UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 400-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

TRADE AND INDUSTRY COMMITTEE

(TRADE AND INDUSTRY SUB-COMMITTEE)

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE REPORT OF THE WOMEN AND WORK COMMISSION

Wednesday 25 April 2007

MS SHEILA WILDE and MS AMANDA ARISS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 55 - 84

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Trade and Industry Sub-Committee

on Wednesday 25 April 2007

Members present

Judy Mallaber, in the Chair

Roger Berry

Miss Julie Kirkbride

________________

Memorandum submitted by Equal Opportunities Commission

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Sheila Wilde, Director of Employment Policy, and Ms Amanda Ariss, Head of Policy and Research, Equal Opportunities Commission, gave evidence.

Q55 Chairman: Welcome. We are very pleased to see you. My apologies for the slight delay in starting but we are very pleased to welcome you here. The Women and Work Commission report is a very important report and we are very keen to make sure that there is progress as a result. You are obviously one of the key organisations we wish to see, both in terms of your input to it and in terms of what happens next and where we go from here. Maybe you could start by introducing yourselves.

Ms Ariss: I am Amanda Arris and I am Head of Policy and Research at the Equal Opportunities Commission.

Ms Wilde: I am Sheila Wilde. I am Director of Employment Policy at the Equal Opportunities Commission.

Q56 Chairman: Let us start off straightforwardly with the report. It made 40 recommendations. Which do you think are the most significant for tackling gender inequality in the workplace, and why?

Ms Ariss: We feel that they are really important as a package. We have tried to resist cherry‑picking the things that we think are the best because in order to tackle the pay gap issues action is needed on so many fronts and, as the Commission concluded, the problem is very complex and the causes of the pay gap are interrelated, therefore you need a number of actors - government, employers, trade unions and others, and indeed, a number of parts of government - to act together. We have come to resist saying there are particular bits we think are more important than others in general but there are some parts that we would like to highlight. One is the recommendations about tackling access to quality part-time working. The Women and Work Commission's conclusions there very much chime with the EOC's conclusions that the lack of access to quality part-time working is a really fundamental obstacle to progress because the overwhelming majority of part-time workers are women and they are mostly opting for that part-time work in order to balance family and work responsibilities and, with some exceptions, it is still extremely difficult to get part-time work that matches people's skills. We have identified that there are about 6.5 million people who are currently working below their skill level in the economy and in many cases that is because they cannot get part-time or flexible work that matches their skill level and that is obviously a huge problem for those individuals in that they are not able to progress, they are earning less than they otherwise would, but it is a big problem for the economy and for employers because people have skills, investment has been made in those skills by government and by employers, and those skills are not feeding through to people working in jobs that are commensurate with them. So we highlight the recommendations about access to quality part-time working. We would also highlight the recommendations around the Low Pay Commission and the National Minimum Wage, which have played a very important role in the progress that has been made in the last five to ten years in closing the pay gap and it is really important to build on that. Lastly, we would also highlight the recommendations around the public sector, in particular how the new duty on public bodies to eliminate discrimination and promote gender equality might impact on the pay gap. Since the Women and Work Commission made those recommendations the Government have brought forward more detailed regulations about how the Gender Equality Duty will work and although it is the Government that sets the framework for that, it is the EOC that is responsible for promoting that and ultimately monitoring and enforcing it. We think if that framework that has been put in place works, if public bodies respond to the challenge, that could be very powerful because of what the Gender Equality Duty requires public bodies to do. They should be setting a specific objective to tackle the causes of the pay gap, not just pay discrimination but all the causes of the pay gap, and it requires them, if they need to do that, to set an objective and then to take action to achieve that objective. They have got to take that action; they cannot just public an action plan and say, "We are not going to do it because we have changed our minds." Once people have committed themselves to action, the legal framework of the Gender Equality Duty does require them to take that action. It is quite a strong lever for change that has been created there and we would say that is a particularly important area to be followed up.

Q57 Chairman: Thank you very much. I think we might come back to the Gender Equality Duty later on because it clearly is important. On the first point you made about the access to quality part-time jobs, do you have one or two specific things you think could really make an "in" on that that you would particularly like to highlight out of the report or your own experience?

Ms Ariss: The Commission recommended a very substantial initiative. The Women and Work Commission recommended that there should be an initiative with a budget of £5 million to develop models of how part-time working at middle management and senior levels could be expanded. We very strongly support that and we were disappointed to see that the initiative that has been brought forward so far is on a much reduced scale, I think £500,000, so only a tenth of what was recommended is being invested. That approach of developing very practical ideas about how to make it work and doing that with employers is a good approach, but we do not think it is being done on a sufficient scale.

Ms Wilde: I think extending the right to request flexible working to all employees is absolutely central to opening this up. It gets women off the "mummy track". What has been done around the right to request is absolutely superb. It is beginning to change things but at the same time it has highlighted how strong the appetite for further change is and it is so much more helpful, not just for employees but also for employers. If everyone is flexible, it is easier to meet the needs of a business, and opening it up in that way we think would certainly help to open up more senior levels.

