Is transparency an optional extra?

Critical to delivering equality is an understanding that discrimination is based on a power imbalance between people who share a protected characteristic. White people have for centuries wielded unequal power over the lives of black people, with the second half of the 20th century witnessing some of the major struggles to rebalance that power in places like the confederate states of the USoA and in the apartheid of South Africa.

Throughout the 20th century, women challenged the male hegemony in areas such as the right to vote in the first half and then equal pay in the second half. The role of government in all of these struggles must include shining the light of transparency on the extent to which power remains imbalanced and discrimination remains culturally entrenched.

The absence of transparency sustains discrimination. This Research Note examines the extent to which Scottish government favours transparency or the shadows of entrenchment.