Over 2024-2025 Scottish Recovery Consortium have been directly engaging with recovery communities, people with lived experience and Lived Experience Recovery Organisations (LEROs) across Scotland. As part of those conversations, we have started to highlight and identify some of the gaps and challenges across Scotland. In December 2024, Scottish Recovery Consortium (SRC) commissioned Briege Nugent, an independent researcher to review the existing evidence to address a gap identified in the knowledge base about women and recovery. This research was commissioned by the Scottish Recovery Consortium to address a gap identified in the knowledge base about women and recovery. This was an exploratory review to understand the evidence and interrogate the pathways into substance for women, the motivating factors to begin recovery, challenges or barriers to engagement and to understand from the evidence what helps women to sustain recovery.

The structure of this rapid review of evidence is that it will firstly present the ‘facts’ currently available on substances and women in Scotland to provide context to the main analysis on women in recovery. Literature searches were carried out on Google Scholar and through Edinburgh University and over a hundred abstracts read for relevance. 45 papers were read in full for this review. Five were reviews of evidence, four were mixed methods studies, 13 quantitative studies and 23 qualitative studies. Nine of the imperial studies involved a cohort of men and women allowing for comparisons, three included practitioners’ views as well as women, and most studies (28) were based on evidence from women only. Five studies did not make it clear how many women they included in their study and five were reviews of evidence, so based on the other 35 studies this review reports on the views of over 24,000 women. Only five studies were Scottish specific, a few were English, one Australian, one Canadian and the rest, and therefore the significant evidence base was based on research carried out in the USA.