Welcome to the 11th meeting of session 6 of the Qualities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. With no apologies today, we're joined by Fulton MacGregor virtually. The first item on the agenda is to agree whether to take item 3 in private, which is consideration of today's evidence. Are we all agreed? Okay, that is agreed. Thank you. Next item is to take evidence from our panel on Women's Unfair Responsibility for Unpaid Care and Domestic Work. I'm pleased to welcome Ruth Boyle, policy and parliamentary manager of Close the Gap, who is joining us remotely. Ailey Dixon, policy and parliamentary manager in gender, and Professor Norrin Arshad, chair in entrepreneurship and innovation at the School of Business at the University of Dundee. You're all very welcome. I'll now invite you all to make some short opening statements starting with Ailey Dixon, please. Thank you, convener. Thank you also to the committee for organising this session and for inviting me to be part of it. Looking back to early spring 2020, engender quickly realised and foresaw the impact that the pandemic was likely to have for women when we started looking at the research of the experience of the previous outbreaks of SARS, Zika and Ebola. We published our first briefing summarising the key issues that we could foresee happening in Scotland back in 26 March 2021, which included a lack of attention to gender mainstreaming, the exclusion of women from decision making, increased care and reproductive labour, increased violence against women and greater exposure to poverty and insecurity. Our concerns at that time have only proven to be right in the subsequent impacts of the pandemic. It's often said that the pandemic has exacerbated deeply rooted inequalities experienced by women, racialised communities, disabled people and other groups. I often cite UN Women's statistics, UN Women's Warning, that pandemic risks setting back global strides towards equality by 25 years. The lack of prioritisation of care in the response that the pandemic is itself gendered. The underlying assumption that was necessary for schools and other institutions to be closed was that the displaced childcare, homeschooling and care for older adults and disabled people would and could be picked up in the home. Women's access to paid work, leisure time and power remains heavily constrained by traditional social roles as carers and mothers, even as they've increasingly entered and remained in the labour market over the last few decades. On average, even before Covid, women in Scotland living in opposite sex-headed households did around 68% of the housework and 68% of the childcare. These patterns of the distribution have been stubbornly slow to disrupt and have only been cemented even further by the pandemic. And in June 2020, Engender published a short report on women and unpaid work, where we found that despite popular descriptions of a crashing productivity crisis in the real economy, women were in fact busier than they had ever been. These findings were then reinforced by data from a joint survey project looking at these impacts of Covid-19 that was developed by Engender closed the gap in other UK women's organisations and carried out between December 2020 and July 2021. We also saw that these themes were repeated in the many stories that were shared with Engender through our online platform Women Covid-Scot. One woman told us, "'My employer is offering flexibility, but there just aren't enough hours in the day for both me and my partner to do all of the work we have to do and make sure our wee people are taken care of. I'm worried about my mental health, but mostly about my children. My partner earns a lot more than me and I'm seriously considering resigning." We heard this over and over and over again, as I'm sure many of us in the room here today have done. And I'm therefore extremely pleased that the committee is today focusing on unpaid work delivered by women and the impacts of that now and in the longer term. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Professor Arshad. Thank you everyone for inviting me to this committee. Let me just give you a background on the impact of Covid on Scotland's women entrepreneurs. The aim of the report was to provide an in-depth understanding of the impact Covid-19 on women entrepreneurs in Scotland had and to explore the support that was available to them during and after the pandemic. The research for this project was undertaken between October 2020 and March 2021. This is a qualitative study that was based on 12 focus groups with women entrepreneurs, six with startups and six with growth businesses in six different regions in Scotland. There were 12 individual interviews carried out on a monthly basis for four months with 12 women entrepreneurs to build a better picture rather than a snapshot of time of what the challenges they were facing at that time. Also, I undertook 26 enterprise support organisation interviews and 11 of those enterprise support organisations were focused on women-only support. The findings of the report highlight the challenges women entrepreneurs faced were amplified during the pandemic. The main challenges focused around historically reported barriers for women entrepreneurs. These are, firstly, access to finance. Many sectors dominated by women were first to be hit, the hardest and the last to receive financial assistance. Networking where understanding how women entrepreneurs could ensure their businesses were promoted and lastly social and cultural barriers and challenges. This is where it included, for example, childcare, unpaid domestic work, working from home and community care. However, there were opportunities arose for many in learning new skills, exploiting digital digitisation and in continuing the relationship with their communities and spending more time with their children. With respect to the enterprise support organisations, they were quick to attempt to support women entrepreneurs but much of the support in particular financing and funding element and childcare responsibilities was found to be confusing by women entrepreneurs and these organisations did not consider the heterogeneity of women and their needs. Policy actions arising from the evidence gathered in this research include access to quicker funding routes by investing in creating a one-stop shop for financial supporting assistance, facilitating access to kickstarter and or seed funding for women entrepreneurs, creating new approaches to sourcing capital investment such as crowdfunding and impact investments, creating digital centres based on local infrastructure such as libraries, universities, colleges and community centres where it is easily accessible for women, creating and coaching mentoring champions in all Scottish regions for women entrepreneurs, expanding and lowering the cost of childcare. This can include higher investment and after school care in early years, offering childcare options within the social infrastructure and these policy actions can be met by simplifying the women's entrepreneurial ecosystem, producing a toolkit to help women navigate the support advice available to them, long-term evaluation and gender disaggregated data, establishing regional women's business inter hubs and collaborating with financial institutions to provide available, accessible and appropriate finance for women entrepreneurs. On a final note, we do understand Scotland as a long-standing policy framework for women's enterprise, but these challenges are still being amplified and have never been any less over the last 15-20 years. More recently, Scottish Government has been working towards remedying the current women's entrepreneurial system with the First Minister announcing and pledging £50 million for funding for a women's business centre. We welcome the commitment in the programme for government to progress a women's business centre, but currently there is little information as to what the business centre will look like and what facilities and functions it will provide for women entrepreneurs, so that might be an area that we could discuss further. Ruth Boyle, I think you are on, Ruth. Oh, sorry, my microphone hadn't come on yet. Thank you, convener, and thank you to the committee for inviting close the gap to give evidence today. We are really pleased to be here, and thanks to the clerks as well for accommodating me remotely. Close the gap is Scotland's policy advocacy organisation working on women's labour market equality. We have 20 years' experience of working with employers, trade unions and policy makers to encourage substantive action on the causes of the gender pay gap. Our analysis shows that women's increased likelihood of having primary responsibility for childcare, care and unpaid domestic work remains a key cause of the gender pay gap in Scotland. The lack of flexibility offered in the Scottish labour market, coupled with continued barriers to accessible, affordable and flexible childcare, creates something of a perfect storm for women who are trying to balance paid and unpaid work. That creates challenges for women with caring responsibilities in entering the labour market, but it also prevents women's in-work progression. Limiting their opportunities to enter senior roles or to increase their hours or their earnings. As a result of having to balance earning with caring, we see that women account for 75 per cent of part-time workers in Scotland. That is significant because most part-time work is found in the lowest paid jobs and sectors of the Scottish economy. That reinforces women's low pay and makes it difficult for women to find work that matches their skill level. Covid-19 has brought those issues into sharp focus as it has fallen to women to manage increasing levels of unpaid work. Over the pandemic, closed the gap has published briefings and analysis on the impact of the crisis on women's labour market equality. That work has highlighted that the crisis has created huge challenges for women in maintaining paid work, with many women having to reduce their hours or leave work entirely in order to care. Just to close, we welcome the committee's focus on the topic. It is really positive to see attention being afforded to unpaid care, which is often a peripheral policy issue. Tackling the issues that we discussed today is vital to unlocking women's labour market equality, tackling the gender pay gap, as well as meeting Scotland's child poverty targets. Thank you all very much for your opening remarks. We are now going to move into question and answer session. Ruth Davidson, particularly if you are wanting to respond to a question, if you could put R in the members, might direct things