Q58 Chairman: You have said it is an overall package and we also know that the whole area all of gender equality is incredibly difficult because it requires massive cultural change tying into the practical issues. I do not know if you would like to comment on that and also in terms of making some impact into that cultural change. You have mentioned some items but are there any that you might be able to see as potentially easy wins to get us going and make people think we are motoring ahead?

Ms Ariss: I think you are absolutely right that that long-term cultural change is essential. It is difficult; we would not want to suggest for a minute that this is an easy thing to do. In terms of what could drive that long-term cultural change, I think we would identify five elements, not all of which we think are really properly in place at the moment. All of them could be. The first element is really strong and strategically well-thought-through leadership. This is something that really has to be led strongly by government but also, when the EOC hands over its responsibilities to the new Commission on Equality and Human Rights, we will need to see them taking a very strong role as well in support of this agenda. So leadership is the first thing we would identify as absolutely essential to success for long-term cultural change. The second element is employers really taking the initiative. We recommended to the Women and Work Commission that there should be some new requirements on employers. They did not in the end go with that recommendation but they have thrown the gauntlet down to employers to take action voluntarily, and that is absolutely essential if there is going to be change. There is so much that employers can do and indeed, that good employers are already doing but there are far too many who are either doing little or nothing and are thus failing themselves to reap the benefits. So there is a leadership challenge for employers and employers' organisations as well. The third element we would identify is about management training and education. In every investigation that the EOC has carried out into workplace issues in the last three or four years we keep finding the same issue, which is that managers, particularly middle managers, lack the training, the education and the awareness to manage in the way that will be needed for organisations to be successful in the future; that our middle managers are under-skilled compared with our competitors and compared with what is needed. Management training and education is a rather unglamorous issue but it is fundamental to making real, sustained, long-term change that would benefit not just in this area around equality but much more broadly in the workplace. So management education is the third area. The fourth thing that we see as really important for long-term cultural change is getting the law right. There is a lot that does not work about the Equal Pay Act at the moment. It is cumbersome; it is focused around individuals and not systemic change. What we would like to see is a new legal framework where we have a single Equality Act that brings together all the existing legislation, that is much easier to use, where the intended outcomes are much clearer and which has a much stronger focus on institutions taking actions to tackle problems rather than waiting for individuals to complain after something has gone wrong. So updating and organising the law is the fourth area. The fifth is actually about the broader support there is for long-term cultural change. We have been very encouraged that there has been quite a lot of warmth towards the Women and Work Commission recommendations from different parties, from employers, from unions and there is some degree of cross-party support and encouragement of change in this area. We think that is really important for long-term change. That will not happen if it is so closely associated with individual politicians or individual parties that political change reduces that momentum. That is what we think is needed in terms of long-term cultural change. That was rather a long answer, and you did ask us about quick wins as well.

Q59 Chairman: If you have any quick wins, you can give them to us as we are going through the evidence.

Ms Ariss: Sheila, would you like to pick up on any of that?

Ms Wilde: Some of the quick wins? Yes, I have already mentioned one of them, which is extending the right to request to all workers. Supporting women entrepreneurs, which I know the Government is just doing - Margaret Hodge's initiative on that is very welcome. That is important not only in its own right but that is also going to increase the number of women in decision-making in business. That can only help to speed things up. Thirdly, providing HR support for small businesses, which relates to the point Amanda was making about the need for management training. We have found in several of our investigations that there is really a need for one-to-one HR support for small businesses but looked at from the perspective of their business. So if you have someone who is pregnant and it is the first time you have ever had to manage a pregnant employee, having someone to turn to that you can talk to, someone who will help you take a longer term perspective and talk you through in business terms is going to be very helpful. Even in medium-sized businesses one has to recognise that human resource issues, people management, are being devolved down to the line managers and line managers do not necessarily actually have the experience in people management. So if we want them to start managing diversity issues, we have to increase the people management component of management training. I think that can be a quick win. There are ways of doing that.

Q60 Roger Berry: Good morning. What is your reaction to the Government's action plan?

