of how a third sector BME organisations are funded and how they are able to help mainstream, because in my opinion, and this is from my personal point of view, I was born and brought up here. I am 68 years old, and we have been working for 35 years in the voluntary sector, and we are still, when we are spoken to, when we are invited somewhere, we are still the add-on. We are never part of the mainstream, and that is something that really needs to be raised at the highest level. The organisations continue to be funded by the third sector, and everybody is always scrambling and looking for the funding to continue their very vital services. There are so many different BME communities where the women have come with different issues. I am talking about the Sikh community and the Muslim community. There is a South Asian woman who has come from Vietnam and Thailand and places like that. Where do they go? I really think that there needs to be change at the highest levels. Just kind of falling on from what Trishna had said, funding is always a big issue. As BME organisations are kind of pitted against one another, and it really shouldn't be like that, but the one thing that I would say in really working in the violence against women sector for so long, there are a few issues within Scotland. First of all, we are not adopting the buy and form model when it comes to third sector organisations, which means that if we are supporting BME women, we should be an organisation by BME women. We have a lot of organisations that have like BME add-ons, however they do not have any BME women on their boards. They do not have any BME women in senior management. It is an absolute massive issue within Scotland if we are really looking at equalities. We have a lot of third sector front-line organisations providing services for BME women, but they really do not understand our experiences with intersectionality and all the issues that we face. It is kind of almost like a theoretical way of supporting us rather than an actual practical grassroots way. The other thing that I would say is that when it comes to violence against women, we are still really not there. We are so far behind when it comes to looking at England and Wales when it comes to supporting BME women experiencing violence against women. In Amna, I think that the amount of calls that we had, and when I had started, I had staff saying to me, were absolutely inundated with violence against women, domestic abuse, and that was my specialism. We had to get funding elsewhere to just get a women's rights case worker just to support women with domestic abuse issues, and that funding now comes to an end. One thing that I have always said is that when it comes to supporting women experiencing domestic abuse, especially no recourse to public funds, it requires a lot more time and resources. When you are looking at organisations such as Amna, Sex and Drug, all those organisations, we are doing the exact same amount of work as other organisations. However, I would argue that the work that we are doing takes twice as long to deliver. However, our targets are the same, and the funding that we get is the same. We need a lot more investment within organisations that are specialist services. Two women's rights organisations such as Amna and BME because the work that we do in Sex and Drug is similar but different, but the women that we support is a lot more time intensive. However, that does not seem to be accounted for anywhere, especially when it comes to funding. The Convener, thank you for that. If it is okay, it is just a quick follow-up, what my name has just said there. I think that it applies to all the organisations because you have done a lot of really good work. Do you think that being women is more comfortable coming to your organisations because you understand the kind of culture and the family structure around everything? I am not going to your usual—you have just said—many third sector organisations that provide help for domestic abuse and do mental health. Even direct domestic abuse, do you think that that is why they come along because they think that you feel that you understand it more? You mentioned, Miriam, that they do not see people like us—I am going to be honest, right—on those boards so that they cannot relate. I have done this all my life. I cannot see people like me even in politics, so I totally understand what you women are talking about today. Do you think that that is why they come to yourselves more? I think that it is the sense of that you do not need to explain it as much. If you are coming to a specialist service, you are not having to say something like you might have the evil eye, for example. I am sure that Pam, you would know that she has the evil eye. It is all those things that sound like you are a bit insane for saying those things, but those are genuine issues within our community. If you are looking at spiritual abuse or black magic, those are all kinds of things. If you were to explain that to an outwith organisation, they would probably think, what is this person on, but when you are coming to a specialist organisation, they just cannot get it. It is also about having that option there. Sometimes we put women towards specialist organisations because, again, we get it, we understand that there is not that need to explain and explain. I would say that other normal mainstream organisations do not have the understanding, but when they realise how time intensive it is, it is almost like we take it and we just know that this is what we need to do for no recourse to public funds or whatever. I would say that organisations like ourselves, we have always built that in, that we know that the work that we do is much harder. I would say that we definitely provide bespoke service, but so do all