directly to members, but if they don't and you want to respond to something if Ruth could put R in, then Fulton will know how to make sure that I am aware that he is wanting to come in as well. The guys in the room, if you just indicate that you are wanting to respond, I will keep my eyes open. Thanks very much, Joe. Good morning to the panel. Thank you very much for being with us this morning and for your opening remarks. I am interested in understanding a little bit about the difference across different age groups of women. You have all alluded to the amplification of existing inequalities that the pandemic had, but we know that the pandemic was maybe particularly acutely felt by younger women, those in the 18 to 30 age group who experienced financial precarity anyway. Can you give us a little bit more detail around that and also how it compares to older women? Are there areas that we should be considering to look at for much older women but still working age? How does the impact change across women's lives? A couple of things I can say on that. I mentioned in my opening remarks that Closic App and Engender had undertaken some polling, which was specifically looking at Scotland, or that there was a UK project that we specifically looked at Scotland and some of that focused on young women. To give you a bit of a snapshot, the survey showed us that young women were reporting even greater vulnerability to economic precarity, and that is not surprising because we know that younger women and black minority ethnic women are more likely to be concentrated as both Noreen and Ruth Syed in the sectors that were first affected and were most greatly affected by the results of the pandemic. 53 per cent of young men had had their furlough salary topped up by their employer compared to just 35 per cent of young women. For BME young women, that was just 27 per cent. Younger women were 7 per cent points more likely than their male counterparts to say that their financial situation had worsened since the start of the pandemic. That was 41 per cent of the young women that we spoke to, and disabled young women were 20 per cent points more likely to say that non-disabled young women were to say that their financial situation had worsened as a direct result of the pandemic. We also know and Ruth can maybe say more on this directly, but we know that the gender pay gap exists at every age, but we know that it widens sharply when women reach 30 and it continues to widen sharply. The lack of available childcare will almost certainly be playing a role in that. I mean it certainly will be playing a role in that. I think Ruth can maybe say more on the interrelation of those two things. The last point that I would make is that young women's mental health has been of particular concern. I talked about the women Covid Scott project that we ran, where we asked women to submit anonymously either publicly or directly to us their own stories of the pandemic. Over and over again, what came through was this crushing sense of mounting pressure that they were expected to do more with the same amount of time that they were expected to do homeschooling for children in multiple different year groups. There was more domestic work because the whole family was at home and although their partners, if they had a male partner, their partner was doing more, they were still doing more. So that sense of pressure is not surprising, but the polling that we did also showed that 62% of young women said that their mental health had worsened since the outbreak compared to 55% of young men. So I think we are really looking at a bit of a crisis point. The existing mental health strategy that is due to run until 2027 was clearly developed in a pre-pandemic world. I think that there are genuine questions to be asked about whether that document is fit for purpose. A transition plan does exist that does play a bit more of a gendered focus, but the lack of focus that we have seen on gendered differences in mental health presentation and experiences is a chronic problem that is pervasive through mental health policy. I was going to pick up on the polling that we had done, so it is very useful that Ailey has already given that context. When we look at young women's experience of employment during the pandemic, we see that young women were more likely to be furloughed than their male counterparts, and they were also more likely to work in a shutdown sector. When we have been talking about women being more adversely affected by job disruption, that is because it is based on women's pre-existing inequalities in the labour market. When we look at young women's employment, we see that they are concentrated in low-paid precarious sectors, so predominantly those service sectors such as retail and hospitality that were shut down during the pandemic. Because of that, we know that young women were already more likely to be experiencing in-work poverty and were therefore less likely to have savings to fall back on during the pandemic. If we look at retail, for example, we see that four in 10 of those working in retail are paid less than the real living wage, and 80 per cent of those working in hospitality reported that they were already struggling with their finances through Covid, so we see an exacerbation of pre-existing financial precarity for young women. As Ellie said, we also saw that young women were less likely to have their furloughed salary topped up by their employer. There are pre-existing issues for young women in terms of accessing training and development in the labour market, and that is often because in the sectors that they are dominant, training and development is not often a focus. A recent report by the young women's movement, the status of the young women report, found that only 44 per cent of young women felt supported by their employer to develop skills at work. That is particularly pertinent for young women with caring responsibilities, who are particularly concentrated in low-paid jobs and sectors. That is obviously significant for Scotland's child poverty targets because young mothers are a target group within that plan. The polling that Ellie mentioned also found that one in 10 young women reported that their caring responsibilities were a key barrier to them accessing training and development or employment support. By contrast, no young men who were polled as part of that project highlighted caring responsibilities as a barrier to employment or to training. To pick up on the mental health issues that Ellie raised, we know that women's experience of mental health is fundamentally linked to gendered inequalities regarding care and income inequalities. As the pandemic has worsened those factors, it is clear why there is a growing mental health crisis among women and young women in particular. We also know that women are effectively poverty managers in the home, so they often go without clothing or warmth or food themselves in order to provide for their children. We know that during the pandemic, when women were reporting that they were struggling to bake ends meat, if they were having to do that gender dynamic of poverty management in the home, that could have increased their problems with mental health and wider mental wellbeing. We see issues there in terms of an exacerbation of women's pre-existing inequality in the labour market. As Ellie said, that is not to say that there are not issues for older women in the labour market. Indeed, I am just doing our latest gender pay gap analysis paper. When we look at that, we see a gender pay gap for all age groups, but it is a higher-than-average gender pay gap for an over-40s women. That is where we see the motherhood penalty playing out in terms of pay data and gender pay gap. Women are undertaking the bulk of unpaid care, perhaps reducing their working hours or leaving work entirely to care for a period of time. That has lifetime implications for their pay rates. While there has been a lot of focus on young women's employment and rightly so, when we look at furlough data towards the end of the scheme, it is older women who are more likely to still be furloughed. I think that there is a little bit of work that needs to be done to understand the impact of the pandemic on older women's employment, because we also know that there are real barriers to older women in accessing employment and also accessing training and development. Thank you very much for that, Ruth. That is really helpful. Can I ask you, as well, to pick up on some of the points that have been made? I was going to say what do we do about it, but the million-dollar question, what are the key steps that we need to take as a Parliament, as a Government to ensure that this financial precarity is not exacerbated as we move forward? I completely agree with Ruth Neill's comments, but, given the perspective from a women's entrepreneurship background and the studies that I have undertaken in women entrepreneurs, the age does not seem to matter, because they are all in the same boat in terms of dominantly earning the service sector, dominantly could not access or find their way around finance, dominantly had childcare responsibilities, dominantly had the unpaid domestic work to deal with. Now, I had 70 plus women in my focus group, three quarters of those women had children. Only one partner helped with those responsibilities. Now that is just a snapshot of a small sample, but it is very applicable to Scotland and the UK. Given that, some of the things that Scottish Government or MSPs or our organisations can do is that we need to understand long-term evaluation, we need gender disaggregated data, so what is happening on the ground? Is it effective? What is impact being made socially and economically? We need to collaborate with financial institutions to understand access to financial support, what is the easiest route, what is appropriate, because women are not just one group, regardless. They have different roles, and very often we touched up very lightly that they have domestic unpaid work, they have businesses or they are working, but a lot of them seem to do a lot of community work too. So how do we work around and assist and support them in their different roles and ensure that it is holistic rather than we are only helping women entrepreneurs here, we are only helping women here? That is a question that I am bouncing back to you. You have the resources, you have the power, so this is how do we approach this in a holistic manner. Thank you, that is helpful. I will leave it there for now. Good morning and thank you very much for coming along. It has been very useful, obviously, hearing open statements in relation to how women have suffered over