Uncorrected Evidence 400

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Trade & Industry Committee

Trade and Industry Sub-Committee

on Wednesday 14 March 2007

Members present

Judy Mallaber, in the Chair

Dr Roger Berry

Miss Julie Kirkbride

________________

Witness: Baroness Prosser, a Member of the House of Lords, Chair, Women & Work Commission, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Baroness Prosser, thank you very much for joining us. We have been looking forward to talking to you about your report since our predecessor Committee in the last Parliament, when we were looking at the issue of occupational segregation and we said that we would need to return to this in this Parliament when you had reported, to see where it had got to and what was going to happen to the recommendations and how it tied into the report that we had done in the last Parliament. So we are very pleased to welcome you today and get your thoughts on your report, where it has got to and what the outcome is and where it is going. Also, from the evidence that we have, if there are any areas where we feel that it should be extended from the recommendations you made. So if I can kick off with a general question. You made 40 recommendations in your report. Obviously there is a whole range of different issues there but maybe you can say which you think are the most significant for tackling gender inequality in the workplace, and why?

Baroness Prosser: I think we concluded that the two most difficult areas are, firstly, the whole question of job segregation - of girls and women going into particular areas of employment that are either undervalued or, in some people's minds, seriously underpaid, and which, largely speaking, are not part of a career path that will lead women further forward. So the whole question of job segregation, either across the labour market by sector, or internally within work places. So, for example, if you went into a manufacturing car plant you might find quite well paid, well-regarded jobs there but mostly those jobs would be held by men, and women employed in such a place would be segregated into other areas within the workplace, and that is true of lots of manufacturing areas. So job segregation is one big thing, and the other big thing we would highlight would be the lack of access to quality part-time employment; almost all part-time employment is contained within the lower end of the labour market. There are very few opportunities for managerial jobs to be made available at part-time, but hopefully we will be able to come on to ways in which some of these issues are being addressed.

Q2 Chairman: Perhaps you could say now something about which do you think are the most important of your recommendations in tackling those issues?

Baroness Prosser: If we take the part-time experience first, arising from our report the Department of Trade and Industry has established a part-time work challenge fund, which is only half a million pounds, which is not to be sneezed at but, nevertheless, in the great scheme of things is equally not a huge amount of money. Applications for funding from that fund closed yesterday and, as I understand it, numbers of organisations have applied to be funded to work out ways in which senior positions can be reconfigured and made available on part-time terms. If I give you an example, I went to meet with one of the big banks. Some people might say why would a big bank be looking for money from government to make changes, they make lots of profit, but in my experience if you have a dedicated fund provided by a body to which you must be accountable then it is more likely that that fund will be spent in the appropriate way. So I do not think it is inappropriate to say that well-financed organisations should not be allowed to apply to the fund. So let me give the example of the big bank. Banks, as we know, employ many, many women in their counter services and local offices, local branches. Where women do not move forward is to become managers, largely speaking because the path is that you would go to be a regional manager and get experience across the region. That kind of a job means uncertain hours, long hours and requires a good bit of travelling; therefore, those women who have family responsibilities are not prepared to go for that and the banks themselves are anxious about that because they just cannot get women through those hurdles. I have not seen an application, but I believe that one of the banks has put in an application so that they can dedicate some work to determining how they can reconfigure those regional jobs to make them more acceptable to women and break them down and enable women to get through that hurdle. So it is for that sort of thing that the part-time work change fund has been established.

Q3 Chairman: Do you think we have to have that kind of fund or project to persuade those employers to take that action?

Baroness Prosser: We do have another initiative going on, which is the exemplar employers' initiative. We corralled together, shortly before the report was finalised, numbers of employers who had either sent in evidence or who had appeared before us, or who we knew were trying to do some things themselves. And we have swept them now into an exemplar employers group, which is overseen by Opportunity Now - it is umbrella'd by Opportunity Now - but funded by part of the money coming out of government funding for follow-up for our work. Those exemplar companies are trial-ing a number of initiatives, some of which are about part-time opportunities; some are about upskilling and retraining women from shop floor to junior management and then junior to senior management; some of which are about providing careers advice and guidance and better training opportunities in specific sectors. So there are a variety of initiatives going on - there are over 100 exemplar companies now in membership, and there is to be a conference on 15 May when the companies will come together and best practice and good experiences will be exchanged, so that people can learn from those experiences.

Q4 Chairman: Obviously the area of gender equality is particularly difficult, because you have been talking about specific examples - we are picking them out here and there - and overall to make those sorts of changes you are talking about long-term cultural change, about embedding a whole range of different areas. First of all, can you say, in order to get the thing going, what might be some easy wins from your report, from which people might be able to see progress was being made and some of that cultural change was able to be exemplified? Secondly, how do you see us moving down that path of changing the culture more fundamentally than just a bit here and a bit there?