Ms Ariss: We welcomed the action plan because it did take forward many of the recommendations in the report and we are pleased to see that in the follow-up report that came out last month reporting on what has happened since the original recommendations were published last year there is some good progress that has been made. Childcare is an example of an area where the Government for a number of years, not just in response to the Women and Work Commission, has been making real and sustained progress and we were very pleased to see things like the Women's Enterprise Task Force proposal. It is early days but we have seen some very good stuff there. We are warm towards what has happened but we do think more is needed. We have already said we were disappointed that the level of investment that the Women and Work Commission called for in supporting change has not come through in all areas, and although there has been a flurry of activity since the report's recommendations were made just over a year ago, we were not convinced that what is going on is sufficiently strategic. If you go back and look at the Women and Work Commission recommendations, although there were some things that we would have liked to see that were not there, taken together, it is a really strong package and it hangs together as a package. We are not quite persuaded yet that the Government's approach to taking it forward has been as strategic as the Women and Work Commission was itself and we would like to see some clearer and more high-profile leadership. It is very difficult to get all of the actors concerned working together. It is about joining up what a number of government departments are doing, and indeed what different bits of the same department doing, joining that up with what employers are doing, with what trade unions are doing and indeed with what organisations such as our own are doing. That does not happen. Joining up government is tricky, is it not? It is easy to say and hard to do, but it does not happen without some really strong, determined leadership and without there being some resources put into that strategic co-ordination. I think we would say some good things have happened but a lot more could be done with a clearer, stronger and better resourced leadership.

Q61 Roger Berry: How do you respond to the observation that, in addition to what you have said, one thing about the action plan is that finding timescales is impossible. If this were a gender equality action plan or for that matter a disability equality action plan or a race equality action plan produced by a public authority, would you not be expecting timescales, rather than just ticking "Yes, we accept" or perhaps "We do not"?

Ms Ariss: Yes, indeed we would.

Q62 Roger Berry: Does that cause concerns? I do not mean to lead the question. Yes, I do actually.

Ms Ariss: As you rightly say, in other areas people have had to produce plans that have deadlines and timescales, and we know that, at the current rate of progress, the pay gap is not expected to be eliminated until 2085, when I suspect very few of us will be around to celebrate the event. We would see it as really important that there are clearer targets in place about what impact government expects the action it has in train to have. When do they think there will be faster progress than there is now? There are a number of frameworks that government produce to do that. The Public Service Agreement framework is one and we are talking to the Department for Communities and Local Government and indeed the Treasury in its overall role in relation to that to press them on this question and we hope that the fact that the proposal is to replace the gender PSA with an equalities PSA will not lead to any dilution. There is always a danger, I think, that if you have a PSA that is about equality as a whole it gets reduced down to a "The government will be nice to everybody" sort of level, which has no real bite to it and does not lead to and stimulate action by departments. We do want to see some proper timescales attached to this because progress at the moment just is not good enough. We cannot wait until 2085.

Q63 Roger Berry: You have talked about possible priorities and easy wins and the importance of easy wins to send the message and get things moving. Have you been suggesting possible timescales for some of these recommendations? Waiting for others to give the timescale is often a long wait and I wonder, given the importance of the recommendations from the Commission, whether you feel the EOC has a view about the timescales that could be attached to some of those recommendations.

Ms Ariss: We have not gone through and said, "We want that one done by X and that one done by Y." We would like them all done immediately really but that is obviously unrealistic.

Q64 Roger Berry: Yes, but suggesting "reasonable" timescales might be a way of trying to encourage others to go down that road.

Ms Ariss: We have done that in some areas but we have not done it across every single one of the recommendations. Our view is that within 10 years it should be really clear that the pay gap is genuinely on course to be closed in this generation of working women. We would like to see it closed by then but, given the current scale progress, we think it unlikely that in ten years' time it will be completely closed. The action that is needed is going to need to be taken over a number of years. We are not going to get rid of occupational segregation overnight, clearly, so although we would like to see a target of the pay gap being completely closed in ten years, we recognise that is probably unrealistic but it is important to have a target of that kind.

Ms Wilde: I think this is one again where the Commission for Equality on Human Rights needs to be cut on the issue. The final report of the Equalities Review talks a lot about the need for data and for management associated with the data. From just the headline figures on the pay gap, it is very clear that whatever progress is being made is being made on the full-time pay gap and the part-time pay gap has not shifted at all over a 30-year period. So you would need two different periods of measurement for that one.

Q65 Roger Berry: At the One Year On Conference, Bill Rammell on behalf of the DfES put forward certain proposals for a variety of pilot schemes which seemed to be well received. Do you have any information on progress with those pilots to challenge segregation?

Ms Ariss: Our understanding is that there has been some progress, particularly around careers advice, and we were pleased to see that there has been a consultation recently on standards around information, advice and guidance in this area and we liked much of what we saw in that, although we felt that it underplayed the role of work experience. Our own research highlights work experience as highly significant for young people in deciding where to go, particularly for young people who are the least advantaged and who may have few other sources of advice. We think the new guidelines on information and advice and guidance are good but could be better. We are concerned about whether some of the pilots that are under way are sufficiently well resourced to allow them to be properly rolled out. There is such a history in equality of good pilot things happening and it stopping at that, that the pilot funding is time-limited, that when it stops the organisations that were doing the pilot drop whatever it was and it never does actually get rolled out. Until we actually see some of these pilots becoming normal practice and we get away from this model of equality being always some add-on pilot that the enthusiasts do, we will not be satisfied that we have really made the progress we need.

