 Good morning to everyone and welcome to the 12th meeting of the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work Committee. May I remind everyone present to turn off electrical devices that may interfere with the sound system? The first item on the agenda is item 1, which is for the committee to take items 3 and 4 in private. Are we all agreed to take items 3 and 4 in private? Yes. Thank you. Before we start, today we have two panels of witnesses. Before we start with our first panel, I would just like to ask if there are any declarations of interest from committee members. John Mason. I would just declare, I noticed one of the witnesses later on is on the ICAS ethics board and I've also been on that board until recently. Thank you. Bill Bowman. I'm a member of ICAS and there are witnesses giving evidence. Professor Paisie trained when I was a partner in KPMG in Aberdeen, as did her husband, who's also mentioned Nick Paisie, on the document. Right, thank you. Dean Lockhart. Yes, I'm a member of the Law Society of England in Wales. Although I'm not a member of the Law Society, I suppose I should declare that I'm still a practising advocate and member of the Faculty of Advocates. Jackie Baillie. Convenor, whilst we're in the mood for declarations, I suppose I should declare that I'm a member of Unison. Right. Any other declarations at this stage of possible interests? No. Well, thank you very much. We'll then move on to our first set of witnesses and I'll introduce them in no particular order. First of all, Peter Hunter, who is regional manager of Unison Scotland. Welcome. Cheryl Gedling, who is the industrial officer public and commercial services union or PCS. Good morning. Ann Henderson, who is the assistant secretary of the STUC. Good morning. And also welcome to Richard Hardy, who is the national secretary of prospect. May I ask members to keep their questions succinct and also if witnesses could try to do so with their answers? If there are areas that are covered today in the session and witnesses wish to submit written information in response to that after the session, then the committee would welcome that. I would like to start first of all with a question for our first panel of witnesses. This is about the statistics that are available in Scotland on pay, earnings and employment for men and women. I would like to ask the panel members if they are confident that we have a definitive set of statistics or in what way the statistics we have could be improved upon. In asking the question, I noticed that the Unison submission to the committee at page 3 and paragraph 2 of the submission referred to this issue. The comment was made that Scottish participants in a particular type of data issue were frequently unable to fully answer questions due to the absence of disaggregated data and also comment about the Scottish Government commitment to fair work and inclusive growth but a need for data to reveal impact. Perhaps we could start first with Cheryl Gerling. If you would like to expand upon the point and then the other witnesses could come in to give comment. I could but I'm not from Unison. I wonder if the Unison could. That is my mistake entirely and I do apologise for suggesting that it was yourself. For Cheryl to fill in the gaps. It's coming back from the Easter break is my excuse, so my apologies again. Peter Hunter is the correct person to ask that question of. My background, I used to work at the low pay units so we used to do regular data analysis and it was a common experience if we were looking for example to break down earnings data by gender and working time. By the time we were getting to the regions of Scotland very frequently there were gaps in the tables because the sample size wouldn't support the analysis we wanted to do. That's been a longstanding problem. My submission makes reference to the Scottish Government contribution to the overall UK report to the review of our compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was placed last year in the periodic review for all human rights compliances on going at the moment. It was an accepted observation on all parties that the data did not disaggregate well for Scotland. The UK data was reasonably robust but by the time we reduced the sample size down to Scotland we weren't able to comment on a variety of economic and social indicators that the UN wanted to hear about. We do have a data problem. I see from previous discussions that people who are better qualified to talk about that than myself, academics have talked about that and other interest groups. That's something that we've been important finding from the committee that you do need to have the data to be sure that whatever policies are adopted or having a desired impact. Anne Henderson wants to come in at this point. I endorse that from the STUC's point of view. I know that the Scottish Government in discussion with the STUC and some of the labour market work that is being done at that level have shared that concern. I think that some of the changes that are taking place in the labour market in reference has been made to those as well in earlier discussions around increased self-employment. What does that actually tell us? Is it masking under employment? Is it like what does that tell us? Some of the detail we really don't have. I think that some of that is a UK-wide problem. The trend towards precarious work is that we use the language but we don't know what it actually means for people's day-to-day lives and their jobs. We don't know necessarily the sectors that are concentrated most in Scotland and it makes it very difficult to target interventions in the labour market. The latest labour market figures showing the increase around economic and activity without us really knowing what that is is also very important. Richard Hardie, don't you wish to comment on this? Obviously, to back up, both my colleagues on the right