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I am a graduate.

Good morning, Professor Logan. Thank you for joining us. One area that I want to explore that has not come up yet is the issue of gender stereotyping in computing science and so on. I know that one of your 34 recommendations was on that issue. You gave a status report on the teaching profession. Can you break down those numbers for us and say what percentage of teachers are women, and will you give us a flavour of where we are in relation to making progress in that area?

That is fine. It was just a throwaway question.

You mentioned earlier that you have piloted the approach with a couple of bodies. Can you tell me a bit more about your roll-out processes and, in particular, what success looks like? How are you measuring that?

Okay. Thank you.

Finally, AI is pervasive. What are the barriers that restrict women’s access to a profession in that area, and what are the opportunities? I do not know whether you have given that issue any thought at all.

I just have a couple of questions. I appreciate the challenges that you have set out around developing the principles and the concept of balancing rights and making sure that it does not slip into, in effect, a hierarchy of rights, which is where many organisations have fallen foul. What, if any, international comparisons were you able to draw from when developing your principles?

You have cited Estonia quite a lot. Some of the gender issues that you have outlined are replicated elsewhere. Just for the record, how do the stats for Scotland compare with those for other countries, such as Estonia, for computing science teachers and the general profession?

I feel as though we could talk for hours about the systemic issues for women in such professions.

If I make the link back to teaching, an issue is the percentage of women in teaching compared with that of men. Sometimes, we will bemoan that because that brings other issues. However, are we missing a trick in not getting more teachers to teach computing science and attracting women to those roles? For other reasons, which I am not saying are right because they also play to societal bias, are we missing a trick by not just attracting teachers but attracting female teachers, because that would be one of the steps that would make that change?

That probably goes back to the comment you just made about the different types of complaints and where the weaknesses are from a rights-based perspective.

I often reflect back on my previous experience. In the private sector, if somebody new came in and said, “Frankly, I think we all agree that this is a bit of a mess,” with cost overruns, as you have set out, and a burgeoning set of commissioners, they might then say—even if they did not follow it through—“I tell you what: I’m going to get rid of them all.” Then, they would listen to the squeals.

What I am asking is whether the public sector is bold enough, in any of the component parts that we are discussing—we realise that there are different bodies—to take the steps that are really required, given our broad agreement about inefficiency and, sometimes, ineffectiveness, lack of governance, lack of scrutiny and so on.