Introducing the #PowerofThree – in conversation with amazing women (and men)

I’m lucky enough to meet some truly amazing, impressive people as I go about my day to day life and business as a writer and inclusion champion. Women and men who achieve incredible things in their corporate lives, people who are entrepreneurs, or in politics, or who are engaged in a charity, social enterprise or genuine passion project.

One of the things that I always ask them is:

“What three things would you like everyone to know about your [book, new business, job, project – ]?”

And I always get some really interesting answers,  which tell me a lot about what matters to them and what’s at the heart of their business or project.

I’ve decided to start sharing some of these stories,  via a new series of articles on the blog which I’m calling The Power of Three (#powerofthree). I’ve already completed the first few interviews and you’ll start seeing the articles in the coming weeks. Prepare to be fascinated as I talk: hosiery, appearing on TV, children’s books, personal branding, leaving home at the age of 16 and being supported by Kids’ Company, dancing at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics …. these are just some of the things I discussed with my first three interviewees.

And I’d love to know who else you’d like to see on here – please message me or comment below with your ideas and wish list!

Sponsors: would you like me to interview and profile some of the key people in your organisation? If so, let’s talk – please contact me for an exploratory chat.

 

Does the #genderpaygap start at pocket money time?

To continue a gender pay gap shaped theme, here is a re-blog of a great article written by Dr. Suzanne Doyle-Morris of The InclusIQ Institute and republished here with her kind permission. (I’ve long been a fan of her work and her first book, Beyond the Boys’ Club, is listed on my recommended reading  page.)

Once you’ve read Suzanne’s article, keep scrolling down to see a joyous piece of film footage from 106 year old Virginia McLaurin.

We all like to think the gender pay gap is a workplace issue, but it seems gender based discrepancies start much younger. The Sunday Times commissioned their own research (£ for the full article) discovering that even the best intentioned of parents are paying sons more, £11.47 on average per week for 14 year olds, compared to £10.67 for their daughters of the same age for pocket money. It may initially sound relatively minor for children, but just like the pay gap amongst adults, it soon adds up. Those few pence every week total an £80 difference each year. However, it’s not just teens who are affected. Other research by the Halifax discovered boys aged 8-11 get £5.06 per week in pocket money compared to their sisters’ £4.85.

And these discrepancies are vital, as they impact how children relate to money. Various studies show the giving of an allowance or pocket money increases ‘monetary competence’. In tests, children with monetary competence spent less when given ‘credit’ and were more accurate in guessing the prices of familiar items. These are undeniably important lessons for any child to learn. It makes us at InclusIQ  wonder: ‘What are the messages we send by giving girls less’? Are we subconsciously preparing daughters for a lifetime of ‘making do’ with less money; a reality which eventually leads to higher rates of poverty amongst female pensioners?

No doubt parents aim to be fair between their own children of either gender. However, this inexplicable discrepancy remains. It reminds us of the differences we see at organisations that are sure they pay people equally and based on merit. However, when we help them look at their internal figures, the evidence doesn’t quite tell the same story – particularly when it comes to discretionary pay. Internally managers always cite seemingly plausible excuses why these differences remain. However, rather than spend time on the creating excuses, we should be creating a fairer world for our current and certainly future workforce. That clearly starts with pocket money.

The Feel Good Story of the Week (other than Adele winning All the Brits) was about a dancing 106 year old from South Carolina. As she and her parents picked cotton and shucked corn in the fields, it never occurred to the young Virginia McLaurin that she might one day eat in the same restaurants as white people. And the notion that she would live to see the country elect a black president, and that one day she’d be invited to the White House and clasp his hands and dance with him for all the world to see? Impossible. And yet it happened — and was captured in a video released by the White House of McLaurin meeting the Obamas during a Black History Month celebration last week.