have said, but to indicate that where pay reporting is done it's quite important that it isn't just a mean or median across a whole organisation that, without digging down into pay grades and jobs of equal value, you don't get the sort of information that you need to resolve an equal pay issue. If you take a too broad a view, the data is largely meaningless. Perhaps at this stage, Cheryl Goodling. From a civil service specific perspective, the point that Richard has made is that the civil service is different to the public sector. Having a story to tell about the consequence of paid delegation, 20 years paid delegation to the UK-wide or Scotland-wide pay rates, those are devolved down to a departmental level, so I could be working in one department earning £2,000 less or more than someone doing a job at the same grade in another department. I think that until we recognise that it's an issue that has to be addressed and of course I'll raise the issue about pay restraints and the impact of pay restraints, which we will come on to talk about more in this session. Until we recognise that it's an issue that has to be resolved then any data that you have will not be an accurate reflection of what's happening across the civil service and the rest of the public sector. I think that Peter Hunter wants to come back in. Just to add something positive in addition to the critical observations that have been made, the increasing devolution of tax powers to Scotland fits in with the data collection. The annual survey of hours and earnings gathers data through HMRC returns on an annual basis. It's a massive data set. Perhaps there is scope within the devolution of tax to adjust the way that the data is gathered in order to address any perceived gaps in the Scottish data. You also have the devolved power to design the census questions in Scotland for 2021. The method of data gathering makes reference in the report to a heavy reliance on online participation. The census is only a 10-year snapshot of what's going on in the economy, but in terms of getting a really good picture of what's happening in terms of work and income, those are two positive areas where possible attention might be paid. I'd be interested in the panel's views on the forthcoming pay gap legislation and whether it will make a difference. I asked that in the context of the Scottish economy largely being comprised of SMEs. The legislation requires pay gap reporting for 250-plus employees. Given that context, do you think that there is scope for rolling out the legislation in Scotland? I think that it's very welcome. I will be saying some critical things in the course of our evidence this morning. It's important to emphasise the positive. It's a great thing that the coalition Government has taken forward. The regulations are clearer and more effective than the Scottish public sector quality duty, which places an equal pay reporting obligation on public bodies at the moment. We should acknowledge that and review the way that we gather equal pay data in the public sector bodies in Scotland to mirror some of the practices that are in the UK pay transparency regulations. Generally speaking, it's a massive, positive step forward. Transparency is very welcome. I think that we've seen that. Public reputation and transparency and image protection. We've seen it in relation to Sports Direct and Uber. Big corporations do not like adverse publicity. Having spent 20 years in mass litigation with tens of thousands of equal pay claims, I'm hopeful that just good old fashioned transparency will work more quickly than that. The threshold in terms of organisations, the upside of that is that big companies tend to set the benchmark rates for the economy so that even if small companies aren't caught by the reporting regulations, the big companies, the public sector and large private organisations will tend to set the going rate. If they are compelled, for example, to increase the rate of support workers or care workers because of pressure that comes through transparency, then small organisations will be compelled to follow suit, as we know, for example, in social care, the recruitment crisis. You will get a positive spread effect of the regulations into small organisations, notwithstanding the fact that they are not covered. I'm optimistic. To add to that, I think that it raises for me another question, which is what you then do with that information, which I know the committee has been given consideration to. There is another angle, I think, linked to where big companies, some of the big companies, are securing contracts to deliver services for local government, for the Parliament, indeed, for other organisations. There is something about where you are looking to contract out a service, and we will come on to this later, too. I'm sure, around procurement. The other side of it is that the pay gap reporting will be there. Will it affect anyone's decision about whether they think that's a good company to give a contract to or not? What do they do with that information? It's a bit like some of the discussion that there's been around blacklisting or some of the other practices. Would it influence your decision to award a contract if you saw a big company had developed good practice and was seeking to reduce its pay gap? I think that any move towards greater transparency is positive. However, I feel slightly less optimistic than my colleague about what will be done about that. Clearly, we would have liked the legislation to go further. It's important that employers are encouraged to publish this information and an action plan about what they will do to improve their figures. Unfortunately, they're not required to do that. We are witnessing what I can only call the decimation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It's one of the areas where you'd expect sanctions to be provided. You'd expect them to be policing and