Examination of Witnesses (Questions 85-99)
CBI, TUC
9 MAY 2007
Q85 Chairman: Good morning and welcome;
we are very pleased to see you here. I think this is the first
time I have been at an evidence session where we have had the
TUC and CBI in the same session. We thought as we were likely
to ask you the same questions it might be more interesting, so
long as the answers are kept reasonably brief, to have you dealing
with the same questions and any interplay or comments you want
to make on each other's responses as well. We look forward to
this session and thank you very much for coming. Maybe you would
like to introduce yourselves.
Ms Seguret: I am Marion Seguret;
I am a Senior Policy Advisor at the CBI.
Ms Anderson: I am Susan Anderson;
I am Director of Human Resources Policy at CBI.
Ms Veale: I am Sarah Veale, Head
of Equality and Employment Rights at the TUC.
Ms Gill: I am Rebecca Gill and
I head up Women's Equality Policy at the TUC.
Q86 Chairman: In the previous parliament
we were very keen to look at women and work and particularly the
gender pay gap and occupational segregation so it seemed logical
for us to look at the follow up to the women and work report which
obviously both your organisations were very involved with both
in the work and in developing it. It is hardly surprising that
both TUC and CBI have welcomed the report as you were both involved
in presenting evidence and drawing it up. We know that the area
of gender equality is very, very difficult because a lot depends
on long term cultural change and it is not something that is going
to be dealt with and changed overnight, but what are the main
recommendations from the Commission's report that you think you
and your members should concentrate on? Maybe the CBI could start
us off on that.
Ms Anderson: I think the first
thing I want to say really is that we have come a long way in
the whole area of women being able to combine their work and caring
responsibilities, but I think we recognise that we still have
a way to go and I think the area we really want to focus on is
the whole area of education and careers advice. Whilst we are
seeing young girls really outperform boys in terms of achievement
at GCSE and A level and even in degrees, they are not necessarily
taking the A levels and degrees that lead to higher paid careers.
We need better information and advice to girls in terms of their
career options. We think work experience can play a useful role
there. I think it is very much in the area of education, careers
advice and work experience where more needs to be done. When it
comes to work, particularly the whole work-life balance issue—rights
to request flexible working—there things are generally working
very well. We would want to focus on education and careers advice.
Ms Veale: We actually agree with
that, so that is a good start. Obviously education and careers
guidance pushes people into particular directions and gets them
ready for particular vocations. I think the only danger with focussing
too much on that is that it rather lets employers off the hook
and there are several workplace issues that the TUC has identified
as being absolutely key for reform, all of which are quite difficult
because they involve quite serious changes and challenges to employers.
I think the first is the whole issue of gender job segregation
which of course is tied to careers advice and education pathways
and so on. However, the fact is that you still have I think about
97% of people working in childcare, for example, being women and
other professions seem to be largely male ghettos at the moment.
That has repercussions in terms of pay and status and there is
a kind of vicious circle that operates where women apply for the
sorts of jobs that they think other women do. I have two daughters
who, obviously without any help from me, have identified particular
areas of work that they simply would not be attracted to for a
whole range of social and cultural reasons and lack of confidence.
There is that and there are also issues about working hours and
I think that now more women are in the labour market employers
are having to pay much more attention to flexibility. There is
a 24/7 culture now where a lot of businesses have to operate outside
the old nine to five hours—certainly in the public sector
that has been the case for a lot longer—so there is an attractive
proposition to employers that they can match people's family needs
and their needs to work flexibly with the needs of the job and
the needs to provide services to the public. I think employers
perhaps have not gone far enough with that and this is an area
where trade unions can be of great assistance in making sure that
flexible work is applied throughout. That actually benefits not
just women but men because one of the other issues we have is
that men are usually the bread winners and the people who are
expected to earn the larger part of the family income and feel
that they cannot afford to spend time looking after children.
I think a lot of men would quite like to do that now but in order
to achieve that employers have to be a lot more imaginative about
the hours in which people work and the way in which shift patterns
are organised. The Commission picked up flexible working and quality
part time working as a major issue. It is hugely important. It
should not be the case that part time work is seen as sub-standard
work and something that would stop you from following a career
because you are not really sufficiently enthusiastic about what
you are doing. That is another big challenge for employers. Those
are probably three issues we picked out as being of key importance.
