 Good morning, and welcome to the 11th meeting of the Conmay Jobs and Fair Work Committee. May I remind everyone present to turn off electrical devices that may interfere with the sound systems or turn to silent otherwise? I have apologies from Gil Paterson and we have a question for the committee which is whether or not item 3 can be taken in private. Are we all agreed on that? We have four witnesses with us today for our gender pay gap inquiry and I'll introduce them from my left to right. First of all we have Rosie McRae who is the Head of Inclusion and Diversity, SSE, welcome. Then we have Shirley Campbell who is the director for people from Scottish Water, again welcome. Megan Horzbryr who is the Head of Diversity and Inclusion for SEDEXO, UK and Ireland, good morning. Finally, Katrina Mackie who is the HR director for Diageo Global Supply, welcome to you as well. We'll start off this morning with a question from committee member Bill Bowman. A nice straightforward question which may be harder to answer. Are you confident that there are definitive sets of statistics within Scotland on pay, earnings and employment for women? If not, what would you suggest? If you want to come in on any question I should have said please just indicate by raising your hand and I'll bring you in. The sound desk will deal with the microphones so you don't need to push any buttons. Who would like to start? Shirley Campbell. I don't know if you'd say that it's distinctive because I'm perhaps a little different from others in the panel here that Scottish Water is obviously a public corporation so we've been publishing figures on inclusion, diversity, gender, our pay gaps since 2013 as part of the public sector equality duty but behind the scenes and voluntarily we also look at the normal pay definition, the one that's the UK definition and we've got our information in that regard as well although that's not something we publish because we don't have an accountability to do that or a responsibility to do that so I guess where it's not distinctive is where you have different organisations using the different methodologies and the different approaches to calculation that may lead to complexities down the line but certainly it helps us to create statistics using both definitions. Katrina Mackie. I'm aware of some of the statistics that are around. I think it's always good to have more transparency and I think it's always good to have more information in that regard and I would hope that some of the gender pay reporting things that will be done will give us a different lens on that so that we're a bit clearer. Rosie McRae. Also to add to that some stats that would be good that would help influence the gender pay gap are things like the amount of roles that are advertised offering flexible working or part-time working. I know there's some stats about that across the UK which says something like 8 per cent of roles that are advertised over £20,000 offer some sort of flexible working. Those kind of stats are really helpful because it's those types of initiatives that are going to drive a change in the gender pay gap. I think so what you're saying is that you have or some of you have your own figures as a measure of how you're progressing or changing but there's not perhaps a definitive set that you would look to nationally to compare to. There is a reliable approach which is the way that the information will be asked to be reported so we use that. We haven't invented our own but what we're required to publish is the gender pay gap as per the public sector quality duty and we have been doing that in the same way since 2013. We've got trend data for that but we also find it useful to use the more comprehensive calculator which is the way others on the panel will be calculating their gender pay gap in due course. I just wonder if I might follow up on something Rosie McRae said about flexible working because if one is looking purely at the pay in monetary terms does that obscure the issue for some workers? Some of the public sector organisations that we'll hear from later have commented on the need for flexible working and so forth and I'm just wondering how that fits with approaching the issue from a monetary point of view because of course that doesn't necessarily take into account other compensations or other things that employees may feel are important in their job package indeed both male and female employees and of course I'm just wondering how for private companies that can be worked into your approach to things and whether or not that calls into question approaching things just using a statistical analysis as it were by saying this is the gender pay gap in terms of money but not taking into account other factors and does that actually cause part or help to feed into part of the problem? Rosie McRae. I guess the views on that are what we understand now because there's a penalty applied to those that take time out of the workplace and also a bias that exists for people who are working flexibly or indeed part-time and normally that's not affecting the pay gap at the point that it starts so you come back from maternity say and you say I want to come back and reduce hours your salary doesn't change, your bonus if you get one wouldn't change it would just be aligned to the hours you work but what happens is the on-going impact of that opportunities for you to progress and those jobs in the progression route being offered on flexible working people feel trapped within that so we do understand where people are working flexibly they feel there's a little room for progression because the roles that are being advertised aren't on the same flexible agile working package so you do feel trapped in the role that you're in and that seems to be the issue so we would like to and we would encourage more senior roles and senior positions to be advertised looking at agile and flexible working Shirley-Anne Campbell I think it's a really interesting point there's some evidence to suggest that if you offer agile working or flexible working it's worth on average to a person 5% on basic pay so an adobe externally would have to be offering a new salary either 5% or higher to encourage that person to move company once they've experienced the benefits of flexible working and agile working and we've been pursuing agile working as a gender pan Scottish Water for about two or three years now and we've got some quite interesting statistics in terms of the effect of that so when we do advertise now we'll make a presumption that it will be done on a fluid basis that doesn't have a location specific element to it and interestingly I was looking at some statistics yesterday our numbers of part-time men have doubled since 2013 so it is having an impact but I think definitely your question is it worth something we have a rule of thumb that it's worth about 5% increases on base pay Do you have figures on that that you could share with the committee in writing after today's meeting? So did others want to come in on that point? Yeah, very happy to So from a Sedexa perspective flexibility is something that we've recognised as one of the key elements that help us to achieve gender balance within our workforce and I'd absolutely echo the points made by the other committee members I think we know that flexibility is not only good for working women we also know that it's good for men as well and so in that regard it fits incredibly well with our overall approach to gender balance which is actually a number of these initiatives benefit the whole organisation and all employees and not just women I think maybe just to build on some of the comments that have already been made I think what we are really trying to do at Diageo is understand what will it take to make things more possible for people In our Scottish business here we have a lot of manufacturing and operational people and so we know that in our office roles and in some of our functions flexible working can be easier to actually offer to people than elsewhere So what we are really trying to do is work out what is it that people really value to enable them to stay in the workplace and progress as they want to and release their full potential and I think you were saying is it just about pay and is that the one wrong thing to look at I think it really is to look at statistics across the kind of entire talent life cycle if you want that you look at so one of the things that we are almost moving away from is just looking at how many women have we got or how many men have we got and trying to work out how many women do we attract at recruitment stage what's happening in our promotions our research seeing balance there what's happening our more people leaving the organisation male or women so that you're getting a much more holistic view of what it's really going to take to have a gender balanced organisation in the future Thank you and now a question from Jackie Baillie I think that Katrina Mackie touched on this earlier and that's the forthcoming pay gap reporting legislation I wonder if the panel think it will make any difference in reducing the gap I'm happy to start with that question from Mr Dexay's perspective we absolutely believe that it will make a difference we think that anything that brings gender balance into the public eye is a real positive but I think our experience is that we published our first number back in November and I think one of our concerns is around people understanding the true difference between equal pay and the gender pay gap and that's something certainly that as we've presented that information out into the public and indeed with our own employees and we employ about 35,000 people across the UK and Ireland 3,000 of which are in Scotland we've come to realise that there's still a great deal of education that needs to be done to help people to understand the difference between those concepts so I think for us whilst the number tells a certain story it's really the narrative which is going to be critical to change being made in a positive manner We agree with that and one thing we'd welcome would be a broadening actually of the regulation to say the narrative is as important as the figure we reported last year in line with the guidelines and so that was two years ahead we were proud of that but we were most proud of the narrative that we provided with it because there were few companies to look at and look at their pay gap and what was said and sometimes we found the number hidden away in a bunch of stats it really is only helpful when people talk about what they're doing to address it and that allows them year on year to say has that achieved something, what can we learn from it so we're really welcoming that for what we'll see next year as part of the gender pay gap reporting and what we can learn from others that's making a difference I think there is evidence that it does create a good focus because when we started reporting our gender pay gap in 2013 we had a very small gap in favour of women and in 2017 our April report that's yet to be published will show a slightly bigger gender pay gap in favour of women so I think there's evidence to suggest that when you do publish and you do look at it and you have that transparency it does have an effect on those companies with over 250 employees when you were talking about broadening it in respect of the narrative do you think that there is an argument to broaden it to include more companies given that Scotland's economy is driven by SMEs principally? I think that yes would be answered however very small movement can create big percentage shifts if it's a very small company there might be a lot that might look positive or negative for an organisation and it's really just because of very marginal changes so that would be the complexity with very small organisations I suggest I think that we also think it's a really positive thing to do I think it's like anything that you do if you understand the data and you understand what's actually going on in your organisation then it gives you other places to probe and go looking to understand the root causes about why is this the case so I think that a reporting in data can really help liberate some of that I think that this will bring a different lens to the way that we've looked at things in the past so I would be really confident that it would drive change We lack an awful lot because agreeing last year to report our gender pay gap we obviously did a lot of accounting and then we did a lot of learning from what the stats were telling us and we are now pretty confident as to where we need to put our efforts We've got 6,200 employees in the top 10 operational roles and out of those 200 are held by women and it's in these operational roles where the skill level is higher than those that many of the women are choosing to enter into retail and administration but not only that the progression points are different as well in the operational roles there are five points of progression so your career can be longer and there's more opportunity to progress and often times in the retail and the admin functions it's three points of progression so we've learned a lot from that and we already knew kind of that we didn't have many women in these roles but to learn that science behind it and the progression points really helped us put a spotlight on it and say, okay, what are we doing to attract more women into those roles It's not just only looking at our own employees those within our own organisation currently it's also thinking what we can do to inspire the next generation so this is an area where I believe that employers and large organisations have a duty to actually get the people within their organisations who perhaps do roles which don't fit with typical gender stereotypes to actually be going into schools and inspiring future generations because we know sometimes that the aspirations of boys and girls differ from a very early age and I think that's an opportunity that large organisations have got to contribute to this issue on a wider societal basis May I ask, just following on from that and first of all do you do break down of statistics for Scotland in terms of your reporting or is it UK wide or From a sedex perspective the stats that we've released and the stats that we will release will be UK wide and that's because we're headquartered in London so actually creating some stats specifically for Scotland may be a bit misleading Well I'm just wondering whether they'd be misleading or whether they might be useful from a Scottish perspective if there were a possibility to do that I mean it may not be required by the legislation but is it something you might think of looking at You aren't certainly happy to take that away and look into it And a further question I think already Shirley Campbell has indicated I think your reporting you said indicated a gender pay gap in favour of women in your organisation but to your organisation and the others is it possible to share your own gender pay gap information to a greater level of detail than perhaps what is published Is that something you'd be willing to do for the committee? When we publish our public sector equality duty report which has to come out in I think it's due in April this year we will use the public sector equality duty approach to reporting but in addition in the appendix we'll use the UK normal pay approach and just show what that means so we're not duty bound to report that but we're going to include the more forensic information in the report as well We'd be happy to share whether we have internal measures that aren't regulatory and that's how we're creating a scorecard and be happy to share that with you For us we've got 21,000 employees across the UK and Ireland and 7,000 of those are in Scotland so it's not something we report on just now nationally but it's something we could look into We'd expect to report for Scotland as well so our business in the UK we have probably about four fifths of it in Scotland with all of our operational areas so it's a hugely significant part of what we do and I think we will be expecting to publish the Azure Scotland data as well as UK data Perhaps the committee can write to your companies on that point Now come to a question from Gillian Martin Good morning You've already all touched on some of the measures that you're taking to eradicate the gender pay gap and to encourage women into your industries but also to progress I'd like to give you all the opportunity to tell me a wee bit more in detail about what you're doing to encourage more women into your sectors particularly in the utility sector where as you've pointed out that it's been kind of unbalanced up until this point I'm happy to start so our narrative following the gender pay gap report last year was about encouraging more women in on and up and that seems to have landed quite well in the organisation, it makes sense so from a recruitment point and coming in I guess with our learnings about career choices and the lack of women coming into the technical roles we made a big investment last year with an education charity called Teach First who helped provide teachers in the most deprived schools across England and Wales we entered into a partnership with them because we thought social inclusion was incredibly important to SSE but also offered us an opportunity to look at women into STEM so that we could encourage, this was giving us access to 200,000 school children so at scale to talk about career choices and also to encourage more girls to participate in STEM subjects so that was a real win I think we've had some good success with some simple things that we've done and these haven't cost a lot of money you know it's things like looking at how we're advertising for our engineering graduates for example what's the imagery we're using what's the language that we're using and making some tweaks to that we've seen great changes, I mean last year I think our intake of females into the engineering graduate programme was 17% and this year it's 40% so we did some really good things going out to the city of Glasgow college for example speaking to with Equate Scotland actually you know speaking to the female engineering students, we had Twitter Q&A sessions we just did things differently in order to show that we were open and inclusive to women as well as men so that's on the end I think on the on we've so this is making sure