monitoring. While it's a step in the right direction, I think that without the ability to make sure that this requirement is enforced and acted upon, it's only going to be a small step in the right direction. Having said that, I'm not entirely negative this morning. It is welcome that it's being done. It should be extended beyond employees of the size of 250. Even in the civil service, there are employers representing smaller numbers of staff than that. There's a secrecy around this information that isn't helpful. Broadly, in line with what colleagues have said, and particularly echoing Cheryl's last point and prospects view, the 250 level is too high. We believe that it should be much lower. If the information isn't collected, we can't use it. Broadly, it's supportive of more transparency, but it needs to cover more organisations. I just wanted to follow up on the question. Certain comment or criticism have been made of what has seen to be the potential effect of the pay gap reporting legislation. I don't know if any of you have seen Kate Andrew from the Institute of Economic Affairs. It made some comment. One of the things that she raised was the point that there's no breakdown of what job an individual is in, what qualifications they have, how long they've been working, or using her words, any of the other million differentials that could contribute to differences in pay. I'm just wondering if that's fair criticism of this. We've heard evidence as a committee that workers don't just value the amount that they get paid, but are also flexible working, for example, if that's available. There are other aspects of a job that may matter to someone who's working, not just the pay. I suppose that there are two parts to the question. One is just addressing the pay gap as a figure, a number, the appropriate approach to the issue, or is there something more to the whole equation? Who would like to? Obviously, the committee has been considering this for several sessions and reading through all the evidence. It's quite obvious that it's a complex issue. Even when you made that point about other things that people value about their jobs, ironically, if I look at the childcare sector or the social care sector, it's full of people who value what they do. It's mainly women who are not paid in the appropriate manner, but they do the job because they care about the job. They listen to interviews with the skilled workforce. They absolutely passionately care about their job. As a society, we don't treat that with the appropriate respect and value. It's far more complicated than the focus of the inquiry. The language around the gender pay gap and the statistic is useful, but all the evidence that you've heard already tells you that tackling it and resolving it is a complex solution. Even that statistic is only part of the story. With the greatest respect to Kate Andrew, I wouldn't attach any particular way to what she said. First of all, there's no enforcement mechanism alongside the transparency regulations. If anybody was to litigate on the basis of data that was revealed under the regulations, then the people who Kate's concerned about would have the opportunity to put forward a material factor defence, which is to say that the difference in pay that has appeared in the headline figures is attributable to some other factor other than gender. That's the way that the law works. There is a defence in there already. The primary problem that we have here is that women and girls do better at secondary school, FE, higher education, undergraduate and postgraduate and do not convert that into cash value in the labour market If there is an under-recognition or an oversight in relation to the skills, knowledge and talent of people in the labour market exists in relation to women and not men, the more transparency we get the better. We know that there is no point in comparing a 15 per cent pay gap in one company or one nation state with a 16 per cent pay gap in a different company or nation state because the statistics doesn't support any observations in relation to that. There is a variance that is possibly going to explain the difference between 15 and 16 per cent. We are all sufficiently intelligent and technically skilled to not assume that the pay gap of 14 per cent in one particular company means that there is unlawful discrimination in there. This is about headline indicators of long-term trends, so I'm sure that her contribution is well-intentioned, but I wouldn't attach any weight to it. People say that workers don't only work for their salary and that people are never worried at the end of the month about paying their bills or getting their kids to school or whether or not they have enough money to get to work, which is the kind of thing that our members are reporting. I appreciate that there are things such as reward packages and other parts of the employment sector that do not exist in the civil service and have not for some time. People who are fearful on a regular basis of losing their jobs are being made compulsorily redundant or being moved 200 miles away because an office is closing where they live. I would share the view that perhaps not too much from a public sector and a civil service perspective weight needs to be given to that. I think that it is important to have the basic baseline information because that gives us from one year to the next comparison information, which of course is not the full story, but it is important. If I can quote a statistic, we've done a piece of research that has looked at civil service patrons since 2007 up to 2016. What we're seeing there is that median earnings of female full-time equivalents are still running at 86 per cent of male full-time equivalents. That's not shown within civil service grades, but that's a consequence of an overrepresentation of women in lower paying grades, which is occupational segregation by any other name. It's