I do not know if Rebecca has anything to add.
Ms Gill: I think that quality
part time work was absolutely crucial and the occupational segregation.
The focus on careers advice, whilst it is useful, it very much
focuses on young women and does not really support the women who
are looking to come back into the labour market now or in the
next five to ten years, who might be looking to change occupation
as well and to support women who might have been doing a low paid
job who decide that they wish to move into a more highly skilled
job and need support in gaining those qualifications.
Q87 Chairman: You are putting responsibility
on the employers to take some initiatives. I was interested in
the CBI evidence which says: "The Commission's final report
was well received with employers. They had committed to tackling
the remaining courses of the gender pay gap". I am not altogether
sure that employers in my constituency are conscious of the issue
or want to deal with it and I wondered how you respond to explaining
about your members being committed to it and what the position,
for example, might be with smaller firms, whether there would
be the same interest.
Ms Anderson: When looking at the
causes of the gender pay gap we have to acknowledge—as Sarah
has done—that a large part of it is caused by occupational
segregation. The reason that I put so much emphasis on what is
happening in education and careers is because I am afraid it starts
in our schools. For example, if we look at the statistics in terms
of A levels we see that only 22% of those taking physics A levels
are girls; only 39% of those taking maths are girls; it is about
equal in chemistry so we have made some strides there; more girls
are doing biology than boys, around 57% of biology A level students
are girls. That knocks on into undergraduate degrees. If we look
at the occupations that are open to those with science, technical
engineering and maths degrees they tend to be better paid occupations.
If we look, for example, at the starting salary for somebody in
retail management—which is where perhaps the girl with the
arts degree might look—it was £17,000 last year. The
starting salary for someone who is going into investment banking,
on the other hand, is £38,000 a year. Clearly if you have
taken a maths degree or an engineering degree you are much more
able to apply for higher paid jobs. If employers are not getting
the applicants with the right levels of numeracy then they are
not going to be able to appoint women so we need to go back into
the education system and encourage more girls to do those A levels
and those degrees that are going to lead to the higher paid occupations,
or lead them to access the higher paid occupations. If we look
at what is happening in the graduate market, for example, in those
higher skilled jobs we see very little pay gap between men and
women for those young people who have just graduated. Despite
what I have said about the occupational segregation, the pay gap
between male and females in the 22 to 29 age group is only two
per cent. What happens at 30 is that women start to think about
starting a family and obviously that will lead a high proportion
of them perhaps to go into part time work where their career will
tend to plateau for a period and that obviously can lead to men
then taking a lead in terms of the pay and salaries. It is not
a matter, I am afraid, of firms saying, "Oh, we don't believe
in equality and I'm going to pay this woman less than this man".
Those members that we know who have done equal pay audits have
not found that they are paying men more than women doing the same
job, it is because men have reached more senior positions and
therefore have accessed the higher pay. Whilst at a company level
you will see a gender pay gap it is because men have tended to
reach higher levels and therefore higher pay.
Q88 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You referred
earlier on to focusing on education and careers guidance. Does
that mean you have members that sit on the Connexions Board?
Ms Anderson: To be honest, I do
not know whether we have members on the Connexions Board but there
are employers on the Connexions Board. We have just put out a
report on work experience. For example here is one we prepared
earlier which Marion can probably tell you more details about.
Q89 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I wanted to
know whether or not anybody was sitting as a representative on
the Connexions Board and with respect to the employers what representations
have you got on particular education boards or within any of the
institutions that are responsible for delivering educational programmes
into either further education or higher education?
Ms Anderson: If you would like
me to provide you with a list I am very happy to do that.
Q90 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I do because
when you say you are going to focus on something you need to articulate
that to a set of institutions and organisations that have a remit
in this particular area. Do you know where that is happening,
otherwise it just sounds like words to me?
Ms Anderson: It is not words because
we know our members are providing very valuable work experience
for young people.
Q91 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I was not
talking about work experience. You said you wanted to focus on
education and careers. To do that you need to have an institutional
position as well as offering practical experience. Where is that?
