A nine-year-old girl rushes up to former SNP politi­cian Anum Qaisar, burst­ing to ask her a ques­tion as she leaves the stage. The 33-year-old, who was elec­ted to Par­lia­ment at just 28, Scot­land’s second ever female Muslim MP, is decked out in her trade­mark black dress, long fake lashes and high heels.

She’s at the five star Old Course Hotel in St Andrews and has just delivered a cap­tiv­at­ing talk on ‘what lead­er­ship looks like when the room isn’t built for you’, at the inaug­ural Scot­tish Women’s Well­being Sum­mit

It’s no won­der this wee girl, also from an eth­nic minor­ity back­ground, is so drawn to Anum and tries to artic­u­late her utter amazement about a story she’s heard – one in which a hus­band has flatly refused to help his wife with the house­hold chores, even though they both work.

She’s des­per­ate for Anum to make sense of it for her. Anum looks stumped… pre­sum­ably at the chal­lenge of how to explain the weight of pat­ri­archy and social inequal­it­ies to someone so young, without dampen­ing her child­ish optim­ism.

Hes­it­antly she says, “I know, it is shock­ing.

What we’re say­ing at the organ­isa­tion that I work for [gender equal­ity char­ity The Faw­cett Soci­ety, where she’s a mem­ber of the board of trust­ees] is that there needs to be more change from the gov­ern­ment to help women.”

But this lone child [daugh­ter of one of the speak­ers] at a con­fer­ence oth­er­wise full of grown women, entre­pren­eurs and busi­ness lead­ers, is not alone in her frus­tra­tion and bewil­der­ment.

The speaker who is most voci­fer­ous in call­ing out the gov­ern­ment is Sally Pattle, Lib Dems rep­res­ent­at­ive of Lin­lithgow ward, who also runs inde­pend­ent book­shop Far From The Mad­ding Crowd: “The situ­ation is get­ting worse. We need the gov­ern­ment to urgently pub­lish the second phase of the Women’s Health Plan and give clear goals on tack­ling health inequal­ity, and a path­way to achiev­ing those goals.”

In the breaks, women swap stor­ies of not being listened to, made to feel stu­pid or being fobbed off. One talks of going to her GP with men­o­pause symp­toms and being told “google it”.

Another tells of her daugh­ter, a uni­versity stu­dent, suf­fer­ing with low mood due to the con­tra­cept­ive pill; a fact the fam­ily only real­ised in Covid when she ran out of it.

I wit­ness another del­eg­ate tell the Scot­tish film-maker and author Kate Muir that her doc­u­ment­ar­ies, made with Dav­ina Mccall, on men­o­pause changed her life. They gave her the con­fid­ence to keep advoc­at­ing for her­self in the face of res­ist­ance from NHS pro­fes­sion­als, and enabled her to keep doing her dir­ector level job.

As Kate’s own present­a­tion describes, women’s health (or, rather, poorly man­aged ill health) is a ser­i­ous eco­nomic issue; her research with Chan­nel 4 found that one in ten women quit due to men­o­pause. Seven out of ten say they have brain fog because of it.

If we can cham­pion what we want to hap­pen, then we can make it hap­pen, because we are women

Con­sequently, Les­ley set out to cre­ate a lead­er­ship event with lots of heart and (dare I say it?) soul. Judging from the amount of teary eyes throughout the entire day, she man­aged.

From fit­ness entre­pren­eur Lee Don­ald talk­ing about the huge emo­tional toll of sum­mit­ing Everest to human rights law­yer Dr Debora Kayembe on racism she exper­i­enced in Bonny­rigg, every speaker soun­ded like they genu­inely cared about their mes­sage land­ing.


Les­ley is undeterred and com­mit­ted to her vis­ion of mak­ing Scot­land a global centre of excel­lence for women’s well­being at work. She’s plan­ning retreats in Janu­ary and May, then one in Bar­ba­dos in Septem­ber, with the Sum­mit also return­ing next year.

Another chal­lenge she’ll con­tinue to face is that the con­tent is eas­ily dis­missed as “women’s stuff ”. Even more so when you tell people what you did with strangers at this con­fer­ence: chanted on a windy West Sands beach at 7am before whoop­ing in the waves; held their hands and knocked their knees in a ses­sion on joy; and walked over hot coals with them, while they bashed tam­bour­ines, akin to some tri­bal ritual.

But if you’re rolling your eyes as you read this (and this is a reac­tion I’ve seen from women, as well as men) then con­sider the women you care about. How are they doing? Have you actu­ally asked them? Are you tak­ing their health ser­i­ously?

It could be that when asked the last time they felt joy, like one woman I was partnered with, they can­not think of one single example. Oh, except the birth of her child. Years ago.

Coun­cil­lor Sally Pattle believes women’s health affects us all because “women change the world in myriad ways every single day, from the small to the large.

“We need to keep talk­ing about this and com­ing together as women. We need to bring these issues into the light. If we can cham­pion what we want to hap­pen, then we can make it hap­pen, because we are women. And that’s what we do. We battle on.”