While this chapter focuses on gender in Scotland, it is important not to think that it is simply concerned with women, but is about relations between the sexes. Gender, in other words, is relational.

This chapter aims to:

• provide a sociological understanding of gender relations and gender inequalities in Scotland.
• examine whether there is a specific Scottish focus on gender, particularly in terms of cultural assumptions and reflected in public images.
• analyse how women and men construe their social identities, and in particular focus on how they relate national and gender identities.
• provide a ‘gender audit’ in terms of inequalities between men and women, and explore how these may have altered over time.
• ask whether the key to gender inequalities lies in the domestic division of labour, in the intimacies of family life.
• focus on gender in politics in Scotland, in the context of the Scottish parliament and constitutional change.