our women feel that there are routes to progress in our career sites internally so bringing more stories to life not just of women who are working flexibly and are still achieving great things but also on men and many of our managers are men talking about the benefits they get from encouraging agile and flexible working and that's been a real thing for us we've got a big building opening up in Reading which means that some of our satellite offices are closing and we've got 1200 employees moving into a Reading Hub office and we've used that as a mass scale pilot for working differently we're calling it so it's really encouraging occasional homeworking there's been a big investment in technology there and this is a big change it's a cultural change for our managers it's a change for our employees but doing that at scale allows us to pilot it in a meaningful way but also to measure that as well and see if it's something across the rest of the organisation which I think has been very good and some practical things we've done just to encourage difference overall because the education piece is really important as well about what we're doing all for it's not just about women it's the greatness that difference brings and all the creativity and innovation so we've seen things like the introduction of shadow boards and some of our directorates where it's not the normal faces around the table dealing with the big business challenges but we're looking at different people, different backgrounds getting together and taking on some of these business challenges and coming up with different responses and that's been really welcomed The utility shall I go next I would echo many of the things Rosie has said in terms of trying to encourage sector attractiveness but very practically for us at Scottish Water we've been looking at both ends of the career spectrum that we could do to change the mix so for example we have now a very large number of modern apprentices that we bring into Scottish Water every year back in 2013 only 11% of those were female we're now up to just under 20% of the modern apprentices that we bring in are females so we've done a huge amount to profile female modern apprentices through social media and using the press to encourage them into what where traditional male roles the other thing we've launched is we've used some people analytics to determine what are our five roles at Scottish Water who traditionally have only been filled by men because irrespective of our positive gender pay gap we still do have lots of occupational segregation so we've got five roles that we know are more attractive to males and we now have a referral scheme for males and females to refer young women who might be suitable for those particular roles we typically only recruit STEM graduates at Scottish Water and over the last few years we've been delighted that we've more or less had a 50-50 gender mix in our graduate intakes and we've been running 10-year future leadership programmes getting individuals senior leader ready or executive director ready in 10 years and in cohort one of our internal people that went on that programme 76 per cent of those were female in the first cohort and 50 per cent were female in the second cohort so we feel our long-term pipelines are becoming much more gender balanced we've also at the more senior level we've worked with the Scottish Government on the shadow boards initiative we've signed up to the Scottish business pledge we're signed up to 50-50 by 2020 and the outcome of that is that back in 2015 9.1 per cent of our board were female in 2017 27.3 per cent of our board are female so again that's had a real impact and then at the national level in the sector overall we work very closely with energy and utility skills and they have just published their workforce renewal and skills strategy through to 2020 so we're very active in helping them develop that and it's very focused on sector attractiveness so there isn't a skill shortage through to 2020 we actually feature case studies in that strategy and the case study is on the ways in which we're encouraging flexible retirement principally from males in traditional operational roles and when they flexibly retire it allows us to bring a modern apprentice into the business to buddy with them until the date of their final retirement so it allows knowledge transfer and it allows that case study to be looked at to determine if this person did flexibly retire would it allow the opportunity to create a better gender balance in that type of role so that's part of the actual case study sorry the business case for a flexible retirement going through so a number of things I think that have made a difference so from a sedexly perspective we've had a global commitment to gender balance since 2009 which was championed by our global CEO Michelle Londell and as part of that commitment he set up a global steering committee of some of our most senior men and women to particularly focus their attention on how do we drive gender balance throughout the organisation so all management grades and within all occupations and there are a number of initiatives which have come out of that group and we've seen some really good progress since 2009 in particular the leadership has put in place some aspirational targets around the number of women in our senior management positions and that's something which we've found is very much focused attention and those targets look to create a 40% representation of women and we've got to that 40% because we actually did a large scale internal piece of research which looked at the gender balance business case so we absolutely recognised the work that McKinsey and others have done in that space but we actually wanted to see how that translated into our own organisation and what we found is that where there was a 40% to 60% balance those entities were actually 13% more likely to report consistent organic growth 23% more likely to show an increase in growth profit and they also performed better on measures like employee engagement client satisfaction and client retention and so that's what's driven our focus on achieving this 40% in those senior management positions as part of SWIFT they've got a particular focus on some of the topics that have already been touched on so things like leadership development promoting flexible working encouraging the start-up and continuation of gender balance employee network groups because we know that through those groups people get access to informal schemes and access to role models in perhaps non-traditional roles and we also have a women work employee network group locally within the UK and Ireland which again looks to replicate some of those initiatives Okay, I'll tell you a bit about what we've been doing if I think about some of the things my colleagues have spoken about here in terms of attracting people in then you know we've been doing a number of the same things I think we worked with skills development Scotland on the not just for boys campaign which I think was great really around again showing people to pursue careers and STEM type subjects it's really great opportunity I think for a long time now we have had 50-50 graduate intake coming in and I think at the moment we're sitting with about 100% of apprentices would be girls as well so that and again over the last five years that's been quite a progression but there's still a lot of things to do again then utilising some of the people that are breaking through into some in some new space so for example in Ailey we have a number of distilleries on Ailey and in our apprentices we brought on two males and two females and we actually used them to really help encourage and front up campaigns to kind of drive this idea that there are some fabulous experiences for women in our industry and we also the whole role modelling thing I think in opening up people's minds to opportunities is something that we use a lot so even you probably think about Scotch whisky and you probably think that's quite a kind of male dominated industry and in a sense terms of some of our operations rules it is but even some of our master blenders and things are women who've worked for 40 years in our industry so I think a lot of this is about the stories that we tell and actually encouraging people to just see the world of work differently and really think about what's the possibility for me in these things so there's a lot of work goes on about trying to get people to come into the business in a gender balance way but obviously we're also very fortunate that we have a loyal workforce and when people join us they tend to stay for a long time so some of the things I think that we've tried to do around gender balance is again use this role modelling idea to run internal programmes which we've called women in leadership programmes and this has been specifically in our supply operation where we have we do we run virtual sessions for people it's voluntary so it's open to everybody and basically what we do is so I participate in this as well as some of my colleagues who might you know run a factory or they might run procurement or they might run supply chain and we effectively have really gathered together all of the materials and the the words of wisdom that people have in us as we've developed our own careers to really try and impart that knowledge into the people who work for us so there are different seminars it's a lot about design to give people confidence to try things differently to kind of go for promotions where they might naturally see many many reasons why not to and I think one of the things we've had hundreds of people have signed up for that in the last couple of years and I think it's our main mission around it is actually to try and kind of give people the confidence to really try and experiment with different things and the thing that really strikes people I think is no two people's stories are the same and I think some of the feedback that we've had from people is about a little bit about the mindset rather than think we get a lot of feedback from some of our female employees that they see many reasons why maybe things that aren't possible so they've got caring accountabilities or they make assumptions about what it must be like to do one of these senior jobs and it almost sort of self-select out so we do quite a lot of work to try and encourage people to think you know well what would have to be the conditions for me to be able to succeed in that role and so we're really trying to give them confidence around that and give them mentors and coaches that can help think about what I want to do and how I'm going to do it is pretty fundamental to many of the things that we do I think other people have mentioned targets and things we've also had that as well we've got about 40 per cent of our executive committee now for Diage or women and we've spent a lot of time on balance particularly in the kind of management arena and I think that we've done that very successfully actually when you look at some of the numbers however for the part of the business that I'm accountable for it is manufacturing and operations and it's still quite male dominated in some of our kind of particular areas of production and things a lot of shift working because we're 24-7 operations and we know probably only about one in four of our shift workers will be female so at the moment we're trying to run focus groups and things again to get insights into thinking what are some of the things that we really could be working on to address that balance and how could we make something a bit more possible maybe the only other couple of examples to give you in the supply chain operation it is more difficult you get a lot less applications from people coming in because way back in the system less people are just taking the right subjects to go into STEM and so it goes on I'm sure you've heard that from many people so we actually ran an event last year where we asked other companies other organisations some of the people here came to that event to say we're all we've all got the same challenges in this arena to try and learn from each other to see what are some of the other things that we might think about so I think it's such a complex kind of area and there are so many things that you could do again I think that's where data helps to really try and pinpoint what are some of the things that we really want to achieve and maybe just one other final theme would be as I say we have a lot of people in that they stay with us for a long time some functions it's very easy to recruit women and if you look into the different functions within your business you will see that some have got a very healthy balance some have got more women than men so the other thing that we're trying to say is well what could we maybe do to encourage a bit more cross functional movement so okay yeah maybe I didn't take physics or something at school but you know well certainly for me school would be a long time ago and so therefore you know what are some of the other opportunities that you might create for people to do different kinds of roles and some of our other policies about trying to document you know what's what's required in a role you know what are kind of cross functional skills that you might have to bring in you know as a team leader into an operational area maybe you haven't had the functional capability or the functional knowledge beforehand but that's something that we can give you skills in and you can utilise your leadership in different areas so that's some of the things that we're sort of trying to encourage around that at the moment I'd ask that question that's fantastic thank you I'm messing thanks convener I think kind of following on Martin's questions I mean I was interested that a I think it was Scottish water modern apprentice apprentices you're getting a lot more women in but the national figures are not good with modern apprentices it still seems to be very traditional are you effectively just effectively extracting more women from a small pool or is it your impression there are gradually more women coming through I think the pool is a big pool because it's about half of the Scottish public in terms that we can pull upon I think what's helped enormously is what is an apprentice so the move away from that always meaning a traditional operational apprentice that's typically being male dominated I think Scottish Water now I think we've got 27 different types of modern apprenticeships that people can apply for and do and we have everything through from foundation apprenticeship through to graduate modern apprenticeships now so when you when you vary the types of modern apprenticeships that people can apply for it can in itself make it much more attractive for females to consider but I think what also helps is in Scotland's modern apprenticeship week which happened quite recently we were almost exclusively profiling female modern apprentices on social media and in advertising just to get the message out there that these sorts of roles are attractive roles they are interesting roles for young women to consider and look how someone is doing it now so no I don't think the pool is a small one I think it's the sector hasn't been great at showing that it can be it is interesting and stimulating and a positive place for young women to apply to and that's what we're really focusing on and that's what I know energy and utility skills are focusing on when they're looking at this more nationally okay I mean, with stems being mentioned and that was the kind of area I'm interested in you can obviously you can encourage girls to apply at the apprenticeship stage and what I'm wondering is where should we be trying to intervene or do more to have change girls thinking if you like and it's not just them, it's families as well is it at secondary school level is it at primary school level is it even at nursery my personal view is as early as possible and again there's been a piece of interesting research done that if you talk about engineering type roles and call them design that in itself makes engineering roles much more attractive to women because you're starting to create a connection between art and design so often it's some of the language some of the terminology that's used that can actually shut someone's thinking off about the possibility of those sorts of roles before they're even aware of what those roles are you don't study engineering at school so people, boys and girls have very little appreciation until much later about what that even means so I think there is a look at what's on the curriculum at what point are young children allowed to drop away from maths at what point are they allowed to drop away from the sciences and you could argue one might argue that that's perhaps too early what did I always think about the age thing that I would suggest if people are choosing subjects maybe S2 that kind of level is quite a crucial age is that what I've got a boy at that stage right now but that's where we've gone with the teach first initiative so it's secondary school it's kind of 11-12 year old it's encouraging people at the career choice stage however that said I think our learning through this is the younger you can get the better so a piece of work one of our actually is to create a workbook for school children and it's aged up to 7 it's called keeping the lights on and the good thing about it is the engineer in the book is a female so that's great but this is something that we've bought into when our females are going out into schools to go and help inspire the younger generation they're taking these booklets with them it's got some workbooks in there it's great but I think that's one thing we have learnt that earlier is probably better family influence it's all very well talking to the children themselves but actually if they're then going home and talking to their parents and their parents are saying that's not a job for girls that's not a job for boys then that good work is undone so I think more can be done by organisations and others to ensure that parents are a bit more open to the possibilities that may not have been open to them when they were young but are now open I mean we're talking about different sectors too and the other three I guess sedexo I wonder though do you have sectors that are quite female dominated within your company? So we're a facilities management