| Thank you very much indeed. It’s a
huge pleasure for me to follow Gordon, and listen to his remarks. For all
of us, and there are several of us in this room who have been campaigning
on this issue for 30 years or more, it makes such a difference to have a
Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Prime Minister who are real champions of
this whole agenda for equality. So, thank you Gordon.
But thanks are due to the Equal Opportunities
Commission too, for all that you've been doing and in particularly for
organising today's summit meeting. And to every one of you here, because
even from those exceptionally brief summaries that we heard, it is clear
there is a great deal of invaluable material and proposals that have come
out from this morning's discussion.
Earlier on this morning, in fact just after I'd
been here briefing the press about this, I was having a meeting with
somebody I've not seen for many years, who is a consultant in gynaecology
and obstetrics. And just because there are one or two journalists here let
me make it crystal clear that is not an announcement of a late pregnancy!
She is now one of many women holding consultancy posts in the National
Health Service, and that figure is going to go up and up, because of
course over half of graduates in medicine these days are women. So there’s
been huge change over the last 30 years when it was almost unheard of for
a woman to be a consultant. But, she's had no children. She said there's
simply hasn't been time. You cannot follow the kind of career path she
said that she'd followed and hope to make a relationship and have a family
as well. That is a classic example of the work intensification problem
that both Wendy and Kay were referring to in their summary.
And it is a very real issue that underlines much
of what we've been talking about this morning. If you asked a man who was
an NHS consultant whether he had children, you’d probably find that almost
all of them do. Of course it’s taken for granted that a man in a senior
position will also be able to have a family - for a woman in a demanding
position it is a very different and difficult choice.
Now when I started campaigning on these issues
back in the early 1970s when we were campaigning for implementation of
equal pay and the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Bill, the phrase
that the media were always using was "battle of the sexes" – that's what
this seemed to be about. These days what people think about is the war for
talent.
And that war for talent is absolutely real in a
world where economic success and the success of organisations (whether
public or private sector) depend on the skills, creativity and imagination
of the people you're employing. If you're going to succeed as an
organisation, you have to find, and then keep and develop, the best
possible people. What we're finding right now, with unemployment lower
then it’s ever been is that employers find it increasingly difficult to
get people with the skills and aptitudes and attitudes that they want.
And as the Equal Opportunities Commission found in
the first phase of the wonderful investigation they're doing, the worst
skill shortages are to be found in the sectors which have got the worst
gender segregation. I guess all of us should have spotted that one years
ago, but in fact it’s been the EOC’s general formal investigation that has
really brought that to everybody's notice. Of course, it makes sense - if
you are only recruiting, as far too many employers are, from half the
human race then you are more likely to have a skills shortage problem.
And, that segregation in the workplace – six out of ten women working in
occupations that are dominated by women and are low paid because they're
dominated by women – that is the one of the biggest reasons for this
stubborn and persistent pay gap that all of us are so concerned about.
We've used the phrase career sexism because there is still a cluster of
attitudes – even in the 21st century – that thinks nurses should mainly be
women or that plumbers should continue to be men, because that's the way
it's always been, rather than looking at what an individual's potential
really is and what he or she could do for themselves and contribute to the
wider society.
Modern apprenticeships are in many ways an
enormous success, indeed the Minister for Skills Ivan Lewis was saying
this morning that there are a quarter of a million people now doing them,
which is a huge achievement. But we haven't in most cases cracked this
problem of career sexism. Most of the apprentice hairdressers are still
women, most apprentice plumbers and carpenters are still men. And we have
to change that in a world in which, by the end of this decade, less than a
third of the workforce will be white men under the age of 45. So this a
burning factor for Government, for the public sector and for employers
everywhere.
Caroline, you challenged us in your group's report
to show leadership as a Government. I think we are, although I readily
acknowledge that there is still much more for us to do. But as an employer
we have already ensured that there are equal pay audits across the whole
of the Government sector. We all completed them and have just about put in
place action plans for dealing with the issues that they've uncovered. And
on flexible working of course, the civil service was ahead of the game,
and I think ahead of most employers.
There is still much more to do. But I'm very
struck in my own department not only by the fact that more than half of
each year's promotions in the Senior Civil Service are now women, but also
that at more and more senior levels, both women and men are finding it
easier either to take a career break or to work part-time. In fact one of
my senior officials, a man, has been working a three day week for several
years, his wife is also a civil servant does the same thing, and they
share the childcare between them. I'm proud of the fact that he was
promoted, a significant promotion, while he was working part-time. But
that's an exception, and we need it to become part of the norm.
The second challenge to Government, I think, is
how we reinforce and accelerate the cultural changes that all of us see
taking place compared to 20 or 30 years ago. And that's what we were
seeking to do in last year's package of new employment rights,
particularly new laws around flexible working. Now already we've seen
nearly a million parents change their working hours over the last year.
Almost all of them are mothers rather than fathers, because it is still
far more difficult for men to put their hand up and say, I've got a family
as well as work responsibilities. And we do need to do more to address
that.
But what we now need to move on to, as well as
looking at how we can extend that flexible working right to carers, is
looking at how new career paths will make it possible for women like the
consultant I was talking to earlier to feel that she can have a terrific
career and use her training and her abilities to the full as a consultant,
without having to sacrifice her desire to have a family as well.
And making it possible for women as well as men to
combine both, so that they aren’t faced with that choice between on the
one hand the good job, career and no family; or the much more common
choice that women make, which is to sacrifice their potential and the
contribution they could make to the economy in favour of having children
and spending time with them. We need to make that choice a thing of the
past. As Gordon was saying, in terms of equal pay, we’ve made the equal
pay audit toolkit available. We’re reinforcing and helping to fund the
training of trade union equal pay reps; and now I'm delighted to say we
have funded a new proposal from the TUC to create a panel of equal pay
experts, who will be able to give employers free advice on equal pay
audits and related issues.
And in response to Susan Greenfield's report we’ve
just created a new centre to promote and champion women in science,
engineering and technology, where we are desperately short of the skills
we need and where millions of women with the skills are not working in
jobs that use those skills.
You also quite rightly raised this issue of
procurement. We identified last year this whole issue of Government
procurement as central to the challenges we face in raising the rate of
innovation in our economy. And it is very interesting that it has been
business leaders amongst us this morning, who have also signalled the
potential of Government's £109 billion annual spend in the economy as a
force for raising skills standards and improving our achievement on
equality and diversity. Much done, much more to do. Together my sense is
that we can do it. And we look forward to the final report from the formal
investigation on skills from the Commission.
We look forward particularly to the report of the
Women and Work Commission, and its interim report next year. Both reports
will help to crystallize the most important and most urgent steps that
together we need to take, to deal with these related issues of career
sexism, and job segregation, unequal pay and therefore, of lower
productivity and lower performance across our economy.
I started off by saying that I've been at this
campaign for the last 30 years. That's fine, I'm happy to have done that,
I will go on doing it. But I don't want my daughter and I don’t think any
of us want our daughters in another 30 years’ time still to be coming to
seminars like this, still to be grappling with these issues. So that's our
responsibility and our challenge and together I'm sure we'll meet it.
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