Q66 Miss Kirkbride: I was struck by your answer to the last question because if pilots are taking place and they are deemed to be successful but they do not happen while the pilot funding or pilot exercises have been stopped then that is a bit worrying, is it not? Why are employers not doing it anyway? If they could see that they were getting value from it because they witnessed it in the pilot, what is stopping them from proceeding when the pilot has come to its official conclusion?

Ms Ariss: Often pilots tend to have pump priming funding which eases the away and when that disappears, especially if it disappears in one go rather than more steadily, the easiest thing to do is to say "We cannot do that any more" and you get a short-term loss, because sometimes the benefits are quite long term and you are talking about the sort of "invest to save" model, that you need to take action now but the benefits may not accrue until two or three years' time and it may be very difficult, whether it is an employer or a public sector organisation, to sustain that initiative to get those benefits further down the track when the costs of the changes may be now and indeed when you are trying to struggle with all kinds of other challenges and changes.

Q67 Miss Kirkbride: It is going to make it very difficult to move on this if they can have in front of their very eyes a pilot project that on the face of it is working but they do not have the wit to realise that it is working over the longer term.

Ms Wilde: I think there maybe needs to be some bridging between the pilot and what happens next because, in addition to the money that comes for a pilot, you can tap into advice and assistance from the Department that is delivering the pilot, and so you lose two things: you lose the money and lose that as well. Perhaps it could be tapered off rather than just stopped dead. We also actually did some research into why it is not being carried forward. I do not know why it does not get carried through; we are just speculating at the moment, but it is worrying, and we have seen it for so many years on equality issues. It happens through the ESF funding, that you get fantastic initiatives taking place while that funding is there and then the funding ceases and things just fade away because there is not a handover. There is a concept of mainstreaming, which means you pass on the learning but who are you passing on the learning to and where is it going? In a sense, projects ought to have built into them what happens after the project, the next stage. What I am asking for is an assumption of success in pilots and that you would then build through that as part of the project itself.

Q68 Miss Kirkbride: Taking from there the issue that has partly been touched upon already of gender stereotyping and the kind of occupations that boys or girls go into, how are we going to break that cycle? What do employers and what do employees need to do? What is your view on where we should be going on that?

Ms Ariss: I think we would argue that the approach needs to go beyond employers and employees because the schools and the careers advisory structure and the training structure around the Learning and Skills Councils and Sector Skills Councils and so on is really fundamental. Our research into occupational segregation identified very strongly that employers cannot do this unless the education and training system is acting too, that although young people, when you ask them, quite a high proportion expressed interest in pursuing non-traditional careers, particularly high proportions of girls but pretty high proportions of boys too, almost nothing happens in school and in careers advice to take advantage of that interest. The whole system operates now to just carry on doing what we do now; the default position is you just leave people to do the traditional things, and the way in which things like careers advice and guidance and work experience are organised do not make any active attempt as yet to encourage people into non-traditional roles. That is starting to change. I mentioned that the DfES had consulted on some revised guidance on information and advice in this area which is improved, but work experience has not been touched and that is really fundamental. We know that a lot of young people's career choices are strongly influenced by their work experience but often young people are left to organise for themselves what kind of work experience placement they will have and that means they often fall back on family and family friends and they often therefore go and do very gender-typical things, and that forms a lot of their views about what to do next. We have also found that young women in particular do not know that jobs typically done by women tend to be less well-paid than the jobs typically done by men. When you say, "If you had known that, would it have made a difference to the choices you would have made at 16 or 18?" they say, "Yes, it would and I'm really not very happy that nobody told me this, that if I went down this route I would be a lot less well paid than if I went down that route." We are not arguing of course that young people are only motivated by money. People might still want to do something because they really want to do it but we do think they should know what the likely consequences are for their future pay and prospects of those choices. So there is a huge amount that needs to happen in schools, that needs to happen in the careers infrastructure, with Connections, that needs to happen in the training area before employers come into the frame, because it is very easy to say this is all employers' fault and it is not; many of the causes of occupational segregation are not what employers are doing but what they are working with, if you like. Having said that, there are of course things that employers can and should be doing to encourage people into atypical jobs. We have just published the results of an investigation we have done looking at, particularly in this case, British black Caribbean and British Pakistani and Bangladeshi women and their experience in the labour market. We found some of the things that we would like to see employers doing to encourage atypical recruits into their organisations, not to sit there and wait for people to come and bang on their doors but to get out there into communities, to communicate with prospective employees about what kind of organisation they are, to sell themselves a bit more, to encourage people in, really actively to give people the confidence that "If you apply in my organisation, you might not a typical recruit but if you apply, we will welcome you and treat you fairly." So there is a lot that employers could do but we do not want to see employers being seen as the answer to the problem on occupational segregation because there is so much that needs to be done by others as well.