Baroness Prosser: I am not quite sure what is meant by "easy wins". In my 20-odd years' experience of working on gender equality none of it has ever been very easy, I have to say.

Q5 Chairman: Some bits are easier than others.

Baroness Prosser: It is a slog; it is a long-term marathon slog and you just have to keep on going. I think there are some things which are happening arising from our report which will send out such messages that they will have an impact rather wider than the immediate. One of the things that we were really, really pleased about, and which is working very well, was the decision by the Chancellor in last year's budget to allocate �40m to be spent over two years on upskilling and retraining women in particular sectors and/or in very low skilled areas. The sector specific work is rolling out extremely well in numbers of different sectors. For example, in the food manufacturing sector there is a big initiative to train up, I think about 500 women from general packing and manufacture and putting together pizzas and all those sorts of jobs that women do, to train them up to become food technicians and then move into management. Apparently there is a really big shortage of food scientists and food technicians, so there is a training initiative to get women from the shop floor into those more qualified jobs. There is an initiative in the construction industry for 400-odd women to do NVQs in construction skills and for 100 women to do management training in construction. There are other initiatives in the logistics sector to train women as drivers and managers, in the textile industry and agriculture. So there is quite a variety. And in the science and technology area to enable women to identify what training they need, what career advice do they need. There is an enormous lack of careers advice for adults; unless you are part of a company and you get careers advice as part of a redundancy package there is nowhere really to go to get careers advice. So this is an initiative for women in the science and technology area to receive careers and training advice. So there is a whole range of stuff rolling out from the money that the Chancellor made available. I was afraid when it was first allocated that those people who had to make it happen would not quite grasp the initiative and maybe it would hang about doing nothing, but actually it is working extremely well. The reason I quote that in terms of how that has an impact, I think if those women regained their confidence and had access to jobs which are much more in line with their capacity and their ability, that has an enormous impact on their children - their children will see their mothers doing something different, something better and learning as an adult, and I think that will have a big effect radiating out amongst families and give girls, particularly, more confidence about the sorts of things that they could be doing.

Q6 Miss Kirkbride: Just on that, and then there is something else I want to ask you. Is that income-blind? It is the sector that decides the women who get taken on?

Baroness Prosser: Yes.

Q7 Miss Kirkbride: So it is irrespective of income?

Baroness Prosser: Absolutely. It is sectors that are short of skills, largely speaking, so that is the added incentive, if you like, for the employer.

Q8 Miss Kirkbride: That is very good. You see it every day that girls are better at school than boys, and I think I saw the more recent statistics that more girls go to university than boys do as well, so what happens? How come suddenly 20 years later or ten years later - I do not know when - there is this big income gap and things change? Secondly, is there any difference in terms of the research you have done between those girls who did go to university and the income equality gap there versus their peer group who did not go to university? Is this problem greater or is it the same irrespective of your educational achievement?

Baroness Prosser: Overall women are less skilled and have fewer qualifications than men. This is obviously changing because, as you rightly say, more girls and young women are going on to higher education, so it is shifting. But one of the things that the research has found, looking at women in low-skilled sectors, is that they are, largely speaking, less well trained or well qualified then their male counterparts, and that is partly to do with the job segregation that takes place at quite an early stage. So, for example, if two young people leave school together the boy goes on to train maybe as a plumber, an electrician, motor mechanic, whatever it might be, those traditional areas, and girls and women will go into office jobs which do not really have attached to them those sorts of qualifications, then of course they have families and then they go and work in the supermarket, so it all goes wrong from there. So, yes, there is a difference in skills level. Secondly, there are indeed more girls and young women going to university and more girls and young women doing better than boys at A Level, et cetera, but the research from the Equal Opportunities Commission showed that only three years after completing a degree, maybe in the same broad subject, girls are earning 15 per cent less than their male counterparts. So it does not take too long to happen.

Q9 Miss Kirkbride: Why do you think that is? That is shocking.

Baroness Prosser: These things are very multi-layered. It is partly to do with, for example, if you take a science degree is it hard science or a soft science, and one gets paid better or differently to another, one is more likely to be done by boys and men than girls and women. It is partly that it is true to say that women do not, largely speaking, push themselves for pay rises and promotion in the same way that men do; and I think lots of women, particularly once they have had a family, do have a great dilemma about where they want to focus their efforts and their energy. It is very difficult, I think, for those of us who have tried to make this balance, to keep really focused on fighting your corner at work when you have so many other responsibilities, and loads and loads of women decide that that is just too sapping and that they cannot be doing with it. The strain for the economy and the country at large is that once that happens and women start to fall behind, mechanisms to enable them to get back to their capabilities are not there, so that is partly what this �40m training money is about.

Q10 Dr Berry: Good morning. The government's response to your Commission's recommendations was the so-called Action Plan. Were you over the moon, were you disappointed? What is your response to the Action Plan?

