Seeing the system behind gender pay

Originally published 1 July 2017

Picture the moment. I’m just back from two weeks holiday luxuriating in sun, sea, family and reading, reading, reading. A text arrives asking if I’d come on BBC Radio 4 Today programme to talk about gender pay and work. How can we address the issue? A 4 minute slot.

As I gather my thoughts I reflect on my holiday reading: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak and Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova.

Patterns emerge. Tales of worlds operating under the shadows of dominant cultures – that promote some at the expense of others. Systemically denying rights, denigrating others. What worlds. Yet through them the glimpses of humanity at its best: love, kindness, compassion, curiosity.

And I gather my thoughts together, order them to make sense to me. I know I don’t have all the answers, many much more learned than me have reams of research and insight. I still go back time and again to the writing of Virginia Woolf – her essay Three Guineas as pertinent today as it was when written in 1937. And that’s OK I decide. Ideas develop and spread through sharing. And in this way we can change the world.

Here’s my thread:

Societies run on certain assumptions of what’s normal, that help us organise how things happen and get done. In much of the world and definitely here in the UK there are two assumptions that I feel key to this discussion: the assumptions on roles people play and on what great leadership looks like. Both were shaped by white, wealthy, upper class men to serve their interests and have been refined and embedded over centuries into our very psyches. White, male, rich, privilege.

In this blog I’ll anchor my arguments to the binary gender discussion although I believe the basic thinking applies across the non binary and also to race, class, wealth, disability and any other difference to the established norm.

So what are the assumptions/paradigms?

First to roles. Men are the breadwinners, women the primary caregivers. Full. Stop.

And on leadership: an alpha male paradigm where self interest, competition, hierarchy set the rules of the game. Strong is seen as leading from the front, do as I tell you, follow me over the hill. It manifests in our legal and parliamentary systems: I win, you lose. Collaboration is seen as a sign of weakness. Adversarial debates, shouting, backstabbing, talking over, interrupting.

And so the world had been for many years. Then along came the First World War and a pivotal shift in the UK. Women left behind started to work, take on ‘men’s jobs’. Corsets loosened and a movement began to grow. Women began to participate widely in society – though to much protest along the way. In 1869 it wasn’t people protesting at the idea of a female Doctor Who; It was hundreds of men protesting at the idea of a female doctor in the Battle of Harley Street. Thank goodness for Sophia Jex Blake. And each decade sees new battles for fair treatment and inclusion of women in society.

Today we see the debates asking questions like why there are so few senior women in the boardroom? Why are women in lower paid roles than men? Why does there seem to be a disparity between reward for women and men doing broadly similar roles? And why is this so after years of effort into fixing the problem?

It seems obvious to me that time and again we focus on trying to fix women to fit into the system. And then wonder why it’s not working.

Well intentioned policies often serve to reinforce the societal assumptions that we seek to break free from. Target family friendly policies at just women and the message you send women’s primary role in society is as the caregiver and that it is not an option for men. My direct experience of this has been fascinating as in my family our roles are reversed. I am the earner and my husband is the primary caregiver. He had to fight tooth and nail to be given a sabbatical when I returned to work when our first son was six months old. Sabbaticals weren’t intended for men in corporate finance. I also appreciate the pressure of being the breadwinner and the burden societies’ assumptions place on men too.

Too often the efforts to accommodate part time or flexible work lead to demotion, reduced responsibilities and less interesting work. I know far too many super bright women doing work way beneath their capability as that is all that they can get to fit with their other commitments in life. And too many men working all the hours they possibly can to bridge the gap to fund their families. And we wonder why we have a productivity issue in our country?

And too often we have a system in place where instead of being able to trust that there is fairness and equity in reward and promotion, those that play the game, compete, focus on what’s in it for them win out. It’s not necessarily a male/female thing. It’s a play the game thing. Some have been part of the game for so long they can’t see it for what it is. Comments today on ‘loads of men ask me for rises, I can’t remember a woman who has’ illustrate how insidious this is. Play by the rules of the game or lose out.