BME organisations. The biggest part for me, again, is the qualities. If you are providing a BME service, absolutely brilliant, but make sure that you have BME women either on your board or in senior management, because otherwise you are not truly providing that service to our community to offer us to actually have that equal footing. Thank you very much, Merym. Over to you, convener. I think that there are a few folk once again, but I think that Sarah has not contributed to this bit of the debate, so I am sorry to the other two who are keen to get back in again. There just is nothing but Sarah. Yes, thank you. I will be very quick. I totally agree with what Merym has said. My BME pupils always tell me exactly, as Merym said, that it is not that white people want to help us. It is not that white teachers want to understand what we are talking about. It is that it just takes them longer to get there. Yes, definitely. Sometimes it is a language barrier. We do not have to speak the same language. I find that, from looking at each other, knowing that we are people of colour, we know that we have experienced certain things. We understand what that stamp on our passports means when it says that there is no recourse to public funds. We not only understand what it feels like. Thank you to the panel. Your answers have just been overwhelmingly fully comprehensive, and I really have gained and expanded my education on this this morning. I really do thank you for that and for that opportunity for myself. Looking at the British Medical Journal study from September of last year on the lived experiences during the pandemic of minority ethnic women in terms of access and experiences of maternity care, it includes the experience of their physical and mental health and wellbeing. There are four emergent themes, including communication, interactions with healthcare professionals, racism and the effect of the pandemic, with further sub-teams identified. I want to hone down on the communication aspect of that. Communication or lack thereof played a major role in the participants' perceptions of whether they were receiving acceptable care. That consisted of routine or emergency interactions with midwives, obstetricians, general practitioners and health visitors. Despite the high standard of English spoken, most participants felt that language barriers were the most common cause of miscommunication between themselves and healthcare professionals. They can currently felt that they themselves were more likely to make inappropriate decisions regarding their healthcare as a result of misinterpretation. I would like to ask you, is this reflected across society not just in healthcare but in financial, social, education and more? How do you see progress being made in addressing this issue? Can I open it up to Maryam to start with, please? Thank you so much, Karen. When it comes to health and access to health, is it interesting that you said that communication has been an issue, even although the language barriers have maybe not been there? I would say that it may be because there has been communication on our part or already preconceived judgments on healthcare from healthcare professionals on BME women. Certainly, we have had a lot of BME women who have maybe gone through maternity care, etc., in the way that they have maybe been spoken to or treated, but when they started speaking, they were like, we are British born, we know what we are speaking about or whatever. A lot of BME women have experienced a lot of racism in the healthcare system, a lot of, well, is she exaggerating or she is not understanding, or just trying to get that service. There were a lot of triage calls, etc., so that was a big barrier for a lot of BME women because it was very much like, can you just tell me on the phone what is wrong with you? I think that that created a lot of barrier for BME women, but when it comes to communication, especially when it comes to health services, I think that from my experience of supporting so many BME women, a lot of them are not taken seriously. We have had to go to doctor surgeries and midwives and nurses appointments to explain certain things. I would say that there is a lot of discrimination in the healthcare system still with BME women. Thank you. I noticed that Krishna wants to come in here. Yes, thanks, Karen. I think that everything that has been said before is right, but I can give you a couple of examples that happened during the pandemic. From a personal point of view, somebody that was pregnant, taken into hospital, it was the lockdown, she was not allowed to have anyment because of her mental health. There was an explanation from the doctor to the symptoms to say that this person is coming in, but we are very mentally unstable just now because of her health and what she expects from the baby will be accompanied by her mother and husband. We went up and went inside. The reception was fine. The midwife came out and she stood in front of the person and the mother of the child in the wheel chair, the pregnant lady in the wheelchair, the husband sitting in the next chair and the mother's partner. The midwife looked at the girl in the wheelchair and said to her, does she know that she shouldn't be here? I was so shocked and so upset by the woman speaking like that. It was so personal, I am sharing it because I feel that people need to hear this. This was me with my daughter. The woman looked at me and said, she, and then I turned around and said to her, she knows exactly what she is talking about and she is here because the doctor advised her to come here. This was just right in the middle of the first lockdown. I was so shocked by all that I came out of. I was literally shaking and I stood outside in the thoughts of myself. If this is how I am being treated and