Baroness Prosser: First of all, I was extremely pleased that they produced an Action Plan at all because when we first started out on this exercise, when I was first asked by the Prime Minister to conduct this Commission, there were mixed views about what the reasoning was behind that. A man of the cloth once said to me, never question anyone's motives they will always be bad. So I try not to think about what the motives might have been at the time, but I do not think they were necessarily terribly pristine. Nevertheless, the report was taken extremely seriously and we are very, very pleased about that. Therefore, the determination by the government to produce an Action Plan, which demonstrated their acceptance of the recommendations and setting out what they were going to do with them made me very happy. The Action Plan, of course, is couched in very civil service/government terms, which I would politely say there could be some different interpretations of some of the wording, and a lot of it leaves some boltholes in case things go wrong and people can maybe escape from those clauses but, having said that, in almost all areas there is work going on. On the exemplar companies, for example, there is the opportunity now, as I mentioned earlier, of umbrella-ing that activity on the part-time work exchange fund, on the upskilling and training. I think the area where I feel most concerned and where I think it would be very good for your Committee to maybe do some prodding and ask some questions is the whole business of the schools side of DfES' work, because they are shining brilliantly with the adult training programme and putting a lot of effort into that, but the DfES has said that they accept our recommendations on work experience, on careers guidance, on the problem of stereotyping in schools, but I am not sure how that is all going to work and I cannot really find any hard evidence of how things are going to change terribly well. If we take careers guidance, for example, that is all going over in April to local authorities, then who is going to monitor how that works? Is there going to be either additional resources or mechanisms even to ensure that teachers who are giving careers guidance are themselves trained to give careers guidance, because largely speaking they are not? What is going to be the mechanism to ensure that work experience is less stereotypical than it is at the moment? So I think those are areas I feel a bit anxious about because if we do not get it right at that level we continue with the same cycle of expectations and behaviour that we have at the moment.

Q11 Dr Berry: Given that the Action Plan came out in September of last year, and obviously your Commission well before that, would you expect the government to have done more by now?

Baroness Prosser: None of these things happen terribly quickly in government, do they?

Q12 Dr Berry: No.

Baroness Prosser: To be perfectly truthful I am quite surprised that as much has been done as has been. In my experience the whole equality agenda is not an agenda that really grabs the excitement and enthusiasm of every person who has to deal with it - not everybody out there is a born again feminist - so we have to keep on prodding all the time. I am not unhappy with the pace but obviously the interest of this Committee is most welcome and I think that is another mechanism, another opportunity to keep the show on the road. There is going to be produced by the end of this month a one-year on report, which will set out all the stuff that has been achieved, how far we have got, et cetera. Then I think on 18 April the Women & Work Commission is meeting again as a Commission to look at the one-year on report and to look and see exactly what has happened over this period and we will then make noises about what we think is lacking.

Q13 Chairman: Can I clarify that? Who is producing that one-year on report; is the Commission doing it?

Baroness Prosser: No, DCLG. We all started off in DTI and then we moved over to DCLG, but there is an implementation team contained within the Women & Equality Unit that has been doing it, but it will be Ruth Kelly's report.

Q14 Dr Berry: I tend to agree. Obviously more is happening now than ever before, but recently I have been looking through some of the Action Plans, for example, produced by public authorities in relation to their duty on disability. I look at their Action Plans and there are specific things with timescales and if they are not then the DRCs fall on them like a ton of bricks. I look at the annex of this document and I have to say that anybody who produced that in response to any of the public sector duty requirements on public authorities in relation to equality, as a response, I think would have been subject to a fair bit of criticism. I mean, status acceptors, accepted in place, no timescales, nothing very specific. I do not want to be uncharitable but I do want to be pretty rigorous in looking at the government's response. Do you agree? Is this Action Plan not just a little wishy-washy without specific commitments and specific timetables, and is that not precisely what is needed across the equalities agenda?

Baroness Prosser: You can be as uncharitable as you like because it is not my report! Clearly, as I said earlier, the more a Committee like this can help push things along the more welcome that is. There is a difference because the gender duty is contained within legislation; there is a legal requirement.

Q15 Dr Berry: It is, yes.

Baroness Prosser: But there is not a legal requirement for any of this stuff, so you have to battle on on persuasion and encouraging people to see that there is added value in it for them, that it is going to be good for them, so to speak. It is always a fine balance on this between pushing and demanding and cajoling people and persuading them that it is good for them, that they will be better off if they do these things. I have great sympathy with the point you make because I think there is a large element of truth in it, but it is a different ballgame to the gender duty or the disability or race duties.

Q16 Chairman: Can I clarify that? Do you not think that when the gender duty on public authorities comes in that that will not be able to be used to give duties on this?

Baroness Prosser: It will be hugely helpful.

Q17 Chairman: I have been raising questions about how the Comprehensive Spending Review should require within the Public Service Agreements recommendations on how departments are going to implement the gender duty. How do you think that would work out? Is that something that you will be continuing to practise?

