The Paula Principle

International

The PP applies across many countries. It’s a sign of developepd status when women outperform men educationally.

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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
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

all round competences

I'm normally a bit sceptical about international business survey results.  but Business Insider recently produced a set of findings which I found really interesting. They come from pulling together the results of an enormous number of '360o ' appraisals. These are where you as the appraised person get the views of all those you work with - above, alongside and below.  So as well as your boss, you get the views of your colleagues who operate at the same level - and those who work to you. BI pulled together results of 360o appraisals of 16000 'leaders', about one third of whom were women and two thirds men.  The average number of…
Read More

Attention on part-time work

I gave a small - very small, attendance about a dozen - seminar  on the PP recently at the Institute of Education.  A clever press release, not written by me, gained a lot of coverage - including the illustration below for the Peter Principle, which made me chuckle. What captured attention was the argument that only if more men work part-time  will part-time work become more recognised as a legitimate career option.  Is this a pessimistic argument, or a realistic one?   I know that friends of mine firmly believe that the only way to go is full-time.  But my argument is that the progress towards greater equality at work…
Read More

Great Gatsby curve

    Ever heard of the Great Gatsby curve?  Nor had I (or should that be, I hadn't)  until I went to a seminar yesterday, and was told that it has             been getting the attention of some important people, including the White House - though whether that includes the actual Person in the White House is not sure. Anyway, the GGC shows a relationship between growing inequality on the one hand and diminishing social mobility (SM) on the other.  This makes pretty good intuitive sense, and also appeals to me politically, ie it's another black mark against increasing inequality.  But the presenter at the…
Read More

Saudi drivers, and more on the WEF Gender Gap report

Women in Saudi Arabia want to be free to drive their cars.  There's a surprise.  From what I've read on the events of the last couple of days (which is not a lot), there has been a kind of Mexican stand-off, with the authorities not enforcing their ban on women drivers and the women not pushing it too far.  But this does look like some kind of crack opening up, which will be hard to paper over. This takes me back to the World Economic Forum's stimulating and rich Gender Gap report.  I posted on this yesterday, so you'll of course remember that it uses 4 dimensions - economics, education, health…
Read More

WEF Gender Index

From the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap  report comes some heavy duty and intriguing indicator work on progress towards gender equality in four areas:  the economy, health, education and politics.  I'm not a serious numbers person (more's the pity), but you can get the essence of the report quite easily, and then spend as long as your inclination or capacity allows you digging around in the detail, including in the 136 individual country reports.  Here's my go at extracting the overall picture, and then a few nuggets.  Maybe more in a later post. For each of the four 'pillars' the report uses a number of indicators to measure equality between…
Read More

Time on our Side

I have productive friends. My previous post drew on Melissa Benn's What Should We Tell Our Daughters?  This one draws on Time on Our Side, Anna Coote's broad-ranging and stimulating collection from the New Rconomics Foundation. It's subtitled 'a new economics of work and time', and brings together ideas about how we should measure well-being more adequately than via conventional GDP growth;   reconcile economic policy and practice with the imperatives of environmental change;  and arrive at fairer and more satisfying balance of  paid work, caring and other activities.  Sounds fairly challenging?  It is, but it's a thoroughly grounded and realistically argued set of essays. The book's key agenda item is the…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

OECD Skills Survey: gender and the use of skills

The OECD survey of adult skills was published yesterday, and triggered a torrent of publicity. It's a massive piece of work - 166000 people aged 16-65 interviewed across 24 countries, and directly tested on a variety of information-processing (literacy, numeracy, ICT etc) and generic (cooperation, problem-solving etc) competences. I know a little of just how much work went into getting this off the ground. Most of the immediate attention in the UK was focussed on our poor ranking in literacy and numeracy. This is always the temptation when league table information is produced. It's the aspect that journalists can most quickly get their pens on to, and we shouldn't complain.…
Read More

Hubris and humility

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic revives the Peter Principle (though he doesn't mention it), asking a number of questions about why more men rise to senior positions. The piece - and one of the academic papers linked to it - takes female 'humility' and opposes it to male hubris. Humility is a more positive way of expressing Paula Principle Factor 3 - lack of self-confidence - and the difference between the positive and negative expressions is worth discussing. But 'hubris' is an even more interesting term. TC-P argues that we are often unable to see the difference between competence and confidence. So people -…
Read More