Ms Anderson: If I may say though
that the days where CBI or TUC had an automatic right to sit on
these committees, that is not something we ask for. CBI is represented
through the employers. They will not necessarily wear a CBI hat
but employers are there, so employers are on Ofsted Board, employers
are on the Connexions Board, our members are delivering high quality
services through actually providing Connexions services. Companies
sit on the Job Centre Board. There are employers on all these
boards and I am very happy to provide you with a list later on.
Ms Veale: There are trade unionists
as well. Of course the career teachers are mostly in the NASUWT
who gave us a lot of very useful information to inform our response
to the initial Women and Work Commission activities. One point
they make to us very strongly is that there has not been very
much in the way of dedicated funding for careers teachers and
what tends to happen is that somebody who is teaching full time
as a day job gets careers teacher tacked on and that means they
tend to do it in their spare time effectively. I pay tribute to
a lot of very dedicated careers teachers or teachers who do careers
advice as well. I think it is an area that has been vastly neglected.
It is difficult because all you are doing as a careers teacher
in a sense is putting an individual into a system so I come back
to the problems in the work place because there is only a limited
amount you can do as a careers advisor for older women and indeed
for school leavers and graduates if the opportunities are not
there. You have to remember that when you are directing people
in particular directions.
Q92 Chairman: I think we will return
to that. Our concern with this inquiry is not to repeat the facts
and the analysis which is well known and understood and has been
analysed within the report, it is to make sure that we get things
to happen as a result. Before I hand over to Roger Berry specifically
on the government's action plan, given that this is a very difficult
area and we are talking long term change, are there any easy wins
that either of you can see where we could make immediate progress
on some part of the Women and Work Commission's report without
it being ten or twenty years into the future?
Ms Veale: I think one area is
the flexibility point and the right to request to work flexibly
has been a great success I think probably to an extent to our
surprise. The trouble is that it has picked out certain groups,
it is now carers and parents of children aged up to six, but that
leaves out parents of older children unless they are disabled.
It gives employers quite a difficult task, which is how to manage
a group of people who now have the right to ask to work flexibly
and a group who do not have that right. I think one thing you
could do is have a look at the legislation and see whether it
could be extended so that all workers who have good reason can
ask their employer if they can work flexibly. That would probably
encourage more men to do that and take away the stigma that attaches
to making those sorts of requests still and to career progression.
There is still an attitude in a lot of work places that there
is a period in women's lives when they are not proper contributors
because they are likely to—or do—go off and have children
and have difficulty working particular times and in particular
jobs. I think one key thing that could be done is a lot of stimulation
to employers and unions to work together to make flexible working
a reality. I think that would unlock some of the problems. Gender
job segregation is massively difficult to change because we operate
in a free market system and people choose the jobs they want to
go to. One interesting statistic that got missed out was that
there is research that boys and girls—young men and young
women—with exactly the same degree go out to work and within
five years a gender pay gap appears between the man and the woman
of 15 per cent. So there obviously is a problem which goes beyond
education and careers guidance; there is something happening at
work which is pushing women down all the time and that is another
thing that has to be properly investigated, whether it is prejudice
or the impact of culture on employment relations it is hard to
say, but it is happening and it is useful that the Women and Work
Commission are pulling out all these statistics and where to go
is of course, as you say, a key point.
Q93 Chairman: Are there any quick
wins from the CBI point of view that you can see?
Ms Anderson: I think why the Women
and Work Commission report was impressive was that it did not
actually go particularly for quick wins or, "Let's have some
more legislation, that will sort it out" and I think it is
admirable that it did not choose to do that. I know that for legislators
it is always nice to pull the legislative lever but I would say
that in this area further legislation would not help. I would
agree with Sarah that the right to request has been a success,
it has been extended to carers and actually CBI took the approach
that it was best to do it in a staged way. We are not looking
for rights to be extended, certainly in the lifetime of this parliament,
to other groups and I think we have received some assurances on
that front. That is not to say at some point in the future, yet
to be determined, that that might not happen. I think there are
no easy, quick, legislative wins on this one but, to be frank,
it is a matter of building on what does work. There were 40 recommendations
in the Women and Work Commission and I think in our evidence to
you we went through each one of them to identify what is being
done. I would say, from a CBI perspective, a pretty easy win would
be to sort out the careers service. In the Leitch report it is
coming out pretty consistently across government the absence or
lack of across-the-age careers service (to address Rebecca's point
really) is leading to a waste of talent. We do need to address
the issue of older women who may want to take a career change,
who might want to take up an apprenticeship but present age bars
prohibit them. I do put a lot of emphasis on careers but that
is not legislation, that is ensuring that we get better quality
careers service that is not stereotypical, that is impartial and
gives young people and indeed older people access to impartial
advice of a high quality.
