One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…

One of the key themes in the Paula Principle is to scrutinise the notion of convergence between men and women's career patterns. The PP is founded on the fact that women's qualification levels have not only converged on men's but long ago surpassed them - crossover rather than convergence. Meanwhile respective earnings have only slowly drifted close together, so the careers gap remains large. As a result the female/male competence gap is increasing faster than the male/female careers gap is closing. In anything other than a simplistic sense, convergence is not happening. But this is not the key point. Talk of convergence has a dangerous tendency to reinforce the idea…

A couple of fairly gloomy charts, I'm afraid, but I find it constantly important to get the message across about how the Paula Principle affects the whole life course. Indeed, its biggest impact is on the second half of people's lives: first, because the gender earnings gap is greatest for older workers, and secondly because this carries on into life after work. Remember that by now, because of the competence crossover (women surpassing men in qualifications etc) a lot of these women pensioners are better qualified than their male counterparts. First the international picture, shown in the OECD chart below. My techno-incompetence (lopping off the figures from the vertical axis)…

The latest OECD report, Joining Forces for Gender Equality, is a massive effort, covering GE-related issues not just in the usual areas of education and work, but across sectors such as energy and with some highly topical specific chapters, for example on Ukrainian women. Not bedtime reading, but definitely worth checking out. Here are a few Paula-related selections. GPG reporting. The report describe (p28) how countries are increasingly using reporting measures on the Gender Pay Gap to build a base for developing action. It highlights a Swiss tool which helps companies do this - https://www.logib.admin.ch/home. Parl-time work. The gender distribution of this has changed very little over the last decade.…

Yesterday I attended a TUC conference on AI - a lot to take in, some of it quite frightening. The TUC has been doing excellent work on the challenges AI presents in the workplace. One of the speakers was Robin Allen, a KC who has long experience of legal issues to do with equality. I spoke to him briefly at the end as he'd referred to the Gender Pay Gap in his remarks. To my surprise he was dismissive of the GPG transparency moves. Robin's view is that only pay audits which reveal what men are paid will have an impact. I'm not convinced; for one thing the obligation (on…

A couple of days ago I took part in a webinar organised by the admirable Transparency Task Force. The TTF promotes reform of our dubiously accountable finance sector. The speaker on this occasion was Nicholas Shaxson. I'd read and enjoyed his exposé of tax havens, Treasure Islands, some years ago. I'd also read and been impressed by his more recent The Finance Curse, which argues that the UK suffers from its overdeveloped finance sector just as other countries have suffered from over-reliance on a natural resource such as oil. Of course we need banks and financial institutions. They enable businesses to start up and grow, and individuals to use their…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and I thought this was the time to get going again on the PP blog, which I've neglected for months. Technology dictated otherwise, so I'm a day late... We had the usual surge of impressive stats underlining the issues still impeding progress towards equality at work. I want to focus on just three of these. The first is the way the GPG expands hugely over the life cycle. The TUC's excellent annual report shows this so clearly: This is very familiar. But in recognising how this age profile has persisted over the years we need to remember that the qualifications profile by age has changed.…

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…

A recent piece in Social Europe took me back to my initial education. I spent many -probably too many - years a student of Latin and Greek literature and history. Very occasionally we were asked to think about the cultural and political differences between the two supposed wellsprings of European civilisation, though at the time - we're talking several decades ago - this would generally have been seen as too broad and unmanageable a question, ie not amenable to the narrow disciplinary boundaries which operated at the time. Now along comes a study which does just that - but in relation to women's representation at board level today. Audrey Latura…

I was very intrigued by Sarah Reardon‘s piece in Nature, on now networks influence women’s success in science.  It was tweeted by Athene Donald, who knows a thing or two herself about networking and science, and whose valuable tweets I've followed for sometime . The piece is a powerful illustration of Paula Principle factor 4, the influence of vertical networks.  It took me back, almost nostalgically, to the turn of the century when with John Field and others I was directly engaged in promoting the notion of social capital as a useful tool of analysis.  The unsurprising finding is how often women working in scientific teams have found their contributions ignored or unrecognised.  The more contentious issue arising…

Yesterday was International Women's Day, so the airwaves were humming with news, reminders of where there has been some/no progress, encouragements and disappointments. In the spirit of international exchanges I thought I'd just focus on one source of comparative information which relates to my recurrent theme of the under-recognition of women's competences. The EU's Gender Equality Index was flagged up by Laeticia Thissen in her excellent Social Europe piece. It covers the domains you'd expect: work, money, power, health, time and knowledge, and is a trove of . The indices inevitably give only a broad and partial picture but the data provides a great platform for identifying where more needs…