We have a piece in today's Scottish Legal News about the way in which 'woman' was defined in the Gender Representation on Public Boards Act 2018 and how this relates to the debate about reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 scottishlegal.com/article/blog-s…
A slightly longer version of this piece is available on our website: murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2020/04/21/shi…
A reminder of the Scottish Government's draft guidance on the definition of 'woman' for the purposes of the Gender Representation on Public Boards Act 2018: 
The Scottish Government has now published its Statutory Guidance to the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018, which defines a 'woman' in the terms below:
gov.scot/publications/g…
gov.scot/publications/g…
The Scottish Government consulted on the proposed guidance in 2019, and published its analysis of the responses in April 2020: gov.scot/publications/a…
As reported in @TheScotsman, many respondents expressed concern that the definition of a ‘woman’ in the Act departs from the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010 (i.e. ‘a female of any age’). scotsman.com/news/politics/…
SG stated “We are carefully considering the responses to the consultation.. & will update respondents & those bodies directly affected.. The amendment defining the meaning of women in the Bill was voted for unanimously by the Parliamentary Committee scrutinising the legislation."
As the guidance has now issued with no material change and without a separate SG response to the consultation report, as is often done, there is nothing on the public record explaining why the government has chosen to proceed as it has. We have therefore submitted this FoI.
We would also like to understand better the long interval between the date on which the consultants producing the consultation analysis were contracted to submit their work (in October) and its final publication (on 3 April), and so have put in this FoI.
And given the delay between the original deadline for submission of the work and its publication, in the absence of a government response, we think it would be helpful to know more about what sort of discussion was going on within government about the handling of the report.
Some have asked what this means for the Equality Act. The definition here is just for the GRPB Act & only affects who counts as a woman in the context of board membership. It has however already been cited (in census debates) as a reason to use self-declaration in other contexts.
It's been pointed out to us that this definition is also cited in explanatory notes in Scottish National Investment Bank Bill beta.parliament.scot/-/media/files/… (See page 8.)
