THERE are few better times in the year than the eve of International Women’s Day to consider, in brief, the situation of women in Scotland. This year will be the last March where Nicola Sturgeon will be in office, though the possibility that she will be followed by another woman seems quite likely.

Under our first female First Minister, a number of promises for change have been made and some important reforms have been enacted, particularly around public-sector understanding and responses to gender-based violence.

The Scottish government’s Equally Safe strategy around the eradication of gender-based violence has begun the work of taking a systemic approach to undoing several centuries of ingrained misogyny through interventions in education, local authority practice and in healthcare.

Changes to the prosecution of domestic and sexual offences such as the introduction of the Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm (Scotland) Act 2016, which criminalises aspects of image-based abuse and the Limitation (Childhood Abuse) (Scotland) Act 2017 which removed the three-year limitation period for personal injury actions that arose from childhood abuse.

Most recently, in her 2022-23 programme for government, Sturgeon announced a commitment to reform the criminal justice system through a new Criminal Justice Reform Bill. This will introduce legislation to protect the anonymity of those who report sexual crimes under Scots law and the end of the Not Proven verdict, which currently disproportionately impacts outcomes of sexual offences trials.

While these reforms are largely welcome, our optimism for sustained change is blunted somewhat violently by the startling material reality that lies before us as women. One wonders how the government can congratulate itself so sincerely for granting a range of policy commitments rendered conceited in the face of austerity and increased costs on a scale as we have never seen before.

Celebrating commitments to “feminist city planning” such as that advocated by Glasgow’s Green councillor Holly Bruce, which has seen Glasgow City Council promise recently that women are to be central to “all aspects of planning, public realm design, policy development and budgets” seems utterly unhinged as the council announced plans to make £130 million worth of “savings” in the next two years to account for a financial black hole on a scale which can only be described as metaphysically nihilistic.

Local authority commitments to trade union campaigns like Unite’s Get Me Home Safely, which seeks to encourage councils to compel employers to ensure safe home travel for night-time workers, seem to have been made in self-indulgent bad faith in the context of a fragmented and sparse public transport system which is barely operational and increased costs for taxi drivers which are driving meter rates up by 19 per cent.

A recent Scottish Women’s Budget Group report published in collaboration with the Scottish Poverty Alliance echoed the truth we have long known: “women are the shock absorbers of poverty.” The current economic situation globally and in Scotland will directly and disproportionately make women’s lives even more challenging and painful.

Poverty translates into an increase in sexual and domestic violence, economic exploitation and wage theft through expectations of the provision of unpaid care and higher rates of illness and death as crippled healthcare systems fail to meet our needs.

Younger women can look forward to nothing but a hypersexualised, precarious future while older women still wait for financial reparations for generations of discrimination in equal pay claims across the country.

Collectively, we continue to experience various acts of violence, degradation and disrespect. We struggle to claim our bodies as anything but tools for labour and reproduction. Men kill women and austerity enables them to do so. It is very clear that serious and systemic harm is caused to women by other more powerful women.

At this juncture, as women, one of the greatest tools of resistance available to us is a commitment to transforming the ways we configure our social and political relationships to one another in opposition to the competition, division, fragmentation and domination encouraged by capitalism. Hostility among women drives us even further towards barbarism.