the need to recognise that in the work that we're doing, the need to conduct full equal pay audits, which are not being done in Scottish-based departments at the moment. I have more information about that to share later in the session. Until a light is shun on those aspects of pay, then we're not going to address the issues that we have. I think to pick up on Peter's point about academic achievement and the fact that women and girls do better. If you look at the structural position of Scottish industry, we've got 3 per cent of charter civil engineers in Scotland are women and less than 10 per cent are women in senior managerial jobs and engineering. Some of the issues that you raised in your question about flexible working, we would argue that the lack of flexible working in certain sectors is a reason why women don't come into the sector or when they leave it don't come back into it, which creates the gender pay gap rather than being something that people are valuing and using as an alternative value to pay. John Mason will come to the question now. That question and your answer Mr Hardy touched on this whole question of occupational segregation, which was the area that I was interested in. We don't seem to be making a lot of progress in some of these areas. I think that slisters have changed quite a lot. There's a lot more women going into them. The care sector continues to be primarily women, the STEM engineering side continues to be primarily men. What can we be doing? What should we be doing to change that? As I touched on workplace policies such as flexible working, transparency over pay systems, transparency of pay on appointment, the evidence would point to the fact that men tend to have higher starting salaries in engineering, but particularly areas that are not governed by collective bargaining. What we've done in prospect is some work with Equate, which is based up at Napier University on a number of areas, one of which is looking to work with employers to bring women back into the workforce after they've had a career break, whereby people feel supported to come in rather than once they've particularly lost the STEM sector. It's systemic, it's not just in Scotland, it happens across the whole of the UK. I do agree that there are certain professions that have changed quite a lot over the years and the legal profession is one. It is not helpful where people come into a science or engineering workplace and there is no transparency about pay. We know that performance-related pay systems can be inherently discriminatory and eventually women get to the point where you have a choice to leave to go into caring or you leave because you're fed up that you're not catching up with your male colleagues because of intrinsic problems within the system. Until we start to measure that, which hopefully will come partly through the gender pay gap legislation, we can't seek to address it, but it's very clear, as I said, that the statistics, particularly for engineering, are very, very poor. I get a little bit frustrated sometimes with the conversation around occupational segregation. I know that we, the trade union movement, and it's an important analytical tool, if you like, but there has been progress and I think that we should capture that progress. Yesterday in the paper, there's an article about the next intake of firefighters in Scotland. 14 per cent of those are women and they interviewed the two women who, as the example of the new pool of recruitment, Skills Development Scotland have done a lot of work to consciously promote women through the modern apprenticeship schemes or the advertising and the promotional work. Some of the things that we would say would be good to do. People are working really hard to try to do that and have images of women in different jobs. Sometimes we don't recognise that progress has been made. I used to work in the railway. When I worked in the railway, the latter few years I worked in the railway, I was working as a train driver. You could count on one hand the number of women train drivers in Scotland then. That's not the case now. You'll all travel on the train. You can travel on public transport and you will see women working in a whole range of jobs. I think that there's an issue about visibility. It's sensible to discuss both as trade unions and employers if there are differences in adjustments around health and safety, uniform, shift patterns or whatever, which will prevent problems arising, if you like, because everybody should be safe and secure in their workplace and shouldn't be subjected to harassment or any of the other problems that we know women experience across the board. We should recognise where progress has been made. It does a disservice to the work that a lot of people have been doing to change what the face of the labour market looks like. I also think that, to come back to the point that I was making earlier, it's not necessarily a problem that a lot of women work in care and work in childcare. We really value our services there, so it may be a problem that they are undervalued. Terms and conditions are not good, there's a slight increase around the use of agency work and practices are not good. There's been bad employment practices in industries that are dominated by men as well, in construction, for example. The focus of this inquiry around the pay gap and so on, we have to be careful to not—like I was looking at some of the earlier discussions, of course we should be encouraging more men to work in childcare and in social care. Absolutely we should, but we shouldn't get into a position where we think that we'll wait until more men are there to then increase the wages. 