I consider myself to be a narticulate herter who understands everything, I hate to think what is happening to somebody who would really come in here with a mother that might have difficulty with English. I find it really painful to admit that discrimination within the hospitals is just terrible. It is a shame that you do not want to tar everybody with the same brush and the NHS front-line staff have done amazing work, but those situations are still happening. When you are talking about the services, there is a perinatal team that is based in Livingston. We have never heard of it, but those support women who are pregnant and have had mental health problems or maybe have mental health illness that they are dealing with. That perinatal service has never worked with anybody from any ethnic community. There are things out there that people are not accessing because they do not know about them or they are not being accepted by the doctors. I am assuming that a perinatal team that, if you have a mental health nurse from a doctor's surgery, somebody should be able to refer people on to that. There are gaps where people are losing out on services because they do not know about them, and it is not all down to language barriers and everything. Like I said, a vast majority of the women that we deal with are all first, second, third, fourth, fifth generation women who are born and brought up here. Sadly, the colour of their skin matters. Do you walk in somewhere and some people just take one look at you and think, she cannot speak English? It is a sad state of affairs. Thank you, Trish. That was really heartfelt and enlightening, although it is sad to hear, but it expands on the question in regards to communication and not just open English. I do not think that anybody else has asked to come in there, convener. Okay, thanks. What would you know? They are just popping in the chat now. Sorry, I thought that you were telling us that there was a little time to come back, so I did not want to. I was just trying to keep time for, after each of the committee members have a question. I just wanted to come back to that question of language, because we have noticed that too. Also, as an AI, we know our limitations. I have a very diverse team, but if we have a domestic abuse problem, we transfer them, we all relate them, but we go to you, the local, the well-known, the young and the small organisations in the third sector. We have a list of you all, and we give those to the women, so we trust you, I have to say that. Language. The thing that we have noticed is that language of our minority ethnic women who are looking for work has deteriorated through Covid, and this is absolutely a key to their employment. Zoom is not helping. It has not met many people lately. It has been in isolation for all the reasons that we know about. Their mental health has deteriorated, and with that, it is their command of the English language. That just has to be taken into consideration. We have noticed that the portals on Zoom take about four weeks to actually work through that shyness to talk, and then they are there. That has to be factored into this. That is what I wanted to say. Thank you so much. I wanted to add another comment about healthcare and something on the back of what Trishna has said. To start with, I would like to say that, from the work that I have been doing in a course run by Education Scotland, building racial literacy and also the work with the stock, we know that different BME communities are affected differently. Of course, the more you defer from the Scottish white standard, the more of a target you become, I am sorry. I have had times where people speak to me loudly and slowly, just in case I do not understand what they say, but I wanted to say that there are communities that are affected much more than others. That means to be understood that people of colour will suffer different types of discriminations. Language, of course, is one of them. I wanted to share something when the midwife registered my child. She did not want to register as other. She wanted to register him as white. I am not white, and my partner is not white. He certainly does not look white. I do not know. It felt almost like, okay, so you guys, you are the half of the peer students, you are a teacher, you are somehow not quite BME because it felt wrong. That is what I can say. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Alexander Stewart, please. Thank you, convener, and I commend the outstanding contributions that we have heard this morning during this evidence session. It has really been quite enlightening. I want to once again go back and look at the education, training and employment. You made it quite clear today that there is definitely a need to try and support women from ethnic minorities to ensure that they build back their confidence after the pandemic. In the short and medium term, what do you think we need to do to ensure that that becomes a reality? It is quite obvious from what I am hearing today that we are certainly failing women from that section of society. There are many obstacles and barriers. You have talked about them already, and we are aware of that from evidence that you have taken previously. However, that has to be a way back for all communities. However, for your community, the BEM community and the ethnic minority community, who are disadvantaged and who are not progressing to what is required, what lessons can be learned so that we can go forward and not go back? What I am hearing today in this evidence session looks like we are having a backward step that the confidence is lost and the individuals themselves do not feel worthy. They are not able to progress into the management roles, and they are not able to get the opportunities. We need to have a sea