company so we do catering cleaning facilities management some of the roles are quite technical and we would see that sometimes there is more of a male dominance in those particular areas you know as has been described by some of my colleagues really it does depend on the individual sector but from an overall sedexo perspective we're gender balanced up until the senior management team and that's why we've got the specific targets in place for that population Who was it in Scottish Water that said you've got sectors that are more male dominated than others? We have occupational segregation at Scottish Water which means we have roles which are almost 100% filled by males and we have other roles that are almost 100% filled by females so that's why we try to get underneath statistics and look at that occupational segregation and see what we can do about that So as part of the answer to get men into some of these roles that's why I was focusing on sedexo because I thought maybe you had sectors like that where we actually as well as getting women into the male roles we get or traditionally seen as male roles we get men more into some of these other roles as well I think that's really important particularly if we look at things like the caring professions if we look at the national statistics on that what we see is that as you rightly say women do tend to be more in those childcare and indeed healthcare type positions so for us it's about balance it's arranged gender balance it's not just about women, it's not just about men but it's how do we get gender balance within the occupational groups and within the levels of the hierarchy Okay, thank you A question from Gordon MacDonald I wanted to ask Shirley about the evidence she gave of us closing the gender pay gap bottom of page 1 it says the causes of any normal pay gap are complex with the greatest driver being occupational segregation followed by length of service and age you've talked quite a lot about how you're going to handle and deal with the occupational segregation what if anything can you do about the other two aspects so our our length of service is our average length of service is just under 20 years and our turnover particularly in the big operational parts of Scottish water are just over 2% so whatever you attempt to do it's quite difficult to eek into those areas if you have permanent employees in those roles for a long time I mentioned earlier something very interesting that we did last year which was to begin we created a central fund of money, not an enormous amount of money but a central fund of money and then did a promotional campaign to particularly targeted at that part of the business to see are you a point in your career where you might wish to consider flexibly retiring and that actually for many people is an enormous benefit not something problematic because actually the transition to full retirement can be quite a brutal thing for some people when they've always worked full time and we had a lot of interest in that scheme the notion of flexible retirement and to date we have I think it's about 60 men from that part of the business now working flexibly now what that means is they might reduce to 2 or 3 days a week we buddy them with a modern apprentice often that modern apprentice will be female their sharing knowledge and wisdom between themselves we also get in return a fixed retirement date from that individual it's an obligation if you flexibly retire to state a fixed retirement date so that gives us certainty then in terms of manpower planning and budgeting and it allows you just very slowly to begin to eik in and make changes to that part of the business and it's gone down really positively and it's something that we will probably repeat Coesilla mentioned a similar aspect and I'm just wondering what the other panel members were doing and what their length of service on average was in staff turnover our length of service would be similar to that, our turnover is very low again just because people come in they stay for a long time so we probably face the same kind of challenges as Shirley was outlying there the point that I was coming to was PWC's women in work index which was published in February 2017 suggested that on historic trends the gender pay gap in the UK currently at 17% might not close until around 2040 so is that a realistic target and how do we reduce that target? I think looking at our trends and I don't know if I speak for other panel members as well movement is slow and a lot of this is about cultural change as well we've talked a lot about getting women in and encouraging but what we don't want to do is get a lot of difference and nobody know how to handle that and it's not that women need to be handled differently but people need to understand if you're in a majority of one gender or another or one majority and a small minority it's how you get the best and you enable that difference and so we've put a lot of effort into that and it's that awareness of our own bias that we all have we've introduced young manager training which focuses in on that and unconscious personal bias and we're making that mandatory so anybody who's involved in hiring looking at internal promotions they will go through this training and these are all small starts but really important steps to take there's a reason why the job title's inclusion and diversity for me because we see that the diversity that's coming whether we like it or not changes it's the cultural change piece the inclusion that's so important to get right I think there's some tactical moves you could make and there's some research out there that says you could nail it in 10 years so things like the flexible working if we all had a spotlight on that and really challenged ourselves with some of the roles not just at the lower end of the pay scale but higher up as well could they be done in a different way and if there's a spectrum of people applying then that would really help things I think we can all do all and take part and pursue all the initiatives that we've been discussing here today internally but we also need to play a significant part externally as well so as part of the Wood review the developing Scotland's young workforce there was a proposal in that that every organisation should enter into a partnership with a school in Scotland for between three and five years and Scottish Water has done that we partner with St Andrew's School in Glasgow to date we've delivered a thousand different interactions with that school and we're now at the point where 38 per cent of girls said they selected science subjects as a consequence of those interactions and that relationship but it's one school and we only have the capacity to connect with one school but we've given a huge amount of support and attention to that school I just wonder whether every organisation is doing that and there's more we could do to encourage that because I think there has to be a societal effect so that we don't just play our part internally but we're doing what we need to do externally as well We obviously need to get more people into STEM so are you aware of how many other companies and organisations like yourself is carrying out that work with schools? I'm not sure We would absolutely welcome a continued partnership with other businesses education and the government in promoting this work we recognise that it's multifaceted as my colleagues have said it's about getting to children when they're young and bringing in more women developing more women and retaining more women and I think that has to continue to be the focus and from a personal perspective I find it incredibly depressing to think that it might not be until 2040 that we're going to close the gender pay gap but I think the more you look into this the more you see how complex it is and I think that's why a partnership approach is really going to be critical just to pick up on the role models piece that we've come through our women's network within Sadexo recognising the impact that role models can have but actually how difficult it is for sometimes people to get their story out there we've done a couple of things so our women's network run podcasts and those podcasts are people telling their own personal story and they tend to be people who are in non-traditional roles and those podcasts are publicly available so they're downloadable via iTunes and that's something that's received both from our own internal employees but also from people externally he can also download them and I think the other party within the partnership approach which I believe we need to take which I think it would be important to call out would be the role of awards organisations who really profile women who are perhaps doing non-traditional roles or who are really pushing the boundaries in terms of the work that they do so that again is something that we find incredibly helpful and I would absolutely encourage that to continue I think it's a stark a stark message that you raised there and I think for me it comes down to leadership and resolve so that may well be the case if we carry on doing what we've always done but I think in terms of trying to see some of these points that get made I think that does encourage more creativity and more leadership and resolve as I say to actually say that's not an outcome that we want so therefore what kind of changes is that going to require for us to make and some of which may seem unimaginable at the moment but I think I've worked in business for quite a long time now and if I even reflect back to what it was like to work versus what it's like now I think that if you've got real resolve and positivity to change then you know I think that it's in our hands to really drive a different outcome One thing we've not touched upon at all and it does have an effect is who remains the person who has the principal responsibility for childcare so although 96 per cent of our women on maternity leave return the numbers of men taking paternity leave has been completely flat in our organisation since 2014 so just approximately 63 men a year will ask for paternity leave and take it but the average amount of leave they take is 26 days now you could argue that's not particularly shared in terms of raising raising children and responsibility for children so again the effect of all of that on a woman in the workplace in terms of who should share the childcare arrangements and I'm aware for example in Europe that certain countries who are looking at incentivising the taking of paternity leave are even mandating the taking of paternity leave now I'm not suggesting that for a moment but I just found this statistic we had that the percentage of people asking for it has remained very flat is there any reason why it's remained flat I mean is it a cultural issue no I don't think so it's on offer so I don't think so maybe we need to story tell a bit more in terms of where it's been done successfully so my view would be that's probably an area where it's a cultural issue within the UK so not specific to organisations I think it's still quite unusual for men to be the primary care givers you've only got to turn up at any school gates and actually the number of men that you see there is very limited so I think it's a bigger issue than within specific organisations okay thanks I suppose it's also a matter of personal choice and how families choose to organise themselves is that I mean as I think Shirley Campbell said you have the option there but to a certain extent people make choices whether or women on how they organise the green shoot for us has been seeing the number of males in part-time roles double over just a few years so I think that suggests that they're working more flexibly because they're also playing a part in cater responsibilities we'll come now to the question from Ash Denham I was actually going to ask you about innovative practices but I think that that's been well covered in answer to Gillian Martin's question so I'll put this to you I don't know if anybody's seen recently Aviva so that's the insurance company they wrote to all their suppliers and threatened to cancel contracts with them if these supplier companies didn't have progression routes for women or didn't have women in senior roles and I'm just interested to hear what your comments might be on that perhaps of the inside track on this a little bit in human resources and I still have a lot of contacts there I think the way that was publicised in the press and how that was stated is not appropriate it was perhaps too threatening in its approach and something of a blunt instrument I think it is always a positive thing to encourage very good working practices in the supply chain and that covers a whole plethora of things from modern slavery human trafficking to gender equality et cetera et cetera so the relationships we have and the sharing of good working practices and the expectation that they also adopt them is incredibly positive but I personally don't think it's positive to resort to threats of cancellations of arrangements I would agree with that I think through our supply chain we're a living wage employer and we encourage that through our supply chain but part of our business are also looking to win contracted work and we see an increasing amount of questionnaires coming through as part of those tender processes is asking us what are your stats what are you doing, what evidence do you have what policies do you have a trend in asking for more transparency with that and I think that's a good thing Can you pass that on to your supply chain then ask them to show what their practices are it's something we're working with procurement at the moment if our internal ambitions are this then we'd be expecting similar we'd want to see that demonstrated in the people who are offering us a service we'd probably even look beyond our supply chain so we're very open around the work and indeed we're quite transparent as an organisation so we're very open to sort of sharing what it is that we're doing in this space and indeed others so we've already done a number of events where we've shared our policies and approaches with both clients and suppliers but indeed other organisations because I think they've also got an opportunity to learn and share best practice Very similar I think more and more you're looking at partnerships with your suppliers and it's very important that we're aligned on some of these things so I just echo the points that have been made really And finally at this one more for Rosie McRaeff I noticed in your submission that you talked about a skills gap that you felt was looming and that you'd identified that there was possibly a pool of women that had skills maybe not exactly the right skills to fit that and that you felt with the right support and encouragement that those women could be brought on to partially at least fill that skills gap could you talk a little bit more about what you're doing there Yes, we're learning in that space but sort of female return ships which I think you had Talat Yacoubin talking from Equate Scotland so we were partnering with her together with the prospect union and they have this pool of women who have been out of the workplace for whatever reason for a number of years and are STEM qualified so it's looking at offering them work placements from 3 to 12 months and we did two of those last year very successful and one of the ladies just got in touch with me and said she's since gone on to another organisation and acquired full-time permanent work which is great I think we can do more of that and especially, and we're all learning in this space I think when we look at some of the stats of our female workforce and those over 50 so I talked earlier about women being commonly in roles where the progression points aren't as many as the technical skilled roles and that's a challenge but one thing I learnt only last week was that the dominance of women over 50 who are in education and health and retail and in those areas the opportunities to progress are slimmer than others and they are probably vastly skilled as well so if we're serious about this we really need to get behind the numbers understand just where our women are at what skills they have and probably look to do some positive action I think at a larger scale Have you any idea what that might look like or is it too early to say? So one thing was a few months ago when I was at a session and it was all about strategic thinking in Germany they're doing things it's called rent a pensioner it's called rent a rentner rent a pensioner where pensioners are kind of going on to this website and saying these are all the skills that I have I'm up for working two days a week three days a week I felt a pressure off the government with pension payments it's keeping a healthy elderly group of people out there and it's working fantastically well and I was really encouraged by that and I also think if you marry that up with what you know about your business you could have great things when we first started looking at this a lot of what we learned was by holding a mirror up and understanding who our customers are lots of our domestic customers in SSE are elderly and yet we look at our retail business and a lot of the people who are dealing with them on the phone are under 35 so that was our first piece of inclusive work we did around having inclusive conversations with people that are a different generation from you but why are we not targeting people at that age category who may have more in common things like that I think we need to get a little bit more creative around I mentioned earlier that we have long term succession pipelines we have a 10 year programme and we are looking at future leaders and future senior leaders and a big percentage of that cohort are women, young women if you are offered a place on that 10 year development programme a commitment is that you must permit managed moves internally on your behalf and that's been that's proven to be quite interesting but what it means over the 10 year programme is that the organisation will determine for you the next move from a development perspective so for women in particular who can be quite hesitant about putting themselves forward for the next move the organisation does it for them so they must do a role in change they must do a leadership role they must do a customer facing role and they must do a