Baroness Prosser: I think it will be enormously helpful to us, and it will be able to be used in conjunction with the social policy changes that our report is largely about. We had the debate in the House of Lords on Thursday of last week, International Women's Day, and Lord Lester, winding up on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, was critical that the Women & Work Commission Report did not make proposals for legislative change, and I intervened and said that that was not in our terms of reference; the whole point of our report was to look at social policy and to look at how policies that we have at the moment work, how they need to change, what different policies we might have to bring in, because the legislation was being looked at at that time by the Discrimination Law Review Group, so there were these different strands of things going on.

Q18 Dr Berry: And of course, the Equalities Review is being published now.

Baroness Prosser: Indeed, yes, there are those three things happening.

Q19 Dr Berry: What strikes me is that there are some government departments who seem to be pretty good on the equalities agenda and some government departments that, frankly, have not yet woken up. Which are the departments that you think have been less helpful in response to your Commission? Which are the departments that we should be leaning on - DTI, for example?

Baroness Prosser: It is very difficult in a way to answer that because some of these departments are such monolithic affairs. Some parts of DTI have been very good, and wearing my other hat as Chair of the National Women's Commission we persuaded DTI to establish a gender advisory group on international trade, for example, and the Secretary of State at that time, Patricia Hewitt, had a real feel for these things. So you need somebody at the top in a department who has the politics of it under their belt, if you like. I am disappointed that more is not made within DCLG, of the relationship between local government and its delivery, its employment of women, its services to women, and the equality agenda itself. It seems to me that that is all dealt with in very separate ways in the department, and I think that is very much a missed opportunity, and with the gender duty coming in on public bodies it is going to be an even more missed opportunity if those things are not woven together, which I think they are not at the moment. So I am disappointed about that. I think DWP has more of a sense of the needs of women and the world of work, and DfES in its training arena has more of a sense of all of that.

Q20 Dr Berry: Finally, on the government's Action Plan, some people have said - perhaps perfectly reasonably - that one of the reasons the Action Plan is a bit vague and non-committal in detail is that there are public spending implications on all of this, and with the Comprehensive Spending Review being in preparation in fairness there was a limit to what could be said in terms of very specific commitments that involved public expenditure. To what extent do you think your recommendations could be achieved without significant extra resources? Is there an argument that a lot of what you recommend, without people needing to worry too much about spending, is simply about the political will?

Baroness Prosser: I think there is a great deal that could be done with political will and some of it is about redirection. For example, the Trade Union Modernisation Fund, we recommended that there should be a specific fund for training equality reps in the workplace and DTI has been complaining for some considerable time about how strapped it is for cash, and so what they did - which was not terribly pleasing to everybody but was, I suppose, the best they felt they could do at the time - was to redirect monies from the Trade Union Modernisation Fund to be specifically allocated to training the equality reps, and there has been one round of claims under that and another round which I think concludes in April, and the T&G, the NUJ and Wales TUC have all started doing the equality rep training arising from that money. So that was a redirection, if you like. Speaking to people in the education service - not in DfES but from schools and from the education unions - they say that work experience and careers guidance will not really improve until there is a recognition that those jobs should be more specific and funded in a more specific way. So at the moment, for example, the responsibility for work experience is just tacked on to the responsibility of a teacher who has to do something else. So if it is not taken seriously at that level then we cannot really expect the teacher to do too much about it. So I do think more funding there would have been helpful. But of course the �40m from the budget was very, very welcome, and the specific training that is going on at the moment, I guess, would not be happening if there were not that extra money for it.

Q21 Miss Kirkbride: You touched on this earlier, about exemplar employers. Do you want to give us any more details about that? You said there were 100 of them.

Baroness Prosser: There is over 100 of them.

Q22 Miss Kirkbride: Does any one stand out as to what they are doing, so that you can inform the community?

Baroness Prosser: I can give you a few examples of things that people are doing. For example, Cranfield University is developing a work experience project and that is targeted at local schools so that they are doing that. Friends Provident has a big investigation going on to try to determine why it is that more women are not moving up into senior management and they have a staff survey going on to analyse all of that. The Royal Mail, for example, has a big springboard training programme going on, which is training women who are working in the sorting offices to become junior managers and then another programme to get junior managers up to senior managers; and in Post Office Limited, which is a separate company within Royal Mail, they have a very big women's network that is funded by the company, and a buddy system for women who are more senior to help those who are coming forward. Staffordshire University is doing an equal pay review. The University of Southampton has a women and science network, so there is a whole variety of different things going on, and a number of the companies involved are the very big corporates, like Shell Oil, the Ford Motor Company, BMW, ABB Engineering - quite big organisations as well as numbers of public sector bodies of course.

Q23 Miss Kirkbride: They are doing things similar to what you have described at the Post Office?