change of attempt to try and make that happen. It would be good to hear from Joy, because you have vast experience in that sector, and there will be many of them, and if others want to come in, they will be happy to take that. Thank you, Alexander. Some of the funding from the Government around employability was and remains superscriptive for the reality of these women's situations. We had PhD graduates during low-paid cleaning or catering services from home, for example, which is amazing, just great initiative. Then taking that initiative during difficult times meant that they were not eligible to join an employment programme aimed at getting women exactly like them back into work, because they were deemed in employment. Even if they were working two hours a week, they were not allowed to join the programme, which suited exactly what they needed. That confused women who felt let down by us and by Government. What we saw was motivated, qualified women who had been passed over before, now ineligible for Government support programmes because they had done what they needed to do to survive. Government confirms that there are other initiatives that they could benefit from, but we hear from the women that those initiatives do not help them to get a job that is meant to their skills level, which is what they want. We would like, under employment, to be taken seriously and treated in a similar way to unemployment. I can go on. I have a couple of other points. Minority women have qualifications, and in particular those who are returning to work should not be forgotten in this journey. They can be very quickly and affordably helped into work, reducing Government statistics. They have skills, and they just need to know how to present them with confidence. The focus should be less on their training. At the moment, we are being told to concentrate on upskilling and training. For us, the main thing is language training, where it is needed. However, we want more on breaking down the barriers that employers, in particular, are putting up that prevent these women entering the workforce. We are putting too much focus on the issues with the women. Most of it is with the employer and the barriers. When we do a programme, whether it is for women or for employers, we always include both so that they can hear from each other and learn from each other. It has to be organic between them. We know that from the experience of mixing the two parties together frequently over the years. It is a match made in heaven when they teach each other. Jobs commensurate to their skills level are key here. With our personal intervention introductions, we are also able to place those furthest from the market due to language difficulties by highlighting to employers that those women have the skills. Just look at their skills. That is all that matters. Do not look at where they got their degree from. Do not look at their name. Just look at the skills, because we know that you need those skills. The more employers we talk to, the more women we are getting into work. Another point is that women from non-Commeworld countries who have gained a STEM or an allied health professional degree, medical, dental or engineering, might not be familiar with the professional registration standards in the UK. They are not aware that they can contact the relevant professional membership body or the organisation to get guidance on how to practice their profession successfully in the UK. They might also be confused about the difference between a trade union and professional standards organisations. Due to the shortage of certain skills in the UK, Government really needs to work with professional membership bodies on establishing a clear pathway on how to assist professional ME women trained overseas to practice their profession legally in the UK. The cost of taking exams to practice certain professions is also quite high, which can be a deterrent, but such highly trained women would also benefit from funding and mentoring from prospective professional bodies. We have dentists in our present programme, we have teachers, we have doctors and we are struggling to help them to be qualified. One of my team took the initiative to talk to a senior Indian female dentist in her practice in Scotland about the two dentists on the programme. The Indian female dentist said that they are crying out for dentists and she was aware that the Government site, the website, was difficult to navigate. The dentist said that what we, AAI, was doing was a great initiative and she was insistent that the dentist's profession needed these women to help them to get through this complicated process of re-quatifying or the women needed them, though they needed to meet these women in order to help them to get through this process. She offered to go straight to the general dentist council and get it sorted and speak to our cohort personally so that they get the best access to information and mentorship. She felt that it was the best way to get them into meaningful employment that equals their qualifications and skillset. Clear access to support for these professions will ensure that highly qualified talent does not resort to be carried as work to bring in money for the family. Thank you very much and enjoy that. That was a very good answer and in depth. If I may, I go to Miriam for her response to it as well. Just to answer your question, what we need to do is invest in more employability programmes. I would say that we have an employability programme and it looks at helping women to do CVs and esol classes, employability skills, what is needed and volunteering opportunities. We are always struggling when it comes to funding and with the demand that comes in. With that targeted recruitment for employers, I would welcome that. Just like Police