The Paula Principle

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…

By the time a woman is aged 65 to 69, her average pension wealth is £35,700, roughly a fifth of that of a man her age, according to a study at the end of 2018 conducted by the Chartered Institute of Insurance. The emphasis is mine. It's an amazing figure - one sex's pension wealth at just 20% of the other's. How does that rather abstract notion of 'pension wealth' translate into income difference? A recent report from the trade union Prospect (Tackling the gender pension gap) found that the gender pensions income gap (39.5%) was more than double the size of the total gender pay gap (18.5%), with the…

A recent piece in The Times bemoaned the absence in New York of the habit of a drink after work with office colleagues. Apparently this is due in part to the highly competitive nature of American offices, so colleagues don't want to risk losing their edge; and in part to the dangers of behaving inappropriately in a highly litigious culture. A further reason is the high-octane character of American cocktails and the high alcohol level of some of their beers (10%!), not conducive to more than a single round. James Dean is the paper's US Business Editor, and so presumably has an accurate finger on the pulse of office cultures.…

This post links three interesting events/publications from the last week. First, I attended an invigorating conference on Women in Economics at Warwick University. The organiser Stephanie Paredes Fuentes and her team did a great job in bringing students from many universities (and countries - a very international group) together to discuss some of the challenges facing women doing economics - one of the very few subjects where men still outnumber women. I was present only for the panel session on the Sunday. Luisa Affuso, chief economist at Ofcom, graphically described some of the severe challenges she had faced as a pioneer in her profession, and this led to some discussion…

It's that time of year again - when the World Economic Forum publishes its annual assessment of progress towards gender equality. This is a treasure trove of data and comparative rankings on four dimensions of equality: education, health, politics and economics. The headline news for the UK has been simple: the country went down 6 places in the overall ranking, dropping out of the top 20. I suppose you could take this as a timely signal of the slide into mediocrity - but I'm always one to avoid cynical pessimism. Here's how the UK's overall picture looks: Let me get my methodological beef out of the way. On education, WEF…

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…

Just a couple of items, before I disappear for a couple of weeks, trekking in the Himalayas (yes, lucky me). First, here's a chart from the Learning & Work Institute's useful data on adult learning. LWI monitors what's going on every year or two; as well as measuring participation levels by all kinds of factor (age, class etc), they ask about the benefits of learning: to the person's job; to their health and wellbeing, and to gaining qualifications. The chart below shows the results on this last one: whether the learning that men and women engage in leads to qualifications, or to more learning. The final column shows a big…

I went last week to a packed meeting of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at Kings College London, to hear Carrie Gracie talking about her book Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. Carrie was in conversation with Julia Gillard, ex-PM of Australia and leader of the GIWL. As Carrie pointed out, Julia was impressively well-prepared, with a postit-festooned copy of the book, and the two women's dialogue flowed along very well. The story is that of Carrie's discovery that as BBC's China Editor she was not being paid the same as her male BBC equivalents, in spite of explicit assurances that this would be the case, made…

It's that time of year again. OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance. I was actually working at the OECD in the 1970s (yes, I know...) when EAG was first developed, though I had no hand in it. In those days the title was descriptively accurate - EAG was a slim document you could flip through quickly. Today the title is richly ironic. Anyway, forsaking nostalgia for my youthful time in Paris I turned to the figures for female and male achievement. They confirm the basic trend: women continue to increase their educational lead over men, at every level and in almost every subject. The situation is…