Baroness Prosser: Yes.

Q24 Miss Kirkbride: So do you see that as a model for better practice that you would like extended to certainly plc companies - or all companies - that would be easier in some ways?

Baroness Prosser: I think more and more businesses are beginning to recognise that there is an enormous waste of talent going on. There is a shortage of skills in the country and they also recognise that their businesses should reflect rather better the people that they try to serve, so if you have a business that is largely aimed at women and it is entirely run by men people are beginning to fall in that that is maybe not the best business practice. So there is all that going on on that side, so it is in their interests really at the moment to try to improve things. Then the lessons that will come out of each of these companies and the best practice that is exchanged will be produced as guidance by Opportunity Now and it will be up to us to come and stand behind that and make sure that it continues to move forward. The one thing that I am really afraid of is that all of a sudden there will be another recession and nobody will want so many workers any more and we all know who will be out of the door first, really, so I am slightly anxious. We need to get to critical mass before such a thing happens.

Q25 Miss Kirkbride: I suppose that is probably what you would hope employers and trade unions are going to do, with your report, to take this up.

Baroness Prosser: Absolutely.

Q26 Miss Kirkbride: Is there anything else in your report that you think they could do?

Baroness Prosser: The mention of trade unions, I would like to see unions being more proactive in the workplace and asking more questions about why it is that women continue to lag behind, why it is that somehow or another men get these jobs and women get those jobs. You do not need an equal pay review when you walk around a trade union organised workplace to determine who is earning what; you can see it. I would like them to be more proactive to encourage employers to monitor who gets what of the training budget, why is it that the training budget always goes to the most senior staff, almost all of whom will be men? Why do those part time women not get more training money allocated to them? Why are not requests for flexibility, extended leave or whatever it might be, monitored more carefully so that it can be determined whether or not a particular manager is behaving fairly as against the behaviour of another manager? But quite often in work places that are scattered or large the answer you get to a question in one part of the workplace would be completely different to the answer you get in another part, despite the fact that the national policy of the organisation might be very progressive and helpful; and yet nobody monitors these things, so it is all a bit happenstance. So there are a number of easy things really that unions could buck up on, frankly.

Q27 Chairman: Following on from that, it is very gratifying now that when the TUC comes to give evidence we have very senior women there coming and doing that.

Baroness Prosser: Absolutely.

Q28 Chairman: But as I am sure at some stage we will be seeing the TUC, from your inside knowledge are there any pointed questions or issues that we should be putting to them about their own practice, both in terms of themselves as employers and themselves as representatives of the workforce, and what they should be pursuing?

Baroness Prosser: The TUC policy has been - and I have no quarrel with this - that we should have recommended statutory equal pay reviews, and at the Commission we could not agree on this so we agreed to set out the arguments for equal pay reviews without making a case for legislation to back them up - that was where we found ourselves. First of all, in a trade union organised workplace unions can of course negotiate to get equal pay reviews conducted so it would be interesting to know just how many are going on and how many have been either conducted or in the process of so being. It would also be interesting to know just how many training agreements are in place, which include the upskilling of women, and there will be some good examples but there are lots and lots more places where lots more could be done. Then the whole question of equality reps; I do not think that an equality representative should be a substitute for the shop steward. When we were taking evidence at the Women & Work Commission a number of equality reps came to see us and we had a round table and they came from all different unions, my own included, but I found it a very disappointing session because they were doing the equality work that the shop steward was not interested in - "Oh, there is a woman's problem over there," but actually it is a workplace problem, it just happens to be a woman who has it. Equal pay is a workplace problem, it is not specific, and it is not something that should be thrown over the shoulder. My idea of equality reps is that they should be proactive, they should be working with the union and with the employer to identify ways in which opportunities for women in that workplace could be improved or measured, or data collected to determine exactly what is going on and how things could be shifted. So it would be interesting to know if the TUC is still supportive of that approach.

Q29 Chairman: Are there any other questions that we should be asking trade unions about their own practice?

Baroness Prosser: Lord above!

Q30 Chairman: It is your opportunity.

Baroness Prosser: You can certainly ask them about their own practice. In my personal experience it leaves a great deal to be desired.

Q31 Chairman: So they follow the same pattern as the rest of society?

Baroness Prosser: Yes. I will not say more than that.

Q32 Chairman: Going back to employers, the examples you gave were mostly quite large employers, were they not, and I know that within your report you did also talk about issues relating to small firms and some of the difficulties, and I think that was one area where the government has not in its recommendations gone as far as you would have liked. Would you like to say something on that and what you think we should be pursuing?

Baroness Prosser: I think it would do no harm if you asked representatives of the small business service to come and talk to you about what they are doing. I recognise absolutely that the issues for small business can be quite tricky and they have a complete fear of the legislation which gives maternity rights and paternity rights - how can they manage when they only have four and a half staff, or whatever it might be, and these are real issues to be addressed. But they are not addressing them at the moment, they are just afraid of them. Many, many women work in small firms and somehow or another it would be useful to get some ideas from them about ways in which we can start stepping forward in this area.