Q69 Chairman: Can I come in on this? You were talking about the problem about careers advice and young women not knowing what the options were and not knowing the implications for future earnings. This is something that we identified in the report of our previous Committee. Who would you pin the responsibility for dealing with that on? Clearly, there is an overall responsibility with the DfES but you have a number of ranges of different organisations. How do you think we can operate to make it happen in schools and in the places that young people are at to get that information and that advice?

Ms Ariss: The Connections service has a key role, whatever it turns into. Schools themselves. Clearly, they do need some help with the information that we would like them to use because schools may well not be aware themselves of the difference in pay that exists between typically female and typically male jobs. So there is a role there for other players, for people like some of the regional players, like regional development agencies, in making sure that people in their area have that kind of information about opportunities and about pay rates. Ultimately DfES needs to take a lead even if the action is needed at local level but it is something we would like to see schools being much more active about. We think they are missing an opportunity, that young people do want to be more innovative and schools are tending a bit to assume that young people are more conservative than they in fact are.

Ms Wilde: It is a different discussion that needs to be had. It is not one about getting a job; it is one about a career and how your earning capacity is going to pan out over your lifetime if you go this route as opposed to that route, and I suspect that that kind of conversation is rather rare.

Q70 Miss Kirkbride: I was quite shocked when Baroness Prosser told us that after three years of leaving university the income of women was already 15 per cent lower than that of men, which is one of those figures that hit home. You just mentioned ethnic minority women and the segregation, sadly, in that respect. What did you think of the Women and Work Commission's proposal? You have already mentioned something that you might do but would you add anything else to those ideas?

Ms Ariss: Subsequently to the Women and Work Commission's report we have done a major piece of work ourselves in this area which I think builds on what the Women and Work Commission recommended. We have identified five areas where currently there are barriers to ethnic minority women either getting into work or, once they have got into work, getting on in a way that allows them to use their skills. Those five areas are participation; there are quite big differences in participation in work between ethnic groups, and they are often not just the result of people making a choice but they are actually the result of barriers. There are gaps around unemployment and pay. Ethnic minority women are likely to be even less well-paid than women as a whole. There is an issue around progression and there is an issue about segregation. Women as a whole tend to be concentrated into a narrow range of jobs and ethnic minority women are even more concentrated. Ethnic minority men are very concentrated in particular ranges of jobs too. So there are five areas where we think action is needed and we have recommended, three years after our report which was published last month, that the Commission on Equality and Human Rights should go back and look at whether what we recommended has been done and whether it has made the kind of difference that it should, but a lot of those recommendations are in the sorts of areas that we have been talking about this morning, about careers advice and guidance, about improving support for women with family responsibilities, about workplace practice, about providing the sort of information that employers need to plan properly so that those who do not realise that they are missing out at the moment by employing either no or few ethnic minority women get the message. At the moment we think a lot of the policy discussion in this area assumes that the problem here is the women themselves, that they do not speak English, that they do not to work, that, even if they want to work, someone else in their community does not want them to work or that they do not have skills. We think that idea that the problem is all about the women is really out of date and that if you look particularly at the younger generation of women coming through, most if not all born here, speaking English as their first language, increasingly having very strong educational qualifications, but finding that what happens to them at work is that they cannot get the jobs that match their qualifications and they cannot progress in the way that others can. That is a huge loss not just to those women and their families but also to the economy as a whole, and potentially is also an issue around community cohesion: if those women are finding that, having invested in education and training, still they get stuck in low-paid, dead-end jobs, that does not help in terms of building cohesive communities and having workplaces where people have equals from all sections of the community.

Q71 Miss Kirkbride: Have you any figures on that? I do find that genuinely surprising. I would have expected women who were not born here to be stuck, so to speak, but I would have thought those that were educated here would have roughly the same chances as their white contemporaries.

Ms Ariss: That is what you would expect, is it not? But we have found that it is not the case, that there are higher unemployment rates, that compared to white women, ethnic minority women with degree level qualifications are more likely to be working in jobs that are below their qualification level and that they have a higher pay gap. We have just published a report that contains all of the evidence that we have been able to gather. Some of it is quite groundbreaking evidence. This is not a very well researched area, which is one of the reasons we want to take a look, because we had a hunch that there was something going on here, that there was a lost opportunity, which was what caused us to launch the investigation and we would be very happy to supply you with a copy of the report if you would find that of interest.

Q72 Miss Kirkbride: What would you hope employers and trade unions would now be doing as a result of the Women and Work Commission's recommendations?

Ms Ariss: Lots! One of the big things we would like employers to be doing, which some are but nothing like enough, is we would like them all to be looking regularly at whether there is a pay gap in their organisation and, if so, what causes it. Is it to do with discrimination in the pay systems? Is it to do with women and men in the organisation doing different sorts of jobs? Is it to do with a lack of flexible working or a lack of part-time opportunities further up in the organisation? What is going on? Then taking action to tackle whatever the cause is within their own particular workforce. If we were going to pick one thing that we really want employers to do, it is that. At the moment they are not required to do that in the private sector. Effectively, public sector employers pretty much now are, but we would like them all to be doing it, whether they are obliged to or not, because we think that regular looking at "What is going on in my organisation?" and "What can we do to make a difference?" is one of the biggest drivers of change for employers.

