Equality evidence strategy 2023-2025: interim review

2. The Principles

The three principles feed into the Equality Evidence Strategy’s vision statement of ensuring Scotland's equality evidence base becomes more accessible, wide-ranging and robust and enable[s] the measurement of improvements. The following provides an update on the principles’ progress, including an update on how the principles have been applied across Scottish Government, followed by specific examples of how they have been addressed through the Strategy’s actions.

Principle 1: More robust and comprehensive data and evidence will be gathered on the intersecting characteristics of people in Scotland across a range of outcomes.

• The importance of intersectional evidence and analysis is increasingly being promoted across Scottish Government and advocated for by external stakeholders. Many policy areas are now building this into their strategies and action plans (see Other Equality Data Improvement Work chapter).
• A number of the Strategy actions are considering intersectional analysis as part of their statistical reporting, where sample sizes and resources allow. For example, the Equality Analysis Team is currently finalising a review of intersectional evidence relating to the experiences of minority ethnic women, which will be published in Winter 2024^[1]. This explores how existing intersectional qualitative and quantitative evidence can be utilised, the importance of identifying and addressing key evidence gaps, and how intersectional approaches to policymaking could work in practice.

Principle 2: Equality evidence will be made more easily accessible so users will be able to access what they need, when they need it.

• Much of the additional equality evidence being collected will be published in regular government reports (e.g. in annual policy monitoring updates or analytical reports).
• The Equality Evidence Finder is a key tool to make equality data easily accessible to analysts, policymakers and the general public^[2]. A project plan has now been set out to ensure regular maintenance of the current tool, in parallel to user research and development of a refined version which will advance accessibility, useability, inclusion of intersectional evidence, and automated data updating.

Principle 3: Good practice will be shared and promoted to support increased confidence and competence in the production and use of robust equality evidence.

• Published guidance regarding collecting and publishing equality data is regularly updated and promoted to assist in data collection of this type.
• Sharing of good practice and work carried out to increase the production and robustness of the Strategy’s actions are delivered regularly to the EDIP board meetings at quarterly meetings. The EDIP Project Board members have the opportunity to comment on the actions’ progress and work to date, as well as provide an update on their own work for others to learn from and share good practice more widely. Updates on work undertaken by action leads and EDIP board members can be found at: Equality Data Improvement Programme (EDIP) project board - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).