96 per cent of the staff who work in daycare services with children are female. You're not going to change that overnight, so we have to look at what we're paying the women who are in the jobs right now. We have to be careful with the conversation around occupational segregation to not shift the focus away from the problem of low pay. Do you think that sometimes the trade unions are in a difficult position? If you take a big employer like Glasgow City Council or something, if they're going to start paying the care workers who are mainly women more, the men are going to get pulled back who are working in the parks or whatever it is, presumably, to keep the balance in the budget. Is the union not got a bit of a conflict of interest in trying to protect both the men and the women? I co-ordinated Unison's single status job evaluation and equal pay strategy for the best part of 10 years, so I've been to the depots where men have had pay cuts imposed on them. Our position is that the male rate tends to be the market rate for the job, and the Equal Pay Act does not provide for the reduction of the male rate in order to achieve equality by levelling down. That also denies us the economic benefit of gender pay equality. If you look at what the IMF or the World Bank are saying, the problem in the economy at the moment is the lack of capacity in the low-income groups to consume the products that the economy is trying to produce, and by levelling wages down to the female rate for the job, we're going in the opposite direction to that, which the IMF, the World Bank and the Bank of England would have us go. It's actually a difficult position for us to be in. There's no easy solution to that. I think that local government is making significant progress. We can maybe come on to the local government experience. I think that there's an awful lot of learning there. Focusing on the question in relation to occupational segregation, without being complacent, this Parliament can give itself considerable degree of credit. When devolution came forward, equality was a high priority within the constitutional steering group for those of you who were around at that time. A prominent solicitor, who is now president of the Employment Tribunal in Scotland, was appointed on a temporary basis to write what I understand to be the first equal opportunities policy for a legislature. We've got good gender balance. We don't only have a large proportion of women as political leaders now, but there's been a number of prominent women leaders of each of the political parties in Scotland in the lifetime of the Parliament. That has a massive positive effect in terms of what young women might think that they can do in the labour market so that there's a long game in that sense. We're up against massive unconscious bias. There's one statistic that's compelled to share with you having done a bit of reading for this, which is that if you look at the Fortune 500 in the United States, 50 per cent of their chief executives are six foot tall men. The proportion of men who are six foot tall in the American society is only 14.5 per cent. I'm not sure that they have an interview process for selecting chief executives in America, but I'm pretty sure that they don't have a height requirement for chief executives. There's obviously a very deep-seated unconscious bias there that's tall white men are the people who we want to have leading organisations. The evidence that I've heard other people quote to yourselves is that there's a correlation between return to equity, productivity and profitability for companies who've got a good gender balance. We have deep-seated unconscious collective processes and I wouldn't say that the labour movement is immune from that. There's maybe other people who would comment on that. UK Labour Party is probably looking like being the last political party to have a woman leader. This is something that's a collective challenge. It's not a party political point. The key point is Ann's point, which is that while we're addressing that long-term challenge, there should not be a penalty for occupational segregation. That's what we have at the moment. If you're a cleaner in a local authority and won't name which one in Scotland and you clean indoors, you're on grade one. If you're a cleaner and you work outdoors, road sweeping, you're in grade three. I don't understand that, which is why we didn't sign the deal. Changing occupational segregation is a long-term process. People like yourself play a massive role in that. I think that there's credit for the Parliament in doing that. But in the short term, there must not be a pay penalty for people who choose to work in something that's valuable as social care, as Anna said. Over six feet tall, one of the men. I'm not going to say anything at this point, but I think that Ann Henderson wanted to come back in on this point. I'm trying to avoid being diverted on to the point about height requirements. There used to be a height requirement for train drivers. In the 1980s, a train crew agreement was signed, which allowed different members of staff to access the train driver's job and remove the height requirement. What happened was that there were a lot of very happy, less tall men in the west of Scotland who were able to apply for train drivers jobs. I was thinking when John asked that question. Peter used a phrase that was probably unintentionally about the female rate for the job, which I wouldn't use in terms of the rate for the job. I understand that it's like shorthand for the gap between the types of work that are done in local authorities. However, I don't really see why Scotland is going to have to decide on this question anyway. How are we going to fund the expansion in social care and childcare? 