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There has been a great deal of progress over the years. I am very pleased that recent data from the Scottish health survey shows a significant four percentage points increase in women meeting the UK chief medical officer’s recommended levels of activity: the level has gone up from 61 to 65 per cent and the gap between levels of participation by men and women is closing. However, although we are delighted that things are headed in the right direction, I do not think that any of us would want to be complacent. We have to continue to work to improve that situation.

There have been some brilliant leadership successes, particularly with younger women taking up opportunities for leadership in sport. Again, I am delighted to see that progress but we cannot be complacent. Although we are seeing more female athletes participating in sport, when it comes to sports governing bodies and the organisation of sport in general, we are not seeing that participation reflected in the boardroom, nor are we seeing the level of participation that we would like to see in the governance of sport, in terms of officials and things like that. So we have more work to do, but we have some good things to report.

You will be aware that, between the pandemic and the challenges that we faced in balancing the budget last year, some tough decisions were made and we did not progress with some work that we had intended to do. It is still our aim to hold a media summit and to challenge some of the reporting around female participation in sport. There are challenges. Football is our national game and everybody loves it, but it probably gets more coverage than almost all the other sports put together. I think that you heard about some of that in your evidence.

The fact that women are playing football, and playing it successfully, means that they are now gaining some coverage, but that does not help to celebrate the successes of other sports. An athlete who is involved in judo gave evidence to you, but the football coverage does not help to give her sport the profile that it deserves. Let me tell you that we are very successful at judo in Scotland and we have some fantastic female athletes participating in that sport.

There are real challenges, although I think that there is a cultural change afoot. There has been some change, particularly with broadcast media—I must credit BBC Alba for its work bringing women’s sport to television. That is phenomenally important. Every year, we have a women and girls in sport week, and every time we are told just how important it is for people to see the roles that they want to be in:

“If you can’t see it, you can’t be it”.

That is vital. I am absolutely passionate about sport. I have not found a sport yet that I do not like. I would like to see coverage of a more diverse range of sports and, absolutely, a celebration of those female athletes who are challenging some of the stereotypes in society.

I am a passionate rugby fan. When I see some of the social media films that are brought out about the Scottish women’s rugby team, where they are lifting weights and are shown as really strong physical role models, that busts the myth about women in general. It is really important that more people see those things.

There is no doubt that what you have highlighted are challenges to women’s participation in sport. Safety—and safe transport to and from sporting venues—is an issue, particularly during the long, dark winters that we have in Scotland, when not everyone feels comfortable being out and about at night. Frankly, some of our environments are not safe for women. Again, that is something that every woman makes decisions about every day. It is the reality of our lives: we make decisions about how much risk we are willing to take and make compromises as a result.

Designing communities with good active transport links to sporting hubs is therefore important. A couple of weeks ago, I opened the phenomenal West Lothian Cycle Circuit, which is linked to active transport routes, is well lit and has been beautifully made so that you can cycle to the track from many parts of the surrounding community.

It is important that we think about those sorts of things, including public transport. In my part of the country, and where I live now, public transport barely exists at all; indeed, where I used to live in the east of the Highlands, public transport tended to stop at a certain time of night. These are undoubtedly challenges and barriers for women, and we need to think about them by designing public transport systems that are accessible to and safe for women and by ensuring that communities are well lit and well designed.

I saw the evidence from one of the committee’s earlier witnesses about the fact that women feel more comfortable and safer walking in overlooked places—say, where there are lots of windows looking out onto a path. It is not always obvious what makes the difference, but we need to do more research and ensure that our communities are safe for women.

Childcare and caring in general are really important issues, too. I have been encouraging many sports to think about opportunities to link up. Given that women do a lot of children’s activities and organise a lot of aspects of children’s lives, we need to provide opportunities for women to participate in sport while their children are doing the same. I remember very well what the first captain of the Orkney Rugby Football Club ladies said about her journey into rugby. She was a rugby mum who had to hang about while her wee boy was at training and just thought, “How about we start training ourselves?” Within two or three years, that women’s team was picking up silverware—they were pretty phenomenal at rugby. Giving women opportunities to train while their children are training is important.

Jogscotland does a lot of that. I participated in a jogscotland group when my kids were really tiny; I could drop my children off at nursery and go for a jog with an inspirational group that was mixed gender, but mainly women, as it was during the day. There were some outstanding older women in that group who gave me, as a young mum feeling very out of condition, a lot of inspiration about the potential for lifelong participation.

There are some real opportunities for collaboration to provide—in that first postnatal year, for example—yoga and exercises that are focused on pelvic health. That would be a win-win. Encouraging more of that, with babies coming along, too, would be a really important way of encouraging women to exercise.

As for the school estate, we have, again, lots of policies in place to enable its use, and it is seeing lots of use. More could happen and we could go further, but we have made a great deal of progress in the past years. We have had a challenging few years with the pandemic, with safety and prevention of infectious diseases at the forefront of people’s minds. Trying to limit the number of people who access the school estate in a day has been challenging, and that situation has been slow to recover, post pandemic, but we are making progress.