The Washington Post describes the moment Virginia got to see the footage of herself (complete with blue nails) dancing with the Obamas:

Then finally, deep into the afternoon on Monday, McLaurin got to watch the moment that had made her famous. Her eyes were fixed on the iPhone in her lap, as she sat in a backroom of Busboys and Poets restaurant near U Street —  in front of a mural of civil rights icons. Her mouth dropped open: There she was, dancing with her beloved president. She seemed almost as amazed by the technology that was allowing her to relive it all.

“Where can I get one of these?” she asked about the smartphone video. “I wish this was mine.”

For a few hours over lunch, she reflected on her life and those precious few minutes she had fulfilling a dream she didn’t even know to entertain until 2008.

 

Here’s the film footage. Just wonderful.

Mind the Gap: Explaining the UK #GenderPayGap

As part of my continuing look at the gender pay gap, here is a sponsored article from employment law specialists Nationwide Employment Lawyers , who share an overview of the reasons behind the UK gender pay gap and the recently announced plans to challenge it.

* * * *

For years, the imbalance of pay between men and women has been a serious, but often ignored, employment issue. Finding ways to correct the difference is a discussion which encompasses wider forms of the employment disadvantage facing women.

The history of the gender pay gap

In 1970, the Equal Pay Act was legislated so that women would receive equivalent pay to men on condition that they perform the same job for the same employer. However, several loopholes have allowed employers to avoid accusations of unequal payment. This includes legal requirements that allow an employer’s payroll to be the only acceptable source of information for supporting claims of unfair payment.

This same data is also considered the only viable means of determining whether certain kinds of work was performed by women at all, allowing employers to allege that assistance from male employees has occurred, thus rendering female workers’ claims void.

Needless to say, access to such data has resulted in employers generally showing greater concern for their own interests, often refusing to reveal certain information in accordance with their legal rights. Furthermore, employers were (until recently) under no obligation to monitor the difference in pay between male and female employees, effectively allowing them to ignore the possibility of equal pay being denied to workers.

Pay discrimination can be obvious if men are directly paid less than women without excuse, but underpayment is often hidden through crafty guises like different job titles and/or descriptions for female employees.

Although women can bring their concerns before an employment tribunal, the tribunal payment change of 2013, which now calls for all claimants to shoulder the majority of fees themselves, has led to a decrease in such cases due to financial concerns. This has certainly led to many women being failed by the UK legal system.

How the pay gap is recorded

The pay gap is often dismissed as exaggerated or even a fabrication, but research by the Quarterly Reports of tribunal records found that 12% of all tribunal cases launched between 2012/13 involved claims of unequal pay, wholly nullifying any notion of falsehood.

Gender pay gap statistics are generated through comparisons of the opposing average hourly rates between male and female employees. The national population and all UK employment sectors are taken into account when determining this figure.

One common excuse for the pay gap is that greater numbers of women are working part-time, which makes for lower overall female earnings. However, this ignores the fact that official figures monitored by the Office for National Statistics do not take into account part-time wages when recording results for the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. These figures focus solely on the mean average full-time wage between genders, which takes into account the pay of higher earning employees to generate an accurate and fair overall sum.

Negative affects on women

Recent UK studies reveal that the pay gap harms women by affecting their lives in various ways:

• Women receive less benefit from time and money spent on their education as they ultimately receive fewer financial benefits, despite performing roles equal to men;

• Mothers are affected by the pay gap as less finances are available to support children, especially single mothers or those without a partner in employment. The result of this can be physical and/or mental exhaustion due to longer hours being required to compensate;

• Maternity and pregnancy discrimination is interwoven with the pay gap, as the level of full-time pay for maternity leave is being increasingly reduced. This has been defended on the grounds that it seeks to support women wanting less maternity leave, but it is increasingly seen as being forced on all women. This is a huge contrast to men who can now receive financial support for undertaking shared parental duties.

Occupational segregation

One area of concern is the effect of occupational segregation, which involves unfair treatment of gender based roles. Men are paid greater amounts in jobs where they mostly work with other men, while women are paid less in roles where they work mostly alongside other women.