commercial role and that's something that they're aware of if they enter into the 10 year so again it helps to develop quite a diverse skills mix just as a consequence of those moves being managed on their behalf Question from Richard Leonard Thanks very much there is a group of workers that we haven't really touched on but some of them are employed by Megan Hawesborough's organisation and these I suspect will be the lowest paid workers they will be employed for you they will be contracted out they will be cleaners and catering workers and others in facilities management could you reflect or share with us your policy and experience as an organisation on this group of workers the lowest paid workers From an organisational perspective like others have said we have a commitment to being a living wage employer so that was one of the commitments that we've made recently because we recognise that those individuals are lowest paid within our organisation but I think in terms of our organisational approach they're really the lifeblood of our organisation and we know that the skills that people develop in those customer facing roles are really critical to actually moving into more senior management positions so we know that an ability to have conversations with people and to have that customer facing experience into more senior management positions and like the other organisations have described we have a long length of service on average within our organisation and what we see is that often people will move from some of those more junior positions actually into more senior positions and if I may share a story from one of our regional leadership committee he actually joined our organisation in one of those lower level positions and he now sits on our UK and Ireland regional leadership team so we've got some great examples of career progression and perhaps people taking career paths that you wouldn't necessarily expect you know people doing things that actually go against some of the gender stereotypes that we've been talking a lot about today so you say that you are a living wage employer so everybody employed by Sodexo in Scotland is on a living wage so we have signed up to the concept of the living wage and through the bids that we have with our clients so they sign up to that or not with us but absolutely we agree with the concept of the living wage and we think it's really important for people's quality of life that they are paid a fair wage and they get those career development opportunities as well it's not only about the here and now but it's also about actually what does the future look like for them so you're a living wage employer on paper but actually people that are employed by Sodexo are not necessarily being paid the living wage have an aspiration that our employees would absolutely be paid the living wage and that is a decision that is ultimately taken by our clients but it is something that we absolutely support as an organisation and what about the staff in the Scottish Parliament do they get paid the living wage I'm not familiar with the details of that contract but very happy to come back to you on that and what about in Diagio for example are you all contracted out catering and cleaning workers paid the living wage yeah I think well we're we're in discussions with Sodexo at the moment well obviously from a living wage perspective terms of our direct workforce and things they're all covered by that including our apprentices and things so I think it is something that we're actively in discussion with at the moment but do you feel it falls within your corporate social responsibility for example to ensure that people working on your sites providing those services are paid a living wage yeah I mean we're very committed to living wage concept as I've already said and I think that in relation to many of the third parties that we've got working on our sites they're kind of more than covered by that and if there are any other ones then you know clearly that that's something that we need to address but what is the currently hourly rate of pay for a cleaner or a contract catering worker on your leaving site or your shield hall site for example so I don't have that information you can apply that to us I don't know whether SSE or a living wage employer you're an accredited living wage employer are you not so what does that mean for any catering or cleaning staff that you employ or are employed on your sites I should say so all our direct employees are living wage or more and we champion it through our supply chain so some of our catering staff are contracted out and we champion the living wage through our supply chain does that mean that they get paid the living wage or not I wouldn't know, I would imagine in some cases they do and some they don't I don't have that data with me we could supply it and Scottish Water we're also an accredited living wage employer we've also looked at the contracts that we have at the point we became an accredited living wage employer there were either two or three contracts that had not yet come up for renewal but the endeavour was to ensure at the point of renewal we would absolutely ensure that those contracts for services providers would give the living wage as far as I'm aware there's either one there might be only one that hasn't yet come up for renewal the others have and I'm aware that one of the more recent ones that meant an increase on the contract cost of £300,000 per annum which Scottish Water was prepared to accept to ensure that those employees also received the living wage final question if you're able to find the resources to pay your own direct employees the living wage isn't it also therefore possible to find the resources to pay for contractors who are supplying services on your sites to be a living wage employers and employees we do to bring matters perhaps slightly back to the gender pay gap issue I think following on from Richard Leonard's question if there are sectors of your employees or workforces who are predominantly male or predominantly female if those sectors are low paid what are you doing to try and balance things out as it were because I think there's broad agreement or a matter of balance how these things are approached but I think the key point from a gender pay gap point of view may be that how do you address that issue because I think a lot of studies recent studies some have shown that a lot of the difficulty arises where men's wages are simply getting lower rather than women's wages increasing and the gender pay gap may be going down for that reason a better reason which might might be that the wages are being brought up to the same mark as it were any comments on that? I think for us in SSE again looking at the numbers and last year reporting on the gender pay gap helped with this what we found was that whilst we are 30 per cent female in SSE which is quite good in our industry the average is 18 per cent we looked at salary bands and only 10 per cent of our women were in roles earning over 40,000 and that was quite alarming to us and we kind of knee jerked into a target around that quite a hard target and said we want to see that more than double by 2025 so that's one thing we deliberately went out with we're also signed up with the powerful women initiative which was formed out of the previous deck members of government and with that we signed up again it's not regulatory but it's our pledge that 40 per cent of our women 40 per cent of our managers would be women by 2030 and that 30 per cent of our senior managers would be women so these are things we found out from our stats and that we've said we want to do better in and have set ourselves a target against certainly for us rather than see our salaries going down we've actually seen them increase and that's been a consequence of that because of the effect of the living wage so much so at Scottish Water that our banding system band E for us is our lowest banding level that's now collapsed completely into the band above so we will be eliminating what we have typically had at Scottish Water for many many years because it's actually had a raised impact and it's all now absorbed within the next level up so we're looking at our banding arrangements in the future just to make sure we've got the right start rates, end rates and overlaps between the bands but it's allowed us to take away the lowest rate of pay that we had in our band E I was thinking at the end of the day it comes back to this gender balance issue isn't it so I don't think it's about trying to reduce pay or anything I don't think that's an objective at all I think it would be more about really trying to encourage as we've already said more women into the higher paid jobs as well I move on to a question from Andy Wightman we heard from Shirley Campbell and Rosie in response to a question about Aviva do any of you wish to say a bit more about what large corporates like yourselves are doing to improve the gender pay gap in your supply chain from a sedexy perspective we haven't yet had a focus specifically on our supply chain although I think that's an opportunity for us for the future but we've been incredibly transparent about all of the work that we do around gender balance and also in regard to the gender pay gap figure which we published last November and we recognise that actually it's a real advantage to us coming together with other businesses as a community and sharing the good practices so that's something that we've been doing on an informal basis and I think it's something that we will continue to do moving forwards because for us it's not just about our supply chain although we know there's some large organisations in there it's actually around how do we move this conversation forward as a UK I think for us we did a piece of work to try and work out where did we have any kind of issues around there and I think it would be a commitment to move that forward so it's actually making sure that we understand what's happening in the different suppliers that we use and for us to again work in partnership with them to make sure that that's a great outcome for everybody You said you think it's a commitment is it a commitment? It's definitely something that we have looked at I think for the vast majority of our suppliers there isn't an issue there may be I think the last time I looked at it there was maybe one or two and again they were in discussion with them to sort that out So you're inviting them to to report their own gender pay gap or is that the kind of thing you're looking at when you're procuring? Yeah they would again in terms of the reporting piece I think they will be aligned around the same legislation as the rest of us in terms of reporting Although many people in the supply chain will not be covered by the legislation there will be less than 250 people Okay okay Yeah that's something I need to take away and have a look at Okay Onto another question about what the Scottish Government's doing we've heard a bit of evidence about some work in the fair work convention and also around the Scottish business pledge but in respect of the gender pay gap those initiatives are perhaps not achieving a great deal at the moment. Do you feel that the Scottish Government is doing enough on this in terms of the policy levers it has and what more do you think it could do? I think on that we are in agreement with the Scottish business pledge however when it comes to gender pay gap I think there is room there to be a bit more specific and a bit more targeted I agree with one of the comments that was made earlier about working together sort of education, government and employers I think if we could be focused on the top three or four things that are gathering evidence to really make a difference if we were all focused in on that we could make some real change so I've talked a bit and a few times about the flexible working piece there's probably more than that but if we could all be targeted on the same things and this is where the business pledge just more factually what are the things that would make a difference? I think for us obviously where could we go further the way we report as part of the public sector quality duty is one way of stating what your gender pay gap is the UK approach applied to the private sector and the public sector in England is more onerous in terms of what the requirement is and it goes into far more detail so I guess there's a question about whether that might be applicable to apply to the Scottish public sector as well we would certainly welcome the opportunity to look more forensically at our information so looking at gender by pay band gender pay gap by ethnicity for example looking at gender pay gap by age by length of service that tells you quite interesting information and we do that voluntarily and for ourselves so that we can make sure that our interventions are properly targeted so I guess there's a question about what methodology will we be using going forward I think it is about partnership it's probably about keeping dialogue between us as well to try and work out the areas that we want to work on moving forward in so I think I mentioned not just for boys initiative that was a good one to help address some of the long standing issues in terms of women and things coming into non-traditional organisations so I think the more that we can see that we could work together on some of those things I think that would be really helpful I think I've spoken at length about Sodexo's desire for a partnership approach probably the one party that I think is really critical to this that perhaps we haven't mentioned so much is actually the role of the media and I think as more and more companies begin to publish their gender pay gap I think their role is going to become more critical in actually making sure that the general public actually have a reasonable understanding of the differences between equal pay and the gender pay gap a difficult construct for lay people to get their heads around so I think there's a real opportunity for media to contribute positively in that regard Thank you A quick follow-up question on that the UK Government's return to work scheme that I think is going to come into force in England is that a good idea is that something that might be I don't think it's proposed at present for Scotland is that something that might be useful in Scotland I don't know if any of you have had a chance to consider that Well, we'll move on then I think final question from Dean Lockhart Thank you, convener I wanted to come back briefly to the discussion on a gender pay gap and progression of women into senior positions and the role organisations can help or the role organisations or programmes can be put in place to help women reintegrate back into the workforce after a career break either for maternity reasons or otherwise We've heard evidence from other organisations that having such a programme is critical in making sure that women do progress through into senior positions after a career break I'd like to briefly get your views on that in terms of what individual organisations can do to achieve this One of the things that I've talked about at length is the percentage of women that we have on our development programmes It's high so that's important and it does look like we're developing quite a healthy pipeline of women that will flow through into senior management positions We had some examples of individuals needing to go in maternity leave partway through cohort 1 but that automatically meant that they came back and went straight on to the next cohort again so that they could continue with the development so there wasn't an issue there We're also delighted that over 96 per cent of women do return from maternity leave and quite interestingly more recently they're returning to full-time roles more than they did before because typically that would be in some sort of part-time arrangement and we believe that's due to the agile working principles that now play across the totality of Scottish water To give you a very recent example of something else we've just endorsed which is a discussion that we had with the executive team last week where our suggestion was that every returner to Scottish water would attend one of our immersion events that we offer to all leaders at Scottish water which talks about business strategy business performance future direction so whether they are or are not a leader at the point at which they might have gone on long-term sickness absence or maternity leave or undertaken an international assignment they will be given the opportunity to participate in that group so that they get a really good kind of context an understanding of where the business is at the point of their return which should hopefully sort of pump prime them as they go back into the role so that's just a small other example of something else which we think will be helpful For us one of the things we offer is coaching and mentoring to those that are going off maternity and maternity and adoption leave so pre, during and post I talked earlier about the hiring manager training and the sort of inclusive approach to that which has been good but another win we had was with our most senior leaders all of whom are men where they undertook some personal belief coaching on this subject they got it they got the business need to have more difference but they went through some coaching themselves as to what that meant for them as individuals that they had to change and I think we can't get away from the importance of that it's these key decision points and the processes that you have in place the policies that you have in place at decision points about people progressing or who you're hiring in that you need to put this lens on that everybody's balanced it's thinking about when you're interviewing that's balanced in many different ways not just on gender and all these things that we're still working through but seem to be incredibly important to make the shift that we need I think for us again so running programmes or whatever is one aspect of it but we have very regular talent review processes kind of annual processes where we're reviewing people's performance and potential and where they might go and I think there's a lot more emphasis put on what do we need to do to kind of further prepare this person for the next step up and just understanding and it's almost like people's own