Eve on Top: Women’s Experience of Success in the Public Sector

publishers.

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Women at the top (or not): history, background, issues and themes

Despite changes in the status of and interactions between women and men at work, power relations between men and women in management remain unequal, and especially so at high levels. Furthermore, the structures and social processes of organizations frequently continue to emanate from male-based practices, prerogatives and privileges. (Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008)

The rate of change over the past four decades has been glacially slow. (Ceri Goddard, CEO, Fawcett Society, November 2009¹)

When women fail to come forward and play a full part in our public life it is not just about the drives within us but about the pressures around us. Women are responding not only to inner desires but to barriers and rewards in our culture. (Natasha Walter, April 2010²)

You have people telling you to smile in a way they don’t do with men. You have in some institutions very male-orientated committees and there’s very male body language behaviour and those sorts of things. I would say […] it’s more to do with behaviour and culture and expectations, rather than structures and processes. (Ruth)

Introduction

In this chapter, we consider the broader context in which our study is placed. We look at some of the developments in the literature on women’s place in employment in order to provide a framework in which our work may be understood. Unlike the main bulk of the book, where we provide an opportunity for our interviewees to speak for themselves, we concentrate here on background issues and themes.

It has long been accepted that organisations benefit from having a diverse workforce. In terms of age, ethnicity, gender and other social characteristics, workplaces are more effective when their practices function to attract and support those with the greatest talent regardless of background. Many workplace policies and procedures are built around this principle, and it is enshrined in law. For a number of reasons, including legal, social and attitudinal change, women’s opportunities have progressed significantly in the last 35 years. But despite these changes, and some recent assertions (Sanghera, 2010), women have not yet ‘caught up’ with men even on quite basic measures such as equal pay, as recent national surveys have testified (Office for National Statistics, 12 November 2009;³ INSEAD/World Economic Forum, 2010) and this becomes more evident as seniority of position increases. Aspects of this situation are discussed in this chapter, where we look at some of the statistical information from surveys as well as some more qualitative research.

It is unsurprising that for many years, studies of gender equality within the workplace have largely focused on the myriad of difficulties faced by women in working alongside men on an equal footing. Early commentators, especially feminists, were concerned with the lack of opportunity for women in all areas of social life, including employment, and much has been written in attempting to understand the situation and to change it. Some studies have considered the various theoretical models of understanding around sex and gender, while others have focused on specific sectors of employment. In addition, a good deal has been published in the developing field of gendered management studies. An overview article by Broadbridge and Hearn (2008) provides a useful summary of significant developments in the field of gender, work and management. In this chapter we survey some of the literature most relevant to the field of interest covered in this book.

While women’s work experiences have largely been framed in terms of the barriers faced by women at all levels, less has been written about the nature of success for women, and how women who reach the top positions get there or what it feels like once those positions have been reached. We know a lot about the ‘glass ceiling’ but not very much about how women break through it and what they do once they attain positions that men have traditionally filled. Women in senior positions, moreover, have rarely been consulted about the important role they might play in advising other women who wish to follow a similar path.

Progress in context: two steps forward, one back?

The early campaigners would see much evidence of progress in today’s workplace, with women enjoying greater legal protection than ever before and being found in the top positions within both public and private sectors. But they would also recognise that there is still some way to go, with women’s presence at the top continuing to be significantly outnumbered by men in all sectors of employment, though the situation is better in the UK than in some countries, including the USA (Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008; see also the Eurostat website⁴). The situation also varies considerably from sector to sector and profession to profession (see, for example, Kumra and Vinnicombe, 2008). Moreover, despite the narrowing of the gender pay gap over time, legal measures and changing attitudes have not yet fully dispensed with the basic pay inequalities between men and women across the board. In 2009, the Office of National Statistics released their Annual Survey of Hourly Earnings,⁵ which showed that the mean hourly full-time gender pay gap narrowed from 17.1 per cent to 16.4 per cent in the previous year, and the mean part-time gender pay gap narrowed from 36.7 per cent to 35.2 per cent in the same period. Even so, Ceri Goddard, Chief Executive of the Fawcett Society, was moved to comment that ‘while the slight narrowing of the gender pay gap is a cause for celebration, we cannot afford to become complacent. The rate of change over the past four decades has been glacially slow, and while some employers are taking positive action to root out pay inequality, most are not.’⁶

It can clearly be seen that, despite equal pay and sexual discrimination policies which passed into law in the UK 40 years ago, overwhelming evidence exists to show that the gender gap in employment is still alive and kicking, both in raw terms (equal pay for equal work) and in more subtle ways, such as the continuing stratification, vertically and horizontally, of jobs along gender lines (Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008). In other words, women are still more likely to be found in lower-paid, part-time work than are men, are still ‘clustered’ in certain types of jobs, and continue to be overwhelmingly responsible for domestic work and childcare. A European Union-funded study by Cambridge University in 2007 which surveyed over 30,000 people found that the ‘have it all’ woman (with a full-time career, partner and children) has turned into the ‘do it all’ woman, carrying out the bulk of domestic duties, even when working full-time. The survey found that men across member states worked an average of 55 hours a week, whereas women in full-time employment worked an average of 68 hours. Commuting and domestic work, including childcare, were factored in for both men and women. The report highlighted three issues contributing to the persistence of inequality along gender lines in the workplace. These were: ‘the low quality of part-time work, the poor pay and status of female dominated jobs, and the under-representation of women at managerial levels’ (Burchell et al., 2007, cited in Womack, 2007). The report confirms that, in some areas, women have made great strides, but more generally when statistics on senior posts are examined it is clear that men are over-represented at the ‘top table’ across a range of occupations and professions. At a conference held in May 2010, where the Fawcett Society joined forces with the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the trade union Unison and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Kay Carberry CBE, Assistant General Secretary of the TUC, warned that at the current rate of progress, it would take three more generations to close the pay gap.⁷

So far, we have suggested that, although more women are rising to high positions, they do so in the context of continuing gender inequality and are under-represented at the top. A number of examples are useful here in illustrating the situation in specific contexts. Education is an area where women are considered to have been very successful, with a long history of their presence as teachers. In contemporary Britain, women make up 87 per cent of primary teachers, but only 67 per cent of primary heads. In secondary education, women account for 60 per cent of secondary school teachers, but only 36 per cent of secondary heads (Brettingham, 2008). So we can see that while women are well represented in the teaching profession, their progress to the top jobs is disproportionately low. The situation is even more pronounced in higher education where only 23 out of 133 university vice chancellors are women.⁸

Similarly, historically, women have been over-represented as nurses (2009 figures show there are 57,000 male nurses compared with 471,000 female), especially in the lower-paid ranks, and under-represented as doctors, especially as consultants, within the National Health Service (NHS), something that projects such as Women in Academic Medicine have sought to address.⁹ Although this balance has shifted considerably over recent years, with more women doctors than ever before (42 per cent of GPs are women), figures for 2009 show that women at consultant level or above constitute around one quarter of the total (Department of Health et al., 2010) with most concentrated in public health or paediatrics. Only 8 per cent of women consultants are surgeons. Moreover, a 2007 report on women in academic medicine showed that ‘despite the increasing feminisation of the medical workforce, women doctors are still strikingly under-represented in the university sector compared to their male counterparts particularly at the more senior levels.’¹⁰ Across a number of areas studied in the report, including appointments and promotions, mentoring and role models, work structures and work flexibility, women were shown to face the same problems as men but in greater magnitude. The study identified important factors impeding women’s progress in academic medicine and made a number of recommendations to remedy the