The single gender assessment of certain kinds of work is known as horizontal segregation. Stereotypical ‘horizontal’ roles for women include manual catering or cleaning work, and basic cashier and retail roles. This restricts female achievement and contributes to archaic attitudes to gender that regard female roles as somehow less valuable than men’s.

The opposite of this is vertical segregation where women work in positions alongside men –  but find opportunities for reaching greater positions restricted, due to gender related constraints causing them to be under-represented in high-paying occupations, adding to pay-gap statistics. It is necessary to abolish attitudes associated with both forms of occupational segregation in the quest to make pay equal.

Steps to solving the gender pay gap

 One way UK employment law is helping reduce the pay gap is by altering the law: as of 26th March 2016, businesses with a staff of 250+ employees will have to release information on the pay and bonus differences between their male and female workers.

All concerns outlined here, along with many others, need to be addressed and rectified before female employees and those close to them are free from the pay gap harm they experience.

Learn about how employment solicitors can help gender issues in the workplace.

 

 

 

 

This is a sponsored post from Nationwide Employment Lawyers . If you’d like to discuss how the Gender Blog can help support your business, please contact me. 

 

On having a minority for every occasion

Awareness of the lack of diversity (racial, gender – the list goes on) in certain aspects of business (and life, really) has now gone mainstream to such an extent that it’s being parodied and mocked on social media.

First we had the genius Man Who Has It All on Twitter and Facebook, sharing such gems as:

 

Is it REALLY possible for men to juggle kids, housework, lack of sleep, dull skin & the first signs of ageing hair?

And:

CONGRATULATIONS to all male EU leaders for getting there on merit alone. Very well done all of you.

And then last week, a satirical website offering “token minorities” for hire – to sprinkle diversity into marketing material or a conference panel – went viral.

Rent-A-Minority lampoons the tech and media industries its founder says pay lip-service to the notion of diversity without making any meaningful changes.  The site was created by Arwa Mahdawi,  who works for an advertising firm in New York. She is half-Palestinian and half-English and told the BBC that she created the site because she was tired of seeing companies making superficial gestures to promote diversity.

“It’s very frustrating when you’re a minority yourself, because while you’re facing institutional hurdles, all the talk of diversity means a lot of people think you’re benefitting from positive discrimination,” she says. “What actually triggered me to set up the site was someone asking me – in a very matter of fact way – if being brown and female was an advantage in advertising, which is absolutely ridiculous.”

She also says that in her view, the problem is particularly pronounced in the technology and media industries. While companies’ marketing materials may feature a perfect ratio of minority faces, their boards of directors is often another story.

(c) RentAMinority

Mahdawi says she hasn’t had a genuine enquiry from any businesses yet, but has been contacted by a handful of individuals who may have missed the point, and want to register as minority guests, keen to speak at future conferences.

As with Man Who Has It All,  the spoof is so near to the truth that it’s quite painful. How long must we wait until the problem dissolves so that there’s nothing to parody and that we also don’t need the Lean In library of photo images, curated with Getty Images to give picture options which don’t play to the oh-so-familiar Woman Laughing at Salad trope?

 

 

Is the #GenderPayGap THE diversity issue of 2016?

(c) The Daily Telegraph

If my inbox is any indicator of the current level of interest in this topic, then yes, it is: there’s a strong searchlight currently shining on employers and looking at how salaries and bonus payments are decided – in much the same way, as, a few years ago,  there was a lot of attention paid,  in the wake of the Davies Review, to the issue of women on boards.

In advance of some forthcoming sponsored content from employment law firm Nationwide Employment Lawyers  who will summarise the details of the legislative approach to closing the gender pay gap,  here’s my round up of some of the current news stories on this topic.

New (UK) rules published last week revealed that employers will have to disclose far more data on pay levels than they had expected. Companies have been waiting for these rules with trepidation and some fear they will be hit with big lawsuits from female employees when they publish the data.  However, employers will not have to publish any information until April 2018, giving them more time to prepare than many had feared.