aspirations and views can change so I think having a regular review process kind of helps in this regard as well where you're always updating what time where somebody is in their career what we need to do to enable the next steps for them Thank you very much to all of our witnesses I'm afraid we're well out of time now so thank you very much and I'll suspend the sitting just for a minute so we can change the witnesses to the next panel so in fact no one needs to leave from the public gallery it's just we're changing over our witnesses for our next evidence session Thank you Well good morning to everyone may I welcome our second panel of witnesses and we have with us from right to left this time first of all Katie Miller who is head of human resources at the City of Edinburgh Council and I think he's here on behalf of COSLA then we have Peter Rieke who's deputy chief executive and director of investments for Scottish Futures Trust Nicky Page who's head of people management for Police Scotland Ian Reid who is the management site secretary for NHS Scotland terms and conditions committee and finally Diane Vincent who's director of people and organisational development for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service so welcome to all of you this morning thank you for coming and we'll start with a question from Bill Bowman convener I can ask a question not so much about your own organisations but looking at the broader picture do you believe that we have a defined set of agreed statistics on female economic activity in Scotland and on the pay gap the earlier part of your question I'm not an expert on so I wouldn't perhaps comment too directly on that but in terms of the information on the NHS it's in a standardised format across all of the NHS boards and there's a level of detail which is much greater than it was even two or three years ago and as you'll be aware each NHS board is required to publish that information in this year by April the end of April 17 so it will be much more in the public domain I think what the nuances are within the NHS is really understanding because although the NHS is a predominantly female organisation it still has a gender pay gap for reasons we can perhaps go into but in terms of the information I think it's in a much better place than it was two or three years ago I think similar to the evidence you heard this morning from our private sector colleagues there perhaps isn't a definitive measure as such but within the public sector I do believe that we're all reporting in line with the public sector equality duty which as I understand it is an average early rate of pay which is minus over time and allowance there are other ways of calculating that but my own view would be that that particular calculation allows some comparisons to be made and we certainly use that when we're comparing our pay gap with other similar public sector organisations I do note that in some of the reports there is a tendency to use the median as opposed to the mean and perhaps that's something that we could consider within the public sector if it's worthy of expanding our reporting to look at not just the average but the median as well Speaking as probably a procura then when you're thinking about the potential to evaluate the basis of figures that come forward from organisations it's really important that they are comparable so that we can make a fair evaluation and we know that some of the standards of publication there are pretty clearly set guidelines on what figures have to be used but from what we hear and read there are some pretty difficult concepts in there about employees, workers, contractors owners of businesses if you're looking at the professional services and basics over times and allowances that can be different between different organisations within a sector as well as between different sectors so I think that for me that concept of exactly how we collect the figures and whether we'll ever be able to get a set of statistics that are capable of being compared in a sort of procurement and that sort of level of transparency and comparability is really very challenging at the minute I would say Nicky Page Thank you Certainly we find that within policing we've got a very good grip of our police officer data we are part way through our modernisation for staff because as the committee will be aware, Police Scotland came together four years ago as a result of that we inherited 10 different legacy pay systems that gives us particular challenges in terms of the look across However being the case we still had an attempt in the current and published mainstreaming report to look at segregation and horizontal segregation we did use the benchmark of kind of salaries for staff to give us some work to build on for future years In terms of the wider question that was asked around data we certainly find challenging is when we look for benchmarks and comparators as Dianne's already pointed out the very basic information is very comparable within the public sector I would say However, as soon as you get into the more challenging aspects of looking at segregation age, service levels and how these things affect pay that's much more difficult because when you do look at other organisations because there isn't specifics and different bodies give you different indicators to calculate that is much more challenging and for us to learn from other organisations it's useful to have common benchmarks and that's maybe something that we all have to work on in the public sector and in different industries at large Nicky has just said that at a surface level then yes there is consistency across the measurements but actually when you start to look at some of the dynamics that sit underneath that so for example the perpetuity for men to work longer hours during a week some reports would argue that perhaps they earn overtime four times as much as women within a working week so it's when you start to look at the next level of detail below the surface level then that's when the dynamics really start to come in I think I think what you're saying is that within your organisations where you have them you're really reasonably comfortable that you're producing information for your own use but reliable benchmarking across other organisations might not be so easy Ash Denham Obviously we've got the forthcoming pay gap reporting legislation that's going to be coming in so I'm wondering what the panel's views on whether just that act of having to report those statistics will actually create change on I think the Scottish Fine Rescue Service have found that the pay gap reporting useful in terms of making us fully understand what our pay and reward systems are providing for our employees and also where we've had to take action to address pay gap so for example similar to Police Scotland we had nine legacy organisations coming to one national organisation also in 2013 and within our support staff functions we inherited 19 different payroll systems and nine different pay and grading systems so our 2013 pay gap analysis and our equal pay report allowed us to focus in on that and we've spent the last two or three years really focusing on the pay and reward framework to reduce that pay inequality within the previous systems new HR payroll system and bring in a new pay and reward system that's based on a single job evaluation scheme which we actually used the COSLA Scottish Joint Council scheme for that so not just publishing the data was useful but it helped us focus in on some of the key things that we also had to do we also used our 2013 report to start to take us into a review of the wider positive action initiatives that we might need to take and I'm sure the committee might have some questions on that as we go forward so to answer your question the reporting of the data is useful I think it helps promote us as an employer of choice it helps to show transparency in our pay and reward systems but it also makes us focus internally on the types of action that we need to take in order to reduce any pay inequality and reduce the pay gap I think the NHS has already started to make an impact because one of the most stark observations when you looked at the data a few years back was the impact that medical and dental staff have on screwing the gender pay gap and that as you'll be aware is a traditionally male profession and also the highest paid in the NHS so that was screwing the gender pay gap quite significantly pay is unlikely to alter very much but the way that we employ doctors is beginning now to be looked at in a much more flexible way so the kind of long hours culture and everything that went along with that we're trying to address and younger women who are coming into the medical profession no longer want to work those kind of rigid fixed hours so we're having to look at greater flexibility more part-time working because across not only the hospital sector but into general practice and you'll probably be aware of a lot of work that's going on around multidisciplinary team working so that the GP for example can be part of the team supported by nurses, physios etc and that's a way of getting more female employees into the workforce and sustaining them in the workforce in a particularly demanding area in terms of whether the duty will or will not make a difference what I can comment on is if we look back at our 2013 published data and we look at our data now for police officers we had a 7 per cent gap a 4 per cent gap or 4.1 per cent gap anyway and for police staff we've also made a 1 per cent progress now with police staff we've got a challenge because of the modernisation of the pain grading system but we would anticipate with the modernisation of that system we'll make further progress with police staff and I think to echo both Diane and Ian's point I think it focuses the mind it focuses activity and because of that you've got obviously much more chance of actually achieving something if you've got actions in place to do that so we definitely feel that the duty to publish the duty to promote is making a difference certainly in policing and I would anticipate that that benefit has to happen as well as that duty is better understood and progressed so I agree with all of what's been said I think there's two points the first is what's measured to manage to go back to management I think a piece of jerk I think if it isn't measured it won't be managed so I agree and I think the transparency point in the reporting of it is really important as well I think some of the impacts of Lord Davis's and probably not wide enough and not far enough yet but the rate of change I believe did pick up quite significantly when people had to publish their information so there's something inherently competitive about particularly corporates and they're trying to compete for talent compete for customers, compete for shareholders and peer approval so if we make people publish this information on a comparable basis then I do believe that leadership attention will be drawn to it and people will want to do the right thing to be compared against their peers positively so both measurement and transparency in publication I think are important to drive change I'm in agreement I think it does focus as the mind there's obviously the dynamics that sit underneath that that we should absolutely be exploring and probably be more transparent about and actually in terms of partnership working ultimately I think we were to look at our strategies we were probably all trying to achieve the same things and move in the same direction so it's actually how we work in partnership across organisations to support each other with that so just to summarise you think that just seeing it there in black and white draws the mind draws the focus to the situation which then leads to a want to kind of improve it so would you agree are all of your organisations setting targets for improvement year on year again just to our recent our recent board meeting I attended it was at NHS 24 when the quality data was presented and the actions coming from it there was a great debate amongst the non-executive directors of that particular organisation about what this was telling them and what they might want to put in place so I think it does open up people's minds and now there's an action plan against that that will be measured and monitored going forward so I think it does help in terms of the accountability I suppose of these issues that the data has actually then been discussed at the very senior levels Just to pick up on that point I would say that within the fire service we're setting targets necessarily to improve it but we are similar to Ian putting in the action plans that support what we're trying to do and positive action and the gender pay gap and those are kept under scrutiny by both our staff governance committee well our senior leadership team our staff governance committee and the wider Scottish Fire and Rescue Service Board It would be a point that's slightly different I come from a relatively small organisation and I think in that sort of environment we need to be really careful of driving the change through numbers specifically because we're hit by the statistics of small numbers so one appointment in one role or another being a male or a female can cause some really lumpy bumpy weird things to happen to the numbers that aren't really reflective of what's happening in the organisation so we try and focus on the change we're making and what we do on a day-to-day basis rather than setting targets by numbers Sorry just to add to that I think what's important in policing is we set outcomes and we'll look to achieve those outcomes so it's not driven by numbers which as Peter's already pointed out can skew behaviours and be quite detrimental to culture if you're not very careful but we do look to see that's the outcome we're trying to achieve and similar to both Ian and Diane the Scottish Police Authority looked at the mainstream in reporting on 22 March and they scrutinised that through the year and they are very interested in looking at where we're progressing in terms of our outcomes Thank you, we now come to a question from Andy Wightman Thank you, convener I wonder if you could put on the record your current latest gender pay gap figures for your organisation and what the trend has been in recent years Our overall gender pay gap for the whole of our employee population is around 5% We are predominantly a uniform service so that percentage is driven by the population of our uniform staff Within our support staff it is sitting around 15% at the moment and since we published the report in 2015 the pay gap has gone from 11% organisationally down to 5% which we're just about to publish in April Ours is an our mainstream in report which was published as I say just recently for police officers excluding allowances in overtime is 4.1% and when you add those in it's 5.8% in terms of police staff it's 12% and when you add in allowance in overtime it's 13% so that's where we're sitting with that just now In the NHS it's not collated across the whole of the NHS but it's done at individual board level and it varies quite dramatically so again we're in boards the figure I've got here is a high proportion of medical staff in comparison to some others it's at 26% whereas in NHS 24 which was the other organisation that I looked at where there's a lower proportion of directly employed medical staff it's at 3.5% so quite a significant difference depending on the make up of the particular workforce in each of the employing boards Our pay gap reporting is done by grade so it's broken down individually by grade and probably similarly and it looks different across different grades we have a very different profile of staff within different grades they're all within the HRC 3% guideline so they range from just looking here from a 0% to a 1.8% so I think what I would say within Edinburgh City of Council we've recently restructured so we've had about 900 voluntary redundancies in the last 12 months so therefore we have seen quite a significant shift in terms of the organisational structures and roles within those structures in terms of grading and new people coming in and some people choosing to leave Okay, on the city of Edinburgh Council you have an overall figure as well though We do, so our overall figure is 9% which is a downward trend compared to the last reporting Okay, thanks for that Could you also perhaps say something about the kind of measures you're putting in place to tackle the gender pay gap to eliminate it? Again, similar organisations in the public sector were slightly constrained due to the pay arrangements because they are nationally negotiated and in the NHS the majority of staff are on agenda for change but a large cohort of the medical staff are on national terms conditions All of the progression in the NHS is through length of service or seniority so again, if people take time out of the workforce then they'll come back in at a lower level so there are challenges there I think as well but on a more strategic basis for medicine the number of females now at university is now over 50% where they were underrepresented so there are things happening at training level each NHS board has modern apprenticeship schemes and again making sure that they are gender balanced we've introduced flexibilities such as shared parental leave that other organisations have and we're also encouraging we've got a flexible working policy that encourages flexible working so that people are returning they can return on a more flexible basis I think in the NHS it's also probably quite important to say that we have a partnership model of employer relations so the trade unions have appointed equality officers in most of the boards who are also working with managers and taking forward the various strategies and plans that are being put in place and then the only final area I would maybe highlight is again for women coming through to very senior positions in the NHS again women are currently male dominated but there's been a lot of leadership development for senior female staff and also a women's monitoring network so that those who are in senior positions can support other women coming through the organisation in order to make sure that the gender balance is correct at the higher levels as well so for police staff we've got a programme of modernisation because I've already