Minority ethnic women's experiences in Scotland 2024: intersectional evidence review

3. Methodology

The first stage of this Evidence Review was to review the NACWG Race Equality report on minority ethnic women’s experiences, published in 2020. This report was reviewed to understand key themes and topics of interest, data available at the time the report was written, and gaps previously identified. A scoping exercise was then conducted to understand what quantitative and qualitative evidence was currently available. Through this scoping, the team reviewed the availability of intersectional sex and ethnicity evidence across a range of sources.

The inclusion criteria for eligible qualitative and quantitative data were:

• Scottish Government statistics that have data broken down by sex and ethnicity (either separate or intersectional).
• Studies that focused on the experiences of minority ethnic women in Scotland and evidence based in the UK generally or other devolved nations to expand understanding of key issues beyond limitations of Scottish evidence.
• Studies published in the last five years, with consideration for earlier studies when more recent evidence was not available. This captured any published evidence prior to the 2020 NACWG Race Equality report to ensure that any missed sources were considered.
• Studies that provided an update to information included in the previous NACWG Race Equality report in 2020.

The statistical sources reviewed were based on indicators or domains used by the National Performance Framework (NPF) and Gender Equality Index (GEI). The purpose of this was to link this report to wider equality outcome monitoring work happening across Scottish Government. The following datasets produced by the Scottish Government for NPF and GEI reporting, using internal data and data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), were reviewed:

• Scottish Labour Market Statistics which draw on surveys from the ONS
• Scottish Crime and Justice Survey (SCJS)
• Scottish Health Survey (SHeS)
• Scottish Household Survey (SHS)

Further information on data sources consulted can be found in Annex 2.

3.1. Considerations about the Evidence

There are some considerations regarding the limitations of evidence, which influence how this report has been compiled. This sub-chapter provides an overview of these considerations:

• This Evidence Review is not intended to be fully comprehensive. Within the time and resources available to the team, this report aims to focus on capturing a general overview of issues against the GEI domains and NPF outcomes to map existing and new intersectional equality evidence that is monitored by Scottish Government. This means conclusions drawn throughout this report are based on the evidence reviewed, rather than all evidence available on the topic area.
• We have highlighted instances where information or data may exist, but it was not possible to gather in time for the publication of this review. For example, Scotland’s Census 2022 data may have been useful in understanding the experiences of minority ethnic women, however at the time of this publication, the full dataset had not yet been published. In addition, we acknowledge that there are areas where we state that intersectional evidence is not available from certain datasets, which may be due to a number of reasons (such as small sample size), however often we do not know why and cannot make assumptions.
• This report is not intended to assess the availability of intersectional gender/sex and ethnicity breakdowns across all NPF indicators as some were not relevant for this publication.
• Where Scottish Government statistics have been included in this report, responses from minority ethnic respondents may have been aggregated to allow a large enough sample size to avoid the risk of identification of individuals as well as to achieve a higher degree of statistical reliability and suitable confidence intervals. While this allows data to be published, it unfortunately limits our understanding of the range and variety of experiences of women in disaggregated ethnic groups.
• Due to statistical survey collection methods and small sample sizes, there may be areas that show no significant difference for minority ethnic women compared to white women, minority ethnic men, and white men. However, this may be not reflective of reality and differences in experience and in these cases, we have looked to qualitative evidence to gain a deeper understanding of a particular topic area or issue.

The following section maps evidence and data on minority ethnic women in Scotland against indicators or domains relevant to the National Performance Framework (NPF) and Gender Equality Index (GEI).