Ms Wilde: It is easy to overestimate the role of trade unions here in closing the gender pay gap. Where unions have a very good relationship with the employer, where they are recognised, they can achieve a lot but that may not necessarily be the case and of course, they may not be recognised. There are different scenarios. Also, looking specifically at equal pay and pay discrimination, equal pay is an individual right and although that right can be delivered through a collective agreement, the collective agreement will not necessarily deliver it, and that is why we are seeing the problems we are seeing in local government at the moment around equal pay. Most trade union officers are overworked and have far too much to do. Closing the gender pay gap is quite a complex issue for them to deal with. We would certainly welcome the creation of statutory equality reps to give some recognition to the role of trade unions around equality, to put some power behind that of recognition, but also to give people who move into those roles the space to do it so that they can become fully conversant with the issues, that they can become experts that people in the workplace can tap into, so that they have time to get themselves trained and to work on these issues. If you have somebody like that in a workplace or in a sector, that is a resource not just for the unions but also for the employer. Certainly, closing the gender pay gap is a challenge for both parties and there are certainly limits on what any trade union, no matter how good it is, can do if it is trying to do it and the employer does not want it to happen.

Q73 Miss Kirkbride: How do you see quality part-time work progressing?

Ms Ariss: We have already said that we think it needs to become a much bigger scale and that the level of investment that the Women and Work Commission recommended in this area is really what is needed, so we were very disappointed to see that that is going forward on a much smaller scale. We are glad it is going forward at all, because all the exhortation in the world will not help if there are not initiatives going on with employers to help them work out how to do this. We think what is happening is just not enough to tackle how absolutely fundamental this is. Almost half of women who are working work part-time and the vast majority of them are stuck in low-grade, poorly paid jobs with poor prospects. So this is not just one element amongst many; it is an absolutely central element and much more is needed in this area to persuade employers of the case for change, to help them make those changes, to make sure that managers are educated and trained to manage a much more flexible workforce and that there are some role models of both sexes.

Ms Wilde: There is a presentational issue here. If a woman is in a senior position and she is working part-time, she is working part-time in a senior position. If a man in a senior position is working part-time, he has a portfolio career. There is a big difference in the perception there and we need to shift that. A woman too has a portfolio career but it is never portrayed in that way.

Q74 Roger Berry: On the question of training, you make the point in your submission to the Committee that mainstream training tends to focus on people who have few or low skills and that that is often no help for women who take time out to raise a family. There have been some changes in the approach to training recently. Do you see this as moving in the right direction or is it still inappropriate training, from this point of view?

Ms Wilde: It is moving in the right direction but there still needs to be much more dialogue between the woman and whoever is providing the training, whether it is job-based training or whether it is externally based training. We are in a very fortunate position at the moment with the introduction of new technology that the possibilities of different ways of providing training have really opened up. There is a huge potential is there to deliver, but it needs to fit in with women's other commitments. It is not women being awkward if they have these commitments. There needs to be a recognition that they do have these commitments and they are real, and what actually do they need? Again, what are their long-term aspirations? Again, that conversation about if you follow this training route rather than that training route, what is going to be the long-term implication for your earnings? If you are training now, what is the implication for childcare? If you have a higher earning potential at the end of this training, is that going to open up more childcare possibilities than you have at the moment? It is a complex conversation, and to really make training take off and be appropriate and helpful, not just for women but for the economy as well, those conversations need to take place.

Q75 Roger Berry: On the key issue, as many people would see it, of equal pay audits and reviews, you do seem keener than the Women and Work Commission on compulsory equal pay reviews. You do though mention alternatives, interesting, the use of public procurement to spread best practice and so on. My first question is: do you believe that there are alternatives to equal pay audits that can do the job, or are you just offering those as alternatives because you thought the struggle for compulsory equal pay audits was ongoing?

Ms Ariss: Yes. This is not an easy one. You are right that we are warmer towards compulsory, mandatory pay reviews than the Women and Work Commission as a whole. We like very much the model that is enshrined in the Gender Equality Duty. When we first saw it we were not sure; it took us a little while to work out what we thought of it but the reason we have decided that we think it is potentially very powerful is that it is challenging public bodies; it is effectively requiring public bodies if they have the pay gap to look at all of the causes of it and to tackle them, and if pay discrimination is one of the causes, an equal pay review would be part of how they tackle it, but if the primary cause of their pay gap is to do with lack of access to flexible working and that is holding women back in terms of getting promoted, we would be expecting to see them concentrate their actions in that area. We remain of the view that, if you have a pay discrimination problem in a workforce, an equal pay review is much the best way to tackle it, and that is what our statutory code of practice on equal pay says. But there are other causes of the pay gap, and there are other actions that need to be taken. Although we still think that pay reviews are tremendously important in tackling pay discrimination and that pay discrimination remains pretty widespread, and therefore our broad position on pay reviews is unchanged, we do think that other things need to be done to tackle the other causes. To an extent, of course, if there is a lack of willingness to progress as quickly as we would like with pay reviews, then we need to look at other routes but those other routes are important in themselves and there are a number of reasons why we would like to see public bodies integrating equality into procurement that go beyond pay.

