gender

The Power of Exclusion – the time for raising awareness is gone

10 March, 2020 By WiC

Women’s career progression continues to be headline news. From the gender pay gap to #MeToo, Time’s Up and the ongoing under-representation of women in executive roles, it’s clear that women need a larger role at the top.

Despite the emphasis on the lack of women at board level, the gender pay gap and the need for greater diversity in management, the recent kickback about female talent development has been fueled by a fear of being seen to be favouring women or discriminating against men by taking steps to increase the ratio.

A report from Talking Talent says that the time for raising awareness is gone. Awareness hasn’t moved the needle. It’s time to take meaningful action.

Not about excluding men

However, it is really important to remember that this is not about excluding men, it’s about providing a platform that facilitates creating content and coaching that is tailored for women. In recognition that women often have a very different experience of their careers by comparison to their male colleagues. And there’s a difference. This isn’t positive discrimination. You’re not hiring a woman instead of a man, you’re nurturing your talent pipeline and ensuring you get the best from every person in your organisation

Not women only

Women-only shouldn’t mean only women. The crucial message is that women-centric is not the same as women only. This is very different to dividing genders, segregating or diminishing. Positive female-focused programmes absolutely must integrate managers and leaders of all genders, providing wrap-around inclusion and awareness sessions that inform and engage the relevant stakeholders. There’s nothing more powerful than men in senior positions promoting programmes for
women and understanding the foundations of female talent and why the organisation needs to protect the pipeline in the first place.

Return on Investment

Females improve financial results. It has been long proven that diverse leadership delivers better financial results. According to McKinsey & Co organisations in the top quartile for executive team gender diversity are reportedly 21% more likely to experience above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.*

Part of the ROI for these female-centric leadership programmes is that you are actively recognising a systemic problem, a shared set of experiences and challenges, for which you are designing a solution to address.

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Successes and Failures – reflections on women’s progress in 2019

10 March, 2020 By WiC

Liz Walker, Commercial Director at Distinctly, reflects on the successes and failures for women in 2019.

Like any year, 2019 has been a mixture of successes and failures for women’s rights. This is true whether we are talking about the rights of women in employment, women in the wider UK, or for women worldwide. One of the truly positive notes to come from the December 2019 Westminster election was that this Parliament has the most female MPs in history, and for the first time, more than a third of MPs are women. On the other hand, women at intersections with other minority groups, for instance LGBT women or women with disabilities, are facing a more hostile working and living environment than ever before. For International Women’s Day 2020, while we need to celebrate the great strides that have been made, we must also discuss the room for improvement that remains.

Successes

Highest proportion of women in work ever

One of the most positive statistics this year was that in August, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced that the number of women in employment was at its highest level in history, at 15.46 million. This number has continued to rise into early 2020, with a new record already established at 15.61 million women in employment, equating to 72.4% of the women’s labour market. This continuing growth in women’s employment highlights that employers are becoming far better at hiring female candidates. Given that this growth in women in employment is credited with the growth in the UK economy that has occurred since 2012, this is a fantastic note of positivity.

Rise in working mothers

A major driving factor behind the growth of women in employment is that mothers are now far more likely to continue working, with approximately 72% of working-age mothers now remaining in paid work. While there is still a tendency for women who are parents to move from full-time to part-time work, this is still a positive trend, and has helped lead to a massive rise in the number of dual-earning families. This is believed to have been driven by a rise in flexible working opportunities.

1 in 3 FTSE 100 directors are now women

For the first time in history, 1 in 3 individuals on the boards of FTSE 100 companies are women. While this number falls behind target for the wider FTSE 350, this is still a fantastic growth given that only a decade ago women made up only 12.5% of FTSE 100 board members. With a growth in women in leadership roles, we can expect changes in wider workplace culture to continue at an ever accelerating rate. However, we still need to bear in mind that this is only the start of the change that is needed. The report also stresses the fact that some roles, such as finance directors, are still well below the 33% target, showing there is still significant room for improvement.