the pandemic, and it is something that is obviously at the heart of this committee, that is why we decided to work on this. My question is around, I have one for you later on, around question on evidence that it is showing that women, disabled women, BME and lone parents have disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Should these groups have received or received focus support to ensure that full access to employment as we embark out our social economic recovery from the pandemic? If so, what kind of policies do you think that we should be looking at in Parliament? I think that this could be to Ruth Cymru and then I will come back to Lauren for her question. Thank you. Thank you. I think that that is a really important question. I mentioned that close the gap has done a lot of analysis of the labour market impacts of the pandemic, looking at the specific impacts on women's employment. Throughout that work, we have tried very hard to take an intersectional approach, so looking at the impacts on specific groups of women, I would note that we have been hindered in doing that by a lack of intersectional labour market data. This is something that we talk about a lot, but we are actually very far from having consistent gendered labour market data. That means that we are very far away from having consistent intersectional labour market data. For example, if we think about black minority ethnic women or disabled women, we are unable to access data relating to furlough, unemployment, occupational segregation or pay. That makes it very difficult to demonstrate the differences that particular groups of women have experienced in the labour market. In terms of an early policy priority, it should be the gathering of gender disaggregated intersectional data as standard across all policy responses, in particular labour market data and skills programmes data. That is really important. What we can do is to predict the impact on different groups of women based on the data that we have. If we look at black minority ethnic women, we expect that job disruption has been particularly acute for black minority ethnic women because of them being concentrated in low-paid precarious sectors. Again, those are sectors that were more likely to be shut down during the pandemic. We also saw in the polling data that Ailey has mentioned already that 21 per cent of black minority ethnic women responding to that polling said that they felt that they were unfairly chosen for furlough by their employer compared to only 1 per cent of white women. Equally, 19 per cent of disabled women felt that they were unfairly chosen for furlough compared to only 1 per cent of non-disabled women. We have questions in terms of some of the discrimination that has perhaps come through. We are concerned in terms of black minority ethnic women that the pandemic can exacerbate pre-existing inequality in the labour market. Black minority ethnic women were already more likely to be in in-work poverty, are concentrated in precarious work and had barriers to progression. Close the gap published research in 2019, called Still Not Visible, that looked at the experience of black minority ethnic women in employment in Scotland. That research found high levels of racism, racial discrimination, prejudice and bias in the Scottish labour market. The issues that we are talking about today in particular, 49 per cent of women who responded to that survey felt that they had been overlooked for a training or development opportunity because of racism, prejudice or bias, 42 per cent felt that they had been discriminated against at interview stage. There could be issues for black minority ethnic women who have perhaps lost their job during the pandemic and are trying to enter the labour market again. What that research highlighted was that black minority ethnic women experienced the barriers that all women experience around caring responsibilities in the labour market, but that was somewhat intensified for black minority ethnic women who also reported barriers in accessing appropriate childcare for their children. Migrant black minority ethnic women who responded to that survey also highlighted that a lack of access to informal networks made it very difficult for them to enter the labour market. That is because that increased their reliance on formal, expensive childcare, which made it very difficult for them to find work that actually made it financially valuable. They also reported a lack of understanding on behalf of their employers that they did not have people to rely on. For example, if their child was sick, that meant that they had to work from home or to have that day off in order to care for children. Therefore, we see particular barriers for black minority ethnic women who could be intensified by the pandemic. There is a real lack of data on disabled women in the labour market and close the gap or plan at the planning stage for some research on disabled women's experiences of employment in Scotland in an attempt to find some data that could plug some of those gaps. We know that flexible working and remote working are particularly important for disabled women, so that is likely to have had a positive impact on disabled women's experience of employment in Scotland. However, I hope that we might have time to talk about flexible working in more detail later, but we are concerned that that increase in flexibility might not be maintained in the aftermath of the pandemic. As Ailey highlighted in the polling data, we know that the financial impacts of the pandemic have been particularly acute for disabled women, with disabled women being more likely to report struggling to make ends meet, greater rates of anxiety and stress. Finally, I touch on loan parents. Loan parents are trapped in poverty by a range of factors, including a lack of flexible and part-time working, a lack of affordable childcare and a lack of access to appropriate training and development. We know that the issues that all women have experienced in the pandemic have been particularly acute for loan parents, who maybe have not been able to rely on informal networks or family members to assist with childcare. Over 90 per cent of loan parents in Scotland are women, so that is a gendered issue when we are talking about the experiences of loan parents. It is likely that loan parents have in particular had to leave work in order to care or to reduce their hours, which has impacts for their financial security. Again, that is significant, because that is a priority group in the child poverty delivery plan. My question is around. It is interesting that you talked about your survey from October 2020 to March 2021. You talked about the three areas, one being access to finance, networking and then the cultural barriers. On those three, you did a snapshot survey then. Have you done anything before that to say that, has it got worse through Covid or is this something that was already there and these inequalities, like I just mentioned earlier on, that it has just come out? Is there a comparison? Thank you. The survey was qualitative, so it was focused groups and interviews. I was previously Jamie Hepburn, Minister for Business, Fair Work and Skills. He is an independent adviser for a year just before lockdown happened. Funnily enough, I had just published a report on this. There was no pandemic then, and the three challenges were highlighted there. I did again all of Scotland, over 100 women. We did 20 case studies. It was similar to this in-depth. It took a year and that got held back. It has been released now, but the publication was during April 2020. Obviously, everything got locked down. They thought, oh my god, everything is going to change. Hot the report. Let's see how things pan out. This study was undertaken as a Scottish Parliament Fellow. I thought, what has happened since? Funnily enough, the three challenges still exist. They have existed for the past 20 years. The only thing is that they have amplified during the pandemic. The access to finance, networking and social culture barriers have been global challenges for women entrepreneurs. No Government has managed to address them. No Government has managed to help them. No Government has managed to fix them. Those have been amplified. Again, we see, as many other studies and women and many other cultures and societies in the labour market, they have been hit the hardest. Those challenges have just been amplified. Thank you, Norrie. Just quickly on this, in addition, that I had asked obviously, Ruth, what policies or practices do you think the Government should have in place if this is something that was going on before the pandemic? Now it has come out even more during the pandemic. What is the way forward in this? What policies do you think? Specifically for women entrepreneurs, one, they need access to finance in terms of an easier route and understanding that women are not looking for £1 million. Often they are looking for small pots of fund to tide them over. One of the key things related to this committee's this morning's committee meeting is that expanding and lowering the cost of childcare is a must. This can include higher investment in early childcare, after-school childcare and early years, but also embedding childcare options within the social and economic infrastructure. We do not have that. The expense of it is impossible, whereas women have had to give up their businesses to homeschool, to look after their children, to help in the community, elderly parents, but long-term evaluations are needed. What is working? What is not working? There is so much happening. Going back to the women's enterprise entrepreneurial ecosystem, there is so much happening out there. It is unbelievable, but there is duplication. We do not know if it is effective. We do not know who is doing what. We do not know what women are coming where. We need to align this. This would work with different sectors, not just in the business world but also in the labour market, to simplify, to understand what is happening for women out there and what is effective, because, at the moment, we do not know. It goes back to the three main challenges. If we knew what was happening on the ground and how effective it was, surely we would address that. Why are those three challenges still happening? No, thank you, Norrie. Alexander, do you want to come in quickly, then? A quick supplementary.  