Talking-up Scotland

Published nearly two months ago by the YCWA, I missed Status of Young Women in Scotland 2015 first time around. Was it covered in the MSM? The section on the part played by the Independence Referendum in engaging and in including young women makes interesting reading:

The young women we spoke to were overwhelmingly positive about the Scottish Independence Referendum process; both in terms of political experience and due to their excitement at being the first generation able to vote at the age of 16 and 17. Across the interviews there was a commonly-held view that, from a gender equality perspective, the referendum experience was “different” and “better” than the 2015 General Election. Young women offered different explanations for this. Some focused on the nature of the political discourse, noting that women were considered a key voting group and thus campaigners did their utmost to engage and appeal to women voters. Others suggested that – unlike typical general election campaigns in which people are often quiet about their voting intentions – the referendum sparked great public and private debate, with extensive conversations among friends, within households and across communities. They felt that this grassroots approach was more inclusive than typical political campaigns, which often focus on party leaders, manifestos or the views of particular newspapers. Some suggested that the referendum had a better gender balance simply because more of the senior political figureheads in Scotland are women, compared to the male-dominated parties at Westminster

http://www.ywcascotland.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Status-of-Young-Women-In-Scotland.pdf