Scotland has done, there was also targeted recruitment for teacher assistants who looked at BME communities. Religious communities went to them and said that they were looking for more BME women to become teachers assistants. That targeted recruitment has really helped last year in getting more BME women to maybe apply and consider that as a profession. There needs to be accountability when it comes to highly qualified and highly skilled jobs. Organisations need accountability about do you have any senior management that are BME, do you have any senior management that are on boards? Again, if we were to do that analysis of Scotland, the amount of BME women's rights organisations that do not have any brown or black women on boards or within their senior management team is an absolute issue, especially when they are running BME-specific projects. I think that there needs to be accountability with organisations but also targeted recruitment and more investment in specialist BME organisations to deliver employability programmes. Just to add to what everybody else is saying, we have been running employability programmes for more than 25 years. We have worked in partnership with the local job centres and we know that that one-to-one support that women need to help them to access fill-in forms, have the confidence to go for an interview are really important. Just to send them or refer them on to the job centres and say that you have to go in there, that just does not work. We have the evidence to prove all of that and we have had funding in the past to do that kind of work and bridge that gap between the job centres and the women and to be able to get them to that stage where they are able to apply for jobs. There needs to be more funding to put into those things and again it is the same as before until that gap is closed by mainstream, which does not look like it is going to happen in the near future. People need to start acknowledging that the services that we are providing on the ground for women from the BME communities are vital and without them you will never have a diverse workforce. You can look at both scales of it, you can look at it from Joi's end and then you can look at it from our end. There is a huge gap there. Somewhere along the line, that needs to be acknowledged taken on board by the powers that we have. I think that Farrow wants to come in as well and that will be the end for me. Thank you very much. I have been taking notes so I am not going to reiterate what my colleagues have been saying about training women in employment. Through the work that we do through the race for human rights programme at Sembo Scotland, this is exactly what it is that we work with clients. It is about looking at how we are going to get more ethnic minorities into employment and obviously the specific scope in here is about getting ethnic minority women into employment. As well as taking cost of action measures and employability programmes, I think that what we can take forward from the pandemic is the number of transferable skills that minority women have gained, for example, becoming negotiators, even if it is about managing between family members or children fighting at home or becoming home educators. The amount of skills that we have had to learn at home should really seem to be encouraged as transferable skills. I will make this quick. Any client that we support, the first thing is that we ask what does your data look like? That is an issue that we still have inadequate measures of collecting data on ethnic minority women in Scotland. That is something that needs to be looked at when we look at deep dive sessions, for example. What are the actual barriers that are preventing minority women from applying for certain jobs? Is it because of a certain skillset? Is it because of racial discrimination? Most likely it is, because of racial discrimination, and those are things that we do work on. On the back of that committee, we are sitting with MSPs. Following public services and public leaders to account and follow-through in the public sector equality duty is just as important. I look to policy makers and ensure that when it comes to collecting data and fulfilling public sector equality duties, that it is on the front line. Without the data and evidence, it is really hard to advocate that what is needed. We know what is needed because we have lived it, but when we are translating it into policy and positive action measures, that evidence is required. The fact that there is still that disparity of trust between leadership and front line and such things as disclosure rates is really hard to find out exactly what are the gaps that need to be filled. That is something that I hope that the committee will take back in terms of looking into as well. Obviously, Assembly Scotland supports ethnic minority women and men as well into employment throughout our different programmes and projects. Thank you very much, convener. I think that that covers the question. I'm fine now, convener. I asked the question. It was basically a mix that my question into both one question in relation to one side, spitting all. Pam Duncan-Glancy, do you want to come in now? Please, that would be helpful. Thank you for that. I know earlier on that there was a comment made about the unpaid work of people and that particularly struck me, because I can see how you will have had to put in considerably more hours of support. I wonder if you could tell us what part of the solution to that is and if you think that the organisations and people that you are working with are getting enough support financially to recruit the number of staff that you need to address some of the problems that you've raised today. Do you want to direct that to somebody? I didn't write down the name of the person who