Q
108Lynne
Featherstone: If someone who thinks that they are paid
unequally takes a case, do you think that the necessity of having to
find a real comparator plays a part?
Joyce
Gould: Yes. The Women’s National Commission is
very much in favour of hypothetical comparators. We will have to see
how we progress that through the
Bill.
Q
109Lynne
Featherstone: You would like to bring that into the Bill,
perhaps? Joyce
Gould:
Yes. Katherine
Rake: I think that that makes a huge difference. The
other thing is that often, people have to take a case alone. If the
Bill had an ability for representative action, in addition to
hypothetical comparators, that would make a huge difference. Many
people whom we speak to, who have taken cases, say, “I know it
is not going to
make a difference to my life, but I am worried about the colleagues whom
I have left behind.” Many of them would have left the employment
by that stage, because they know that there is a systemic problem, and
the ability to stand together to take cases is hugely
important.
Q
110Lynne
Featherstone: I am sure that we will debate those kinds of
issues when we go through the Bill.
Emma
Stewart: I just want to comment that in our
perspective, one of the reasons why business has been so slow is that
there are a huge number of myths, looking particularly at flexible and
part-time working, which has enabled more women to enter the labour
market after they have had children. In particular, there is a lack of
services that can help businesses to understand how to implement
flexible and part-time working. There are various specific examples,
such as how to design jobs that are part time and flexible and how to
train line managers in managing a flexible work force. The myth often
persists around the perceived regulatory cost of flexible and part-time
employees, which is not necessarily the
case.
Q
111Lynne
Featherstone: I thought that it was quite interesting when
Mark, through the Chair, asked you if you were comparing part-time
women with full-time men. There is obviously a huge differential. Once
you go part time, you are not considered—the high jobs do not
come in part-time packages. What can I do in the Bill to help with
that? Is there some way? I understand that there is a whole raft of
things outside the Bill in terms of training, education and working
with employers. But is there anything in the legislation that you see
that we can help you with? You do not have to answer now, but think
about it. Inevitably, we will take the Bill through, and I am sure that
we will all welcome external things. I am just looking to see whether
there is something around that differential that we can work
on. Emma
Stewart: I think that there is a raft of measures
outside the Bill—certainly, ring-fencing and ensuring that there
is a focus on auditing the part-time gender pay gap explicitly. In
other areas of the Bill, such as procurement, we certainly advocate
that in considering procuring good employers, there could be a
commitment from those employers to provide a percentage of part-time,
flexible jobs in their
organisation.
Lynne
Featherstone: Thank
you.
Q
112John
Penrose: I just want to pick up on the point about the
gender pay gap. I was particularly interested in Baroness
Gould’s point about there being many reasons for inequality in
pay. Discrimination clearly is an important one, and I think that
everyone in this room will be united in trying to find ways to sort
that out. I am just a little worried, though, about the pay audits.
Even if they are done in the way that Ms Rake was
describing—following the guidelines to ensure that we are
comparing like to like—is anyone on the panel worried? It might
lead to a situation where we move from false negatives, where women are
not able to bring cases when they should be able to, to a situation of
false positives, where firms may be blamed for inequality in pay, which
is not to do with discrimination. They might
have done all the right things to ensure that they are not
discriminating intentionally or unintentionally—following the
two classes of discrimination that Ms Rake described earlier—but
the inequality is due to disadvantage or some other reason. Is there a
danger of that, or does the reporting guideline that Ms Rake described
avoid it entirely, meaning that we would get no false
positives? Katherine
Rake: If you design the pay auditing system correctly
and as the code suggests, there is no danger of false
positives. You
raised the broader point of where the boundaries of responsibility for
individual employers and the state lie. Something that needs to be
developed with this legislation is a set of measures for the
Government’s own delivery. Clearly, the Government should not
require other organisations to take action without making an equivalent
commitment to things such as making quality part-time work available,
improving structural provision to allow people to travel to the jobs
they want more successfully, ensuring that transitions into and out of
unemployment are supported appropriately, and child care provision.
There are problems with every one of those measures, and it is not
within the reach of an individual employer to address
them. That
does not take away from the case for pay audits, but it shows that
there must be an extended argument about the Government making a firm
commitment to addressing women’s employment disadvantage more
generally, and to do so using all the tools they have. They should be
bold. We have a target to narrow the gender pay gap, but it does not
specify by when and by how much. That should be the first measure the
Government take to show that they are taking a lead by ensuring that
they provide the circumstances in which employers can pay and promote
women
effectively.
Q
113John
Penrose: I will follow up on that in a second. Do the
other two panel members have a comment on the last
question? Joyce
Gould: I do not disagree with that, although perhaps
I do not agree 100 per cent. with the conclusion. I think that it is
right. That is why, when I listed the things that I think cause
disadvantage, they were Government responsibilities and not employer
responsibilities. I agree with Katherine that alongside this there has
to be a focus on what the state and Government are doing to get over
some of the other problems. Some of that comes in other parts of the
Bill, not least in the socio-economic area, which I think could make a
big difference to women’s lives and might assist an awful lot in
some of the areas I
listed. From
a gender point of view, we must ensure that we have girl and women
apprentices in training—I do not think that we should have an
age barrier on apprentices—as well as the concentration that we
tend to have on boys and men. We need to ensure that there is absolute
equality in such provisions that we make. Another area is paternity
leave. We should be looking not just at maternity leave but parental
leave, so that we try to get the balance right between men and women in
the work force and the facilities they
have. Emma
Stewart: In terms of putting the emphasis on
employers, there is a limit to how much we can ask them to do. The
Government could step in to improve the business support services
available, particularly to small
businesses, through organisations such as Business Link. They could be
made to address explicitly issues of equality and diversity and to
ensure that they can provide adequate, accessible advice to businesses.