Q94 Roger Berry: It has been said
that the Government's Action Plan does not have the usual characteristics
of an action plan in the sense that yes, the word "accepted"
pops up in response to most of the report's recommendations, but
in terms of specific courses of action, timescales et cetera,
it is difficult—if not impossible—to find either in
response to any of the recommendations in the Government's Action
Plan. Equality action plans are meant to look a bit different,
some would say, from the Government's response to the Commission.
Do you think that is a fair criticism or are those critics being
unreasonable?
Ms Anderson: In my view they are
being somewhat unreasonable because, as I have said, I do not
think that we need to say that this somehow is going to be the
answer. I think that some of the things that the Government has
been doing (I know some other organisations take a different view)
for example the half a million pound fund for developing quality
part time work is very much on the CBI agenda and the TUC agenda.
I think it is actually helping develop some good practice and
I think in many of the areas what we need to do is to grow the
things that are already working rather than saying that legislation
is somehow going to answer these things. It is good practice.
It is using the funds that government is not making available
and building on the best practice—the Exemplar companies
for example that the Commission helped to establish—and
I think that is going to be far more productive than new initiatives
that add little value or that focus on somehow requiring employers
to have, for example, equal pay audits.
Ms Veale: From the TUC's perspective,
we were disappointed there were no hard targets because you can
measure things against a target. Something which can be demonstrated
by figures would have been an appropriate area for setting a target.
As the entire purpose of the exercise was to address the gender
pay gap we were a little disappointed that there were not some
specific ideas with targets attached to them. There is a big issue
about funding as well because the Women and Work Commission recommended,
for example, five million pounds for the Part Time Work Initiative
and with that amount of money I think we could have gone with
the CBI and worked out some really, really good proposals for
targeting specific employers and specific areas where there are
particular gender job segregation problems. As it is we got £500,000
distributed rather late in the day which has gone, frankly, to
employers who are already doing a pretty good job. I think in
a sense that has not been properly seen through. It is very well
intended and it is going in exactly the right direction, but without
being too critical more money would obviously have been very helpful
and a bit more careful addressing of how you get employers, unions
and others to work together to find out where the problems are
and do specific projects which are time limited and have a specific
objective in mind. The other thing I would just say that we though
was extremely welcome was the focus of the Government on the skills
level for BME (black, minority ethnic) women in particular where
there are double problems of gender job segregation and ethnic
job segregation as well. We very much welcomed the money that
is going in to helping the Sector Skills Councils to identify
areas where that is a specific problem and address the training
deficit and the workforce development needs there. I think that
will make quite a difference. There are a lot of positives but
I think you are right, it is disappointing that there were not
hard targets and more funding given to this important project.
Q95 Roger Berry: Apart from additional
funding are there any other things that you would have liked to
have seen in the Action Plan that are not there?
Ms Anderson: We are awaiting the
DfES paper that we are expecting shortly and we do expect there
to be some concrete proposals there and we will measure that very
carefully to ensure that they are both taking the Leitch Review's
recommendations very seriously and that they are addressing the
very specific proposals that CBI has made in terms of improving
careers advice. I am happy to share those with you. That is one
area, for example, where we think there needs to be quite a comprehensive
readjustment in terms of the resources and it could in fact require
considerably more resources. That is one area where we shall be
watching very closely to ensure that this new Green Paper will
actually address our concerns about the inadequacies of the present
service.