Q76 Roger Berry: As far as public bodies are concerned, you are suggesting that where it matters, the Gender Equality Duty effectively would require an equal pay review.

Ms Ariss: Yes, it does. Effectively it does, yes, and that is what our statutory code of practice on the Gender Equality Duty says to people, that if you have a pay gap, you are going to have to have a very good reason for not setting an objective to close it and for not taking action and that is something we will be looking at very closely.

Q77 Chairman: That helpfully brings us to the area we need to explore in our last few minutes, which is that there seem to me to be three different areas that relate to legislation and structural ways forward: the gender pay duty, the discrimination law review and the Comprehensive Spending Review and Public Service Agreements within that for departments, and there are a number of questions around that. Are you saying that you would like the Gender Equality Duty extended to the private sector?

Ms Ariss: Yes, we do think a similar approach would be appropriate - not necessarily exactly the same in every last detail because clearly, the Gender Equality Duty framework was designed with the public sector in mind and it spreads well beyond pay; it covers every aspect of what public bodies do. We are not advocating something exactly the same for the private sector because the way forward needs to be tailored, but we do think that there should be an onus on organisations to eliminate discrimination and to tackle it effectively. At the moment that onus is only there in the public sector.

Q78 Chairman: That seemed to be the main point in your written evidence that you were putting in to the section around discrimination law review and yet I think it was when Sheila spoke earlier you made it broader than that. Was that your main tenet of what should happen in terms of amending the law? Can you say any more about what your proposals are in relation to the discrimination law review? Also, we are a bit unclear about where it has got to and I understand, Amanda, that you are on the reference group for it, so could you clarify both where you think it has got to, why it is not there yet and what your views are about what should be being done on legislation which clearly many people have said has come to the end of its usefulness. Maybe you could expand on that and also how it ties into the gender duty and whether you are saying that should be a major part of that review.

Ms Ariss: What I think is happening with the discrimination law review is that a Green Paper is due out in May. The reference group is an advisory group rather than one that has any decision-making power. That is my best information. It has been delayed a number of times so I am not yet holding my breath but we are expecting to see a Green Paper in May and of course, there is a manifesto commitment to introduce a single Equality Act in the lifetime of this Parliament. So that is what we think is happening. Because there have already been a couple of years of discussion around the discrimination law review, we made a major submission a year ago now and we identified three priorities in that submission, which remain really important for us. One of those priorities was to improve the way in which the law worked to speed up closing of the pay gap, and in that we recommended that there should be an obligation on employers in all sectors - the private sector, NGOs, et cetera - to look at what the pay gap is in their workforce and to take action to tackle the causes of that pay gap. That is still what we would like to see happen. We are not very confident that that is what will happen in the discrimination law review and we have a number of other proposals that we would like to see taken forward in terms of improving the way that the Equal Pay Act works as it currently stands and we can say a little bit more about that if you would like.

Q79 Chairman: Would you think the Equal Pay Act should be abolished and subsumed within sex discrimination legislation, and how does that then tie into a single Equality Bill?

Ms Wilde: That is one of the issues that we are still working on because it is actually quite complicated, not so much because of the two statutes but because of the whole raft of regulations around equal value which attach to the Equal Pay Act, and it is how you would actually take those into a single Equality Act. We are talking to lawyers and to independent experts and to the tribunal system as well at the moment about what the best way forward is on equal pay. We will have sorted our position out on that when we respond to the Green Paper but we did not express a view on that in our original submission.

Q80 Chairman: So you are not expecting that to be dealt with within the context of the discrimination law review?

Ms Ariss: We do expect there to be proposals around equal pay but we are not quite sure how wide they will go, whether they will treat the Equal Pay Act as something that will stay as a separate piece of legislation or, if it is incorporated into a single Equality Act, whether there will be a chunk of it that has a ring-fenced conceptual framework, because at the moment, obviously, the Equal Pay Act has a very different conceptual framework to what prevails in the rest of the discrimination law. It would be possible to incorporate it into a single Equality Act but still keep it having a very distinct set of concepts and ideas. It is arguable whether there would be any advantage in doing that. It puts it all under one cover but it does not actually make much difference to how effectively it works and at the moment there is widespread consensus that the Equal Pay Act, important as it is, and we are not arguing for a minute that it should be got rid of, is too slow, too cumbersome and too ineffective and the fundamental problem is that the onus is with individuals to complain after the event. It does nothing to tackle discriminatory pay systems on a proactive basis.