In many instances, we are looking at legislation in relation to gender
equality duty, but as you said, people will experience other areas of
inequality in businesses that are above and beyond the control of those
businesses, per se. Businesses need more support to help those
candidates, clients or employees get the support that they
need.
Q
114John
Penrose: A final question on this. Let us assume that by
one means or another we manage to eradicate discrimination by employers
and that part of the gender pay gap goes tomorrow—we have a
magic wand. How much of it would be left? Are we looking at a very
small proportion of the problem here, with the other factors that
contribute to the gender pay gap being much greater? Or is this by far
the biggest thing and will only a small amount of it be left to
address—all the other issues which Baroness Gould was talking
about? Katherine
Rake: Discrimination is a tricky thing. It is quite
difficult to observe directly, and as a former academic I know that it
is difficult to register and measure directly. However, when people
have decomposed the gender pay gap to look at the different elements
that contribute to it, discrimination is the largest factor of all, the
remaining factor. Having said that, there is an awful lot of penalty
attached to working part time, to motherhood, to discontinuous labour
market records, all of which are more familiar to women. But my belief
is that if organisations get good at addressing pay discrimination,
they also get good at diversity more generally, and promoting equality
for women.
Where we see
good practice in private sector organisations, for example, they tend
not only to have pay auditing systems—very successful
ones—but they also tend to promote more women into senior
positions, have good flexible working policies, and have maternity and
paternity provisions above and beyond the statutory minimum. They do
that because they know that it delivers to them. In an economy that is
dependent upon human resources, it delivers the bottom line to them
because if they lose the skills of 52 per cent. of the population, they
will not be effective organisations. I think that good practice on pay
will feed through and make organisations wake up to a whole series of
issues that they have elsewhere. There will be all sorts of positive
benefits from addressing discrimination.
Joyce
Gould: Again, I do not have a disagreement with that.
I only make a couple of additional points. First, if we did
this—taking the points that Katherine raised—we would be
using women’s skills far more effectively, which would only be
of benefit to the economy overall. Also, the removal of the pay gap
would make women more economically sound, which would benefit the
economy. It is a much wider agenda than just the pay gap—the
consequences are much wider.
Emma
Stewart: I support that, too. Under-utilising
women’s skills has been proven to be a huge loss to the economy.
It is also a huge cost to the economy in terms of the cost of child
poverty to the Exchequer. There are definitely wider social
implications in being able to address this. I have two thoughts on the
gender pay gap
no longer existing. One is that we would still need to ensure that there
is sufficient volume of opportunity in terms of flexible work for new
women entering the labour market. We know that there is a huge dearth
of that at the moment. Addressing that through the gender pay gap
within individual organisations will go part-way, but we need
persistently to ensure that increasing opportunities exist.
Secondly,
looking at flexible working practices for both fathers and mothers is
an essential ingredient in this to ensure that we are looking at a
change in work force culture going forward, which will enable both men
and women with caring responsibilities to balance work and home
life.
Q
115Mr.
Boswell: May I pick up on this exchange first and ask one
question about that, and one on another issue? I will ask Emma first
and others may contribute. The question of access to employment seems
quite important—particularly for women who may wish to work part
time, or return to work part time. On Second Reading I referred to an
article in Whitehall and Westminster World which talked
specifically about the record of the civil service in making jobs
available part time and advertising them as such. Could you tell us
from your experience whether that is changing culturally and whether it
is a problem concentrated in the public service, or is it also part of
a systemic problem throughout the employment of
women? Emma
Stewart: Being an organisation working with 2,000
employers in London, our experience is that it is starting to change.
We are certainly seeing the impact of the recession changing a large
number of employers’ perceptions about part
time.
Q
116Mr.
Boswell: So that is a positive as well as a
negative? Emma
Stewart: That is a positive that we think needs to be
promoted by highlighting the business benefits and efficiency gains
that can currently be had in terms of part time, while moving forward
to create sustainable quality part-time jobs with progression that will
remain above and beyond the recession for women returners.
We are seeing
a shift among SMEs, certainly in London, when the right messages are
put across and the right access to support is given, towards a
recognition that part-time work can be of value, and we know that there
is a lot of good practice in the public sector. The challenge is to
ensure that new jobs are created on a part-time and flexible basis, not
that jobs are negotiated once women are looking to return to an
existing
employer.
Q
117The
Chairman: Are there any other
contributions? Joyce
Gould: What Emma says is absolutely right. There is
evidence that employers who are taking on flexible working are
benefiting from it. They are finding greater efficiency and less
absenteeism, and all the evidence suggests that they are definitely now
in favour and supportive of promoting flexible working. That will be a
benefit. Katherine
Rake: I want to make one quick comment about
legislative measures that might enable change to happen. Currently, you
have the right to request flexible working but only after you have been
in employment for a certain period of time, so the entry point is
critical. If
you have decided to change career after a break for looking after kids
or, indeed, elderly relatives, it is very difficult to negotiate at
that point. We think that day one rights to request part-time work
would be a significant
step. The
other legislative change, which would feed into broader cultural
change, is extending rights to everybody, not just to parents. One of
the problems is in the terminology. “Part-time” is a
diminutive. It is compared with the norm, which is full-time. All of
this dates from the industrial revolution and the male-dominated,
male-designed workplace which, frankly, is totally anachronistic now.
We all contribute in different ways, virtually as well as physically in
the office, and do different hours. We need to get away from the notion
that there is the normal way of working, which is full-time, and then
there is the rest, which is part-time. Making the right to request
flexible working available to all would be part of a culture
change.
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