What kind of game-changer do you think that that is going to be, if it is a game-changer, or is it just going to progress to then assess and look at where we are, what is required, but there will still be a gap, even having that centre and the resource that comes behind it? At the moment, we know what women need and how that can be addressed. It is £50 million over five years, I think, that the First Minister announced. I have tried to chase up several people. Obviously, it is a new initiative, it is very early, but I do not know, and I cannot really answer that, because I do not know what the centre will look like, where it will be based, is it digital, is it bricks and mortar, what facilities, what functions, because we know the challenges, we know how they can be addressed. The £50 million for the women's business centres, how will those challenges be addressed, what will it look like? That is my key question back to you. I was going to ask questions around mental health. I feel like you have answered some of those questions, so I would like to shift that focus a bit here. We have heard about women often going without food and clothing to prioritise others' needs, so I would like to ask in the context of something that is often prioritised, and that is women's health. Women tend to have more physical disruptions for want of a better word, such as menstrual-related health issues, pregnancy and birth, postpartum care and menopause, which in itself has multiple layers of health issues, and all of those can impact day-to-day living without appropriate care. For example, heart disease in women is a silent killer, as it is often overlooked or dismissed. Job access equality and working out of the home often depends on being physically able. Where does women's physical health come into this? Was this also a deprioritised or overlooked? Did you see within your remits any effects of women's health inequalities, which perhaps became more apparent during the height of the pandemic? Is this a noted factor in gender-based inequality? In terms of health, the polling that Ruth and I keep mentioning did look at physical health and activity levels, and across the board found that women were doing less physical activity and had lower access or that their nutrition had been deprioritised. For example, 42 per cent of young women believed that their physical health had worsened since the start of the pandemic compared to 30 per cent of young men. Nearly half of disabled young women reported that their physical health had deteriorated compared to 38 per cent of non-disabled young women. We know that that was a key theme. It would have been interesting to look back at the first lockdown when we all had one hour a day in which we could go out how women used that hour. I have said that over and over again in different contexts. In that hour, many women, if they did not have gardens, had to take their children out to play, but the playgrounds were closed. Many women were trying to do paid work, so they could not go for a run at night when it was dark because they did not feel safe in the streets. How did women prioritise their access to physical activity? There was time-use data published by the Scottish Government, and it showed that women tended to spend a bit more time over 2020 during the pandemic. Women tended to spend a bit more time than men on social leisure activities. The examples that they used were letter writing emails, but I suspect that we all thought that they were on Zoom and that they were checking in on people and that sort of thing. Men had considerably more access to leisure time, more time at the house, more time on the internet, and more time relaxing. That is a pattern that we have seen over and over and over again. We have all skittered around the issue of childcare, and it has been so significantly impactful. The de-prioritisation of childcare within the initial stages of the pandemic, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, was that there was somebody there to do that care when we had to close the schools. I am not suggesting that we should not have closed schools by any measure, but it did not appear in any of the pandemic planning. We saw a complete lack of gender mainstreaming. That is true across the board. When it comes to health, we all know the considerable pressure that health services have been under, but looking at some of the stories, some of the reporting, some of the anecdotal evidence that we have seen, there were restrictions on maternity services, where women were finding out terrible things that they had lost their baby or that they were going to have a difficult delivery and they could not have a birthing partner with them. It was just that lack of focus and attention that has cemented so many of the pre-existing inequalities that will have, unfortunately, led to worse outcomes in women's health. I think that is something that really needs to be prioritised in both the independent inquiry that is forthcoming, and we have been advocating that there should be an explicit equality and gender equality specifically, because if gender is not mentioned, it does not get looked at in the terms of reference that the Scottish Government will set for that inquiry. Obviously, then it will be independent and it will be up to them how they look at that, but I think that health is one of those things that they really need to be paying attention to. I think that Ruth is wanting to come in, sorry. We do not do a great deal of work on women's physical health, although, of course, it does impact women's access to the labour market. We have seen increased focus in recent months and over the last year, perhaps, of menopause as a workplace issue. This is something that we will be looking at. There is an inquiry at the minute in Westminster on that issue, and I am sure that that is something that close the gap will be picking up in due course. One thing that I want to highlight that is impacting women's access to the labour market in terms of health is women's experience of long Covid. We see that women are more likely to be experiencing long Covid and, as a result, inadequate employer responses to long Covid is making it difficult for women to maintain paid work. In this way, long Covid has become another means by which women's inequality is being exacerbated by the pandemic. A recent TUC survey found that over half of respondents said that they had experienced some form of discrimination or disadvantage due to long Covid, and over one in 20 responses said that they had been forced out of their jobs because of long Covid. We also know that women are less likely to be in jobs that give them access to statutory sick pay. The women hold around 70 per cent of jobs that are not entitled to statutory sick pay, so, again, that could be another way in which women's financial precarity is increased. We also know that the current system of employment injuries assistance does not meet women's needs. Therefore, if women have injuries that they have acquired in the workplace, they are less likely to be able to access the support that they need. We have responded to the consultation on Mark Griffin's proposed Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill. That is a new thing that we should be thinking about in terms of how women's physical health is impacting their ability to maintain their work and how they are able to gain support if they have acquired an injury or health issue within the workplace. If I had time, I just also wanted to briefly say on the last question that I realised that I did not actually highlight any policy responses despite that being a core part of the question. I just wanted to highlight that, for us, some of the key areas that we need change is around gender-sensitive employability support, gender-sensitive skills and training support. We need to further extend the funded childcare entitlement that we have called for for an extension to 50 hours a week, ensuring that we have high-quality social care that enables women to enter the labour market and also the designation of care as a key growth sector to grow these sectors and also to revalue women's work within those sectors. We also need to increase access to quality flexible working and part-time work and reassess our policies around shared parental leave. I think that those are some of the key priorities in terms of allowing women with caring responsibilities to re-enter the labour market or to maintain paid work. Fulton MacGregor is wanting to come in on a shared parenting later, but Alexander, did you want to come in just now? Can I talk about the difficulties at home that home might not be the most safest place to be because of the multiple pressures that were taking place, the financial instability and the more domestic work that was taking place. We have seen that there is no doubt, once again, an increase in violence against women during that time. That creates the perfect storm for someone who is trapped in that environment and is not able to access and get the support mechanisms that they need. What lessons do we need to look at? What does that tell us about the support mechanisms that we need to put in place? Abandoning people to that situation and circumstances, there was also the need for agencies to be involved, and some of them took longer because they had other priorities and other commitments to deal with. We understand that, but it put individuals in a precarious situation and continued for them for that duration. As I said, that created even more difficulties and there will be consequences, as we already know from that whole process. It would be good to get a flavour from you all on how that might be early to start with, because you spoke about it primarily in your update. Of course, thank you very much. It is really important to be clear that, when we discuss violence against women, coronavirus does not cause violence. It is the measures that have been put in place to manage the public health impacts that have created and exacerbated the circumstances in which women are made more acutely vulnerable and perpetrators' abuses more easily facilitated. That would be women being exposed to poverty. If women had to give up work because of childcare and they suddenly found themselves reliant on a partner's income, that facilitates much more easily the access and control over resources. Universal credit is a state design that does the same thing. If women found themselves on universal credit, access to resources was constrained. As you mentioned, women found it much more difficult to interact with the normal support services and agencies that they would have done so, or the health services and education services that might identify risks for women. We are not able to do that. Women's inequality is a cause and a consequence of men's violence. We need to think about that in two tracks. There is work that needs to be done to better support the services that women rely on. That means core funding for