Companies with 250 employees or more (about 8,000 firms) will have to publish both their mean and median gender pay gaps for salaries and bonuses. They will also have to publish the number of men and women in each salary quartile. The government said it will use the data to produce sectoral league tables that rank whole sectors against each other according to their average pay gaps. As reported in the FT, a government spokesman said they had not decided whether to also publish league tables of individual companies.

Employers must also publish their gender pay gap on their websites. They will have to report every year and senior executives will be expected to sign off the figures personally. However, I find myself agreeing with Frances O’Grady of the TUC when she notes that:

“It is a real shame that bosses won’t be made to explain why pay gaps exist in their workplaces and what action they will take to narrow them.”

If you’ve ever wondered what the pay gap might look like as it relates to your job,  here’s an American (but I imagine the model is similar for UK roles) calculator from the Motto newsletter. And the New York Times reports that President Obama has announced a similar approach to the UK aimed at closing the American gender pay gap.

Meanwhile,  Adzuna, a job search site, has released data suggesting women in the UK are much more likely to be underpaid than men. Three out of five women could be earning less than their ‘market value’ compared to just two in five men, highlighting a clear gender divide. While only 17% of women surveyed earned over £50,000 per annum, almost double that percentage (32%) of male workers were paid at that level. At the other end of the scale, more women (20%) than men (13%) reported earnings under £20,000 per year. The research analysed self-reported actual salaries of over 20,000 UK workers to highlight salary variations across genders, 20 industries and 12 UK regions.

However, some companies are taking matters into their own hands: Intel claim to have closed their gender pay gap and Swiss bank UBS is reviewing its compensation to look for—and address—instances where male bankers are paid more than their female colleagues.

Reuters  have examined how the (US) gender pay gap hurts women’s retirement plans (clue: it means working for an additional ELEVEN years). And, in case you were wondering if this gap was due to having had a career break at some point, mid-career – nope:

“A woman who works full-time over a 40-year period loses $435,480 in lifetime income (today’s dollars) due to the wage gap, according to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), a nonprofit legal and advocacy group. Put another way, the typical woman needs to work 11 years longer than a man to achieve accumulated income parity.”

However, equal pay for millennials is a boost for equal parenting, trumpets the FT. So it’s all good for future generations – in theory, at least.

To all of this,  we can add the recent news stories in which we learned that,  not only do women tend to earn less,  they also have to pay more for the same items – here’s the BBC’s take on the gender price gap, where  we can see that, at its most simplistic, pink stuff costs more than blue stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week, I’m reading: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

Rebel of the Sands is the first book, published today, in a forthcoming trilogy of what is billed as a Young Adult (YA) series, but which could be enjoyed by anyone who loves a strong story set in a fictional, dystopian world, fully fashioned by first time author Alywn Hamilton. The world in question, centred around the unforgiving, dead-end town of Dustwalk and the deserts which surround it, is an at times unnerving steam-punkesque mash-up of nineteenth century wild west USA and an Arabic-type fundamentalist religious culture, in which plural marriages, the servitude of women, covered heads and faces and calls to prayer abound. As one character comments:

“I’m a girl who could’ve done just about anything if I’d been born a boy.”

In this setting, we first meet our sixteen year old heroine Amani, disguising herself as a boy and using her sharpshooter skills as the Blue Eyed Bandit to find a way to escape her life as an orphan in her uncle’s home.

Various adventures, encounters and shoot outs lead to her going on the run, before falling into an oasis (in every sense of the word) of allies, family members and a new understanding of herself and her background. The latter half of the book is full of spoilers (which are in turn, I would guess, setting up all manner of plot twists for the forthcoming sequels) so I’m being deliberately vague here … but the pace really picks up as the novel progresses and I found it to be a riveting and compelling read. And,  as one review I read commented, I did indeed find myself: “cheering for Amani the whole way as she escapes the bonds of oppression and finds her own power.”