16,000 new full-time equivalent jobs coming through the childcare pledges, early years and childcare pledges that the Government has made, welcome pledges. That's a lot of new jobs. It's not a very good headline if it's then the next line is and this will be paid for by halving the wages of the men that you know who are working in completely different jobs. We're going to have to find a different way of funding the services that we depend on and value. That was part of the problem in terms of trying to resolve that undervaluing of particular jobs within a small pot may not be the best way to do it. There's a big question out there with some specific current Government initiatives that require more than saying somebody else will pay for it, your neighbour. It just takes money out of the local economy. That's not going to help. Cheryl Gedling, do you want to come in there? Obviously, those are very broad issues around how society values these employment sectors. Clearly, a lot of work needs to be done to address that, but I think what I want to pick up is a point about why would we ask for something that would maybe lead to a levelling down rather than levelling up the point that Peter made. If you followed that through to its logical conclusion, we'd never asked for a greater pay increase than we thought we were going to get. Clearly, we're here to aspire on behalf of our members. I think what hasn't been mentioned in how we address occupational segregation is the importance of unions and collective bargaining. What is really important in addressing this, for instance, is flexible working, which isn't just the hours that you work, it's how you work, could you temporarily work from home? Term time working, which is something unions have fought for, carers leave. All those kind of things remind us of the importance of strong unions in the workplace, and those are the kind of things that help address occupational segregation as well. In addition to the positive story that Anne highlighted earlier in her contribution about the changes that have been achieved, this is a really important point for us to highlight as well, the importance of trade unions and the importance of collective bargaining and the kind of policies that allow workplaces to be truly flexible. I think that Ash Denham wanted to come in and ask a question that may follow on from what's being discussed there. Thank you. I'm quite interested in the idea of culture, particularly in this instance about workplace culture. I was reading the submission that you sent in from Unison, which I thought was very interesting. On page 7, you've got a list here of discriminatory practices that you say are not uncommon, so I'll just read a couple of them. Things like sacking pregnant women, knowingly retaining discriminatory pay systems, manipulating job evaluation schemes and generally investing time and effort into maintaining the status quo. I suppose that what I'm interested in firstly is do we think that things are getting better? Is this picture improving? Are these types of practices becoming less common or is this still a real real issue for particularly female workers? Somebody should put me on the clock on this one. I've personally witnessed all those things, some of them repeatedly. Some of them have been brought out in employment tribunal evidence, so the manipulation of job evaluation scores and the destruction of evidence of the manipulation of those scores. Misleading the employment tribunal about the evidence that was given to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Misleading the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the course of a formal investigation. The Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a formal investigation into pay at Glasgow City Council. Glasgow City Council is now 12 years into long running and already expensive equal pay battle. You might be interested to know what the outcome of that investigation was. I'm interested as well. The investigation is closed, nothing has ever been published. It doesn't feel particularly transparent to me. I'm sure that the basis of the closure of the investigation was entirely satisfactory and completely proper and above board, and therefore there should be no difficulty in publishing the results. Some awful things have happened. In 2006, we had a finance committee inquiry into job evaluation in a single state that has made various recommendations, most of which were ignored. That was revisited by the local government and communities committee in 2010 under the chairmanship of Duncan McNeill, I believe. Most of the findings of that were ignored. We're now into the 12th year. There won't be much change at £1 billion. There's a nod at Scotland investigation at the moment. Due to reports, the Accounts Commission will be reporting, and the summer is vital that that's open. The findings of that are analysed and that further action is taken on the back of that. We've achieved a degree of stability in local government. In everything that I'm saying today, we've tried to be balanced. The employers and trade unions have worked very positively to revise the job evaluation scheme. That was completed over a year ago with a third edition accompanied by guidance about how to go in and look at some of the hotspots that gave rise to such great expense. Providing that guidance is followed with enthusiasm and resource, the positive steps that were made to counteract some of the difficulties that people got into will be very welcome if that happens. To follow on from Peter, it's a mixed picture. In some of the bigger companies, there's a growing understanding of how job evaluation needs to be undertaken, the need to do it on a regular basis, the need where there is a functioning interaction with a union or a staff committee to involve the union in that process, so there is oversight of it. On the other hand, we've recently taken a case for a member of staff in a small consultancy organisation, an HR manager, who had worked part-time, came back into a job after pregnancy and was told, well, the job's full-time. Six, seven years of working part-time without a problem, and that cost them quite a lot of money. Even in bigger companies, we have multi-site companies in Scotland where, on one site, they're very good, and