women's aid services and men's violence against women services such as rape crisis Scotland and what Scottish women's aid. That was done. The Scottish Government did give out more funding, but there still is a big problem with security of funding and long-term funding. When those services had to redesign themselves, a lot of that scrambling was around access to resources that they could use in order to develop new forms of services. Scottish Women's Aids did a survey of the services in June 2020. What that showed was that only about a quarter of services at that time said there had been no impact or decreased inquiries for support. Most services had seen either a huge increase or fluctuating increase, which in some ways is more complex because, again, you're trying to respond, design a service in a new way and you don't know what the demand will be. Women have had pipeline issues with getting women out of their home into refuge accommodation and then into other forms of more permanent accommodation. I think there are many things that we need to tackle. The financial support is one thing. It's been talked about a lot recently in the 16 days of activism debates, but the impact of the backlog in the justice system is having a significant impact on women who are victim survivors of abuse and men's violence. There really needs to be some concrete action to speed up the reopening of court processes. The cultural attitude is complicated but vital. When we did our unpaid work paper, what we found was that attitudes about what roles women should or shouldn't do hadn't changed as much as we would have thought. Between the 1980s and the 2012, I want to say, but I apologize if that's wrong, the number of people who'd said that women would be more predominantly responsible for care had only decreased by 10%. There was still an underlying assumption there that women would take on the majority of childcare and that they would give up work to do that, and that's underpinning everything in this culture. I think we're at risk at the moment of entering into a vicious cycle where women are becoming further detached from the labour market, further detached from the support systems, further detached from finance that allows them to take advantage of opportunities and to develop their own careers and their own social contributions. As a result, they do more care, they do more unpaid work, so then they have fewer opportunities and so we're just in this endless cycle. I think it's really important that we do look for those policy interventions that will disrupt it, so yes, the 50 hours of wraparound, cultural, flexible childcare that we need to see, yes, making social care and childcare key policy, sorry, key economic infrastructure, investing in those sectors. It's a whole systems approach. If we look at flexible working as the silver bullet, for example, whilst we're in this cycle of women becoming more and more detached from the labour market, it could inadvertently lead to women being required to take on more care. So we do need to think holistically about all of these things. We do need to think about violence against women. We do need to think about funding for women's organisations, and we need to think about how the two interact with one another. So that's a very long answer to your question. Everything and nothing. Thank you. Andrews, you may have some views as well on this one. Yes, I would reiterate everything that Ailey has said there, particularly around the funding point and also the nuance that is required around describing this increase in violence against women during the pandemic. I just wanted to touch on some of the workplace implications of that. We know that violence against women affects all aspects of women's lives and the workplace is no exception. So three quarters of women who experience domestic abuse are targeted at work, and a recent survey by Close the Gap that was conducted as part of our employer accreditation programme found that 75 per cent of respondents had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment in the workplace over a 12-month period. When we think about the Covid-19 context, as Ailey says, what we see is an intensification of that. So with women who are working from home in unsafe situations, we see that perpetrators may have prevented victim survivors from working from home by denying access to necessary equipment or insisting that women have responsibility for childcare. Within sexual harassment in the workplace, we see that perpetrators had new access to women because of a reliance on online communications. Also, women reported that they had increased barriers to reporting sexual harassment during the pandemic because they did not believe that that was a priority for their employer during the crisis. That is concerning because pre-pandemic, we see that 80 per cent of those who experience sexual harassment in the workplace did not report because of fear of not being believed, of being blamed or losing their job. As Ailey outlined, violence against women is a cause and consequence of gender inequality, and therefore tackling women's labour market inequality is key to tackling violence against women. I just wanted to flag that Close the Gap has an employer accreditation programme called Equally Safe at Work, which focuses on the link between gender equality and violence against women. It underscores the employer role in tackling violence against women in Scotland, and it highlights that employers can improve their employment practice to address the barriers that women experience at work. In the aftermath of the pandemic, this is an important opportunity for employers to reassess their employment practice, to see how they can better support women and victim survivors of violence against women within the workplace. As Ailey said, flexible working is really key for victim survivors of domestic abuse in entering the labour market and staying in employment. Although there has been a popular narrative that flexible working is now the workplace norm because of the pandemic, we are unsure if that is the reality. Also, if there has been an increase in flexible working in some cases, it is not predetermined that that increase in flexibility will be maintained in the aftermath of the pandemic. Ultimately, that was a reactive decision on behalf of employers in response to public health restrictions rather than a strategic business decision. We could be complacent about thinking that flexible working has been solved, but in reality, we continue to see real barriers to that. Thank you, convener. Good morning to you all. Thank you very much for joining us. It is really important, I believe, that we get right under the skin of this because not just of what you have said about the UN's warning about women's equality, but all of us in our constituencies will be seeing every day the impact that it is having on women. We need to get ahead of that and thanks for helping us to do that. My questions are about the impact on unpaid care. I have spoken to a number of unpaid carers over the course of the pandemic and before, but the story is bleak, and it can be pretty grim. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about your assessment of the impact of the pandemic on unpaid carers and the impact of the pandemic on reduced health and social care services. The impact that that has had on women's expectations of others on women to do unpaid care. Are there any particular groups of women, for example, younger women or disabled women, or lone parents, who have in your experience ended up doing more of this unpaid care as a result of services shutting down, et cetera? I wonder if you want to go first. That was quite a lot of questions. I should have wrote them down. Given women entrepreneurs, as I mentioned earlier, three quarters of them had children and only one said that she had help from her partner. That lets you know of the 70 plus that they were doing at themselves. I can give you lots of examples. For example, one woman whose business was earning more than her husband's was employed. She took the decision that she would stop her business and look after the children, even though she earned more, because his job was seemingly more important. Sorry, I'm not being facetious, but this story was occurring over and over again. I think that the assumption is there, as Ailey mentioned, that women are the carers. It's not just childcare, it's community care, it's elderly parents' care, it's care, and lots of different arenas and environments. Going back to that, with everything being shut down, it was just a given that women would do it, and particularly with the business women that I spoke with and the services not being available, going back to affecting mental health, having set up a business and it had to close, or had to put it on the back burner. They didn't have the support they needed from their partner, et cetera, because maybe they were working. We did see a lot of that. I keep going back to how we can resolve this in some sort of manner in terms of embedding childcare throughout the social and economic infrastructure. It's not just for those in paid employment, it needs to be for everyone who earns money, whether it's small businesses or growing businesses, paid employment, flexible working part-time. It needs to be across the board, and I think that's key in how we can help resolve or take some of the burden of mothers who participate and contribute to the Scottish economy. I'll stop there, because I can go on a rant. I think that the experience of unpaid carers is a really important aspect of the impact of the pandemic. We know that there are now 1.1 million unpaid carers in Scotland, 60 per cent of whom are women. Work by Carers Scotland found that 78 per cent of carers reported that they were having to provide more care than they were pre-pandemic. If the amount of unpaid carers that you are having to do is increasing, that obviously creates challenges in maintaining your paid working hours. We know that unpaid carers already had barriers to entering the labour market and maintaining their work in the labour market, and that is going to exacerbate that. We also see that the pre-existing mental health challenges that existed for unpaid carers with one in four carers reporting that they had not had a break from caring in five years. We also see that 53 per cent of carers receiving carers allowance reported that they were struggling to make ends meet. A lot of the issues that we have discussed today around financial precarity, barriers to the labour market, mental health and stress are particularly pertinent for unpaid carers in Scotland. What we see at the start of the pandemic was