Scottish Government employees granted maternity leave: FOI release

Information requested

1. In each year since 2019/20, how many Scottish Government employees have been granted maternity leave?

2. In relation to Q1, what was the recorded gender of each of these people: e.g. male, female, nonbinary etc?

Response

1. The information you have requested is provided in the below table. As maternity leave is a statutory entitlement, it is not ‘granted’ by the Scottish Government as such. However, we have interpreted your question to mean the number of Scottish Government employees who have had a period of maternity leave in each of the years requested. Therefore, a single continuous period of maternity leave will appear in more than one year where it has spanned two different calendar years.

Year	Number of Employees
2019-20	166
2020-21	187
2021-22	216
2022-23	287
2023-24	326
2024-25	223

2. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested. This is because our HR system holds information on legal sex and not gender in relation to pay and benefits.  This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.​​​​​​​

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The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.