Q81 Chairman: Are you saying at the moment you do not have a fully worked out set of proposals in relation to equal pay legislation and what you want to happen, and if you do, can you share it?

Ms Ariss: We do have a detailed list.

Ms Wilde: That fundamental question of whether you take the Equal Pay Act into a new single Equality Act or whether you keep it separate is one that we have not worked through but we have worked through some of the other important issues.

Q82 Chairman: If you could send to us what you have, because I have a couple of other questions and we have to finish at 11 o'clock.

Ms Wilde: Of course.

Q83 Chairman: We will be writing to government departments and public authorities to ask how they intend to implement the Gender Equality Duty. Is there a programme? You said that you had responsibility in relation to how that was implemented. What about in relation to what happened in Northern Ireland and their legislation? How closely connected are they in terms of their experience and being a bit ahead of us?

Ms Ariss: They are quite a long way ahead of us. In fact, I was talking to Evelyn Collins, the Chief Executive of the Equality Commission in Northern Ireland, about this last week and they are about to launch a substantial review of how the public duty framework in Northern Ireland has gone, which I think is due out within the next couple of weeks. So we have been able to learn from their experience and indeed from the experience of the Commission for Racial Equality - we have been overseeing the race duty for some years now - and from the Disability Rights Commission, whose duty is only a few months ahead of ours, but nonetheless there is some useful learning for us. One of the main things we learned from talking to other people was that some of the existing duties are quite focused on processes. If you look at what the law requires people to do in relation to race equality, it is about setting out your arrangements for doing things, not actually doing them, and technically, you can comply with the law and do very little apart from publish documents. Clearly, that is not what anybody intended. I was really struck by this because I was responsible for implementing the race equality duty within the EOC, and I was quite shocked. Obviously, we wanted to do it properly because we are an equality organisation but I was quite shocked when I realised, if you were clever enough, how little you could do. We put a really strong emphasis in the gender duty on making it focused on outcomes, so it is not about setting out your arrangements for doing things; the heart of it is setting objectives that will help to eliminate sex discrimination and harassment and to promote equality of women and men, and then to take action to achieve those objectives and, in monitoring what happens, that is going to be right at the heart of what we are looking for. So we hope that this is a better designed framework. While the duty has been in preparation we have consulted on and produced a statutory code of practice and a series of non-statutory guidance documents to try and help public bodies to implement the duty successfully. We have also had a substantial as our resources will permit programme of activity to raise awareness of public bodies about what is happening but also to help them think through what this means, what kind of things might be changed. So we published research, for example, looking at how gender equality would change transport planning, which concluded that currently most transport planning is done by men for men and that if we took a more imaginative approach, we would get much better value for money out of the public investment that goes into transport. So we have done research to try and help people. We are now, as the duty comes into force, moving more towards the monitoring and enforcement stage of the work and we will be looking very closely, again, in so far as our resources permit, at what people have done with the pay requirement. We have already identified that in our monitoring work one of our strategic priorities will be looking at what public bodies are doing with the pay part of the gender duty and although we do not want to be running around the place issuing compliance notices just to look macho, we do think that Parliament has given us enforcement powers for a reason and we should be making sure public bodies are very clear that this is not a nice optional extra but something they should do because it would be good for their businesses, but they must do it and if they do not, we will be on their case.

Q84 Chairman: That is extremely helpful. I think we could do with exploring this in more detail. If you have any information setting out how you see the gender duty working and your role in relation to it, maybe you could liaise with Elizabeth and make sure that we have that because I think it would be useful. Also, the sort of questions you will be asking public authorities, because we may ourselves wish for our own purposes to see what answers we get when we ask them what plans they have to implement it and also what they are going to put in their Public Service Agreements about it. If you have any more information on that, and also on the proposals in relation to equal pay legislation, that would be very helpful. It may be that we will need to have a look at it and maybe have some telephone conversations with you to clarify any points that we do not understand, if that would suit for us to proceed in that way because it clearly is very important.

Ms Ariss: I did not mention but we can send you some information also about some work we have been doing jointly with the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission that we have been doing jointly with the Treasury on the Comprehensive Spending Review and the PSA framework, where we are trying a mixture of carrot and stick to encourage the Treasury to take a very upfront and energetic approach to this.

Chairman: I got a very positive response from Stephen Timms when I raised precisely this point in Treasury Questions, about approaching from different angles. Anyway, it has been an extremely interesting session. We could easily have gone for another two hours but I am sure you have other things to do, as do we, but it would be very helpful to have that information, if you could let us have that, and we will come back to you if we have any questions on that. Thank you very much for your time. We do appreciate it, and we are looking forward to our future sessions, in particular when we get government departments in as well, and start raising these questions with them as to what they are doing. Thank you very much indeed.