made the comment. It was really early on, but if the person who said that could remember that they'd said it, maybe they could come back. Otherwise, I guess maybe Mariam or Farrakhan. Mariam is nodding, so. When it comes to staff, I think that this is probably all third sector organisations. Do we ever feel like we've ever got enough funding? We're always fighting for funding. We've got a cocktail of funding, which is always a dangerous situation to be in, but it needs to be done. What I would say is that, in my time in Aminah, what I have tried to do is be more realistic with our targets and really go back to funders and say, we know that you're wanting us to support, for example, 12 women. That might not look like a lot, but look at the amount of time and resources that that is going to take. There has definitely also been a burnout of staff. I think that this has been all organisations that have said that, but it's been about, for me, speaking to my staff and supporting them through this, whether it's been through external counselling, extra team meetings. I would say that my background has always been in advocacy, so it's always been in women's rights. I cannot get it, so I think that it's been that listening there for your own staff, but also understanding how difficult it is. To summarise funding, I keep going back to this. BME organisations and, especially when we're looking at inequalities, we need that extra investment, but when we're applying for violence against women funds or equality in human rights funds, we're putting for the exact same money. That intersectionality is not taken into account that maybe we need the same amount of work that we're going to deliver, but rather than having one worker, we need two workers. Unfortunately, I would say that it's still not built into our funding streams to reflect that, but I'm sure that that would be the same with all the colleagues on this call. I think that Tristan was wanting to come in on that. To add to that, the thing is that all of that about round funding is so vital for our organisations that we had applied for the equality in human rights fund and we didn't get anything, and yet we were the only Sikh family support charity in the whole of Scotland supporting women from the Sikh community. Because of the loss of that funding, we lost our outreach worker who was reaching out to more than 100 people a week. We're now having to wait until the next round of funding before we can employ somebody. That doesn't mean to say that the referrals have stopped, the referrals are still coming in and I'm having to pick them up. So there's a real misunderstanding, mismatch somewhere when we apply for funding for a real fundamental aspect of the work that we're doing and we don't get anything and then we're having to look elsewhere for that funding. It just defies the imagination because you think, then why are we always having to fight for funding? Does nobody appreciate the work that we do? Is it not acknowledged at some level? Is it really just that add-on that they're there, they'll do it? Other mainstream organisations are funded by statutory services. Why is there no single BME organisation that is under the statutory umbrella, whether it be social work, health and social care or anything like that, whether it's children's services? It's a question rather than, I know that we're looking for solutions, but the solutions are there. We're delivering the solutions, but they're not being acknowledged in the right way because, if they were, we wouldn't be looking for funding to keep us going. We have the solutions, we're delivering them. All of the organisations are doing that. I think that Farah would like to come in. Thank you very much. In terms of the solutions to supporting the recovery and looking forward, if only money was the solution to all of our problems, that would be an easy fix, wouldn't it? The circumstances that we're in, with finances, with the budget, with the economy, as well. What Covid and lockdown has definitely taught us is that it's time to work smarter, not harder. When the Scottish Government has acknowledged the fact that there is institutionalised racism within Scotland, I think that if you were to bring in people with those lived experiences, including the professional experience, into those more leadership positions, and have that diversity within that workforce, that trickles down. We know that, in the minorities, when it comes to the employment market, there is a higher gap between white and non-white applicants. There is a lot of groundwork that needs to be done in supporting that recovery. Even when it comes to training and upskilling, it is needed to be flexible. The best thing that we learned out of the positives to take away from being in lockdown was the flexibility of working from home, because that meant that, with childcare, you could work from home and not have to worry as much about who is going to look after his children. That was a less of a financial responsibility, although it does take its emotional toll. The number of times that I have felt like banging my head off the wall when I have my children in the background, and they come into a meeting that I am in. However, if it wasn't for the flexibility of being able to work in my role, I probably would not be in employment at the moment. Prior to me working with Central Scotland, I worked part-time, and it was just an as-and-when. I think that that is something to take positivity, and we need to go forward in allowing—not allowing, sorry, but promoting that hybrid working and the options and possibilities that are there now that we see through a digital-connected economy. Another positive from being in lockdown is the awareness of mental health. Prior to lockdown, it was so hard to explain why I had to