From both a feminist and a diversity perspective, I loved the fact that Amani is such a strong protagonist – and that all we initially know of her appearance is that she has blue eyes, which in this world indicates that she’s from “foreign” stock.  There’s lots of coded stuff in the book about being different, Other, standing out or fitting in, being included and excluded. And, as with other YA series (like the Divergent and the Hunger Games books) Rebel of the Sands gives a clear message  about the role of women and how different societies can limit or grant freedoms.

The book was sold at auction and is due to be made into a film – I can already imagine some of the special effects and shapeshifting that we’ll see on the screen and I’m so curious to learn who’s been cast as Amani; it will be a gift of a part for a young actress and this is a gem of a book.

 

Thank you to Faber & Faber for the pre-publication copy of this book.

Hillary has (just) triumphed in Iowa – but who remembers Shirley?

On our recent USA road trip holiday, we drove nearly 2,000 miles across four states – but I only saw ONE Vote for Hillary car bumper sticker (just about pictured here – and no, I wasn’t driving when I took this photo). Due to the curiously American habit of using one’s vehicle as a mobile billboard to proclaim various relationships, allegiances or preferences (“I Brake for a Double Latte” being a great example of the latter) I was able to monitor the growing tide of public support for assorted potential Presidential candidates as we drove around – and can say that, based on what we saw, Ted Cruz was doing pretty well amongst SUV drivers, shortly followed by Donald Trump.

(As an aside, I think it’s an interesting metric-cum-weather-vane as to how a state’s voters think when you look at their bumper stickers – so I wonder which US state is currently leading the pack with regard to Hillary support on cars? Has anyone ever measured this?!)

I’m a huge fan of the work of journalist and author Nicholas Kristof, co-author with his wife Sheryl WuDunn of books “Half the Sky” and “A Path Appears” as well as a roving op-ed columnist for the New York Times. He sends out a regular e-newsletter related to his columns and a recent edition referred to Hillary Clinton’s changed approach to referencing her feminism, commenting that:

“It’s a measure of how much the country has changed that these days Clinton is running as a feminist, after decades of skirting the issue. In 2008 she barely mentioned her gender; now it’s a refrain.

“This really comes down to whether I can encourage and mobilize women to vote for the first woman president,” Time quoted her as saying. She even said she’d be open to choosing a woman as her running mate.

Kristof expanded on this in the newsletter, opening up with:

“One gauge of this election’s weirdness: It may result in a female president, or in a president (Trump) who has been a champion of sexism. And on the sidelines, President Obama has weighed in with a call for a tax break for tampons. Women increasingly are affecting the national conversation, and change is afoot.

“I didn’t have space to get into it in the column, but there’s interesting research on the extent to which women leaders matter. For “Half the Sky,” Sheryl WuDunn and I examined female presidents and prime ministers around the world, and we found no impact on such metrics as maternal mortality, girls’ education or access to family planning. But there’s also an argument that the first woman leader in a country (think Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir) is often particularly tough and less focused on women’s issues, but that later women will be. There’s also evidence, particularly from India, that women leaders matter at the grassroots: Female village leaders are less corrupt and more focused on women’s concerns than male village leaders. And there’s some evidence that women in power create role models who change expectations about what leadership can be.”

Kristof also notes that:

“Conversely, maybe it’s also a sign of progress that young women aren’t particularly inclined to support Clinton: They’re less likely to see their space defined by glass ceilings.”

– and I wonder if that’s because, if you’re of a certain age,  the idea that a woman could be Secretary of State, or a CEO, just doesn’t seem so impossible?  I’m certain that this is a measure of a progress and a good thing,  but this recent article on the BBC about Shirley Chisholm,  who ran for the Democratic Presidential ticket in 1972 and is now somehow almost forgotten in American history,  was a reminder about how far we’ve come, but how far we still have to go.

“She was a pioneer for her generation, a woman of many firsts – the first African American congresswoman. The first African American to run for president. The first woman to run for president.” 

Back to today: I’m glad to see that Kristof’s paper, the New York Times, has come out and endorsed Hillary for the Democratic nomination and I look forward to seeing how she does in the campaign.

(This link will allow you to sign up for Kristof’s newsletter, if you’re interested).