Failures

Statistics fail to show underlying problems

Unfortunately, while there are some very positive statistics for 2019, they fail to account for some underlying structural problems. First, women are still expected to be the primary provider of childcare, carrying out 60% more unpaid work than men, especially in terms of childcare provision. This is partly influenced by the fact that Shared Parental Leave, designed to allow parents to split the workload of looking after their newborn between them, has seen abysmal uptake. Only 9,200 new parents used the scheme in 2017/18, which was just over 1% of those eligible, highlighting the fact that cultural changes around childcare are far from complete. This has certainly not been helped by the fact that the cost of childcare for children under 2 has risen by 5%, meaning that in attempting to return to work, many women would actually be incurring a financial cost.

Similar socio-cultural issues can be seen elsewhere — for instance, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), women are still expected to undertake the majority of housework. This is believed to be a major factor behind many parents not taking up full-time roles when they return to work, even where it has a major impact on their pay. These underlying cultural problems are being slowly eroded, but they are still impacting the ability of working women to work in the roles they would like to, due at least in part to the need to balance their responsibilities as primary caregiver to their children against pursuing their careers.

Women are still facing pay-based discrimination, even in government

Mandatory gender pay gap reporting has now existed for companies with 250 employees and above for three years. Despite this fact, women are still routinely being paid less than their male colleagues, with little change to the 11% average pay difference seen over the past two years. Even women employed directly by the government, who purport to be looking to end discrimination against women, are failing to be paid an equal wage for the work they do. While 13 of the 18 government departments large enough to conduct reporting had managed to decrease their gender pay gap, one saw no change, and the remaining four saw an increase. Of the 18 departments, only one, the Department for Work and Pensions, had no reported gender pay gap. This raises serious questions about how the government could possibly hope to succeed in changing the private sector pay gap when it is busy failing its female employees.

Women in niche industries are still being failed by employers

Across the STEM and creative industries, women are still being left behind. While there are definitely positives, such as the number of women engineers doubling in the past decade, and 1 million women now working in STEM occupations, this shift has not been occurring consistently. In some sectors within STEM, women have actually dropped as a percentage of the workforce despite increased numbers, due to an even higher number of men entering these fields. A good example of this is Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) managers, where despite growing every year since 2015, the number of women in SET has dropped heavily as a percentage.

In fact, between June 2018 and June 2019, over 300,000 men entered STEM employment, compared with only 150,000 women. With men thus offering an even larger proportion of the overall talent pool, they are statistically more likely to receive promotions and pay rises, further contributing to the marginalisation of women in the STEM workforce.

This same struggle can be seen in the creative industries. Despite a 30.6% growth in the creative industries between 2011 and 2018, women still make up only 37% of the employees, with a growth rate of under 3% in the past 6 years. Between 2017 and 2018, the number of women in creative fields actually dropped, despite overall growth. Clearly, despite the fact that the picture across the wider workforce looks so positive, for women in STEM or the creative industries, there is a lot of work still to be done. As two major growth industries in the UK for the past decade, continued domination of these fields by men implies that — without major changes — gender imbalance in the UK economy is likely to persist for a long time.

See also Visualizing the data: Women’s representation in society (released by the UN)

We cannot wait until 2090 for gender balance on executive committees

19 July, 2019 By WiC

Another wasted year

Despite the Government setting a target of 33% women in leadership roles at FTSE 350 companies by 2020, and despite a flow of formal reviews, The fourth consecutive report, Women Count, produced by Pipeline shows there has been little to no progress. This independent report of the FTSE 350 has found that:

Only 3.7% of companies have female CEOs – and this is down from 4.6% two years ago
More than 85% of companies have no women executives on their main boards#
Only 9% of executive directors on main boards are women, unchanged since 2017
A mere 17.1% of executive committee members are women, a tiny increase of just 0.8% since 2018
One in five companies have no female members of their executive committees at all
At the current rate of progress, it will be almost 2090 before executive committees achieve gender balance#
Just 5% of executive committee positions are held by women in roles with profit and loss2 (P&L) responsibility
More than half of FTSE 350 companies have no women on their executive committees in a P&L role at all
This situation is replicated on the main indices of major economies across the world, with India and Germany having no women CEOs at all, while China, Hong Kong, the USA, Spain and France have only one each

The fact is that many FTSE 350 companies are failing to offer talented women access to key executive positions as such opportunities continue to be given automatically to men.