alluded to an inherent in those 10 different pay systems that's given us a number of issues so we anticipate that that will make a big difference in terms of pay in addition to that under the provision of the public sector pay policy and just in our last pay settlement the trade union brought forward a proposal as part of that kind of joint work through negotiation that we were doing to raise for those that were under the Scottish living wage at that point in time to put that in a position where that will take them considerably above that position so we shouldn't have a problem for the next few years anyway so we endorsed that proposal and that was part of our pay settlement in addition to that we're doing a lot of work just now to try and tackle the differences that might arise from occupational segregation in that we have done a lot of work around a day in the life we have run taster sessions so in our operational support division and our specialist crime division we find that they're less attractive to women we've done a lot of activities so taster sessions so people can go along too for example roads policing try out the motorbike there we historically had issues where for example people were put off by equipment so the fact that it was bigger bikes and a woman would go along and go well this isn't for me because it's too heavy so we've changed our equipment we've adapted our equipment to make it more female friendly if you will in addition to that some of the equipment in certain aspects of policing is different people worry about will they be able to handle it so those taster sessions allow them to put on that equipment try it out and realise that yes they can absolutely cope with that and yes it is a career option for them in addition to that we've done a lot of engagement on the other side to encourage flexibility within our kind of male staff as well we still are male dominated in the policing side certainly so we've done engagement with the fathers network to encourage flexible working not only for our females which is obviously predominantly where we get our applications but if we are to help society to change from women taking on all the care and responsibility or the majority of it we equally have a social responsibility to look at how we can encourage our males to be in a position to feel that they can also take some of that burden so working with the fathers network in our youth division which for those not familiar with policing that's our airshire we've ran a few exercises first we've been looking at expectant parents both male and female raising awareness of flexible work and raising awareness of care provisions we've got an EAP that helps advise both males and females on care provisions and how they might manage childcare going forward the other session that we've ran in youth division recently is around we worked very closely with the Scottish Women's Development Forum about returners to work because that also affects our pay and women particularly after maternity leave or career break would find it quite intimidating to come back to the workplace so again a lot of work done to integrate those workers back in very well but in addition to that the nature of policing is that when somebody gets pregnant we quite often have to take them off operational duties trying to get body armour over somebody's heavily expectant bump is quite difficult so on that basis we have to look and we've worked very well with the Scottish Women's Development Forum at making sure that when we do have to pull away from front line duties there's still very meaningful roles for women to carry out during that period again that means we keep women engaged they're more likely to return to work so all these things we're doing in policing to try and tackle some of the issues that arise from occupational segregation that lead to obviously gender pick-up as well I thank the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Nicky mentioned the modernising agenda for our police support staff and we've been fortunate enough to complete that process and therefore we've managed to move over to integrated HR payroll systems from the legacy arrangements and we've focused on bringing in our own pay and reward scheme so that we take out inequalities that we inherited from the legacy arrangements and we've done that we've still got more work to do though because within our support staff arrangements particularly where there's the biggest gender pay gap it is down to occupational segregation and it's not a dissimilar pattern to the one that we heard described this morning so women typically being the lower paid jobs of cleaning, catering and administration and our middle grade jobs which typically are ICT and engineering being occupied by men I have to say that as we move into the more senior roles there's much more of a balance and at our most senior level below director we have a 50-50 split on our senior management team with unsupport staff the board have also made a commitment to the 50-50 by 2020 agenda and we now have a 40% female board after the latest round of board appointments so we've completed our modernising agenda on pay for support staff but there's more to do around occupational segregation as a key point we're looking at the 50-50 by 2020 agenda for senior appointments and we're making some good progress on that similar to other colleagues, we've looked at alignment with the Scottish public sector pay policy for low pay and we are committed to the living wage so all of our employees are on living wage as a minimum and we're working through with the poverty aligns at this point in time our accreditation is a living wage employer and a low pay issue that's including extending the living wage and fair work into our procurement processes for the awarding of contracts within the parameters of EU procurement legislation but we're following Scottish Government guidance to try and achieve that we're also doing very much the developmental initiatives that colleagues have described so we've reviewed our appraisal system, we're about to review our leadership management development programmes we're looking at succession planning much more deeply we're making sure that any gap between uniform staff which are predominantly men and support staff is objectively justified in terms of the role and the very nature of the duties and not so much around the gender pay gap itself but we are a predominantly male organisation firefighting is still traditionally seen as a male occupation and we're working really hard to try and change that stereotype but it is a long and painful journey so our latest recruitment campaign focused on telling the stories using social media using the wider media to promote people who are not stereotypically seen as firefighters and we were able to tell the stories of many female staff through those arrangements and we did increase our attraction rate to 8% but that is not enough so whilst we had 8% attraction rates we did actually take 14% into our recruitment round so it's not so much that people are not able to be firefighters they are able to achieve the fitness standards etc which typically the women would think were beyond them but it is about improving our attraction rates and expanding those stories and trying to change the face of the fire service in terms of it being stereotypical stereotypically male but we've got quite a journey to go on that John Mason wanted to come in with a supplementary order For Mr Reid I think you said that your pay was linked to length of service does that not mean that it's automatically biased if they can never catch up? Well they will catch up provided they don't if they have less time in their career yes they won't catch up so incremental progression which is the model that we have in the NHS applies both to nurses, doctors and all the agenda for change groups so it's a fundamental issue around progression based on length of service that if you do take breaks it's difficult to come in at the same level quite often now you can do things to address that through a more proactive career break option for example but a lot of people when they return from maternity leave don't want any periods of unpaid leave etc so it is a difficulty in terms of the pay system and what the talks at a UK level have begun to look at is lengthening the scales cutting down overlaps so that there would be just now some of the scales have seven or eight points there would only be four points on a scale so some discussions have begun at the UK staff council to look at that both the trade unions and myself from a Scottish employer perspective are involved in and that would help address the situation Thank you Can I just ask on a follow-up to that have you as organisations NHS Scottish Rescue and Fire Service Police Scotland looked at the issue of pension arrangements as part of looking at this topic of how pay arrangements affect this issue because of course there's been new pension regulations about part-time employees and so forth have been brought into force over the past few years have each of you looked at how these affect your employees To be honest, not specifically at this time I think that's something we need to to consider I think we're in the same position I don't think we've looked specifically at the impact of some of those changes that are having and so that's an area that we would need to I think begin to look at What I would say is in policing obviously there was the changes to policing pensions fairly recently in our previous staff survey that certainly came out as a number one concern for police officers less so for police staff police staff currently are in the local government pension scheme and police officers are obviously in a separate scheme in terms of looking at specifically pensions we have done some work recently the Scottish Police Federation raised concerns about the number of certainly younger officers opting out of the pension scheme as a result of that during our probation or training we are more proactively focusing on raising awareness that it's important to say for your retirement and in addition, although the police and pension scheme has changed it's still one of the most competitive pension schemes you can be in and raising awareness of the benefits of that and again we routinely do that induction for police staff I'll move on to a question from Richard Leonard My question was really just to look at the era that we're living in of one of very tight public finances and in the case of local government reducing public finances I observe I just wonder whether you could describe your understanding of any gender bias that comes with that public sector expenditure policy I don't know whether Katie Millar can answer that I think what I would say is that whilst we've been going through transformation effectively for the last 15 months within City of Edinburgh council that is every change that we embark upon goes through a very rigorous process of a business case so that business case clearly starts with an end service user it's designed within a cost envelope which is an inevitability of it but at each stage we have an equality's impact assessment that's done so that's both in terms of the outward service but also any internal impact that we might have on equality so when we monitor that very consistently we share that publicly it's talked about regularly with the trade unions who rightly keep us on our toes with that so I think we're tight in terms of the organisational processes that we would go through we obviously do a lot of impact assessment on pay as we look through that we're very stringent on our job evaluation and keep us safe in that aspect one of the areas that was quite interesting last year is that we too started to redesign our performance management framework it was actually specifically not developed by HR it was developed by our own workforce so there was a working party, several hundred people and they themselves have designed our whole approach to performance management, the language everything around it and one of the really interesting bits for me was that feedback was coming back to say that one to one's appraisals were very task orientated so outcome driven on the one hand that's great but on the other hand staff are saying I'd love a conversation with my line manager where they actually get to know me as an individual so they understand what my work-life balance looks like they know where I've got care at issues or they know when I might need to leave work on a particular time that I still do the job that I'm employed to do so the cool part of our new approach to performance management is about just great conversations and one of the biggest aspects of those conversations is getting to know your team member and the work-life balance so trying to bring that into the frame as well I would just reiterate some of that again in the NHS change is required to be equality impact assessed and like the local authorities we've got a strong organisational change policy that involves individual discussion with staff and responsibility to take on carer issues if there's going to be a change of location for example if the service is being reconfigured so again we do consider that the issue in the NHS as you'll be aware is that very often transfer of services is difficult but we do everything to make sure that people can be redeployed into their local area if not in the same setting that they've come from Thank you Don't feel obliged to all of you to answer every question I should have actually said that at the outset rather than now it's just obviously we have a limited time but if you do want to come in on a specific issue simply indicate that some questions clearly are more directed or able to be answered by some rather than others I want to move on to questions from Jackie Baillie at this stage This is directed at all of you except for Katie I've got a slightly different question for Katie I think it was Diane that raised 50-50 by 2020 and you seem to be quite confident that you will get there I just wonder what the view is from the rest of the panel as to whether their boards will be compliant with that by 2020 Again, my understanding is that they will be compliant through the public appointments process in terms of executive appointments then every panel we are now ensuring there's a gender balance on the panel and making sure that wherever possible we can appoint fairly and equitably no matter what the background is of the individual Just to echo what Ian said the commitments there from the police authority what we would say is that it's a public appointment certainly I was speaking to our qualities officer the other day and they were saying what work goes into where we advertise these appointments all these sort of things are actually fundamentally things that the Scottish Government have an influence over so there's an element of we can certainly do our part of gender balancing panels all these sort of things we can certainly raise awareness we can put out adversity and we are trying to attract particular groups or particular backgrounds and it's working heavily with the Scottish Government I think the key is the duty to publish obviously and it goes back to the point Peter made earlier focuses minds so that's an absolute critical aspect so I think that's welcomed and we are certainly committed to doing what we can in policing to ensure that that's achieved With our latest round of public appointments when that's just worked through the system we'll have a 60% female non-executive board and our leadership team internally and the executive team is a 50-50 gender balance just now Good, long may it continue I'm curious about local government though because in the case of public boards whatever you do about the pipeline ultimately it's a matter for ministers with elected politicians at local government level it's a different picture Is COSLA doing anything to encourage diversity or is it something that you leave to political parties? No, we would absolutely encourage it so there's actually an equalities portfolio within COSLA which I've just taken up about six weeks ago so just one of the first meetings I had was with some of your colleagues here so I met with a couple of your colleagues around actually is there an opportunity for local authorities and yourselves to share an equalities plan which I guess comes back to my point that many of us are trying to do the same thing so actually build once and use many times so certainly within COSLA there's a whole raft of conversations that we'd be having around some of the best practice that's happening within local authorities and whether that's within a policy framework or actually culturally so one of the key things within Edinburgh that we've really focused on in the last year is the cultural aspect of leadership so we have a whole raft of policies around flexible working etc and actually for me one of the most impactful things is around the role that leaders play so the last 12 months has been a really sustained effort in what we would call our wider leadership team roughly the top 100 of our leaders meeting every single month around their leadership the impact they're going to make on the organisation and we've now kind of cascaded that down and we're into the next 600 managers so we've got two day workshops where we are just talking about great conversations how to have them so really driving the cultural bit from the top down as well as the policy bit from the bottom up but yes certainly COSLA have a very active role to play in this OK, thank you very much if I ask my next question, convener, I'll just wait carry on might as well do it now and this is entirely for the Scottish Futures Trust so can I ask obviously SFT is responsible for co-ordinating billions of pounds of public investment in major infrastructure projects I'm just wondering whether there's any consideration given to making it a requirement that the companies you deal with do something about the gender pay gap is reporting against it or actually taking measures to close it this is a particularly tricky area as what we're talking about interacts with European procurement rules obviously and there's two things that basically can be done in procurement one of which is excluding parties from tendering for particular reasons and the second is scoring characteristics or behaviours in the delivery