Q33 Miss Kirkbride: If you were they what would be your answer to that, given the very practical difficulties of four and a half staff in the business and one goes off?

Baroness Prosser: Lots and lots of jobs can be done in very different ways; lots of jobs do not require nine to five attendance at the workplace. So trusting employees to work in different ways, and starting that process before it is thrust upon you I think would be a help to them. They do get repaid for maternity leave so it is not such a financial burden as they seem to think. We have a big problem in this country that small enterprises do not grow into bigger enterprises; we have lots and lots of small firms, not so many of the small and medium enterprises, and if they want their companies to grow they have to embrace modern society. It costs them more to employ people; to train people, bring them in and then do that all over again than it does to work out ways in which they keep those folk.

Q34 Miss Kirkbride: You just answered to Judy the question of compulsory equal pay audits, upon which the Commission did not agree. In your opinion do you think progress can be made unless they were brought in, without them?

Baroness Prosser: I think it is interesting that the people who pressed most hard for compulsion was the trade union group and actually within trade union organised companies it is not such a problem, I do not think, because the pay and grades are negotiated, it is much more transparent in the union-organised workplaces. The areas where it is a problem are areas where pay is not transparent, largely speaking right at the top of law firms or city finance, those sorts of places, over which the trade unions do not have any influence at all. So I found that odd positioning. I do not think that those major companies would ever make their systems transparent unless they were forced to.

Q35 Miss Kirkbride: That is an interesting point you have raised, is it not, because law firms, accountancy firms are unlikely to be unionised, partly because of their structures in partnerships and things, so who would do it and how would you allow for the confidential commerciality, which is reasonable in those circumstances, whilst reassuring the women staff that they were being paid fairly in comparison to their peer group? What mechanism could be used for those kinds of companies?

Baroness Prosser: Certainly the major firms all have HR departments and pay systems that are computerised.

Q36 Miss Kirkbride: But who would be in charge? How transparent then would that information be on the issue of confidentiality?

Baroness Prosser: The mechanism of conducting the review is not too tricky. What you would then do with the information is the next step, of course, and I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that these things are commercially confidential. I would like to see that tested; I do not really think that that could be seriously argued.

Q37 Miss Kirkbride: It might be tricky if all these firms compete with one another, they might not necessarily be keen on the other companies knowing their pay structures?

Baroness Prosser: Of course what they have at the moment, if you look at law firms, they all have the same problem, that women leave. So they all know that it is a big issue, and I guess under the surface that the most senior lawyers at Clifford Chance will know what the senior lawyers at Simmons are earning. These are quite small fields anyway, are they not? I think the big problem for them is partly that it is about who gets paid what, but more it is about the requirements that are laid upon people who want to get to the top or who the company wants to get to the top - 24 hours a day is not too much of an exaggeration really. If you go to the Clifford Chance offices in Canary Wharf you could move in there and live there for six months - you would not be deprived of anything, everything is available.

Q38 Miss Kirkbride: Just bring your toothbrush.

Baroness Prosser: Yes, and they expect people to spend hours and hours and women either cannot or do not want to do that. But they are losing a lot of talent. Clifford Chance is one of the exemplars and has joined us as an exemplar.

Q39 Miss Kirkbride: What are they doing, out of interest?

Baroness Prosser: I do not know to be truthful and I cannot answer that in detail, but hopefully when we have the exemplars' conference we will be able to learn more.

Q40 Miss Kirkbride: The Commission was cautious on the question of reforming the Equal Pay Act. Could you take the Committee through that because there is still in broad terms men's work and women's work, is there not?

Baroness Prosser: Yes. I think there is a general recognition that the equal pay for work of equal value regulations are convoluted, to say the least, and lead to tribunals and claims that can go on for years. But, as I said earlier, it was not in our brief to make detailed legal recommendations because the Discrimination Law Review was meeting at the time. Hopefully we will see the results of that review before too long because, particularly with the establishment of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, there is a requirement for a single Equality Act - it is a mess at the moment and I would like to see more employers on the bandwagon of demanding that because it is a mess for them. They have an employee that might be a disabled woman - which bit of legislation are they going to look at? They have to look at all of it at the moment, whereas if we had a more streamlined approach it would be much more helpful all round.

Q41 Miss Kirkbride: So what would your own view be on the Equal Pay Act and the measuring of men and women's work to make sure that there is better parity? Or what has traditionally been men and women's work.