You are absolutely right to raise the issue. There is already general concern about each of those groups and the women and girls who fall into those individual categories. Undoubtedly, the barriers are greater for those who are in more than one group.

A group that particularly challenges me is people with disabilities, and I would love to see more participation from—and more opportunities for—that group across the board. When I went to a disability sport festival in Dingwall, I was so impressed by the work that was going on to target inclusion. That was probably over a year ago, so it was at a time when we were still feeling pretty cautious about the pandemic. Many of that group of participants had spent a lot of the pandemic being very isolated and very vulnerable, and it was really joyous to see them participating in sport, sometimes with siblings, as they might never get a chance to play those games or do that sport together in the way that other siblings do.

Some really important work is going on, and it is bearing some fruit, but we could do more. Last year, sportscotland’s young people’s sports panel ran a very powerful course that challenged us all to reflect on what adaptations we could make to encourage the participation of people with disabilities. When I speak to people participating in sport who have disabilities, almost all of them talk about how challenging it was to get involved in school; they were told to sit at the side in PE classes. As those education sessions amply demonstrated, it is really easy to make adaptations that enable everybody to be included, and my plea is for every possible opportunity to encourage inclusion and participation to be taken.

I can highlight some great examples. Recently, I went to a badminton club run by a coach called Rajani Tyagi, who had won a prize as sportscotland community coach of the year—or something like that; I have probably got the title of the award wrong, so apologies to Rajani if I have. She had done some fabulous work on encouraging participation by the black, Asian and minority ethnic community. It was just the basic things that you would expect, and what she was doing was spread by word of mouth. She targeted people; she made sure that they had a safe environment to come along to; and she held sessions at times that suited people. They were at 8 o’clock at night, which would have been quite late for me to be running around playing badminton, but it worked, because many of the people involved had caring responsibilities and it was a time of night when they were freed from those responsibilities and could participate.

It is just basic: you ask the community that you are targeting what would work for them, then you do it and you reach out. Rajani had a thriving badminton club, and she had done quite a lot of work on cricket as a way of targeting BAME participation. Some really powerful work was going on.

As for the LGBTQ+ community and homophobia in sport, I think that the committee has heard from earlier commentators that women’s sport has traditionally been quite a safe space; it has been inclusive and welcoming to everyone. We really need to be proud of and hang on to that as we go forward. Clearly, there is a debate to be had about trans participation in sport, and some challenging conversations are taking place on that issue, but I again make the plea that we focus on inclusion where possible, recognising just how important the benefits that everyone gets from participating in sport are.

Each of the communities that we have talked about will face marginalisation and challenging health outcomes, and sport can be part of the answer. We therefore really need to make sure that we consider inclusion, where possible. As I have said, women’s sport has had a relatively healthy attitude to earlier discussions in previous times, and we need to hang on to that.

Individual sports governing bodies are looking at that question to varying degrees. They want more participation, so it is absolutely in their interests to ask those questions and to pursue the answers. I do not think that the answer will be the same for every sport. It is also difficult to generalise about different ethnicities. Rajani Tyagi, the badminton coach whom I mentioned earlier, initially was largely targeting Muslim women’s participation, but a whole variety of people of different ethnicities were coming along. What she had done was create a safe space for people of different ethnicities to participate in sport.

There are all sorts of barriers—for example, certain religions might have rules around modesty or clothing, but not all of them do. Therefore, once you get the data, you need to ask in a sensitive way what the barriers are for people and try to take them away. As I said, participation is key; we are dead keen to improve participation and all the sports governing bodies will be trying to do that.

You are absolutely correct, James. That drop-off around puberty is well recognised and it is a long-established pattern. It is a challenging situation to shift. For children, we see a difference in participation that becomes statistically significant only between the ages of 13 and 15. Although boys participate more than girls, that does not become statistically significant until puberty. We see that difference continue throughout life. The reduction in participation is not permanent. Girls’ physical activity drops off at puberty, as does boys’ physical activity, but they re-engage at future points.

For women and girls, there will be expectations around caring roles from a very early age. There are challenges when girls hit puberty, because of the changes in their bodies. On my daily mile this morning, I was reflecting on the difference in my body confidence at age 50 compared with age 15, and I think that everyone would recognise such differences.

There are challenges for girls as they come of age in a gendered society such as the one that we live in at the moment. There are expectations with regard to body conformation and there is discomfort about menstruation. On the radio this morning, I heard a triathlete, Emma Pallant-Browne, talking about a photograph that she had posted of herself running with a bloodstained swimsuit. Menstruation is still taboo and body hair is still taboo. There are all sorts of reasons why girls stop exercising as we hit puberty.

It is a challenging issue to get into, but I think that we are in a healthier space than we have ever been in with regard to the debate that is occurring. There are particular programmes and other things that will help, including women and girls-only spaces. With regard to communal changing spaces, I note that women tend to have a preference for privacy, so changing the changing rooms so that it is possible for women and girls to change privately rather than in a communal space will help.

