Close the Gap newsround (9)

This weeks newsround includes articles from the Herald, The Guardian and others. Topics include occupational segregation, gender stereotyping and equal pay.

NEWS - SCOTLAND

Herald Scotland

MP calls for more female radio presenters on BBC

NEWS - UK

BBC News Manchester

Bury equal pay case: Council settles with dinner ladies

Financial Times

Richard Lambert on performance and pay

O'Donnell derides business approach to gender

The Guardian

Davos: if women are the future, where are they?

Hollywood women unite to break through the celluloid ceiling

Why are women stuck at 17% of top jobs?

Television 'misrepresents' young people and older women

Coast presenter Alice Roberts appointed professor of public engagement in science

The Telegraph

'BBC should be scutinised for sexism and ageism', says MP

Human Resource Magazine

Lehman sisters: is there a connection between gender and ethics?

EVENTS

International Women's Day - Women in Scotland 2012 - The Big Picture

Close the Gap will be speaking at Engender's Women in Scotland 2012 Conference being held on International Women's Day Wednesday 8 March in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, 10am-4.30pm

The event is an opportunity to take part in discussions around; gender budgeting, occupational segregation, welfare reform and poverty, childcare, women in the economy and many more issues. For more details about this FREE event click on the link above.

UK Resource Centre for Women in SET

UK Resource Centre for Women in SET are hosting workshops on Women's Enterprise in TV. There are various dates and venues in February and March.

Inspiring Women's Enterprise in TV - One day Workshop

Pay, incentives, gender, and the case of the RBS Chief Executive

The subject of Stephen Hester’s bonus has been exercising commentators on politics, business, and labour relations. It has variously been framed as an issue of Stephen Hester’s honour, as a skirmish in the global war for talent, and of the awkward symbolism of one man receiving so much from the publically-owned pay pot while public sector pay freezes bite for other workers.

Hester’s bonus occupies the most recent paragraph in the story about pay, incentives and fairness that has emerged from the banking crisis. The engineers of opaque CDOs, who built houses of cards at the heart of august institutions, did so in part because they were incentivised to take risks, and because they bore no personal costs for their eventual collapse. The Walker review identifies remuneration as an key area of risk that boards need to bring in scope, to call time on pay policy that acts against the medium-term interests of the institution that is paying the salaries and issuing bonuses.

Chuka Umunna MP, speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, reminded listeners of the UK Government’s commitment that banks with majority public ownership would  pay bonuses to their executives commensurate with those banks meeting the Merlin targets. RBS has missed its Merlin targets for lending to small businesses, which is of no small concern to SMEs seeking capital to stay afloat. There is, it would seem, a disconnect between executive pay and the corporate behaviours that the pay is intended to incentivise and then reward.

Close the Gap has done work with a number of UK-based banks, looking at the issue of gender and reward, and has spoken to hundreds of women working across the financial services sector. These discussions paint a picture of pay structures that have the potential for great unfairness. Target-setting often functions in a way to disincentivise flexible working or part-time working, and bonuses for junior (mostly female) staff are sometimes linked to the performance of the senior (usually male) staff they support. Line managers often reward in their own image, and performance management frameworks appear to value stereotypically male attributes (aggression, risk taking) above stereotypically female attributes (team-working, building relationships).

The introduction of performance related pay, which is now a characteristic of pay policy in financial services, usually increases the gender pay gap within individual companies. It takes effort and commitment to mitigate the unintended, but nonetheless real, negative effects on women’s pay. Some banks in Scotland have made real headway on this, while others have not.

The issue, as Walker sets out, is one of managing risk. The financial services sector has not seen the torrent of equal pay cases that have swept through the pay policies of local government and the NHS, but it is not invulnerable. Close the Gap has seen evidence of unjustifiable differences in pay in some large financial services companies. However, the issue is not just about managing immediate financial and reputational risks. It is also about incentivising the types of behaviour that benefit companies and the wider economy. Scotland needs confident financial institutions that will keep capital flowing through the recovery. Scotland’s financial services sector needs staff who can build business relationships across and within communities, who can innovate in the design of products and services. Our discussion about reward must shift its focus out of the executive suite and tackle the more complex question of how, or whether, companies can use reward to drive the behaviours in which we all have a stake.

Close the Gap Newsround (8)

This weeks newsround includes articles from the Herald Scotland, The Guardian and others. Topics include occupational segregation, gender stereotyping and poverty.

NEWS - SCOTLAND

Herald Scotland

Female professorships reveal 'glass ceiling' at universities With a quote from Close the Gap

NEWS  - UK

The Guardian

Campaign to get more women on BBC's Today programme

Typing-It's complicated

Profile of Sheryl Sandberg Facebook COO

The welfare reform bill will erode women's financial independence

Boy raised without gender stereotypes

The woman's part: is single-sex casting sexist?

Reuters

Celluloid Ceiling: Women Comprised Only 5% of Directors in 2011

Civil Society Media

Reinforced glass ceiling in the voluntary sector

Age UK

Women more likely to be poor in old age

Huffington Post

Why women should become mentors

EVENTS

International Women's Day - Women in Scotland 2012 - The Big Picture

Close the Gap will be speaking at Engender's Women in Scotland 2012 Conference being held on International Women's Day Wednesday 8 March in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, 10am-4.30pm

The event is an opportunity to take part in discussions around; gender budgeting, occupational segregation, welfare reform and poverty, childcare, women in the economy and many more issues. For more details about this FREE event click on the link above.

UK Resource Centre for Women in SET

UK Resource Centre for Women in SET are hosting workshops on Women's Enterprise in TV. There are various dates and venues in February and March.

Inspiring Women's Enterprise in TV - One day Workshop

High cost of childcare forces women back in the home

The latest government statistics have revealed that an increasing number of women are being forced to give up their jobs because of the high cost of childcare.  The number of women who have given up paid employment to stay at home and look after their children has risen by 32,000 in the past year.  The average cost of full-time childcare is £385 a month but this rises to £729 for children under the age of two.

Women are already penalised when they take time out of the labour market to have children. A lack of flexible working and a dearth of quality part-time jobs mean that, after they have children, women are very often forced to work in jobs that are well below their skill levels. Even when both parents are in full-time employment, women are still usually considered to be the main caregiver.  When the cost of childcare becomes prohibitively expensive, it is, therefore, unsurprising that it is the woman who has to give up her job to take care of the children.*   

With the increasing cost of childcare and the impact of this on parents, it seems that greater public investment in childcare is desperately needed. Increased provison of childcare, free at the point of use, would go some way towards rebalancing the inequality women face when trying to combine a career with parenthood.  

*This refers to mixed sex relationships. There is little evidence about the dynamic of childcare in same sex relationships.