Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Overqualification, underutilisation

I've just been at a session of the Skills Commission.  Alan Felstead, whose work on how the skills picture has evolved over time has been so valuable, gave evidence before me, drawing on data which goes back twenty years or more.  Alan showed how the incidence of training declined before the recession but, surprisingly, not during or since.  However the duration of training has shrunk - i.e. the time people spend in training is going down. The focus of the Commission's discussion was on how well skills are being used.  Here the picture is complex and the evidence often quite tricky to interpret.   Alan's general points are: 1.  The…
Read More

Claudia Goldin and ‘grand convergence’

Claudia Goldin's presidential address to the American Economic Association - don't go away - is a stunner. It really should help to shift the whole focus of two important debates: the role and use of skills; and questions of gender equality at work. So it's hugely PP-relevant. There are large chunks of sophisticated number-crunching which are well over my head, but Goldin does a great job of summarising the key points, and how they fit into the historical narrative of what she calls the 'grand convergence' of male and female roles. She traces out the previous chapters of this narrative, which include greater female participation at work and, especially, changes in…
Read More

Self-employment: another area we need to understand

I've just been to a stimulating meeting at the Resolution Foundation, which always provides food for thought on employment issues.  This one was on self-employment, which now counts for over 15% of the workforce - some 4.5 million people. As Gavin Kelly, the FR's CEO, observed, when you have numbers of that kind routinely left out of most labour market analysis, it makes one query how robust the conclusions can be. Add to that the absurdity of using 16-64 as the age frame; and then pile on the limitations of the simplistic binary division between full-timers and part-timers and you reality begin to think that we need a radical rebuild…
Read More

Balancing the balance argument

The chief executive of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, recently made a really important point on gender 'balance', reported in the last issue of the Times Higher Education.  Speaking to the Association of University Administrators she observed that whilst it would take an additional 15000 female students to 'balance out' the current male dominance in engineering, it would take getting on for double that to do the same for the current female dominance of subjects allied to medicine, which includes nursing.   So, she argued, we should maybe be paying at least as much attention to getting more men into subjects where they are underrepresented as we do in respect of…
Read More

Confidence, convergence and caretakers

An interesting recent post from Jessica Valenti on 'why the female confidence gap is a sham' has made me rethink PP Factor 3.    PP Factor 3 refers to women's greater reluctance to put themselves forward for jobs, or for promotions, as one of the explanations for flatter careers and lower pay.  I've been in the habit of labelling this as 'lack of self-confidence'  but it needs a broader and more nuanced description. Valenti's piece is a guffaw at a new book The Confidence Code, which argues that American women need more confidence.  "It's true," she says, "that there's a gendered disparity in confidence..but the 'confidence gap' is not a personal defect…
Read More

Asia: where the PP applies most strongly?

The Economist recently ran a long piece on 'Holding back half the nation:  Japanese women and work'.  It chronicled the challenge facing Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as he seeks to change the position of Japanese women in the economy.  Japanese women are amongst the best-educated in the world, but 70% of women who have children stop working for a decade or more, and many never come back.   The  economic participation rate  for women is just 63%.  Fertility is, predictably, low. Japan and Korea are probably the most powerful examples  of the PP at work, with exceptionally well-qualified women almost all of whom have poor career prospects.   Mr Abe…
Read More

Grey trainees

Lucy Kellaway's column in today's Financial Times puts forward the idea of middle-aged trainees, with her usual reflexive wit.  (Sorry, I can't give you the link - no FT online sub…)  She contrasts her own early traineeship as a 'sneering waster' with the knowledgeable commitment likely to be shown by anyone who is taken on in their early 50s.    Older trainees might be quite willing to work at trainee rates, at least initially, if they had paid off mortgage , kids were off their hands etc. The key behind this, of course, is the increased duration of our working lives, from 40-odd to 50-odd years.  That makes an investment…
Read More

A fertile post

Below is a comment submitted in response to a blog of mine challenging Mrs Moneypenny's sense of value. I've kept it anonymous at the request of the author  (let's call her K) but quote it in almost its entirety because it encapsulates so many PP issues.  In particular: 1.  Fairness is and should be central.  The driver is K's sense of injustice at her discovery, not her desire for more money.    People should not have to work to find these things out, nor happen on them by chance. 2.  Part-timers often give better value.  Another, rather different, example:  I was listening the other week to Brian Moore - the…
Read More

The Good Life and productivity

I've been reading How Much is Enough?, a thought-provoking tract for modern times by Skidelsky pere et fils.  Robert Skidelsky is an economic historian who has written with massive authority on Keynes and his legacy;  Edward is a philosopher.    Robert is giving a public lecture tomorrow (25/3) at the Working Mens College, part of an excellent series which the College has been running over past months (declaration of interest:  I chair the WMC governing board.) The Skidelskys' challenge is to the dominance of GDP and income as dominant measures of how well we are doing, as individuals and as a society.  They make trenchant and, to my mind, effective criticisms…
Read More