leave my job because of mental health issues, because I suffered extreme paranoia and anxiety. I could not leave the house, for example. Coming into lockdown was a blessing in disguise, because that pressure was no longer there to leave the home. However, it meant that other people were more willing to understand what I was going through and therefore were able to accommodate and make those and be able to facilitate that. I think that going forward, those things need to remain as it is and being able to remember that mental health comes first. Humanisation of people, and I think that in the chat bar as well, I have seen the racial discrimination of ethnic minorities not just in the workplace but within society is something that is within the vima of everyone here to act upon. Right, thanks Farrah. I see that Joy is wanting to respond as well. Thank you. No quick fixes here, but certainly some easy solutions. I would love to see a workplace that is accepting if not embracing of diversity. Those are long-term goals that need to be striven for. Child care, we have not been mentioned much today, but women are wanting to work, they are going to need that. A more holistic approach to training and employment guidance, definitely taking into consideration the importance of this need for improved resilience. Finally, flexibility, we have touched on it before, but it is misunderstood by employers and without them understanding what it means for minority ethnic women and how important it is to fit around their culture, their needs, more education from employers to ensure where possible they offer hybrid or remote working, which is much more accessible for everyone. One good thing that has come out of the pandemic in my opinion is that remote working is now going to be able to give more access to jobs for minority ethnic women wanting to work, because they can work from home with children on their laps, and they will do that. We have one person who works full-time, she has two children, she just manages around their needs. Finally, we know gender is an issue, we know race is an issue. We know that this has been compounded by the pandemic for minority ethnic women, but whatever is done now going forward, we must be careful that support and resources go to the most affected. I see that Sarah MacDonald would like to come in. Hi, I couldn't agree any more with everything that has been said. Thank you so much for all the iterating. With regard to employment, I just wanted to add something about the teacher profession and GTCS standards. There are a lot of qualified teachers in other countries who are just trying to exceedingly hard to qualify here in the UK. Scotland has a target to meet by 2030, and to ensure that that happens, we need to accept teachers of a diverse background into teacher education programmes 300 every year. They are not sticking in the profession, they are not saying a lot of it is because of hostile environments. If there is an easier way to ensure that BME workers in Scotland know their rights and if we can shift that burden of proof a little bit, then employers will have to be more aware of what is right and wrong. Yes, racism is institutionalised, but it is man-made. It is something that can be reversed with a lot of work, and I am hopeful and faithful that it will happen, perhaps not for my generations but for generations that follow us. Thank you again for having us here. I am just going to go to Pam Gossel for a last quick question. The question was about—Dara, you talked about working harder than your colleagues—white females, white males. I just wanted to ask a question about that. Did you work harder? I mean, I have been talking to a lot of BME women as well and reading a lot of the books and stuff, that sometimes we feel that we need to work harder to put our position in society and make the guilt that we just need to work for to be noticed. Do you think that it is that or that it is more the employer that is pushing you to work differently from other colleagues? I think that I have put it kind of right. I think that it is both. I think that it is the pressure that you have of—I have had a baby, but it does not matter. I will still do this, I will still do that. I will go over and beyond to prove that my male counterparts are not getting some sort of advantage over me when it comes to a promoted post. I think that a lot of that is self-imposed pressure, a bit like when it comes from the culture. However, I do think that there are times when you are giving extra work and you think, why am I giving extra work? I remember coming back from how we came when I was ill and there was an email sent to all my departments and they asked them who can supervise these mini-disturcations that people have to do. Nobody answered. When I came back, I opened my email and it landed on my desk and I was like, there are 12 people here. I fought it and I did not have to do it in the end. It does seem to be a little—when staff needs to be disciplined, I think that women often get those emails or those little comments like, oh, you did not do quite right. I do think that it is targeted. I am not saying that it is conscious, but it is there. Thank you, Sarah. Okay, thank you, Pam. Yes, that is me, thank you. Okay, thank you very much. I guess that last point was said is something that certainly the men in particular need to always be mindful of, because sometimes elimination is not conscious, but that does not make it okay, I am sure. So, thanks hugely to everyone for coming along today and giving us a little bit more of your time than you agreed to. It has been really, really helpful. Thank you all very much. We are now going to move into private session and we will start that private session in five minutes, if committee members. Time for a quick break.