Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Professor Tom Schuller

THE PAULA PRINCIPLE AND THE NEED FOR A LIFECOURSE PERSPECTIVE ON WOMEN AND SKILLS

Summary

The Paula Principle is this: “working women stay below their levels of competence”. Women’s increasingly superior educational performance is evident, but not sufficiently recognised. It is not reflected in career and pay trajectories. This is part of a broader issue about skill utilisation in the UK.

My submission:

(a)Shows the crossover points in education at different levels, as women overtake men—and therefore the lag involved in closing the pay/careers gap.

(b)Shows that whilst the pay gap has largely closed at the point of entry into the labour market it widens again over time—faster for younger generations.

(c)Argues that the issue of part-time careers is central to the debate; and this should be seen as applying to men as well as women.

Submitter

Tom Schuller is currently Director of Longview. From 2008–10 he directed a national inquiry into the future of lifelong learning, sponsored by the National Institute of Adult Education, and was the main author of the report Learning Through Life. From 2003–08 he as Head of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation at OECD, the international thinktank, and before that Dean of the Faculty of Continuing Education and Professor of Lifelong Learning at Birkbeck. He is a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck and the Institute of Education. He has written or edited some 15 books, on education, ageing, pensions, industrial democracy and social capital.

Longview is an independent thinktank which promotes the value of longitudinal studies. The UK is a world leader in large-scale longitudinal studies, and Longview aims to make sure that these are used effectively by policy-makers and researchers, especially in areas such as employment, education and social mobility. See www.longviewuk.com.

The Paula Principle

1. The Paula Principle (PP) is that “working women stay below their levels of competence”. It is the mirror image of the Peter Principle that “people rise to their level of incompetence”, expounded in the 1960s when only men had careers. See www.paulaprinciple.com for further detail. A book on this is in preparation.

2. Why does the PP matter? Partly for reasons of fairness: women should be rewarded fairly for their competences. But also because an increasing proportion of the nation’s human capital is female, and underutilisation of these competences harms us all.

Educational Crossovers

3. The superior education and training performance of girls and women has been going on for some time. The simple table below indicates the years when female achievements overtook males.

Educational level	Date
Women overtake men in FE participation	1981
Girls overtake boys in getting 2+ A levels	1989
Women overtake men in HE participation	1994
Ditto in Russell group, undergraduates	1999
Training
Higher participation in training	1993

From all these crossover points women have either continued to increase their advantage, or maintained it. Women achieve better qualifications initially, and improve their competences more consistently than men. The gap exists at all levels of qualification.

However the superior qualifications and competences have not been reflected in the pay and careers of women in the workplace. There has been progress, but this has been not only slow but patchy—as we can see with part-time workers.

Careers and Pay: The need for a Lifecourse Perspective

4. The gender pay gap has certainly closed over the decades. We can argue about the slow pace. But the key point here is that the gap widens again over time as women and men pursue their careers—and that it widens faster for the younger generations.

5. Longitudinal research illuminates this. Using large-scale data from two cohorts born in 1958 and 1970, whose careers have been followed at roughly five-yearly intervals, Jenny Neuburger’s analysis (Figure 1) shows how the pay gap starts at different points but expands over time. Although the pay gap has decreased very significantly between the two generations, the gap widens over time as each generation gets further into its career path—and this happens at a faster rate for the younger generation. So for those born in 1970, the gap at age 26 was only just over 10%, compared with nearly double that for the 1958 cohort measured at roughly the same age (23). This is the kind of progress one would expect, especially given that the women in the younger generation had begun to pull ahead of the men of their age in terms of qualifications. But for this same younger generation, by age 34 the earnings gap had increased by eight points to 18.5%; whereas at a similar age, the previous generation had gone up only from 19.5% to 23.4%. Figure 1 shows how the gap starts smaller, but then widens at a faster rate for the younger generation, whose women have a larger qualification advantage over the men in their cohort than the 1958.

Figure 1

THE PAY GAP HAS DECLINED ACROSS THE GENERATIONS—BUT GROWS BACK OVER TIME!

Source: Jenny Neuburger, personal communication

6. So we may have made progress in shrinking the gender pay/career gap, but this is not necessarily being sustained over the lifecourse. It is possible that as big a pay gap will have opened up by the time the later cohort reaches the later parts of their career as existed for the earlier cohort at the equivalent age. The implications are large, for women as individuals (pay, status, self-respect, pension) and for society generally. At a time when we shall all be living longer, and therefore also working longer, we need the kind of evidence which tracks people over their careers.

7. The lifecourse perspective is also crucial for revealing the effect of women working part-time. The Committee has already heard from many sources about the importance of giving greater value and reward to part-time work. Longitudinal research shows that it is not so much having children as shifting to part-time status which really sets women’s careers on a flat or downward trajectory.1 And the effect of course cumulates over the lifecourse—with a cumulative loss of earnings to the individual, and talent to society.

The PP Factors

8. The Committee will have evidence on why the women do not reach the levels their competences suggest they ought to. I’ve summarised these as:

PP1	discrimination: overt or covert
PP2	caring: child and elder care. The UK costs are exceptionally high.
PP3	psychology: lack of self-confidence means women do not present themselves for jobs/promotions
PP4	vertical networks: women don’t have the links to people at levels above them—a vicious circle

And a rather different one, less negative:

PP5	choice. Women choose positively not to go further up the ladder. This is obviously contentious. It is of course true that choices are shaped by circumstances; but we cannot attribute too much false consciousness to women who say they are choosing different routes.

Leaky pipe rather than glass ceiling

9. The presence of women at senior levels is important, symbolically and for reasons of power. But it’s arguable that the “glass ceiling” metaphor narrows attention too much on the top levels. It’s irrelevant for most women, whose skills are being underutilised at all levels. However evidence is harder to gather at these lower levels.

Implications: a better time mix

10. Mentoring, cheaper childcare, better careers guidance and managed career breaks are all part of the mix. But I am increasingly persuaded that abolishing the outdated fulltime/parttime distinction, and enabling careers to be built on a range of worktime patterns, is absolutely central. This extends to men as well as women. The practical implication is for a default position where all jobs should be advertised and available on a sliding hours basis, except where it is demonstrably inappropriate.

11. We need also to look at careers in a way that is both more diverse and more coherent over the lifecourse. There is much rhetoric around how we all need to change careers many times in a working life (probably rather less often in fact than the rhetoric suggests), and to work longer. The challenge is to think about how to offer career opportunities to all which combine coherence with change. Such an approach would be especially beneficial to women.

12. This is in fact part of a wider argument about the utilisation of skills. The argument has been too dominated by the supply side, ie increasing the supply of qualified people. The Paula Principle shows how women’s competences are underutilised; we need to pay more attention to job quality and how work is organised.

30 November 2012