In that sense I’ve always been a bit odd. The only times I’ve felt the need to have a discussion on my reward have been when I was leading our London practice and I asked for my proposed reward to be reduced to be more in line with my team and as CEO where I chose to cap my reward at 20x the average employee salary.

So is the issue that women need to just ‘man up’ and learn to play the game? Much leadership training for women has been geared in this way for years. Early days forging us into she men, latterly how to assert ourselves, have our voices heard, make an impact – yet most still on the paradigm of an alpha male leadership model.

Now some fall back on the old adage ‘if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen’, and yet…

Let’s take stock of the world we are in. Reaching the limits of our sustainable resources, the highest degree mass migration outside a world war fuelled by conflict and economic scarcity. Big challenges of an ageing population, people living longer, advances in medical science, lack of housing – I could go on.

And as dear Einstein said we don’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them. We don’t solve problems with the same systems that enabled them. Self interest, competition and hierarchy have run riot and no longer serve us as the primary model of leadership. The societal expectation of women as primary caregiver sees many children with one (or both) parents either too busy and tired to spend time with them or absent altogether. Community fractures and the state is left trying to pick up an impossible number of pieces. As Robert Putman asks in his book The End of the American Dream ‘when did our kids become my kids?’

So if we agree that it is the system that needs to change, you might ask what to?

In terms of roles we need an expectation of shared responsibility for caring and earning as our contribution to society (and an expectation of contribution to society nurtured in our young by their community).

And the leadership needed to solve our big issues needs to be anchored around shared purpose, collaboration and connected communities. And it’s so much more energising to lead that way – where people are connected to and bringing their whole selves to their work. Doing work that they feel is meaningful. Working together with colleagues to create great work. Connecting ideas, people and resources to move better, faster.

So finally, if we can see the system is broken and needs to change to this new one how do we do it? Progressive leaders – women and men – around the world are working on this doing some amazing work. I’ll keep blogging, tweeting and sharing my influences and learning and experiments as we forge this path to shape a new normal, a better future.

If I was to summarise things I think work/help in this area into just three:

• shine a light. Transparency is powerful for letting us see things and explore what is happening. The gender pay gap reporting will highlight the structural issue that exists in most organisations including my own. For us we know we have an equal number of women entering our firm, yet by partner we have only 14% (although 33% on my leadership team). If you have more senior men than senior women you will have a gap on average pay. Shine the light on the issue, the broken system.

• Symbolise the change. For me as CEO capping my pay was something I could do. For our partnership committing to being a shared enterprise was something we could do. State your intent, figure out how to make it work as you go. If you don’t start you either make no or too slow progress.

• Work on your whole culture/system – from the stories you tell to policies and processes. What is the norm you are reinforcing? When the law for making flexible working available to women, carers etc came in we made it available to all our people. The former reinforces women as caregivers, the latter shared responsibility. Our new family policy recently recognised by the Working Families Innovation award allows parents to choose how they take parental leave – and how they pace the reward over the period too. When I led our London practice I had more senior men working flexibly or part time than women. And highly successful people too. Making it a normal thing not a fix the women thing. We have masses of work still to do in this respect.

  
  

So, with all of that buzzing in my head I wake super early on the morning of the interview. I get a cab to the studio and to get my voice working early in the morning a chat to the cabbie. He asks what I’m going to be talking about on the radio. I say the gender pay gap. I ask him what he thinks and he goes quiet for a bit, then he says ‘my wife looks after the home and she does it way better than I could, I drive my cab and earn the money. There are things women are good at and men are good at and we should just accept that. And if people find a man reading the news is more serious and prefer that then so be it,. And he sums up my whole view of embedded norms just like that.

So finally, into the studio. Four minutes whizz past like 30 seconds, I cover a fraction of what I feel matters. I think I get across the point that the gender pay gap points to structural issues in workforces that are reinforced by the assumptions in our society at every turn. Tweets and emails follow through the day suggesting some of what I’ve said has struck a chord. My head still buzzes with all that I haven’t had a chance to share. And I think I must write a blog on this.