In their efforts to get to the top of their professions, women have broken through the glass ceiling only to find a concrete one in its place. Jody Clarke reports.
Has progress towards workplace equality stalled?
It looks like it, says a report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. They found that in 12 out of 25 job categories, including the judiciary, police and higher echelons of the NHS, there are fewer women in high-flying jobs than there were five years ago. There are a smaller number employed as Government ministers, while the number of senior female editors on national newspapers has fallen from 17.4% to 13.6%. Britain has just one woman law lord, Lady Hale, while Iraq and the patriarchal state of Afghanistan have more female MPs than Britain. “A snail could crawl nine times round the M25 in the 55 years it will take women to achieve equality in the judiciary and the entire length of the Great Wall of China in 212 years, only slightly longer than it will take for women to be equally represented in Parliament,” said the report, entitled Sex and Power. “To say that things are changing for women at the top at a snail’s pace seems about right.”
Is the Commission overreacting?
Not at all. Despite receiving better grades at university and at school, there has been a drop off in the number of women in the best jobs, a waste of a “colossal amount of talent”, said Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society. Some people, such as Rake, put this down to continued discrimination in the workplace, as they believe it “is still very much a man’s world when you get to the top”. However, discrimination isn’t what it once was. While there is still a pay gap between men and women, it has fallen from 29% in 1975 to 17% today, while over 70% of women are now in full-time employment. That figure was just 60% in 1975. A more important point to note might be that British employees are the hardest working in Western Europe, clocking up 41.4 hours a week against about 39.5 hours for our continental neighbours. The fall in the number of women in senior posts may be more to do with working hours than with discrimination.
How’s that?
Longer working hours, particularly in the professions, have made it harder for ‘supermums’ to balance working life with home life. The advent of the BlackBerry, while supposed to make working hours more flexible, has in fact made it impossible for mothers ever really to leave work behind them. About 85% of women have full-time jobs before they have babies, but after they give birth the figure falls to just 34% of those with pre-school children. That suggests more women leaving their high-flying jobs not because they have hit a ‘concrete ceiling’ of intolerance, but simply because their work places are not flexible enough (in terms of total hours worked and of when those hours are worked) to let them combine a fast-track career with mothering. Jill Kirby, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, points out in the Daily Mail that “the evidence shows that the careers of single women advance at the same rate and often faster than those of comparable men”.
What about the cost of childcare?
This doesn’t help. In a recent study of ‘extreme jobs’, the economist Sylvia Hewlett found that 30% of women in top jobs have partners who earn more than they do, while only 2% of men are in the same position. That makes it easier and cheaper for the women to drop out of full-time work than men. The alternative is paying for expensive childcare, which, at £126-£375 per week for a nursery place, means you could be paying as much as £19,200 a year to get someone else to look after your children, says the Daycare Trust. And that’s only from 8am to 6pm. If you’re a corporate lawyer working late into the night on deals, you’ll need more than a nursery. You’ll need a nanny, possibly two nannies – one for the day time and one for the night time. Nannies cost a good £500 a week each in central London, so £25,000 plus after tax, or around £40,000 pre-tax. That makes it hard for anyone but the most well paid of senior, professional high flyers actually to cover their costs by working.
Can the Government do anything to resolve the situation?
It hasn’t so far. Since Labour took office, they have gradually extended maternity leave for working mothers to one year. This has entrenched a woman’s traditional place as being in the home because, instead of sharing maternity leave between mother and father, it is the mother who, if she chooses to, takes the time off work. This has made it impossible for parents to share their responsibilities. It may also have led to a shift back towards sexual discrimination in the workplace, as employers avoid hiring women of childbearing age (in their 30s – the same age that most men make the biggest leaps in their careers), in order to avoid paying out any potential maternity expenses.
Long hours: a British disease?
In 1847 an act was passed in Britain limiting both adults and children from working for more than ten hours a day. By the 1870s, average working hours were about about nine a day. Yet last year, one in eight people in Britain worked over 48 hours a week, according to the Office of National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey. That’s nearly ten hours a day, while the figure is one in six for workers in London, where many people work even longer hours. Under Europe’s working time regulations, workers are protected from working more than 48 hours a week. In the UK, workers have the right to opt out of this protection and, encouraged to do so by a standard clause in their contracts, they usually do.