that care was rapidly redistributed from the state to the individual, and it was almost automatically presumed that a woman would step in to fill those gaps. What work from the Alliance, Inclusion Scotland and Glasgow Disability Alliance has found was that social care packages were removed in some instances or that eligibility criteria was tightened, which made it harder for people to access social care. That means that a lot of that care was displaced on to female family members, which again increased their burden of unpaid care. Again, I know that I keep continually bringing up flexible working, but flexible working is really pivotal in allowing unpaid carers to manage their unpaid and paid work. Without an increase in flexible working and high-quality part-time work, it is likely that we will be pushing unpaid carers out of the labour market, which will cement their poverty and financial insecurity over the longer term. We have welcomed the increased payments of carers allowance supplement over the pandemic, but there really needs to be a longer-term mechanism to guarantee unpaid carers financial security. We also need training for carers who are trying to enter the labour market and considering how employers can better support unpaid carers with managing their paid and unpaid needs. I am going to take Fulton, who has a similar associated question, and then we will come to Fulton McGregor. Thanks, convener. I just want to say before I start my question, thanks to colleagues and to all the panel today for allowing me to be online. I suppose that the very reason that I am online is relevant to today's meeting that allows me to perform childcare functions this morning, but I have to say that, based on all the similar discussions that we have had, even as a dad who is trying to do a lot more, it is only a fraction of what my partner in the room next door does with her three children. We need to be honest about that and reflect on it. Even when one of the panellists was talking earlier about the fact that we all had an hour a day to go back to that time, I am more or less always put the hour a day for a walk or on a cycle, but my partner did not always. We had two kids at that point and both the third came along. I think that we do as men, we need to reflect on those things as well. Thanks for allowing me to say that and for being remote. On my main questions, my first one, convener, is about key workers who were women during the pandemic. I wonder if the panel can elaborate. I know that you have talked to me a bit about it and how key workers who were women were affected, particularly if they had childcare responsibilities, I am thinking of nurses, police officers, royal male workers, whatever one you want to think of. They had to still work and the childcare stuff was non-existent at that point. How do you think that those workers were impacted and I am happy that any order that you chose, convener? Both to Ailey, because she will want to pick up on some of the points from the previous question as well. Thank you very much. I will start with Ms McGregor's question. In terms of key workers, we know that between 17% and 80% of key workers at any time were women, or women who were in the professions listed in the UK Government's list of essential workers were women. We all know that essential workers were in theory able to access childcare throughout the pandemic, but in most cases that was only if their partner was also an essential worker or a key worker. We heard anecdotal stories about women whose partner simply refused to take on the childcare, leaving them in incredibly difficult situations trying to negotiate with their employer. Their partner just simply said, I can't cope with it 24 hours a day, I'm not doing it. We also know that it had a significant impact on women who were essential workers, but who were lone parents. In some cases, there weren't even options for them. The forums would say, is your partner also an essential worker? If they didn't have a partner, what were they meant to do? So anecdotally, we know that it was a real issue, and attitudinal issues underpinned all of that. To answer the question about social care, I think Ruth has covered a lot of what I was hoping to say, but I think it's worth stressing again that it's not free labour. It's labour that women are there not getting paid for, but it's not free labour. In fact, the unpaid carers in the pandemic were estimated to save the UK £530 million a day, so it's money that's coming from somewhere. If women simply downed tools and refused to do it, the state would have to pay for it. So we're still quite a long way away from recognising that in some ways. We still think it's magically going to appear out of nowhere that women will be available to take on that unpaid care, but if they're not, what does the state do then? Ruth has already mentioned that the organisations that have done a significant amount of work demonstrated the impact that changing last minute or ending social care packages had on households and families who were affected by it obviously undermined disabled women's access to a dignified social care. They denied them their choice of what they wanted to do with that time, and in many cases may have denied them opportunities to participate in paid work or other forms of participation. Again, it has had that impact on female family members. The essential fact is that we can't afford to wait for a new national care service whenever that is created. All those social care workers are affected now, as Ruth said, and many of them have been exposed to the virus. Some of them are affected by long Covid. In many cases, their PPE didn't fit them appropriately because it was designed for male bodies. We need investment in social care now. It's not something that we can afford to wait. Again, it comes back to that whole package of measures that we need to take. We need to look at childcare, social care, prioritising infrastructure, and doing the attitudinal changes. There has been some really positive work that has been done. I can't remember the countries. I know that Uganda was involved, but looking at the fact that, around the world, men did more childcare than they have ever done before—that's a positive story. It shows that they can do it. The problem is that women are still doing more. As we go back into whatever a normal looks like whenever that happens, there are opportunities to redistribute some of that labour internally. Ruth Davidson would like to come in just now. Just before we moved on to another panelist in terms of the questions about key workers, I wanted to pick up on stuff that I heard as a constituency MSP. Maybe it can be integrated into the further answers, because a lot of childcare was available in the early days through the education system and the early days of the lockdown. It wasn't as well taken up. A lot of people said that to me because, at that point, quite rightly, we're dealing with a new virus that people were really anxious about and what key workers—many of whom were women—were actually being told that they could access this childcare and put them in their family at further risk, because the virus is running rampant. I wonder whether that could be taken into account as well, because there did seem to be a gender imbalance in that message. I just wanted to add that, and I know that Ruth Davidson is going to come on to my question. That is a very important issue. Surprisingly, one that maybe hasn't had as much prominence as you would expect it to have had. We did some analysis that found that 79 per cent of key workers in Scotland were women. That was mostly women working in low-paid, undervalued sectors such as essential retail, social care, childcare and nursing. Research by the women's budget group at the UK level found that women accounted for 98 per cent of key workers earning poverty wages. Those are jobs that were previously branded unskilled and were now seen as being essential to a successful pandemic response. We have an important opportunity in the aftermath of the pandemic to reassess the undervaluation of women's work within those sectors. What we have seen over the pandemic is a reinforcement of the importance of social care and childcare infrastructure to women's access to the labour market. The first lockdown also showed that women have a reliance on informal networks to plug gaps in support. Obviously, in that first lockdown, both formal and informal childcare was removed from women. That created real challenges for key workers, but particularly for low-paid and key workers, as Ailey outlined. We did see that schools and nurseries opened for care for essential workers' children, but there were some problems with accessibility for some families. We know that women are reliant on public transport, and often those services were further away from their homes and their normal services, which might have created challenges in accessing that care. Eligibility was also determined at the local level. While I have not looked at that in detail, I wonder if all the different types of key worker jobs that women are doing were covered by those eligibility criteria. Again, it highlighted the importance of flexibility and childcare in terms of allowing women to maintain their paid work. Just to pick up on the PPE question, there were some issues around PPE for women's key workers' roles, in particular social care, and the Royal College of Nursing raised concerns about nursing staff who were working outside of hospital environments. We also know that there are long-standing issues around PPE being inappropriate for women, so the TUC found that only 29 per cent of women who utilise PPE in their work actually use PPE that has been designed for women. That meant that, in the pandemic, PPE was not necessarily keeping women safe in some of those roles. As you outlined, Mr Greger, that meant that it was very difficult for women to make decisions, particularly if they were unpaid carers for disabled people or older people who were perhaps vulnerable to the virus. They had to make a decision as to whether, going into a workplace and potentially putting family members or loved ones at risk, what was that worth in terms of being able to maintain your paid work. I think that the key worker experience has brought into sharp focus some of the pre-existing issues that we see for women in the labour market and the continued undervaluation of some of those jobs and sectors. Just before we finish off, I want to quickly go around everyone. We are past time, but I would be keen to hear what we are doing as we are looking back and what went wrong, but I would be keen to hear a quick snappy. Here is the thing