The Paula Principle

Politics

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Competent cabinets

The cabinet reshuffle has hardly been an exercise in gleaming meritocracy: after much trailing that it would change the gender profile, just two women were added to the numbers of full cabinet members.  This is not, at all, a snide comment on the competences of those who have been promoted.   It is simply that the exercise seems to have been very largely to do with presentation, and not at all to do with competence.  And that's not only unhelpful to the supposed  beneficiaries but runs directly against the cause it's supposedly espousing - better recognition for women. It's good that David Cameron has been sparing in his reshuffles.  Whether…
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

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

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

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

Men and choice

Since I have to rewrite my  PP book completely (a difficult verdict  to swallow from a publisher, but one I now recognise as correct), I've been doing some further interviews, or conversations as I prefer to think of them .   My latest respondent described to me the remarkable case  of her father, a senior engineer who chose to leave his job and be the main parent for his four girls, while his wife took up her career as a teacher.  This was not for financial reasons - the father would have earned more, even though the mother ended up a headteacher- - but simply because the couple decided that…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Confusion over ‘part-timers’

I half-listened to an episode of Money Box yesterday, on part-timers.  What a total guddle.  Even if I had given it my full attention as the very experienced and articulate panel explained points of tax and benefit to people who work in all kinds of untidy formats - several contracts with the same employer, repeated contracts, zero hours etc - I would have been a long long way from grasping how the system works. The relief and gratitude from some of those who had phoned and got answers to their specific problems were palpable.  They had clearly experienced frustration  in the face of an overwhelmingly complex set of 'rules'.  Just one…
Read More

Pioneers

It's still August, yet there's a steady stream of PP-relevant items appearing in the media.  More posts to follow shortly on caring grandmothers and human capital contracts.  But yesterday was a bit of a blue-letter day. In the morning I listened to Joanna Haigh being interviewed on The Life Scientific.  She is professor of physics at Imperial College London,  has done hugely important work on climate change, and is an FRS.   She came across as authoritative but very modest.  Amongst other tributes, one of her former students gave testimony to how encouraging and non-hierarchical her attitude was to those she supervised.  Later in the day I went to the Globe Theatre…
Read More