Why does this matter?

Evidence shows that the failure to draw on a wider pool of ability actually damages the companies themselves. Those FTSE 350 companies with 25% or more women on their executive committees last year achieved an average 16% net profit margin3 while those with no women achieved just 6%. P&L roles are the pipeline for future CEOs and if women are blocked at that stage then they will not get the chance to run companies and companies will not get the chance to benefit from their broader talent pool.

Why don’t companies address the problems of gender imbalance?

Where there are already women at the top of companies, the evidence shows they are much better at progressing other female talent. Research reveals that women CEOs have twice the average number of women in executive positions than their male counterparts, and FTSE 350 companies led by women have an average of seven times more female executives on their main board than those led by men.

It is hard not to conclude that where men are in charge, they tend not to want to let go of their grip and allow women a share of the action.

6 Key Facts

1: Business performance is maximised when they promote women

2: Women on executive committees

3: It’s not just about numbers, the type of role matters

4: Female leaders succeed at progressing all talent, where male CEOs fail

5: Company boards remain a male executive preserve

6: Across the globe, it’s still a man’s world

4 Recommendations

MAKE IT THE CEO’s RESPONSIBILITY
ESTABLISH HARD TARGETS
TRANSPARENCY IS KEY
GOVERNANCE

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Blah equality, Blah gender, Blah workplace Blah …

15 April, 2019 By WiC

Enough talk. We’ve heard it all before. Let’s just do it!

These words, a tweet from @LaraOyedele popped into my timeline in response to an article in Diversity Woman Magazine which revealed that, according to research by Bank of America Merill Lynch, “Gender equality can lead companies to make more money.”

This revelation is by no means ground-breaking. Our Knowledge Bank is full of research documents saying the same thing. Yet

Gender pay gap set to last for 36 years

Recent research by Easymoney suggests that the pay gap between top earners is unlikely to close until 2055. The research found that 79% of the 860,000 people earning over £100k pa are men. This has fallen only marginally since 2011, when 83% of the top earners were men.

Academics Geraldine Healy, Queen Mary University of London and Mostak Ahamed, University of Sussex have taken an in-depth look at the Financial Services Sector and identified that women, on average, earn 27.2% less than men an hour, whilst the bonus gap is nearly 50% (and 79% at Barclays).

Moreover, the lack of progress of women in Financial Services is a global phenomenon. IMF chief, Christine Lagarde said at Davos: “The numbers are just appalling … you have 20% of board members and 2% of CEOs who are women.”

2019 Pay Gap reporting reveals poor progress

This year’s Pay Gap figures indicate that far from the pay gap narrowing in the past year, it’s widened with four in ten private companies reporting wider gaps than last year. Surely it’s time for companies to publish Action Plans alongside data and narrative.

The pace of change is slow – let’s change that!

At a recent Lunch, I sat with 3 other women. By pure coincidence we were aged 75, 65, 55 and 45. Our conversation turned to the progress of women in the workplace. We concluded that (1) regrettably there has been much less progress than any of us anticipated and (2) none of us thought at the age of 25 that we’d be saying this 20, 30, 40, 50 years later.

Yes, it’s time to be a bit more Lara – LET’S JUST DO IT!

Moving jobs, negotiating a pay rise? Check out what your worth first.

9 January, 2019 By WiC

Are you earning what you’re worth?