of service to encourage people, as we said with transparency to adopt them on the exclusion part of that first of all that's regulation 58.8 if you like and I think that that would be really tricky to apply in this area either to the publication or to any steps taken to reduce the gender pay gap because first of all as we all know the requirement to publish in the private sector is only for large organisations so I think it would be very difficult to impose that requirement on smaller organisations only for the purpose of public procurement it might set up a bit of a two tier within the SME community and also it might not be proportionate to exclude someone from procurement simply for failing to publish information on the basis the sort of aspect around the nudge that comes from giving scores to particular behaviours that is really driven through the Procurement Reform Act 2014 and the statutory guidance which is already in place there for the selection of tenders around addressing fair work practices and using the living wage in particular and that guidance is based around the fact that fair work practices will lead to the delivery of higher quality services so that allows us to evaluate working practices as part of the service delivery that goes with tendering itself and that guidance focuses on all aspects of fair work it's just got to focus on the living wage at present but it includes in the sample invitation to tender question a question around steps that employers have taken to promote a quality of opportunity in the development of a workforce which represents the population of Scotland so that can in a way be scored and there's no reason why any procuring authority shouldn't if they wish particularly refer to the gender pay gap in that question I think there's a couple of caveats around that, first of all in the field of major complex procurement as you say infrastructure and quantitative scoring in a tender process we can, if you like, afford to give to the employment practices of companies delivering the service as opposed to how much you allocate to for example the quality of the end hospital or road that is being delivered through the procurement and that's something that procurers wrestle with all the time is how much of that percentage can they allocate to these areas pretty deep supply chains in construction in particular and it's quite difficult to when these supply chains might not have come together at the stage of the procurement to drive that analysis or any scoring down through supply chains and as I said before we need to be really careful that we don't inadvertently discriminate against SMEs that might have different practices, policies and be perhaps less good at the essay writing part of tendering so that we really focus on the things that will drive change rather than the ability to answer a question well although all of that said if you do put these things in tenders then it drives attention towards that area and as we've heard before the generality in my view is that attention on the subject and leadership attention is what will drive change overall so it's a tricky area but I was just trying to unpick everything you're telling me and what I heard was that actually you're not doing anything directly now that might be unfair in which case do come back to me at that but it just seemed to be in the too difficult to do box because of European procurement rules I think what we can do in procurement as I've said is that area of scoring fair work practices as part of service delivery now fair work practices has a whole host of different things sitting within it and the one that has predominantly been focused on by procurers in that category to date has been payment of living wages as we all know I think there is an opportunity to expand that further and to ask some more direct questions on gender pay gap as I've said I would I think there is some risk if we do that simply through asking people or beginning to try and score people and the numbers associated with it I would much rather we were able to score people on the steps they are taking to address it and that is a very great challenge but it's something that we're trying to do the case will you now take this away as a specific piece of work and look at doing that in the billions of pounds of infrastructure projects that you co-ordinate along with the Scottish Government's procurement directorate we'll have a look at whether we can be more specific on those questions Thank you Julian Martin I have a specific question for Ian Reid about the NHS there is a lot of evidence to say that you do have an issue with a lot of women not coming back after having children particularly to GP roles I just want to ask specifically what you're doing as an organisation to address that Given that we do have GP shortages in the country we do have shortages of practitioners and a lot of them are women who find it too difficult to come back given the working practices that are expected of them in the NHS The issues are complicated as you know because the NHS doesn't directly employ general practitioners so there are issues about partnerships and the business arrangements around all of that However, in any discussion we are now having with GPs where the partnership is struggling for want of a better description we are supporting in terms of part-time appointments that could be directly employed by the NHS and the funding mechanism adjusted so that they are directly employed with the NHS because it will still be part of a partnership locally although we would have not the same benefits that the other GPs would obviously have in that business sense Again, through GP training looking at that being more flexible so that people can work less hours during their training it has issues of course about extending the training However, the work of the greenway commission was all related to that it was about how could you be more flexible during the training period as well and that's a significant issue not only in general practice but in hospital-based services because of the hours and the training requirements currently that are there for junior doctors but again, as you know, there's caps on what those working hours can be and again, we're attempting to be as flexible as possible I'm hesitant I suppose because I do think there's more deep done in that particular area but I think it's a recognised issue that we addressed and I think you'll see more progress in that in the coming years I suppose I'd like to widen that out to other people in the panel as well particularly in police and fire service where a huge investment is made in people's training in order to get in that point so staff retention is a really actually got a big cost issue for you and how do you see addressing issues around agenda pay gap and flexible working is working in retention of staff staff turnover in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is relatively small I don't have the figure to hand to be honest but I could get it for you we do have flexible working policies in place we don't see necessarily a huge uptake on those within our uniformed staff but we have done two day shifts and two night shifts we have done some staff surveys around that positive action work that I highlighted earlier where staff have reported that those fixed work patterns are actually useful because they're set so far in advance that allows them to make childcare arrangements and provisions for caring responsibilities etc but we are moving into a new duty pattern this year so there will be a bit more flexibility in how people use what we would call out of pattern rostered reserve in terms of being able to organise their work life balance a little bit more flexibly we have a range of opportunities out with the fixed shift pattern and what we would call day duty working patterns which are typically Monday to Friday but it's a much smaller cadre of staff and in terms of maternity and paternity provision we did put a focus early on and that is an organisation to get a harmonised position and we do think we've got a fairly generous maternity and paternity provision scheme and it's actually aligned with Police Scotland we did a lot of benchmarking with colleagues to try and bring that into place so we don't see turnover as a big issue but we support people through flexible working, return to work after maternity or adoption provision we have had some very nice stories that we used as part of our recent recruitment campaign around support for pregnant firefighters and particularly one firefighter who needs support with IVF treatment et cetera so we do have those arrangements in place for staff where they're necessary but they're typically not overly utilised given the demographics of our employee group if that makes sense in terms of specifically first of all police officers we have achieved 30% females to males that is obviously as it's published just now better than PSNI and Wales so we feel we're on the right track in terms of trying to get gender balance in the first instance obviously if we're to represent our communities which is our ultimate aim we've still got some way to go but I think traditionally policing has been viewed as a male-dominated industry so to obviously get as far as we've come in the last few years is a positive but it's to be built upon so some of the things we're looking at we've got the Police Scotland young volunteers we are finding that we're getting good gender balance within the volunteers I don't have the figures with me however you know that is very very positive because as some of the previous witnesses we're talking about making young women aware that policing is an option for them at a very young stage it's absolutely critical it's getting into the mindsets of young people that they can't do if they want to pursue a particular career there should be no barriers to doing that so the Police Scotland youth volunteers it's important that we attract in both genders in addition to that we had a session in Aberdeen where we again were focusing on trying to encourage female applicants from that we've managed to appoint four out of five people that came to those sessions so when people came we allowed them to for example try out the fitness test sometimes psychologically women feel they won't be able to achieve it Diane's already commented on that so being able to come along to a taster session and actually try out these things and say well actually I can do that I can apply for policing is very positive then when obviously we attract people and start them with the organisation I've already mentioned some of the work we've been undertaking in new division in respect to maternity we've also worked heavily with the Women's Development Forum who to be fair as a partner have been absolutely fabulous at working with us identifying areas where the feedback is that women are concerned this year alone we've not only done work on maternity the pay provision before last year we obviously increased maternity provision for female officers that was another obviously step in the right direction so quite a lot going on in terms of the police officer side in terms of the staff side police staff are predominantly women we certainly have a low turnover rate in terms of our police staff and again higher uptake of flexible working partners we actually have a good return to work rate generally speaking but we are constantly I think all of these issues they're an element of you can never take a foot off the gas we've done a lot of work to get to 30% and if we don't continue to focus on it we'll slip back we have to have that constant pressure because the reality of it is that the Scottish Women's Development Forum played a video it wasn't their video but it was one that I think other people have seen and it was about young children who were maybe 4 or 5 that kind of age they put a firefighter, a police officer and an astronaut and they all had helmets on and every one of those children thought they were male so the problem is is if we stop as an industry pushing that no you can't have these careers there's so many social biases that we're fighting against that we'll lose the traction so there's constant work for us all to do with education providers with early childcare all of these we've all got a responsibility and a consistent message that there's not a career that's kind of specific to one gender or not that people can't have a think about and potentially have a go at I'll slip back I'm just returning to works one thing and making it easy for women to return to work but what about progression up the graze should they opt to have the flexible hours that the agile work in so in terms of promoting progression or most recent stats show that we are getting a good balance up our ranks there is two blips and that's at our superintendent and our exact level just now so we know we've got work to do there but the broad picture since we've started reporting has been that we are actually increasing female promotion we haven't got stats done specifically around those that are maybe inflexible work patterns and promotion obviously trying to produce data and do comparisons we're restricted by our systems and how flexible or otherwise they are but certainly in the stats that we are able to pull just now and are looking at we are seeing that we've got a good picture and a positive picture of where female promotion is going we do have work to do and it's reflected in the mainstreaming report around temporary promotions and as we're having quite a good rate and substantive promotions but we have to look at temporary promotions and how we make sure that we are fair and extro on that as well and we are doing work internally on that at the moment Ewan to come back in I should have mentioned during my response was the challenge of our services in general practice as well which I'm sure members will be aware of and the work that Sir Louis Richie's been doing developing community hubs etc and some of all some service redesign issues will be critical I think in sustaining some of the services given the way that the workforce is changing in terms of its expectations of working patterns If you get any comment on the last point that I asked about in terms of progression when you've maybe had a career break for caring of any type you come back whether or not that's going to be a progression in jeopardy at all and how do you monitor that? My own sense is that we've got sufficient flexibility in terms of working hours etc particularly nursing for example so there are opportunities for people to take on more senior roles on a part-time basis The areas where you haven't got that I would say it's still a challenge both in medicine and some of the healthcare sciences for example What's specifically been done to address it? Again, just looking at ways that we can provide services perhaps more flexibly by substitution of certain grades etc so that some of the work that can be done in less time potentially so issues like that but I would say that it's we're still a bit away off getting a real solution to it Thank you, I think Dean Lockhart had a question on the economic relationship of this matter Thank you We've heard from the panel today a number of measures taken across your organisations to address gender pay and related issues I just would like to get a sense of what economic or other steps have the most impact in addressing this issue because we've heard a lot of encouraging measures and encouraging steps all of which are heading in the right direction but to help us as a committee to understand in practice what has the most impact it'd be good to get a sense from each briefly from each of the guests as to what has the most impact it will be interesting to see if it's the same answer or different measures have different impacts across different organisations Katie Miller mentioned a change of leadership or a change of culture and focus of leadership on this issue has been very impactful would there perhaps I can start with you would there be other measures you would put up in terms of having very direct impact I probably think that at the societal level one of the pieces that came through from the COSLA feedback so from the local authorities that did respond because I'm actually here on behalf of them would be around the extension of childcare infrastructure and provision which I'm sure is something you've probably heard previously but that would be a very common theme that's come through and perhaps the sense that until we can reach a position whereby either through stereotypes or actually through provision women aren't taking on the majority of the carers role that actually until we're in a position of being able to do that the take up of the kind of equality of role perhaps is lacking I agree that at the sort of society level transparency point we've all talked about and occupational segregation steps to address that and family friendly policies but inside organisations I think a lot of it is about leadership examples and really particularly I speak for a smaller organisation as I've said the flexibility for every single worker in every single situation and really thinking through that for the individual and for the organisation and keeping the focus on that the level of individuals is what seems to make a difference for us rather than having a very rigid this is what happens in this situation it's about well how can we make what works for you work for us in this situation to keep great people in great jobs I've said I think for us as an organisation and I'm sorry for repeating it but we are a fairly new organisation with a long history so our focus has been on making sure that our pay and reward works are transparent and are free from bias as much as they can be and making sure that we've followed that modernising pay agenda in line with Scottish public sector pay policy and living wage accreditation has been a real focus for us and has been very important I think more work around attraction into what are stereotypically male roles is something that we can all try and work harder on at societal level as colleagues have mentioned that comes from the leadership examples the stories how those roles are portrayed in the media how they're supported at a political level etc so that that's a wider societal change piece and I think in terms of impact maybe answer the question specifically I