More than 30 years after the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) is hunting the missing 6,000 women it says should be in senior positions across the public and private sector.
Its annual report Sex and Power: Who Runs Britain? reveals that women make up just 10 per cent of directors of FTSE 100 companies and barely 20 per cent of parliament.
The EOC describes the pace of change in many top areas as ‘painfully slow’ and says that in some cases it has gone into reverse – despite the massive growth in numbers of women in work and public life.
It calculates that 6,000 women are ‘missing’ from the 33,000 top spots across the public and private sector included in the survey and adds that women from black and ethnic minorities are particularly poorly represented.
Among the ‘missing’ are:
- 78 from among the 194 senior judges
- 101 from among the 269 senior police officers
- 162 from among the 449 council leaders in local government
- 197 from among the 646 parliamentarians – Iraq, Afghanistan and Rwanda currently out-perform the UK
- 217 from among the 914 civil service top managers
- 233 from among the 751 members of the House of Lords
- 448 from among the 1,130 directorships in FTSE 100 companies
- 3,067 from among the 21,103 public appointments.
This year’s report is the last to be produced by the EOC, which becomes part of the Commission for Equality and Human Right (CEHR) in the autumn. The EOC hopes the CEHR will continue to produce the report.
Jenny Watson, chairman of the EOC, said: “Today’s troubling findings show just how slow the pace of change has been in powerful British institutions. They suggest it’s time not just to send out the head-hunters to find some of those ‘missing women’, but to address the barriers that stand in their way.
“Thirty years on from the Sex Discrimination Act, women rightly expect to share power. But as our survey shows, that’s not the reality.
“We all pay the price when Britain’s boardrooms and elected chambers are unrepresentative. Our democracy and local communities will be stronger if women from different backgrounds are able to enjoy an equal voice. In business, no one can afford to fish in half the talent pool in today’s intensely competitive world.
“As the EOC enters its final year, we are calling for change to make it possible for men and women to share power in the future. Asking for flexible working still spells career death for too many women in today’s workplace, and as a consequence women with caring responsibilities all too often have to ‘trade down’ to keep working.
“Extending the right to ask for flexible working to everyone in the workplace would change that culture and enable more women to reach the top. And political parties need to continue to take full advantage of the laws that allow positive action to enable more women to be selected as candidates at national level to ensure that the progress made here doesn’t go into reverse.”
But is it as simple as extending the right to ask for flexible working? The right currently applies to parents – and will be extended to carers in April – so the law practises equality and enables both men and women to take advantage of the right.
Do as many women as men want to go for the top jobs or into parliament? Do women simply not apply for the top jobs because they believe they can’t do them?
Clearly the fact that women have to do the childbearing means there is always going to be some gender inequality – but has the EOC got it wrong? Is it the fight for choice that is important rather than the fight for equality?
Here at HR Zone we’d be interested to know what you think.
One Response
Yawn!
This is the same tired and tedious nonsense that is run out every year, year after year.
Counting the number of bodies in each kind of job, quantifying them by type and then concluding that x minority is underepresented by their % representation in the population is unscientific.
Where is the real value research – the study of how many people of each type apply for each role, how many people of each type met the defined essential and/or desirable criteria, how many people of each type were invited to interview, how did those people perform at interview? Those are the questions that need answering to determine if a body of people have been excluded or are in fact over represented compared to the number of applications, qualifications etc. recieved for the roles.
I strongly feel that equality does not lead to equal representation, but should enable people to have the opportunity to do something if they so choose.
I work in Learning and Development which is treated as a subset of HR, in my experience (this is an unscientific “straw poll” approach) women make up way more than half of my profession, but I am not shouting for more male representation mainly because the large majority of my colleagues (of both sexes) are highly skilled and highly competent professionals.
And I’m pretty positive that the under representation of certain minorities within top jobs is not due to the lack of opportunities in the workplace. But the poor level of support for certain backgrounds throughout a “one size fits all” education system which demonstrates time and time again that it fails certain communities. Are employers to be expected to hire people unable to do the job just to make quotas?
Enough is enough really, it’s time to base conclusions on real research rather than head counting and determine if any of this has to do with discrimination rather than other unstudied factors.