The UK labour market has changed a lot in the past 30 years. The days of men being the main breadwinners are gone, and women now make up almost half the UK workforce. At first sight these changes look good for us: the burgeoning service sector offers more openings for women and greater flexibility in working hours suits those with family commitments.
But we only need look a little deeper for a more worrying picture to emerge.
Many of these jobs are of low status, with low pay and limited career progression. Although women account for a huge proportion of the labour force, they are often stereotyped into a limited range of jobs – computer operators, carers, cooks, cleaners
The new flexibilities and family-friendly policies are offset by a worrying trend towards longer working hours
Although it's widely agreed that women's management styles are more effective than those of men, we still hold less than a quarter of all management roles in the UK
In senior positions the situation is even worse, with hardly any female representation on the boards of our largest companies
The net result is that, despite three decades of equal pay and equal opportunities legislation, the average woman still earns significantly less than her male colleagues.
What are the facts?
One reason for the pay gap is that women and men choose different kinds of employment. The most common jobs for women are: sales assistant/cashier, secretary, teacher, nurse/careworker and administrator. Men tend to opt for work in transport, management, construction, production and electrical trades. Both sides find it difficult to get work in the sectors dominated by the other sex. It's true that women are increasingly moving into law, medicine and accountancy, but there's no equivalent female invasion of science, engineering, ICT and the skilled trades. Only 1% of construction workers and 4% of engineers are women. The situation is better in information technology, where around a third of employees are female.
The difficulty is that jobs seen as 'women's work' command lower wages than 'men's work', even where they require similar levels of qualification.
Further up the career ladder, women are moving into more middle-management positions. Businesses have become very results-driven in recent years and our persuasiveness, team consciousness and ability to communicate have become highly valued commodities. But recent research has found that women account for a tiny proportion of all directors of the FTSE-100 companies, while more than half of those organisations still have exclusively male boards. Contrary to popular opinion, the glass ceiling hasn't been shattered – it's just moved up a bit.
Why does it matter?
These astonishing figures are not just depressing indicators of the real state of 'equal opportunities' at the start of the 21st century. Unequal gender roles have also given rise to potentially disastrous skills shortages, with massive shortfalls in engineering, construction, the skilled trades and ICT. By ignoring women, employers are missing out on our huge untapped potential. Employers who wish to survive and prosper over the next decade should aim to recruit from the whole of the labour force – not just from 50% of it.
Most people agree that a more diverse, less gender-defined workforce will help to create a healthier workplace culture. And the skills and values that women can often bring, such as communication and negotiation rather than confrontation, co-operation rather than competition, are now recognised as essential components of business success. So what's holding us back?
