Women: Contribution to Economic Life

Lord Watson of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Richmond (LD)]

My Lords, I add from these Benches my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Palumbo on his excellent and refreshing maiden speech. He explained that his business was muscular; I have the sense that his contributions to this House will be as well. We welcome him warmly.

Back in April 2009, I had the strange experience of being invited to lecture at a university in Mecca. I was told that up to that point I was the first non-Muslim to be invited to lecture. The subject that was given to me, partly because of my involvement with Cambridge University, was excellence in higher education. I remember arriving by car and stopping outside the university’s marble halls, where I was met by the rector, who appeared to have stepped directly out of a David Lean movie and was very dramatic. As he took me into the hall, he said: “There will be about 4,000 people in the hall but of course no women”. I looked slightly surprised and he said: “They are watching on closed-circuit television from a separate campus 25 kilometres away”. I said: “Will they be able to ask questions?”. “Oh yes,” he said, “and they assuredly will”. So they did, and their questions were among the best and sharpest. The women are involved in the university, mainly as medical students, and it is in the medical field that they are able to study alongside men.

I recount that experience because, when we talk about the underrepresentation of women in certain sectors, we tend to think of barriers that are sometimes difficult to define and, for that reason, somewhat difficult to eradicate. When you have a barrier that is as physical and obvious as the one that I have just described, in a sense the problem is more obvious and the challenge more manageable. In Britain barriers to women realising their full potential are much less obvious and therefore harder to eradicate fully. I shall focus on two aspects: first, underrepresentation in the sciences at university level and in subsequent careers and, secondly, underrepresentation at board level, especially membership of executive committees.

First, on university and career levels, the Women’s Business Council, which has been referred to several times in this debate, in its very good report last June, Maximising Women’s Contribution to Future Economic Growth, shows quite conclusively that while girls outperform boys at GCSE and A-level, and the gap may be widening, when it comes to university places women take up only 13% of engineering places, 18% of technology places and 22% of mathematics places, while the figures are 89% for nursing, 85% for educational studies, 73% for linguistics and classics and 72% for language and literature. We know that there are a number of reasons why this is the case, and that they are interconnected.

Later today I shall be doing an interview for a webcast with Professor Dame Ann Dowling. Hers is a remarkable career. She is a non-executive director with BP, she heads up the engineering faculty at Cambridge University, now the university’s largest faculty, and she has recently been elected—the first woman so to be—as president of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK. She publicly condemns the fact that fewer than 8% of UK engineers are women and that so few women actually study engineering. She sees this bald single fact as “stark”, “terrible” and a huge loss of talent. Light-heartedly, she urges parents to buy Lego for their daughters and to encourage them to mend bicycles and to get mucky. Much more seriously, though, she says that one of the problems is an A-level system that allows young people to ditch maths and science at 16. The failure to take the opportunity at university level, and subsequently in careers, will be affected by role models, and I think that Ann Dowling is an important role model for young women in this area. She has had, and continues to have, a brilliant career.

In her report for the Women’s Business Council, Ruby McGregor-Smith points out the inadequacy of careers advice to girls at schools as being another important factor—they are simply not well informed about the opportunity that exists for the sort of career that Ann Dowling has had. The Ofsted report on careers advice is very important; it urges government and business to encourage girls into STEM subjects and careers. I ask my friends on the Front Bench what the Government really intend to do to take forward rapidly the priorities that emerged from the Ofsted study.

What actually can be done? Let us look at a few of the aspects of this issue. Unless the UK brings more women into work, into STEM careers and into the boardroom, it is calculated that it could forgo 10% of GDP growth by 2030. This really must not happen. The 30% Club, to which I belong, calculates that any man starting work at a FTSE 100 company is 4.5 times more likely to reach the level of being an executive than any woman. Currently only 20% of FTSE 100 boards have female board members. More tellingly and, I believe, more importantly, only 70% have female executive directors and only four have female CEOs.

My right honourable friend in the other place, Vince Cable, urges now that we should really look at all-women shortlists for boards, and reference has been made to that proposal already in this debate. As we all know, there are problems with such a course. Among other things, the Equality and Human Rights Commission would have to advise on the legality of such shortlists. I do not know what General de Gaulle’s position was on female equality, but he was famous for saying frequently that the French, in choosing between liberté, égalité and fraternité, have an instinct always to go for égalité. To achieve that égalité sometimes involves a changing balance with liberté. In charting the way forward and realising the potential contribution of women to the UK economy, we will need to consider that balance between, if you like, the volume of liberté and the power of égalité. What is clear is that for us as a nation and as an economy, the present underrepresentation of women in the workforce and in the boardroom must not continue. It is in fact deeply damaging and, essentially, intolerable.

We may be dealing with attitudes that are absolutely intractable. The phrase has been used that many of the attitudes that lie behind this are “hard-wired” into both genders. There was a little illustration of this the other day with Chancellor Merkel, who has already been referred to today as a role model—indeed she is; what an extraordinary political career and achievement—as the phrase that is used to describe her is “Übermutter”. It has never occurred to anyone to describe her as an “Überfrau”. Now there is a role model for you.

Whether it is hard-wired or not, how deeply set some of the attitudes are may be an acceptance of things too easily by many women and girls and an inability to see things as they are by far too many men. The fact is that this is unfinished business. If we as a country are to be as competitive as we have to be, this is something that has to be addressed and changed.