Nicola Lacey talks about the LSE Commission on Gender’s recommendations to fix the proble

Lacey, Nicola

LSE Research Online

11/10/2015Childcare is a central issue in women’s participation andadvancement in businessblogs.lse.ac.uk /businessreview/2015/11/10/childcare-is-a-central-issue-in-womens-participation-and-advancement-in-business/The LSE Gender Institute has recently launched the report Confronting gender inequality — findings fromthe LSE Commission on Gender, Inequality and Power. Drawing on LSE research and external experts, thecommission was designed to inform public and policy debates in the UK concerned with inequality and powerimbalances between women and men. The work focused on the four main areas of Economy, Law, Politics, andMedia and Culture. Here, the commission’s co-director Nicola Lacey talks about the report’s most business-relevantfindings.The main business message “I think the main message is that businesses are losing out — despite the progress that women have made in termsof their achievement in education where they now outstrip men in degree level. They are doing very well in thelabour market in their thirties. But after the thirties all the evidence shows both participation rates fall off and wagedifferentials start and massively increase and there’s every reason to believe this has to do with patterns of care.Basically women still have the burden of child care and therefore their childcare responsibilities and other caringresponsibilities have an impact on their labour market participation and achievement. We argue in the report this isa loss of skills to businesses. To look at it in a longer-term way, businesses would be doing well by themselves interms of efficiency to try to keep women more fully and up to their skills-level involved in the labour market.”Norway’s example“We would like to see this country building on some of the initiatives we have seen in some continental Europeancountries recently, with tough targets for participation and representation of women in leadership roles on companyboards and so on. We think that those are places for targets and even for quotas in some areas. But probably themost concrete thing that we think could be done in the shorter term is to do something like Norway has done, whichis to restructure access to parental leave. At the moment, essentially, the bulk of parental leave is taken by womenas maternity leave. That was also true in Norway when it was possible for men and women, mothers and fathers, toagree to split a chunk of the available leave. In fact, in sort of 99 percent of cases women took the vast majority ofthe leave. Norway a few years ago introduced a system where if a father doesn’t take his entitlement to leave, thenhe loses it. The couple lose it. And this has made an absolutely dramatic difference to the number of men —whereas now over 90 percent of men actually take up that parental leave entitlement.”The political feasibility of quotas“Quotas at the moment are very, very difficult but they’re not impossible, of course. We know through the example ofthe Labour party’s all-women’s shortlists policy, which in the end required special legislation. But probably morerealistic is to take the idea of targets, because I think everybody could see that a target can be a motivating force. Itfocuses minds and can have real impact relatively quickly. So I think it will be much easier to garner the political willand social support by applying targets than around formal quotas except in certain areas. We feel that in the idealworld there would be a place, given the way things are, for legislatively mandated quotas. Now this is a verycomplex thing, both in terms of political support and in terms of the equality legislation in this country and atEuropean level. Nonetheless there are examples where this has been achieved, as with the labour party’s all-women shortlists. And we feel this is a policy area that should not be abandoned prematurely and should perhapsbe revised for the government to look at.”Job performance evaluations1/2“This is a subtle thing. Obviously one of the ways in which people progress in their careers and feel motivated tocontinue to achieve is when their work is valued. And I think there’s quite a lot of evidence that some of the thingsthat are really precious are things that typically disproportionately women bring to the workplace. Various kinds ofcommunications skills, social skills and perhaps caring skills aren’t always fully recognised in the ways in which jobsare graded and promotion decisions and hiring decisions are made, and so we make counterproposals about howthat might be more adequately handled. The idea would be to try to build a proper evaluation of the social skillsalongside the objective skills to incorporate them within that – not to think of them as subjective or in a differentcategory, but as part of what makes somebody good at a job.”♣♣♣Notes:The post gives the views of the interviewee, and not the position of LSE Business Review or the LondonSchool of Economics.Featured image credit: jencu CC-BY-2.0 Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy, attached to theDepartments of Law and Social Policy and to the Gender Institute. From 1998 to 2010 sheheld a Chair in Criminal Law and Legal Theory at LSE; she returned to LSE in 2013 afterspending three years as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor ofCriminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford. She has held a number of visitingappointments, most recently at Harvard Law School.  She is an Honorary Fellow of NewCollege Oxford and of University College Oxford; a Fellow of the British Academy; and amember of the Board of Trustees of the British Museum. In 2011 she was awarded the HansSigrist Prize by the University of Bern for outstanding scholarship on the function of the rule of law in late modernsocieties.Copyright © 2015 London School of Economics2/2

Childcare is a central issue in women’s participation and advancement in business

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