Ms Veale: I gather we are coming
onto equal pay later on, but one of the biggest issues now is
that we are almost in melt down in the public sector with an equal
pay crisis of massive proportions. In a sense it is quite easy
to be wise after events have suddenly appeared, but nonetheless
I think the Woman and Work Commission did not really get to grips
with the fundamental problems that the legislation is well out-of-date
and does not actually apply any more to a modern workplace. I
think that was a disappointment; they did not really get to grips
with that issue. I know there is the Discrimination Law Review
going on but I think the changes we need go well beyond legislative
change—although that is desirable—and until you start
at looking at a way of getting equal pay by looking systemically
at issues in the workplace rather than encouraging individual
women to put in applications that take 13 years to get through
an employment tribunal, you are missing a trick on equal pay.
One of the weaknesses for us in this was not only that they did
not make recommendations about pay audits which we do think are
important because you cannot expose gender pay discrimination,
you cannot do anything about it because you do not know it is
there, but also there are all the important areas of remedy and
measures and so on and I think that was unfortunately a bit of
a missed trick and it was partly to do with the timing. You could
see it all coming; it has all been rumbling for a while.
Q96 Chairman: Coming back to this
question of culture and how difficult it is to change it, the
EOC pointed out that a lot of young people are interested in non-traditional
areas of work and employers realise they need to get more women
and skilled workers to deal with skills shortages and bring business
benefits. However, the EOC were pointing out that we are still
not really making much progress in opening up opportunity and
choice. I know the CBI has focused very much on careers and skills
and I understand that, but are there other ways in which both
employees and employers can take action to break down that gender
stereotyping? Is there a role there for employers and employees
and if both employees and employers want to break some of those
down what is stopping people? Is it just the careers advice at
an earlier level and what happens in schools or is there something
that is happening later on that you, as organisations, can address?
Ms Veale: For us one of the important
keys to this is having people in the workplace who know about
these issues and can have discussions with the employer about
them. Unions come into their own there because they are interpreters
of the employers' desire to run the business profitably, deliver
the service and so on and the workforce desire to do things differently
and genuinely often to give better opportunities for people who
have not had those in the past. It is a question of completely
rearranging work structures and systems. You have to take positive
action. I know there are restrictions at the moment in terms legally
of what employers can do, but adventurous employers would probably
quite like to be able to give women the opportunity to be assisted
into new areas of work and given the special training that might
need and given the support that might take and put into positions
where they are doing something very different and given the chance
to try and test them with the guarantee that if it did not all
work out there would be no prejudice and it would not count against
them. I think also one of the other things you have to do is have
women in senior positions because at the moment if you are working
on the shop floor and you see the whole of the management system
is white male you kind of switch off and say, "That's not
for me, I can't do it because nobody else has done it". I
think there is a real difficulty with that. You do have to take
some artificial measures to push some women up, to push some disadvantaged
groups up. I think that can only be done successfully if you have
representatives of the workforce working with employers with a
will to make it happen. I think there are a lot of good employers
around who do want to make it happen but we see the role of the
union equality rep as being absolutely key in that. They are trained
up and work with the groups of people who want to try those new
opportunities and they would be able to talk to the employer about
who could do what where, what it would cost, what the implications
would be and all the rest of it. Often the shop floor understands
how the workforce operates better than some senior management
who have become rather distanced from it. There is great opportunity
there but there has to be quite a lot of good will on both sides.
We do talk to the CBI and there is quite a lot of interesting
work we are thinking of developing together. That is something
the Woman and Work Commission ought to be pushing, they ought
to be pushing us together and telling us that together we can
make some changes. We have to.
Ms Anderson: Here is one we prepared
earlier, a CBI/TUC and, indeed, DTI practical ways to reduce long
hours and reform working practices. This is something that we
did and we looked at case studies of companies that had addressed
the whole issue of work-life balance but I think it is important
to recognise not just for the benefit of women but also for men,
where you started off by saying that caring responsibilities are
not just a matter for women, they are also a matter of giving
men the opportunity to have better work-life balance. In this
report we looked at the very positive examples of what companies
are doing in terms of addressing work-life and long working hours.
We had a range of companies, for example BNFL, who introduced
a annualised hour system and credit time and they reduced overtime,
for example, to the delight of the company but also with the acceptance
of the workforce who actually found that their overall pay was
actually slightly higher than it had been in an environment where
they had relied on overtime. Another company in a completely different
sector, Eversheds, introduced a work-life policy with about seven
or eight different options from annualised hours to zero hours.
