Lucy Hunter Blackburn

Lucy is a freelance researcher with a particular interest in the conduct of public policy making, with two decades’ experience as a policy maker in local and national government, culminating in ten years as senior civil servant in the Scottish government. She has a special interest in higher-education policy, on which she has published, contributed to inquiries and been extensively quoted; she recently completed a PhD on student funding and inequality at the University of Edinburgh. She is a past board member of the Howard League for Penal Reform Scotland. 

In late 2018, with Dr Kath Murray and Lisa Mackenzie, she formed MBM Policy, a policy analysis collective currently focused on how questions related to sex and gender identity are approached in policy making in Scotland.  

“I can’t remember a time I was not aware of how sex has shaped women’s lives, now and in the past, here and globally. My mother was born the year women gained the vote on equal terms to men. My grandmother died young from poorly treated gestational diabetes. Within my own lifetime, it was legal to pay women less than men. This is history within touching distance. We still live in a world where sex too often is noticed when women would benefit from it being ignored; and ignored when women would benefit from it being noticed. Sex will matter to me for as long as that persists.”