However, there is massive societal pressure and it will take time. We must not underestimate the societal pressure on women and girls to look a certain way, which we feel most strongly at the stage of life between the ages of 11 and 15.

Absolutely—that is a really good idea. We have committed to introducing during the current session of Parliament statutory guidelines for schools on increasing the use of generic items of uniform, and we have a lot of focus on reducing the cost of the school day. We have consulted on guidelines on school uniform and clothing. We engaged with pupils and undertook a public consultation. We are analysing the responses and our report summarising the findings will be published soon—pretty much around now, I would have thought. The costs of school uniform and of clothing and equipment for physical activity and sport come into it, and there will definitely be a focus on trying to reduce costs for families.

I think that looking at breast care is a really important part of that. It is definitely one of the reasons why there is a drop-off in participation. As we have discussed, there are lots of reasons, but that is one of them. Seeing what we can do to engage with that and improve the situation is really important.

Active schools co-ordinators are good at collaborating with the assets that already exist in the community and they make those links between the sports clubs in each local area. I know that Emma Harper’s part of the country is big on curling and ice sports, and my part of the country is big on shinty. We need to think about making links between the sports that are already being played in communities in order to give children and young people opportunities to join with assets that are already there. That is an important part of getting it right.

That is a real focus for the Government, and we have committed to double the funding for sport and physical activity in this parliamentary term. We are determined to focus that extra funding on tackling inequalities. You are absolutely right that there is pre-existing inequality in participation across the board.

Football, to give it credit as our national game, is the one sport where there is equal participation across all the socioeconomic groups. Every other sport favours the wealthy, so there is a socioeconomic divide for literally every other sport. How do we tackle and improve that? We are speaking to all the sports governing bodies about that. There are some amazing programmes in place. For example, Scottish Athletics is doing some great work going into communities where it would not normally operate and targeting those groups that might not naturally participate in athletics. That is gaining it participants from those particular areas of socioeconomic deprivation, but it is also gaining athletics a more ethnically diverse participant group. That is an example of specific work that can be done.

Socioeconomic issues should not be ignored. Women experience inequalities generally because of inequality in wealth, in power and in status—when I was the Minister for Public Health and Women’s Health, I used to talk about women experiencing health inequalities for those reasons. Women also experience inequalities in sport because they do not have as much money as men.

One of the basic things that we can do about that is to encourage those sports where money does not matter and make things such as participation in the daily mile integral to the school day in Scotland. That is a really important way to target absolutely everyone, so that boys and girls can participate in the same way. There are no economic barriers to participating in that activity every day.

We have 1,000 schools participating in the daily mile across 32 local authority areas, which is really good, but that is still only about half the children in Scotland—so about half of children are not doing the daily mile. It is just 15 minutes of exercise three times a week. I do my daily mile every day, let me be clear, but the recommendation is 15 minutes of exercise three times a week. For that, you get such a bang for your buck. You get measurable improvements in children’s fitness and a decrease in body mass index and body fat—all the physical changes—but you also get cognitive changes. Children are more able to learn, more confident, happier and calmer. The cognitive and mood impacts are huge for a very small investment in time and no money. It is about the most inclusive programme that we have for exercise in Scotland and we are pretty keen to expand it further. Everyone should do their daily mile.

It is a really challenging area and that is an excellent question.

I am absolutely passionate about sport. I want sport to be well funded but I want sport to be healthy and inclusive. There are two groups who are particularly vulnerable to alcohol sponsorship and alcohol advertising. The first group are children—there was a very dismaying study a couple of years ago that looked at the Calcutta cup in 2020 and found that children saw an alcohol prompt every 12 seconds as they watched that match on television. The other group that is particularly affected is people who are in recovery; they are particularly susceptible to advertising.

I believe that we can strike a balance. We have to start from a place where we acknowledge how much alcohol harm there still is in Scotland. Over 1,000 people a year, or around 24 people a week, die of drinking alcohol in Scotland. Although we have made some progress in recent years, it is absolutely essential that we continue to make progress.

There is a perception that the people who are dying of alcohol are a distinct group that you can somehow target with your intervention. There is some truth in that—there is no doubt that the socioeconomic divide appears here as well. If you are living in poverty and drinking excessively, you are more likely to die than somebody who is wealthy and drinking excessively. However, alcohol and alcohol misuse and harm from alcohol know no bounds; we saw that over the course of the weekend, when a couple of colleagues spoke up. Miles Briggs and Monica Lennon, both of whom lost parents to alcohol, have spoken very powerfully about the stigma of alcohol dependence and misuse.

It is important for us to have those conversations about what we can do, at population level, that would shift the curve somewhat, so that fewer people find themselves in a situation where they are drinking hazardously. A discussion around sport sponsorship, promotion and advertising is a really important part of that national conversation.