think the you know the living wage accreditation and how that's impacted in the supplier chain while it won't address the overall gender pay gap it certainly starts to send a message out about pay transparency and transparency in the public sector generally speaking for the service as I've mentioned before our challenge is attracting women into our uniformed roles I think we'll start to see a change as our service starts to redesign and change and respond to a demand for our services our traditional demand for services and what communities are going to demand of our services in the future and that will start to change the shape of the role of a firefighter which will help the stereotyping issue and in terms of that leadership progression we have put in place the usual forums networks support groups linking in with other partner agencies that colleagues have already mentioned and I don't think we can put our finger on that any one of those makes the most impact it's a collection of all and depending on what your data is telling you and depending on what circumstances your organisation is facing at a particular point in time will depend on which one of those is going to lend most weight but we need to have all of those things in our tool bag I think My thought relates to the gender pay gap as you'll be aware most of the professions in the NHS now are degree based and a lot of NHS boards are looking to see how they can bring in particularly young people into the caring professions that might not have the educational qualification at the outset but can support them either through skills development or modern apprenticeships so they can begin to make a transition on to a profession if that's the way that they choose to go but how we attract young people in particular into the caring professions I think will be a challenge going forward as well I think Peter's already mentioned the importance of role models we've got a very proactive DCC in Rose Fitzpatrick who not only is a role model herself but she's very proactive in that she works well with the Scottish Women's Development Forum she speaks to our women what are we doing about she's constantly challenging she takes active participation in the promotion processes she will go out and engage and write in fact to individuals to say why aren't you applying for this because she knows from her reading and industry statistics that women will tend to avoid going for promotion as early as their male counterparts so we are very lucky that we've got role models but in addition to that we've got the public sector pay policy we've already commented that in terms of the Scottish living wage we've pushed that provision through work at a local level I think there's a lot more work we do and we require to do more of around engaging fathers and promoting flexible work across the service one of the previous witnesses to this committee spoke about the fact that parental leave and shared maternity leave is not getting taken up in general by obviously fathers there is an element of a lot of that relates to pay provision your question specifically related to kind of economic factors the difficult here is if you start obviously putting occupational pay up that has a cost to it however if we don't start to do things like that then clearly we will not encourage more males to partake in that but there is a cost and with compressed public sector budgets just now that's a challenge for all of us so there is things that ideally we could be looking at or we should be looking at but economics do play a part in what we can actually achieve John Mason did you have a short question calling on from Jackie Baillie's first question which was on boards like targets and quotas for boards and I was really thinking about further down the organisation I mean do you think not just for your own organisation but generally it is advantageous to have targets and quotas and so on because I think for example the police I think you've been successful maybe at the top and at the bottom but I think we've heard previously that in the middle there can be a bit of resistance well as it stands just now in our current mainstreaming report we're broadly achieving quite well across our ranks with the exception of superintendent we've had a dip this year and our executive so we're not complacent we know that there's work to be done I've already mentioned that our DCC, Rose Fitzpatrick does do an incredible amount of work it is an area that because of the small numbers especially in the executive one or two levers can make a huge difference statistically and that goes to the point Peter was making earlier as well so there's a lot of work to be done equally when you look at areas in the exec and that policing is as a service you come in you join as a constable then you go to a sergeant and you have to work your way up the ranks there's no chief constable that hasn't been a constable so the difficulty is certainly within our exec you're talking about people who are broadly at about 25 plus years service so you're looking at the recruitment practices of 25 years ago and it goes back to that age and length of service and the difficulties you've got in trying to balance that so the work we are doing now to encourage and increase the number of applicants and people joining the service as women are obviously going to impact the service in 30 years time hopefully when I'm retired 30% is what you've got at the moment 30% that's correct Are you aiming for 50? Well we're always aiming to improve it we don't have a specific target over and above the kind of outcome of trying to reflect our communities and be more reflective of those communities and obviously the communities in Scotland have slightly more than 30% female but that is constantly working on having role models if you look at our material even from a few years ago to now or marketing and everything else we can actually now go to virtually every area you can go up to the islands and still find a female officer and make sure that when you're doing marketing in any area you've got a gender balance for our recruitment stall if you went back even five years ago you might have struggled in some areas to do that so I think as you progress and as you increase the number of women it's got a kind of return on investment if you like but there's always work to be done because as I say you are still living with that historic recruitment practice and you've got to constantly be doing work to ensure that you don't slip back Okay I accept that Fire you said 8% is that your recruitment 8% of your recruits are women Our last recruitment campaign we had an 8% attraction rate and we recruited 14% of the intake was female overall it's roughly 92% to 8% So how long would it take you to get to 50% or would you not want that I don't think I could reasonably comment on that if I'm being perfectly honest and I think generally speaking and this is maybe more of a personal view rather than a view of the Scotch Fire and Rescue Service I think targets are helpful in some ways because as we discussed earlier they focus the mind and you have action plans etc but clearly targets can also have negative connotations and you know feedback we get from women is you know well I only got promoted because I was a woman or you only took me in because I was a woman so you've got to be careful with target setting and had the perceptions that that sets within the wider population either in terms of your candidate pool if you're bringing people in or in terms of your internal promotion arrangements I think specifically looking at I think like Nikkei we are constantly trying to find ways to improve our attraction rates and when we can achieve that then I think we'll actually start to see you know the progression of women through our fire service careers but we do have a journey to go on and there's no point in saying otherwise as I mentioned earlier though we are moving into an arena over the next few years where the types of services that are being made are starting to change so we're looking at responding to things like out of hospital cardiac arrest a wider emergency medical response service much more support for vulnerable groups in our communities and that might attract a different kind of person to join our organisation and we need to capitalise on that in terms of our brand moving forward so not setting targets but aware that we've got more to do on my engineering hat as a civil engineer rather than maybe as my SFT hat but we talked about some of the input things that are going to make a difference in all of this and there could be a place for targets and publication in there for example we heard before about partnering with schools and we know a lot of construction companies and people in our supply chains are looking to how many visits the site have you had how many school visits have you made how many people have you contacted and what this profession and this area and sector can mean to you so I think right at the other end from the targets and quotas about what we get out of all of this but the targets of what we're measuring about how much we're trying to to change perceptions right from an early age in professions and sort of set up those the ability to measure the difference people are making at that early stage which would be a step in the right direction as well Thank you Perhaps two final questions for myself first of all the gender pay gap the numbers used the 4% or the 13% gender pay gap is effectively a calculation so a number and not that to discount as a measure to look at these issues but I think certainly Police Scotland and COSLA in the written submissions talked about other aspects flexible working flexibility of contracts that sort of thing is it the case we should be looking at more than just the numbers in terms of the monetary payment when we look at this issue to address where we're at and where we should be going to be interested in each of your views on that So in the last mainstreaming report we did actually put data in there in regards to flexible working requests and we actually also commented on the fact that from our last mainstreaming report we had had fewer applicants it's a very complicated area because when you start to monitor and look at the reasons it's really about getting behind the data so we have tried to do sort of exit surveys and other things to try and understand what the data is trying to tell us because it's one thing having the statistics but if you don't understand why they're coming out the way they are it's really unhelpful so I think there's an element of statistics help but you've actually got to do proactive work with other partners as well so the Scottish Women Development Forum mentioned that they work very proactively with us they are able to do surveys and engage with women in other groups for that matter to give us that kind of feedback as a service to say what about that's led to us having engagement with other partners as well in respect to the commission for human rights and equalities we've just done maternity work with them as well as the result in that relationship so I think we do need to do more we need to get behind and one of the previous witnesses commented on it's being published that 5% you have to increase your wage by 5% to move if you're giving up your flexible work compartment you can totally understand that because if you've got a flexible work compartment it can reduce your childcare costs all these other things so I think trying to understand better how people put values on things is really important for us but equally there's other aspects to it for example for police officers if somebody wants to increase their hours after decreasing their hours they can do that as a police officer automatically they can increase their hours and it means that you don't have that under utilisation as people as the kids start going to school and all these other things that give people more time and they can start to increase their hours we don't have those provisions for example for police staff where we can start looking at increasing their hours arguably it can be more difficult because you might have smaller groups and more specialists so just increasing hours can become inefficient but I think there's various things that we have to look at and start saying well what's in the art of the possible to try and see where we can encourage women and give women opportunities to do things like that cos it's definitely successful on the police officer side so there's an element of learning systems and provisions to try and assist us in our learning across the board but a lot more work to be done on it I think the direct answer to your question is yes I think a total reward package would be useful to highlight the challenge there is how do you place value on certain elements of that total reward package so that you can do that benchmarking comparison so the average hourly rate of basic pay is a very simple comparison that you can make with other organisations we are looking at that wider total reward package and benefit scheme because people do place value on flexible working as opposed to perhaps an hourly rate in some cases but I'm not quite sure that we'd have the answer as to how you tot all those elements of the reward package up to give you some kind of gender pay gap analysis but certainly in terms of the transparency in the reward packages if you're promoting that that allows people to make choices both men and women if you've got that flexible reward package that's certainly an aspiration but we're not quite there yet I was just going to make a similar point because it's related to the earlier point about the pay structure because clearly what the statistics do demonstrate is there may be significant problems with the pay structure that takes time to change but the pay structure needs to begin to include some of the things that you've been talking about so where the hourly rate is important those wider issues need to come into that context as well There's maybe some other bits that we haven't addressed on what allows flexibility as well and some of the enablers of that that we need to look at in organisations and we're involved in smarter workplaces across the public sector and the idea of if we have multi-site operations or indeed the public sector ability to collaborate so you can work in a different location that gets your IT system and your past gets you into the building and all of these infrastructure and hard end of the organisation aspects that can help promote a more flexible way of working overall that I think can help as well as some of the leadership aspects and developments and policies and practices that we've been talking about so it's not to forget the harder end of business infrastructure that can support those flexible practices I was just going to say the total reward piece or total value statements I think one of the most insightful things is when you give employees the opportunity to almost pick and mix and actually that gives you a huge amount of insight around where they put their value and that's both in terms of monetary but as equally as important the non-monetary aspects as well Okay and finally Ian Reed touched on this I think he mentioned that female of students coming through from university now and medicine are female and I think he also said that NHS degree it requires degree based qualifications for employment now I'm just wondering we've all heard of firefighting and of course your public based bodies with limited budgets and I did ask the question about have you looked at the issue of pensions and changes effect and effect employees and the differentials there but I understand and I'm sure everyone does the sort of restraints you have to work within the constraints of budget of time and this sort of thing now if we take for example the issue of university students where there's now a recognised problem which is that the majority are female rather than male and the Scottish funding councils the gap in that but things like that come through and obviously affect your organisations in terms of employment forward planning how realistic is it to expect you to address these issues is it a matter of trying to create a level playing field now equality of opportunity through various ways that we've talked about and try to move them all forward so that you can achieve that or one can have good intentions but the practical level is much more difficult I think everyone understands that I think the point you raised is well made because I don't think necessarily we can change it only within our own organisations alone in the example of education we did some work when I was in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde with the colleges and the Scottish funding council to address the issue that I was describing on a partnership basis because they had to bring funds to the table as well as the NHS so I think of a lot of the solutions across public sector and I think we just need to think about how we can work more effectively together in tackling some of these issues final comment from one of the others if they wish or Diane Vincent I agree with what Ian said and in terms of your question about whether it's realistic I don't think it's something that can be achieved in the short term but if we don't keep tackling the issues in the way that we've discussed both in this session and in the earlier session then we are not going to make progress and we are making progress maybe not at the speed that all of us would like to see but I do genuinely believe progress is being made and as I mentioned earlier all the things that we've discussed are tools that you have to have in your tool bag particularly within your own organisation I've certainly found this session very useful, I've enjoyed listening to other people's experience I've taken a few takeaways so you know we will endeavour to continue on this journey and I think we have to it's the right and proper thing to do and it's also organisationally the sensible thing to do as we start to look at demand for services and how we best serve our communities and how we can help them and we will take that as the final comment and thank you to all our witnesses for coming today and I'll close this session and perhaps that will allow for people from public gallery to leave the room we'll move into private session thank you very much