The Paula Principle

Author: peterprinciple

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
Read More

Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
Read More

Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More

Going Dutch?

I've said before - many times - that we need to rethink our approach to part-time work.  This is increasingly obvious in the light of the changing nature of employment generally, and not only in relation to the PP.   Included in this rethinking should be proposals for new ways of classifying part-timers.  The simplistic binary division into full-time and part-time has to go if women's careers and competences are to get a fair shout. In the last chapter of the PP book I suggest that we might restrict 'part-time' to work that is 8 hours a week or less, i.e. that is genuinely marginal.  This may be a step…
Read More

Clara Zetkin and International Women’s Day

My PP book will be published on March 8 - International Women's Day.  So it was with particular interest that I read in Richard Evans' magisterial account of the C19, The Pursuit of Power, that IWD was founded in Copenhagen in 1910, by Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was obviously a powerhouse.  She was born in Saxony, daughter of a German schoolmaster and his highly educated French wife.  She travelled for a while around Europe with the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin, and later married an artist 18 years younger than she.  Back in Germany she took over a feminist magazine, renamed it Die Gleichheit (Equality), and took its circulation up to 125,000 by 1914.  That's…
Read More

Convergence and difference: Brenda Barnes and cancer rates

My eye was caught recently by obituaries of Brenda Barnes.  She was obviously a remarkable woman: third of seven daughters of a pipe fitter who started as a nightshift mail sorter in Chicago and rose to be CEO of Pepsicola. In 1997 Barnes resigned, choosing to focus on her three children - sparking a major debate on worklife balance on the one hand, and whether she had 'betrayed' the cause on the other (just as Anne-Marie Slaughter did 15 or so years later). Barnes had cracked the glass ceiling once (and in this case the metaphor is apt;  though in general I prefer to focus on levels below these top…
Read More

Social mobility, occupational maturity and an early pay gap

The Social Mobility Commission's report on the influence of social class on professional progression deservedly got wide coverage.   It moves the debate along from looking only at entry into different professions, to show how people from different social origins do or do not make progress and are or are not rewarded once they have been working for a while.  The analysis shows that those who come themselves from the lower social classes earn on average £6800 less - 17% - than their peers who themselves originate from the professional classes. The class gap is bigger for men than for women.  But the report points out that there is a double…
Read More

Basic incomes surface in Davos – no longer marginal

Back in Aug 2014 I wrote a post on the idea of a citizen's income.  The idea of guaranteeing a basic income is PP-relevant because it would help people - especially women -  move in and out of formal employment without looking like deviant marginals. I said: The CI has been around for a long time. It has generally been dismissed as either cranky or ok in theory but unworkable. But when it was first being discussed 20 or so years ago, the labour market was very different..... As a political sell, it’s a tough one. Many will have an instinctive reaction against the unconditional something-for-nothing proposal....But as Iain Duncan…
Read More

Reduced working hours: linking the PP to inequality and to climate change

The primary conclusion of The Paula Principle  is that women's competences stand a chance of being fully recognised only if men's work and career patterns change to a more 'mosaic' model.  Central to this is the need for us to recognise that careers, at whatever level, should not require people to work full time or continuously (hence the mosaic image of different pieces put together in a variety of patterns, rather than a vertical career ladder). In this post I want to make the link between this and two items: a. new analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which shows how inequalities in incomes have been increased because lower-wage men increasingly…
Read More

Sapiens and sapientiae

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is great read.  Harari apparently was trundling along as a rather specialised mediaeval historian when he was asked to teach a course on world history and this caused him to break out of his boundaries in no uncertain terms.  One review describes it as a 'starburst', which I like, but it's a starburst with humour as well as dazzle. There's no way I'm going to summarise the context or direction of the book.  I just want to pick up on Harari's account of the positive aspects of nomadic foraging over the settled life of the pastoralist. Foraging apparently gave you a much more varied diet - you ate…
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Hillary and Montaigne

I just came across the blog below, which I wrote over a year ago, and for some reason failed to post.  The first part reads so sadly in the light of what eventually happened - though I doubt even the perspicacious Dejevsky foresaw how her prediction would be fulfilled....   Readers may know that the fifth 'PP' factor is positive choice:  women actively choosing not to go on up the career ladder, even though they (probably/possibly) could.  By 'positive' I mean that the choice is, to any reasonable eye, not constrained, e.g. by grumpy partner's unwillingness to do more childcare, but is the product of 'free will'.  I argue that this…
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