This is attractive both to men and women although we have to recognise
that the vast majority of that particular company who took advantage
of it were women. There are many good examples of companies who
are doing things and we are finding through our surveys that the
companies are taking the whole work-life balance agenda very seriously.
As Sarah said, this is not just a matter that benefits employees,
it benefits employers because if you want to have flexible working
either because you are in retailing or because you are in financial
services and you operate 24/7—you are dealing with Singapore
and India—you need people who are prepared to come in and
you want them to come in and work happily and contentedly so you
offer them working life options that suit them. Our surveys show
that the vast majority of employers are offering at least one
flexible working opportunity, it is often part time work because
that particularly suits women with childcare responsibilities,
but we are tracking this over time and, for example, the numbers
that are offering at least three flexible working arrangements
has been steadily rising. Companies are doing an awful lot.
Q97 Chairman: Are there mechanisms
for getting the positive value that employers get from such arrangements
over to other companies and employers that may be rather behind
the game on it?
Ms Anderson: I do not quite recognise
some of these companies that you are talking about. You particularly
asked me about smaller firms. We found, for example, in our survey
of members that actually smaller firms provide and agree to more
requests for flexible working than their larger colleagues. They
do offer more informally; they do not necessarily go through the
formal right to request and follow it to the letter, but actually
I think they accepted something like 96% of all requests whereas
the average was 90.
Q98 Chairman: What about the other
areas like the gender stereotypes not just flexible working, companies,
employers actively going out to recruit women into slightly less
usual areas of work?
Ms Anderson: Sometimes these choices
reflect a real decision about the sort of lifestyle that you want
to have and I think we should not say that what we are aiming
for is equal outcomes necessarily if actually the fact that women
prefer to go into teaching, for example when we look at some aspects
we see that primary schools are dominated by women. If that reflects
a genuine wish of women to go into teaching I do not think we
need to say that we should be aiming at a 50/50 split; I think
we have to give people choices and opportunities. We are not going
to drag people kicking and screaming into sectors of the workplace
where they do not want to go. Yes, we do things like this with
TUC; these are available on our websites. We have another guidance
that we did which we published recently and this is a report that
was actually financed under the European Commission funding. This
again is emphasising the real practical benefits to employers
of work life balance and also gives them a guide. In terms of
what can be done—Sarah makes this point very well—around
positive action, again we find here that there is a difference
between large and small but what we find is that large firms tend
to be more comfortable than smaller firms with positive action
because a lot of people know that positive discrimination is not
permitted but positive action is. Large firms will have teams
of in-house lawyers or HR experts and they know the difference;
smaller firms do not and so they may worry that they are not allowed
to do that because that is not permissible, that is positive discrimination.
Therefore they need better guidance on the difference between
permissible positive action and what would take them into unlawful
positive discrimination. I think they can learn from each other
and that is an area where we would expect and hope CEHR to make
a matter of priority.
Q99 Roger Berry: In the CBI evidence
you talk about the importance of high quality work experience
placements for young people and you give examples of good practice
in relation to business education partnerships and so forth. What
do you think needs to be done to move that project forward, to
really push hard in that direction?
Ms Anderson: I think this is a
matter for schools and for employers and for young people. Marion
can take us forward on that one.
Ms Seguret: I think with 95% of
students in the run up to GCSEs when they are taking work experience
placements in the run up to GCSEs. There is a huge opportunity
to open up their minds to non-traditional sectors, particularly
in science and engineering. As Susan mentioned earlier, since
we have submitted our evidence we have published this report with
the DfES on work experience and how work experience can help develop
both employability skills and raise students' awareness about
potential careers and sectors. We have found that the great majority
of students—over 90%—enjoy their placement. The employers
we spoke to also said that they saw the promotion of relevant
careers and sectors as one of the key benefits of work experience.
It is a great story. There is still a long way to go with only
60% of students finding that work experience has really helped
them identify a future career but we are heading in the right
direction. We mentioned earlier that it is really about a partnership
between schools and employers. This report, for example, has defined
in an employability framework, the types of skills that can be
developed during work experience and can form a good basis for
other employers to use.
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