The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt

'Advancing Women in the Workplace'

This issue has cropped up throughout my career, not just because I personally have had to juggle my responsibilities as a working mother balancing home and work commitments, but also in a professional capacity as a policy analyst, an employer, an MP, and now, as Secretary of State.

This is a key issue facing our economy and our society.

Today I want to talk about;

• the huge cost our country pays because of long hours working - in terms of inequality; excessive stress; and low productivity levels
  
  
• how we strengthen the coalition that is gathering around this agenda and how British boardrooms in particular need to take a lead, to meet their skills requirements over the coming years

The Problem - huge cost to economy and our society

Women are still held back from reaching their full potential at work. The pay gap is stuck at 19%. Only a quarter of managers and less than 10% of directors are women. In the FTSE 100, only 7% of directorships are held by women. There is only one female chief executive in the FTSE 100.

There are cultural reasons behind this. It is not just a women's issue. It's an economic issue. There's something very wrong with any economy that fails to harness the potential of more than 50% of its talent pool. It is also a social issue and hits us very much at a personal level. The issue is about responsibility for children and responsibility for parents. After all, male business leaders are just as likely to be parents as women. Why should it be different? They both have to balance their life and work commitments. And they both presumably had the same skills to get the job in the first place. The issue is the same. And the cultural barriers are just as difficult for men to overcome as women. As you see when you look at the take up of flexible working options amongst men. Only 2% of men work annualised hours, 3% do job shares and 6% work a compressed week. The demand for flexible working options is really high though. Of men working normal hours, 48% want to work flexitime and 40% would like to do a compressed working week. 38% would like to work from home and 24% would like annualised hours.

We need to get mothers and fathers working flexibly to underline the message that flexible working is for everyone - not just women with young children. It takes the stigma out of flexible working.

The perceptions are wrong though. The culture is wrong. Unfortunately, it still too often the case that when a man says he wants to spend more time with his family we assume that he's either had his hand in the till or been having an affair with his secretary. This workplace culture causes longer hours working. More than a quarter of all male workers usually work more than 48 hours a week, compared to only 11% of women. And this leads to more stress. We lose 6.7m working days a year because of stress at a cost of up to £12billion a year. Around 2% of total scheduled workdays are lost because of stress far more than is lost because of industrial action.

The Solution

So we need to turn this situation around. And it's a challenge for all of us. It's a challenge to us in Government, in delivering a strong economy and a strong society making sure everyone can contribute to wealth creation and share in national prosperity. A challenge to us as individuals - as parents. It's very difficult for women working in a male dominated environment to deal with that fact alone. Let alone also dealing with doing our jobs properly and managing our commitments outside of work. A challenge to British boardrooms - thinking about the skills they need, how to get the best people for the job and then, once they've got them, working out how to hold on to them.

Business

I know many businesses are already seizing this agenda. Many businesses I see now raise this issue with me before I raise it with them. They say they want to be the best. And being the best means you must recruit the best. And when you've recruited the best, you've got to keep the best.

According to the CIPD survey in 2001, almost a third of employers surveyed said they'd improved family friendly benefits to improve staff retention in the last 12 months. There are many marvellous individual examples of this.

Take Peter Elwood's work at Lloyds TSB. In 1999, they introduced a flexible working scheme called 'Work Options', which provides staff with a means to balance home and work life more effectively. For example, staff can

• reduce their working week by working compressed hours Monday to Thursday
• work from home one day a week or
• opt for increased hours during term time to balance reduced hours in school holidays

One reason for introducing 'Work Options' was to help the business retain skilled staff and attract new employees. It works. 80% of employees involved believe they are performing better and 90% of their managers agree. They've also increased their maternity returner rate by 10%.

Or to take another example, Listawood, a company I first visited a few years ago and then saw again last year when I presented them with a Castle Award. I know Irene and Arthur Allen from Listawood are here at this conference.

Listawood started in 1987 with £500 capital and £40 a week from the Enterprise Allowance. It struggled for a few years but is now a thriving, profitable business - last year sales were £8 million. Their excellent flexible working practices with no distinction in pay rates between full and part time workers have enabled them to really reach out to women. Two thirds of the 200 staff are women, involved with making or decorating mouse mats and other promotional products. In the management team of 12, there are 7 women. 80% of production team leaders and 66% of the 50 top earners are women.

We've also seen many other companies doing marvellous things on the international study tour we carried out last year. The key finding from this tour was that different companies find different solutions working within different regulatory environments to deliver their own win-wins.

To give a few examples of the sorts of cases we uncovered:

• At 3m in Ireland, staff turnover is well below the national average as a result of flexible working
  
  
• At Schott in Germany, overtime is a fifth of the national average. Schott Glass has always been ahead of the game, they had an 8 hours day in 1896.
  
  
• At Interpolis Insurance in the Netherlands, they're doing away with the old 9 to 5 structures - this has allowed them to provide a much more flexible service to their customers.

Government

So more businesses are seeing the benefits of flexible working. We in Government are doing our best to publicise them through using case studies and via events like this, and also through our website and other publicity material. We're also updating the legal frameworks and structures. We've got the new rights on flexible working coming on stream in April. These new rights mean:

• parents can say "I want to change" and the employer has a duty to sit down and consider it
  
  
• maternity pay will go up to £100 a week, the biggest ever rise since it was introduced in 1948
  
  
• the introduction of paternity pay for the first time ever. We estimate that 80% of dads or around 360,000 fathers each year will choose to take up this new right

Individuals

But all this work, by Government and by business, will not come to anything unless individuals - by that I mean parents - themselves take charge of the agenda. In particular, it's really important that men have the courage to challenge and change their working patterns. Unless they do, women will still feel uncomfortable about taking time off or asking for flexible working because they think it may harm their careers.

We need a culture where women have the confidence to challenge workaholic attitudes. Where men have the confidence to say I have children, I have a life. Men sometimes just want time to meet their girlfriends. It will work in different ways in different companies. But the key thing is we need the culture to change.

Government can't solve all the problems. Individual men and women can't solve all the problems. Industry can't solve all the problems. But if we have a broad consensus and partnership between all three, I have no doubt that together we can crack it.

I wish you the very best for a successful conference.