that we need to do going forward. What is the positives that we can take out of the pandemic? Throwing that in there, Norton, do you want to go first? One thing that the study did report back was that women are much more resilient than we give them credit for. Very quickly, I think that the positives that we can take are that, as I mentioned, men are doing more than they ever have done before. Let us focus on getting some of the burden off of women when we finally return back to some of the state support for that care work. Also, we saw that there was a huge amount of popular support, more than we have ever seen for some of the measures that would make life so much easier for women. There was support for more pay for carers, unpaid carers, more support for NHS workers, pay. We know that the public is starting to value care in a way that they maybe did not before. The one thing that I was hoping to come back in and say is that the impact of isolation—people have been locked in their houses and for unpaid carers in particular who are preparing for a disabled person who is vulnerable to the virus, that is something that is continuing for them and their families. They are still isolating and removing themselves from a lot of the opportunities and that is having an impact on their mental health and the stress and the pressure that we talked about. I think that we need to look again at mental health and how we can look forward, but also the pandemic is still with us and it is still very acute for some members of society. For this week, Ruth, the last word. Yes, I think that some of the issues that I have raised already in terms of gender sensitive employment support, gender sensitive skills and training is really important and just gender mainstreaming and all policy. I think that one of the benefits of the pandemic has been that Covid has demonstrated that many more jobs in the Scottish economy are capable of being done on a flexible basis, so that has challenged the cultural assumption against flexibility that we see in certain jobs and sectors. I think that we need to make sure that employers are understanding the business case for maintaining flexibility in the aftermath of the pandemic. That is things like productivity gains, enhanced employee wellbeing and morale, being able to recruit from a wider talent pool, closing the skills gaps that you have within your business. We have seen that there has been an increase in home working, but we have seen that other firms of flexibility have actually declined over the course of the pandemic. It is ours-based flexibility with a focus on part-time work that is really important for women. We need to take the small glimmer that we have seen around flexible working and try to build on that. How can the Scottish Government integrate flexible working into fair work criteria, for example? How can we use the various levers that we have with employers to encourage them to take forward flexible working moving forward? We know that 87 per cent of women want to work more flexibly in the future, and it is really about trying to make sure that we are meeting that demand. We have another session on this next week, when we will be looking at intersectionality, which we have all raised this week. We will now move into private session.


In this episode, we're going to find out how to maximize your e-bikes range. Then we've got a range challenge. What does 40 miles actually look like in LA and where will it take you? Every e-bike on the market has an advertised range. For bikes with a throttle, the advertised range is basically how far you can get with the throttle alone under ideal conditions. Pedal assist bikes like this one is the distance you can get pedaling under ideal conditions, but who knows what ideal conditions are. The best you can do range-wise is make sure your bike is set up as well as possible. And maybe the most important thing is tire pressure. Ever tried riding on nearly flat tires? Yep, it's hard and slow. So always pump up your tires to the pressure marked on the tire's sidewall before a ride of any distance. If you have an e-bike with a chain, that's the other area that will increase resistance and decrease range if it's in bad shape, so lube it up regularly. A lot of e-bikes have what's called regenerative braking, which means that the energy built up through braking is fed back into the battery, recharging it. Braking gently over a period of time is going to give you more recharge than braking hard and quick. Most good e-bikes have a lithium-ion battery that shouldn't be run until they're dead, and they'll keep their charge the longest if you store them in a cool, dry place. You know what? There is one other thing you can do to increase the range on your pedal assist and throttle-controlled e-bikes. Pedal harder! Since no one ever rides their bike in ideal conditions, I'm going to do a range test in a real-world scenario on this Pure Cycles Volta, complete with all the beautiful imperfection of life that is Los Angeles. I've got about a 40-mile route planned out, heading toward the beach, and the goal of the day is to have as much fun as possible. Beautiful day for a little bike adventure. Alright, I'm off the bike path and onto the mean streets of LA, but you know what? They're not that mean. I've gone 10 miles now, and I feel great. The bike is doing most of the work. I'm heading up my first hill of the day. Let's see how the Volta handles it. I have now gone 18 miles. The bike is rocking. I have half a battery left, which should be plenty to get me all the way to the beach. Here I am. I can't believe it. The ocean. This is the bike that just never quits. I've ridden about 25 miles, and I'm headed that way towards Malibu. Alright, this adventure is coming to an end. The battery just died. I got 35 miles, which is great because LA is full of hills and traffic lights and stops and starts and all sorts of things. I'm feeling pretty good about it now. Look where I am. The beach.  For more bike tips and tricks from Pure Cycles TV, click the link to subscribe.


Kumurasaki. The famed Oira are notable for deceiving men out of their entire fortunes, but you know what's worse? She also deceived them into unsubscribing from the Grand Line Review, preventing them from getting regular One Piece content uploaded straight into their YouTube feeds, so words cannot even express the true depth of her treachery. Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today, it's time to talk about something that has bothered me with the One Piece manga for quite some time, and for anime only watchers, I'm just going to throw out an immediate spoiler warning for the events of Act 2 of Wano. There's some fairly significant stuff that, for the sake of solid discussion, I won't be able to avoid, so if you're not keen on spoilers, then please do come back to this video at a later date. But as for the topic of today's video, it has to do with Kumurasaki and Hiyori, and specifically, the jarring storytelling mystery left behind by the revelation that they are the same person. Now, I'll start off by saying that not everyone shares my perspective on this matter, and there have been a whole ton of people who have commented on my chapter reviews, who see what Oda did as perfectly natural, or weird, but not an issue. But this is really something that has kind of vested within me and remained throughout the Wano arc, and because I have a channel focusing entirely on One Piece, I thought why not make a video on it, because I've developed some pretty strong opinions on the matter, namely that this is either a case of phenomenal foreshadowing of the highest degree by Oda, or quite possibly, one of the worst technical implementations of storytelling in the entire series. Now, both of those options are pretty fantastical, and some may even say hyperbolic, but one way or the other, I absolutely refuse to believe what Oda has currently presented us with, because it requires an unfathomable suspension of disbelief. And to summarize the events in question as they appear chronologically in the manga, Kumurasaki is supposedly killed in chapter 933 by Kyoshiro. Her body is slashed, we see her lying seemingly dead on the floor, and that's that. Quite dramatic. Word about her death spreads in the next few chapters until chapter 937, where although her name isn't stated, a woman would appear claiming to be Kozuki Hyori, as well as the famed Oran, Kumurasaki. And I don't have any issue with this, in theory. I mean, using the Occam's razor explanation, everything checks out from a technical perspective. Kumurasaki's death could have been staged, more than likely with the help of Kyoshiro, who was secretly working for either the Allied forces or for his own individual purposes. And he then helped Kumurasaki slash Hyori escape along with Toko. So that's all cool. Part where I take issue with everything is that apart from their appearance, Kumurasaki and Hyori are completely different characters. Kumurasaki is portrayed as this cold, calculating, and effectively merciless mastermind capable of deceiving any man into parting with their entire fortune. Calling her intelligent doesn't even begin to describe how Kumurasaki was able to operate within the nation of Wano. Not only that, but she was also exceptionally proud, capable of standing up to even Shogun Orichi and delivering lines like, If you would prefer a weak woman, then strike me down right now. I am the daughter of a samurai. I will not disgrace myself. So Kumurasaki was a pretty formidable and unique presence on Wano, but to contrast that with Hyori, well, she is very much portrayed as the exact opposite. Hyori is a joyous, open and loving individual with an incredible degree of naivety about her. The kind you would expect to find in a young and inexperienced person. You know, like a Rebecca type of character, although Hyori is supposed to be 26 years old. These personalities really don't match though. In the space of a single appearance, the Kumurasaki slash Hyori character has changed in every single facet, except for that of visual design. And when I pointed that out in my initial chapter review, I had a lot of people making the basic argument that, well, Hyori was just pretending to be Kumurasaki to survive. And this is her real personality. And that particular thought is one that I just cannot accept. There is 100% guaranteed to be some deception at work here, but that cannot be it. Mostly because the way Hyori acts after encountering Zora gives us no reason to believe that she would be at all capable of manipulating the entire world around her. The thing about deception is that it really only goes one way and it is very difficult for a naturally