Welcome

Welcome to the Paula Principle site. I’d like the site – and the PP label – to help get a debate going on the mismatch between women’s educational achievements and their rewards at work.  For me this is a matter of both economic efficiency and fairness. But it also brings a rather more complex dynamic to discussions of equality. (I’m not generally a 50:50 person on gender equality, for reasons I’ll say something about on a later blog.)  My intention is to feed in arguments, facts, thoughts, mainly from the book I’m writing on the PP, and hope that this might prompt some reactions.

Today’s current item: in Saturday’s Guardian Simon Goodley wrote about female talent not getting a foothold in the boardroom. This is an issue that deserves repeated coverage. But there’s a problem with the ‘glass ceiling’ metaphor: it concentrates only on top positions, and many women feel it is nothing to do with them.  ‘Leaky pipe’ may be even better because it focusses on the extended process by which talent is lost – at all levels.  The PP applies as much to the clerk not getting (or going for) a supervisor’s job, as it does to a lawyer not becoming a top judge.   I’ll be talking about this in a couple  of weeks at a meeting of the Chartered Management Institute, with Cherie Blair as the main guest speaker.