Baroness Prosser: There has to be some kind of mechanism to value work but the hurdles that you have to get over currently in the equal value regulations with all the assessments and goodness knows what else puts people off and gets people very confused, and that is one of the problems with equal pay reviews; it is all very well to say, "We have men over there doing that and women over there doing that and she is paid as her job has been assessed, so that must be all right, and he is also so that must be all right." An equal pay review is not going to get into valuing those jobs against each other because that is just too much performance, so it will not really, in my opinion, shed a lot more light on whether or not there is real fairness going on. When I was with the T&G one of the responsibilities I had was interviewing people who wanted to become paid officials of the union and we used to travel around the country interviewing very senior shop stewards and conveners who wanted to work full time for the T&G and I used to say to them, "We have had 30 years of equal pay legislation and we still do not have equal pay. What is going on in your workplace? - Everyone is paid equally in our workplace. No, no, of course we have equal pay." Do they walk out of the gate with the same money in their pocket? No, of course they do not. And they cannot get their heads around the difference. So there is a lot to be done on that front.

Q42 Chairman: So the concept of the hypothetical comparator, is that just unworkable or unusable or does it need to be extended so that it covers part-time legislation and so on?

Baroness Prosser: The requirement for the hypothetical comparator is a real problem because if you look at the way in which contracting out has happened in local government, for example, you have lots and lots of women contracted out to do school meals or cleaning, whatever it might be, lots and lots of men contracted out to do gardening and those people cannot compare their jobs with each other because it is all men doing gardening and it is all women doing school meals, and you cannot use the hypothetical comparator argument. So it is a big issue.

Q43 Chairman: So you do not have any suggestions that you want to make to us?

Baroness Prosser: I am assuming that the Discrimination Law Review Group has done all of this.

Q44 Chairman: Moving on to the future work that we are planning to do, the first area we were looking at was whether we might ask some of the companies that we all meet in the normal course of our work as individual MPs and through the Committee about the position of women in their firms or workplaces, and then we thought rather than us drop a questionnaire we would wait until you came and see if you had any ideas on what sort of questions we should be asking them. If you were a member of this Committee what would you ask companies about their practice and how they would tackle these issues?

Baroness Prosser: I think one area of interest is how do they recruit people because if you are talking about particular areas of the sectors of the economy, which may be predominantly female or predominantly male, what are those companies doing to try and break down those barriers? Do any of them offer internal adult apprenticeships to women to enable women to change path, a bit like I was saying earlier about women employed in the food industry who are now being given the opportunity to train as food technicians. What sort of upskilling arrangements do those companies have to enable the women they currently employ to move on to bigger and better things? What sorts of arrangements did they have for women returnees to enable women to keep in touch while they are on maternity leave, maybe, or maybe extended leave for caring of one sort of another? Do they have special programmes to enable women to keep up to speed with what is going on in that particular area of the economy, the area of employment? I cannot think of anything else off the top of my head.

Q45 Chairman: If you do have any thoughts on the sorts of questions we would be asking that would be very helpful to know and you have a chance to come back afterwards. The other area of course we are going to be seeking oral evidence from government departments and inevitably you start off with DCLG, but we then have this issue about why they should be responsible for getting everybody else to do everything and that other government departments need to also be taking a lead. There are those with a clear responsibility, like DfES, who have given us some thoughts on some of the things which we should ask them, and DWP and DTI, but all government departments do have a role in relation to that, so we thought we might send round a questionnaire, and what again do you think we might ask to test whether they are taking their responsibility of giving a lead as a government public agencies?

Baroness Prosser: Given that there are so many departments which cover so many different areas the big broad question is what sorts of data do they keep about women? If you take the health service, for example, where is the data about different people in different kinds of jobs? Everybody is talking very positively and understandably so about the increased number of women in medicine, but how many of those women are GPs working part-time, maybe, because that is the easiest thing to do if you have a family? How many of those women have managed to move up to become surgeons or consultants because my guess would be that almost all of those women are in the GP side, and that is a good step but it is not far enough. So what sorts of data are they keeping to enable them to monitor how some of these things are progressing? DCA also, for example, with solicitors, are they keeping an eye on newly qualified women solicitors or women barristers, how they are moving forward and what the opportunities are there and what opportunities may be being missed?

Q46 Chairman: The other area we thought we might pursue was government departments which have huge public procurement responsibilities, which also ties into an inquiry our overall Committee is doing on the manufacturing industry and public procurement is one of the aspects of that. We did have an interesting exchange with one of the European officials when we were there who did not really seem to get us asking about whether it was legal to impose conditions on people from whom you are procuring in relation to, for example whether they were implementing the new gender duty. Are there areas there where, from your knowledge, we could be seeing guidance from government departments on how we deal with public procurement?