naive and open person to commit such mental trickery. The explanation that I would find much more plausible is that the Kumurasaki persona was the real version of Hyori and what we're seeing right now in the current day is all an act. And that's because I could certainly believe that someone like Kumurasaki could pretend to be exceptionally naive, while I simply cannot believe that someone as frankly airheaded as Hyori could ever pull off being a mastermind that could rise to the level of the nation's most revered Oran. But then of course you have to come up with a reason why Hyori is deceiving people into thinking that she is less mentally capable than she really is. And I have two answers to that, but at this point I also want to introduce another significantly less satisfying idea into the mix. And that is that Oda, from time to time, does have a tendency to drop the ball with auxiliary female characters and relegates them to a very technical role in the story. For example, Viola on Dressroser, she was introduced as a merciless femme fatale of the Don Quixote family but almost immediately after encountering Sanji, her personality flipped to a caring, gentle and morally upstanding individual, which was her quote-unquote true personality and her time as an officer of the Don Quixote pirates was a twisted lie, narratively intended to provide a neat twist to introduce a princess of the Riku family. And this is a surprisingly common arc of a classically beautiful female character in one piece. I mean, going way, way, way back, that's also how Vivi was introduced as well as current straw Hatnika Robin herself and even Rebecca was briefly presented to us as an antagonist. Oh, and there's also Pudding, but her character is much more of a complicated mess. Being introduced as good, then turning bad, and then good, and then just becoming a big bipolar, something or other. But the general idea is that the femme fatale turned good is a painfully common trope used in one piece. However, the difference with the Hyori situation is that none of the other characters I've just mentioned have had such a radical personality shift upon the revelation of their true self. Pudding accepted, but that was kind of the point of the bipolar character. But take my first example of Viola for instance. She appeared as an antagonist holding a certain level of maturity and none of that was lost when she suddenly converted into a protagonist. The core value she presented changed, but her overall character remained solid and consistent. But in her transition from femme fatale to I guess we'll call it a damsel role, Hyori did not retain a shred of her former character. She lost all maturity, a huge degree of general intelligence, and had a complete personality shift from cold mastermind to warm bubbly, lovable girl thing. And I'll say it right here and now, if this is all there is to Hyori, then this is quite possibly the worst written character in the entirety of One Piece.  It is a shock to the system to see Komarasaki and Hyori juxtaposed, but there are a lot of mysteries that need solving behind it.  But putting the potential of awful character writing aside, one must come to the conclusion that the Hyori we are currently seeing is an act being put on by an individual whose personality resembles something closer to that of Komarasaki. Now why would she be deceiving Zoro and Kawamatsu? Well one simple explanation is that Hyori may be the traitor of the Alliance, and the reason why Kinemon's efforts keep being undermined at every step. However given that Hyori has clearly stated that she does want to kill Orochi, I find this to be, well, unlikely to say the least. Unless it's part of an even more convoluted plan to feed Orochi information that will eventually structure his downfall. That is an incredible stretch though, and I don't feel like either of those thoughts are going to be the answer. So naturally, my next explanation is going to be even more left field than that. And it's born from the fact that Hyori is currently deliberately hiding herself from the rest of the Scabbards and Momonosuke. Now this is allegedly because she doesn't want to distract the Alliance. And I don't know, maybe this makes perfect sense in like a manly Japanese mindset, make sure the woman isn't being a distraction at all, but I don't personally buy it. I think that once again putting the idea of bad writing to the side, there would be a consequence to Hyori showing herself to Kinemon and the others. And at this point I'm going to put out there the idea that this is not in fact Hyori, but Lady Toki pretending to be Hyori. I propose this because it's the only thing that even comes close to justifying her actions in my mind. It would make perfect sense for Toki to not want to see Kinemon, Momonosuke, and everyone else. She sent forward in time because they would immediately recognize her as they would have seen Toki very, very recently in the grand scheme of things. Meanwhile, you could reveal yourself to someone like Karl Matsu because he's had to live through the last 20 years, so his memory is hazy and he'd be more willing to accept such a thing. Actually come to think of it, despite the fact that Hyori slash Komarasaki is physically a carbon copy of Lady Toki. It's very important to point out that Karl Matsu did not recognize her at all at first. Of course, Karl Matsu also brings up the biggest piece of evidence that contradicts the thought of Toki impersonating Hyori, which is that Hyori proceeded to explain why she ran away from him, which is something that surely only Hyori would know. So once again I have to perform a bit of a stretch here and propose that Toki has been in contact with Hyori and knows if her past with Karl Matsu and for reasons is currently pretending to be her daughter. I don't think that maths checks out. So I'll move on to the next thought, where the ideas get more insane. When you consider the idea that Hyori and Toki could be in league together because they are near perfect physical copies of each other and whenever there is a doppleganger in a story you can rest assured that there will always be some sort of crazy reveal at some point. For example, maybe for a time both Hyori and Toki were playing the role of Komarasaki with Toki taking on the calculated dirty work in order to keep Hyori safe. Then in an ultimate sacrifice to free Hyori from this life Toki allowed Kyoushiro to actually kill her in front of Orochi thus removing the Komarasaki persona from this world also removing the need for a narrative explanation of the fake death because it would have been a real death and one that may hit incredibly hard in a future flashback. Now I've gone on and on about this sort of stuff before in chapter reviews to which I often get a lot of comments with people bringing up the quote-unquote fact that Toki is dead. And you know, once we actually see what happens in the Odin flashback then I might just give up on all of this. However, right now all we have are the words of other characters to show as actual evidence for her death and something just really does not sit right with me about a woman with time travel powers dying in a blaze when she could have easily just gone forward in time again. Plus there's also the fact that very very recently Oda revealed that Toki had received a distinctive scar and I'm not saying that this is proof for anything but he went to some pretty great lengths to make sure that we saw the scar on Toki's thigh in a scene where it would have been just as easy to state that she had been injured and then have Odin go crazy from there. Oda doesn't often waste pages on unnecessary details unless it's for comic effect of course. So when I see something like this it immediately makes me think that this distinctive scar is being set up as some sort of dramatic revelation down the line. So I would keep an eye out for this little feature. Although maybe I'm wrong and Oda just felt like drawing some thighs. Nothing is said in stone but the whole Komarasaki Hyori Toki dynamic has far too many of these weird little features going on and I know I probably sound like a raving mad man going over all this crap but I would rather believe this than a world where Oda designed two female characters who look exactly the same for no good reason and proceeded to pull out his tried and tested femme fatale tones damsel card in the laziest way yet. Instantly taking one of the more intellectually fascinating characters on the island of Wano and dumbing her down to a naive girl who does nothing but fall nervous aura. And if this were almost any other story I wouldn't really care either. It's only because I have painfully high standards of One Piece that I have wasted my life thinking this in depth into something like this. But the One Piece fan within me just can't bring himself to believe that Oda would have done something this poorly.  Although one final nail in the coffin of my hopes may actually come as per usual in the form of the anime because Hiyori and Toki have different voice actors and you'd figure that if some sort of super Hiyori's Toki twist is going to take place then they would probably be the same person but then again that would completely give away the game and possibly spoil the manga so I'm not putting too much stock in the anime handing us evidence. In any case what this video effectively amounts to is a long rambling about an obscure topic that I've spent far too much mental energy on. The logical side of me is resigned to the fact that this is probably just Oda lazily writing yet another femme fatale turned damsel princess into the series to act as an object of motivation and that I should just give up on ever expecting something more. But the other part of me really wants to believe that there is a greater purpose behind the jarring contrast between Komarasaki and Hiyori. But that pretty much does it for what will probably amount to a pointless character rant. If you somehow enjoy this video and the content this channel produced in general then please do consider donating to the Groundline Review Patreon because the support of all of your amazing people is what continues to make this channel possible. And if you'd like to see more videos like this but applied to other anime manga series then please do check out my second channel New World Review for all of your wider needs. And if you'd like to join the fun at any time then please do head over to my Discord server where a wide array of shenanigans takes place on a daily basis. And finally please do comment with your thoughts on Komarasaki and or Hiyori. And you know what, Toki as well, why not. This has been the Groundline Review and I'll see you next time.