– global executive gender pay gap falls dramatically to 8.7%
– UK gap nearly halves since March to 12%
– US leads the way with gap dropping to 2%
– CEOs have the biggest gender gap of 31%
– in Technology, gender gap has reversed in favour of women

Research published last November has highlighted the impact equality legislation is having on the gender pay gap for senior executives, with the global gap nearly halving to from 17.1% to under nine percent (8.7%).

While the UK is witnessing the largest narrowing of the gap – in the six months from March it fell from 21.5% to 12.2% – executive pay is noticeably more equitable in the US, where the gender gap decreased from 7.9% to 2% during the same period.

The findings have emerged from global analysis of remuneration packages of over 7,700 executives earning over $100,000 conducted by The Pay Index, the leading source for senior executive compensation and part of the international human capital specialist firm Leathwaite.

Before new regulations in the UK were implemented in April the gap was significantly larger. In the United States, last year’s introduction of legislation in several states which restricts companies from asking prospective employees about their existing pay has effectively given the country a six-month lead in the battle for pay parity.

James Rust, founder and managing director of The Pay Index said

These laws have put gender pay firmly under the spotlight. The Pay Index is providing us with an unrivalled insight into the current global gender pay gap – and with over 100 new executives adding their profiles every week, it’s allowing this on-going debate to be underpinned by real-time statistics.

However, there is still much work to be done to create parity, but the speed and direction of the trend is a very positive sign. We’re hopeful that in a further six months, the size of the gap we’re seeing in the UK will gravitate much more closely to those figures in the US.

It’s well documented that companies are facing increasing challenges to attract and retain talent – at all levels – due to skills shortages, high employment levels and increasing job opportunities. As such, companies with gender pay gaps will find it increasingly difficult to maximise their performance if they do not embrace pay parity. Pay parity is a positive thing for both individuals and business.

The Pay Index analysed trends within ten key industries over the last six months

Key Findings

CEO … the gender gap has almost halved. Currently men receive 30.5% more vs March when they were paid 52% more than women
Legal … the gender gap is falling. Currently men receive 29.1% more vs March when they were paid 35.4% more than women
Technology … the gender gap has reversed in favour of women. Currently women receive 9.2% more vs March when men were paid 6% more than women
COO / Operations … the gender gap has shrunk and is now almost non-existent. Currently women are paid 0.1 % more vs March when men were paid 11.9% more than women
Sales, product, marketing and digital … the gender gap has almost halved. Currently men get paid 8.6% more vs March when they were paid 15.5% more than women
Risk … the gender gap is falling. Currently men get paid 2.1% more vs March when they were paid 4.6% more than women
Audit … the gender gap has narrowed but still favours women. Currently women receive 16.2% more than men vs March when they were paid 23.7% more than men
Information Security … the gender gap has narrowed but still favours women. They currently receive 11% more vs March when they were paid 13.2% more than men
Finance, Tax & Treasury … the gender gap has widened in favour of men. They currently receive 7% more vs March when they were paid 3.1% more than women
Compliance … the gender gap has narrowed slightly but still favours women. Currently women receive 5% more vs March they were paid 6.6% more than men
HR … the gender gap is falling, but in a function where there are more women employed than men, currently men receive 14% more vs March when they were paid 18.6% more than women

Check out your salary

About the data:
– the findings are based on the analysis of 7,708 senior global executives in September
– the respondents analysed lived in 452 different cities across 64 countries
– the original data set (3,912 respondents) was captured in March
– approximately half of the database work within companies with over 10,000 employees
– 90% of the database possess a Bachelors’ and / or Masters’ degree
– 86% of the database possess 16 or more years in industry

About The Pay Index:
The Pay Index, which is the leading source for senior executive compensation, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Leathwaite Human Capital Limited.

Leathwaite was formed in 1999 and is a leading international firm of human capital specialists with offices in London, New York, Hong Kong and Zurich. With a leading reputation for delivering exceptional executive search, executive interim, management consultancy and market intelligence solutions, Leathwaite is seen as a partner of choice for some of the world’s most innovative and ambitious companies.