Baroness Prosser: Absolutely. I think it is very important and I should have mentioned it earlier, perhaps. We held a round table on procurement as part of our evidence taking and the Office of Government and Commerce could not get the argument that maybe it was good for people to have some sense of equality and equality of requirements contained within their modus operandi, if you like, and at that meeting were representatives from the Greater London Authority, who were doing this all the time. They have big requirements on equalities, on training, on health and safety for the contracts which they put out for London Underground, for example, and other London-based organisations. If they can do it I do not see why anybody else cannot, and there was somebody there, an academic whose field this is, and he was arguing that this is not a problem. The Office of Government and Commerce were saying, "We have to fall in line with all of this because this is what Europe requires of us," and the opposite view was, "Nonsense, you can do it, you are just being too tight-lipped about it all." So I think it is a very big area, there are huge amounts of money spent and what we always used to call contract compliance has been long forgotten, and it is a pity.

Q47 Chairman: One of the areas of evidence we have is from the Greater London Authority, which obviously has a long history of in the past having wished to pursue those issues, so we might pursue that a bit further.

Baroness Prosser: Yes.

Q48 Chairman: Just a final, maybe broad question. Earlier on, or threaded through the evidence really, you talked about the impact on the economy, the loss of skills that we are losing, and obviously as a trade and industry and economic Committee the whole issue of the relationship between this issue and the economy and health of the economy and the waste of skills is a very critical issue and there was a report from economists at the IMF showing the lost growth around the world of billions of pounds from not implementing gender equality issues. For us that is clearly an important issue in relation to our broad remit as a Committee, but do you have any thoughts on how we can promote that as an issue, that this is not just a moral question, a question of fairness, it is an issue that is a serious economic issue. Is that something that Commission addressed at all ---

Baroness Prosser: We have included that in our report.

Q49 Chairman: And how would you think we could pursue that?

Baroness Prosser: I think I am right in saying that we determined, "The Commission estimates that removing barriers to women working in occupations traditionally done by men, and increasing women's participation in the labour market, could be worth between �15 billion and �23 billion or 1.3 to 2.0 per cent of GDP." So that is a lot of money. That does not include such increased tax and national insurance contributions that would come from women who were earning more, it simply is an estimation of how much more could be contributed to the economy if they were in levels of employment which they themselves have determined they would have the ability to do and to cope with.

Q50 Chairman: How widely do you think that argument is accepted and understood within government or within the economic players, employers and so on?

Baroness Prosser: This report was widely pored over by Number 10 and Number 11. The Chancellor of the Exchequer invited himself to the launch, which we were very pleased about, but, for reasons of space and all sorts of other proprietorial niceties, he was not on the original list, but he wanted to come along and we were, of course, very pleased about that. He would not have wanted to come along if there was anything contained in the report that (a) he did not agree with or (b) he thought was going to make him a hostage to fortune. I can only conclude from that that he is quite comfortable with this point and I would hope that it encourages his department to continue to recognise that upskilling and retraining of women to enable them to participate at an appropriate level is good for women and families and good for the economy generally.

Q51 Chairman: That is extremely helpful. Can we ask you, you know we are going to be carrying on with the inquiry, is there anything that you feel that you have not covered or other issues that you feel we need to jump on and keep pushing on?

Baroness Prosser: I do not think so, thank you. You are going to be calling DOC, TUC and CBI and they will be able to hopefully say a number of the things that I have said and some of it will be a bit different and different angles. Of course, DOC has lots of research evidence of detail about these things, but I am grateful to you for conducting your work and for asking me to come along because it is another measure of keeping the show on the road.

Q52 Miss Kirkbride: I remember one headline we saw a few weeks ago which we all remarked upon and I wonder what your take was, which was the figures on women in the boardroom had gone backwards and the underlying assumption for this was that they were all going out to work for themselves instead of starting their own companies, and I wonder if you had any observations or further thoughts on that.

Baroness Prosser: There is a lot of evidence which says that women are starting their own businesses because either they are not prepared to face what some of them see as a daily grind at that level, or they are being ignored and not being enabled to reach the level that they see is appropriate. I hope that business takes this as a big wake‑up call to them because it is an enormous loss of talent. I sit on the board of Royal Mail, there is now one other woman who sits on the board who is a non‑executive director with a financial background but everyone else is male and much as I must say I really thoroughly enjoy the work, masochist that I must be with the problems that Royal Mail has got, I am extremely fortunate in the sense that the men who are there are very much of the view that as long as you demonstrate you know what you are doing then they are really pleased to have you along. There is not a closed atmosphere about it. For all that, all their conversation is based around, "We need a good chap for that", it just comes naturally and if there is not a woman in the room to pull these blokes up sharp sometimes, they bowl along without thinking.

Q53 Miss Kirkbride: And discussing football all the time!

Baroness Prosser: I have to put a stop to that.

Q54 Chairman: That is a good end, it shows us what we are up against. Thank you very much for coming. You have given us a lot of thought to sharpen up the questions that we need to go on and ask of other witnesses and hopefully it will help sharpen up the debate around your report and recommendations to us. We are very grateful to you for giving us your time, even though you have only had to come down the corridor, but thank you very much indeed.

Baroness Prosser: Thank you very much.