The Paula Principle

Politics

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More

Whose flexibility?

I went recently to the launch of a Resolution Foundation report on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).  My daughter was on one of these for quite a while.  I think of a 'contract' as something struck between two or more agents with some degree of reciprocal obligation towards each other, however minimal and formal.  ZHCs don't look much like  that to me.  They vary, of course, but typically they involve the individual being at the organisation's disposal, at almost any time, with no reciprocity. The RF report, and other research by Jill Rubery focussing on domiciliary care workers, shows just how unbalanced the deal often is:  work which is very intermittent, so that…
Read More

Critical paths

The recent IPPR report, A Critical Path, is a level-headed and coolly-argued analysis of the options for the future of higher education in England.  It combines a coherent set of criteria for deciding where we should be going, a realistic acceptance of financial constraints and a set of rigorously worked through scenarios.  As a result, it's an excellent basis for constructive debate. I'm going to focus on one particular aspect (part-timers), but before  that I'd like simply to highlight a selection of the report's telling points.  It restates (albeit briefly) the case for universities to have civic and local responsibilities.  It brings into the argument the large amounts of tax relief (upwards…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Discrimination against part-timers: a slightly unfair example

"The flexibility of Britain's labour market makes stagnation slightly more tolerable in the short-term than in countries where rigid labour markets have contributed to high unemployment. Yet there is a price to pay, as many jobs are part-time or temporary; when you take account of inflation, wages overall are declining." Thus Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of OECD, writing in this month's Prospect magazine. Nothing remarkable there, you might say. Padoan goes on: "If economic weakness lingers, there is a risk of further polarisation between full-time employees and those in part-time, insecure, often low-paid work." Again, the statement is in one sense unremarkable - except for the important warning from…
Read More

The Double X Economy and measuring things

Professor Linda Scott from Oxford University has coined the term the Double X economy to refer to the need to look at global economic issues through different eyes.   Now the competition is strong for catchy concepts which might waft their author to fame and fortune.  But this one has a very down-to-earth application.  I'd urge you to listen to the part in Scott's inaugural lecture where she talks about what it means for girls in many Afircan countries to have to use cloth rags as sanitary towels. Scott is an economist who has plenty to say about the failings of neo-liberal approaches, but also about the irrelevance of some radical critiques.  She reminds…
Read More

Culture and change: last session of Women and Skills Commission

I went into the Palace of Westminster for the final public hearing of the Women and Skills Commission, with Secretary of State Maria Miller and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jo Swinson.  Maria Miller is SofS for Culture, Media and Sport;  she attended the Commission, I assume, because she carries the equalities brief (being one of the very few women in the cabinet....), whereas Jo Swinson represents  the Dept of Business, Innovation and Skills .  (No sign of DBIS’ SofS, Vince Cable...). Perhaps ironically, Ms Miller in fact spent a lot of time talking about culture  - not her ministerial diet of theatre and music, but culture at work.  She stressed the need…
Read More

older women

Jackie Ashley's piece in today's Guardian  is subtitled 'the nation's great untapped resource' and makes a strong case for paying attention to the competences of older women.  This generation of 50+ women is the first to have a high level of qualifications, and far fewer of them have no qualifications at all.  So we need to think much more about how they can play a full part in paid as well as unpaid work.  She makes a powerful argument that this affects us all, for fairness and efficiency reasons. Ashley quotes some significant changes in attitude compared to 30 years ago.  In 1984 65% of women agreed that a husband's…
Read More