Women: Contribution to Economic Life

Baroness Prosser Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

I, in turn, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for tabling this debate today and join her in wishing others a very happy and progressive International Women’s Day.

When the noble Baroness opened the debate, she talked, among many other things, about the work currently being done which helps women who are rather towards the top of the employment field: getting more women on boards, et cetera. All that is very welcome and I am extremely pleased about it, but I want to concentrate my remarks on the situation for women who are rather further down. A woman who used to work in the Transport and General Workers’ Union used to say, “Stop talking about the glass ceiling. My women have not got past the skirting board”. An awful lot of women are in that position.

Back in 2004, I was asked by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to chair a commission of inquiry into the continuing gender, pay and opportunities gap—opportunities is an important word there. Eighteen months later, in February 2006, we produced our report, entitled Shaping a Fairer Future. We made 40 recommendations, many to government, many to employers and others; 98% of those recommendations were accepted. Our work took us across all four nations—we took evidence in Scotland, Ireland and Wales as well as in many places in England. Many people came to us. I felt as though I spent my life in the basement of the old DTI building, with no windows; it was quite a trying time. We took evidence from academics, from those involved in women’s organisations and from women themselves—younger women, older women and girls who were still at school. We came out with four main areas of concern, which plays to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who has just spoken. We said that education choices and careers advice was one of the first areas where it all starts to go wrong. Job segregation, lack of skills and training opportunities and poor quality part-time work were the others.

I will say a little about what we found, what we suggested and where I think we are now. The pay gap for full-time women as against full-time men, when we finished our work in 2006, was approximately 22%. Nowadays, it is 19.7% so it is going in the right direction but ever so slowly. If we compare the earnings of women in part-time employment as against men in full-time employment, the pay gap rises to over 40%. Some people would say that that is an unfair comparison but it shows us that the value of part-time jobs is generally pretty low. We decided at that stage that this was not a discussion about the legalities of equal pay, although those obviously can be talked about. We wanted to look at what the whole opportunity was for some kind of social change: for social programmes and a cultural shift in the workplace, which would enable more women to move forward.

Let me go back now to education choices and careers advice. We know that girls are doing better than boys overall. Nevertheless, many girls are still in the category of aiming low to avoid disappointment. That is something which needs to be addressed. There is a massive shortage of girls going into the engineering trades, and of course in order to go into those trades they need the sciences and good mathematics. First, we suggested that girls and boys should be in separate classes for those lessons. The noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, just mentioned that point. That was because girls get a bit overwhelmed by boys who, all the evidence tells us, talk far more than girls in classrooms, and because the teaching of those areas concentrates almost entirely on the ways in which boys look at these things.

Secondly, we discovered an organisation called Computer Clubs for Girls, which teaches girls about the ins and outs of a computer in a way that they appreciate. It talks about the different kind of programmes that girls would find interesting—and girls engage with that. They do not want to do computer programmes that are all about wars and fighting, which do not suit them, so special attention being paid to the different ways in which girls and boys think is important.

Thirdly on this area, we found that very few young women were ever advised when they were girls at school about the financial implications of the choices that they were making. Yes, we need beauty therapists and hairdressers but they will not earn quite as much money doing that as in many of the areas of employment where you find young men.

This brings me on to careers advice. At that time, the careers service was run by Connexions, which has gone now. We found Connexions to be a very mixed bag and that careers advice was just an add-on to the role of teachers. However, over the last year or so I have chaired a number of conferences on careers advice and, to a man and woman, everybody is really fed up and anxious about the standard and the system that we currently have. It has been devolved down to all schools, so that 4,000-odd senior schools are all doing their own thing and engaging with private companies to help them. There is no teacher interaction taking place. The Department for Education spends 0.04% of its budget on careers advice, so we are the only country in the developed world that spends more on careers advice for adults than for children, which is not terribly helpful.

All those points move us into the job segregation area. Women are vastly contained within administration, retail and caring services, et cetera. Even if young women leave school and get into half-way decent jobs, if they then have children where do they go? They go completely down the career path. There are many women in that position who can afford childcare for one child but do not earn enough to afford childcare for more than one. They end up working in the retail sector in the main where, because of the long hours which the retailers have to be open, those women have to accommodate a whole variety of shift patterns. However, those jobs are poorly paid and often have few progression opportunities and poor job satisfaction.

We end up where everyone is really a loser because the woman herself has gone down the pay scales and the job opportunities ladder, while the employer which she was originally with has lost somebody who they had trained up, even if only at a pretty small level. The Government also lose because the woman is paying less tax; she may not even be paying tax at all. Even in 2006, we calculated with the assistance of economists from what was then the DTI that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was losing between £15 billion and £23 billion a year in spending power from those women who had gone down that financial ladder.

One of the things we recommended, as I think I said at the beginning, was that there should be much better quality part-time job opportunities available. There is a really good organisation called Women like Us, which was started by two women at the playground gates who said to each other, and to their friends who were waiting for the children to come out of school, “There must be something better out there”. They went round to employers and persuaded them of ways in which they could provide decent quality jobs with part-time hours, which would enable women to move forward. That organisation has gone from strength to strength. It has been working with KPMG and others and engaging with a large number of companies. However, we need a government initiative to put pressure on employers by saying, “Let’s up the game here. We have all these women who have a much greater capacity to work”. Yet those women are stuck there doing the kind of retail jobs which are poorly paid, as I have said.

There is the whole question of retraining and reskilling. We find these women who have fallen out of their traditional path into jobs which are not giving them job satisfaction and then there is no opportunity for them to go anywhere because there are no retraining or reskilling chances. At the Budget a month after we launched the report in 2006 Gordon Brown, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, allocated £40 million to be spent on women-only training. That money has largely been allocated via the UK Commission for Employment and Skills and through the sector skills councils. In the five years of its running, it trained up and upskilled more than 25,000 women. It was academically researched three times by Leeds Metropolitan University and was found to be an excellent service, partly because the money which came from employers far outweighed the money which the Government put into it.

We then had all these women who were able to move on and expand their opportunities. It covered the textiles area; we also had women trained up as bus drivers and food workers; there were women in law, in the power sector and, interestingly, in the sector which includes engineering and manufacturing. That programme came to an end in March 2013, I am sad to say. I am not exactly sure how much of a chance women are going to get now, if that funding is not directly allocated to women only.

Finally, there is no silver bullet answer to any of this. There are a multitude of approaches to be made but government must have the political will to take the lead in encouraging employers and others to make better use of their female employees—not just those at the top on boards or those in the pipeline leading to boards. All that is important, as I have said, but those at the bottom may well have good ability too and a good opportunity to do rather more.