on another site, because the HR manager is different, you get a completely different outcome and a completely different approach. The cultural change within companies is important. Just perhaps to go back to John Mason's question about unions having vested interests. We were a union that took the Cadman case to Europe on equal pay in the HSE in the UK, and we achieved success there, not by levelling down but by levelling up. I think that Cheryl's answer was excellent in that it's good, strong collective bargaining and involvement within the workplace that ensures that when you get an outcome, that outcome is positive for everybody, rather than simply being a levelling down to the thing that we were worried about in the first place. I agree with the comments that have been made around the importance of collective bargaining and the fair work convention framework, and it also gives us that to work with. I was thinking about the question of culture in an organisation, and I think that it's important that we all take some responsibility for that. Whatever our organisation is, nobody is in a bubble really. The recent report that the TUC published on sexual harassment in the workplace was quite a surprise to a number of people. The very high levels of just daily niggling that women were experiencing in the workplace and then moving on to consequential problems in the workplace. It's often not the people that you and I know that are also responsible for that joking, casual, what becomes quite threatening and unpleasant behaviour in a workplace, so there's something for us all to look at in our work all the time. When you're looking at recruitment processes and recruitment panels and how we do or how we contribute towards tackling this thing about not just recruiting in your own image, that's my shorthand, but that recruiting from whom we are most comfortable and if you're most comfortable being among whatever your environment is, how do you change that? How do we build a more diverse workforce where there is true equality of opportunity and we just are not getting there? I hope that some of the questions that have been discussed and emerged through this committee's inquiry will throw some of that up. The culture question has to be addressed at every level, is really what I'm saying, and trade unions are part of that, but it has to be addressed at every level and we often take some responsibility for speaking up for someone who appears to not have been treated equally and so on. Some of the evidence around pregnancy and maternity leave discrimination is just shocking, absolutely shocking. The drop in applications to employment tribunals when the charges came in and things tells you a story as well. I would think that new pieces of legislation, like shared parental leave theoretically, could contribute quite significantly to changing some of the discriminative practices that exist in the workplace because it's less hard to tell if the old adage that a woman of childbearing age may be treated differently through the recruitment process. It's harder to identify if a male worker is about to become a parent through an interview process, so the whole language and drive to deliver services and support for all parents in the workplace could help, but only if we all buy into changing that language and culture. I think that the cultural change is really important. The difficulty that we find ourselves in now is around the impact of huge job cuts and workload issues. I used to hear stories, I used to be a civil servant and formerly worked for some time for the Scottish Government. I have people turning up for job interviews with the job clearly stating that it could be worked on in a flexible pattern, but being told, of course, you understand that this is a full-time job. I thought that was a thing of the past, but that's not the case. I'm starting to hear that kind of anecdotal evidence again. I think that it is really important to answer the importance of the unions in doing that, and people challenging that. We are going to change the culture, but the creeping back of that is a concern. The way that people are treated returning from sick leave, I am particularly thinking about women here in terms of some of the particular medical issues that women have. I'm seeing a much harder line, including in the Scottish sector, under the control of Scottish ministers, where previously real efforts would have been made to look at working in a different way. That's simply not the case now. We're not going to achieve that kind of cultural change that you're talking about. Without recognising that, we need to address those overarching issues and allow people the space to discuss those things. Managers that we represent as well are struggling when we recognise that, but it isn't okay to be told that I want you to be at work from 8.30.05. That's simply not acceptable. Those are the kind of things that we're starting to hear again as reps, unfortunately. While having made some progress, I think that there's a feeling of a step back in the wrong direction now. I think that Gillian Martin had a question that may follow in on this, and then a further question, possibly, that's related. I'll let Gillian ask that. There's a thread going through all the evidence sessions about the gender pay gap being something that a lot of organisations are almost trying to avoid addressing. In all the sessions, I want to tease out from the people who come in front of us the actual cost benefit of tackling the issues that you've just talked about in relation to what Ash Denham has just asked you about. I think that it's important to bring out what we see as being an actual productivity reason for organisations, an economic benefit. You've alluded to that, Mr Hunter, when you mentioned Mark Harney and others. I'd like to give you all the opportunity to talk about why should organisations absolutely relish the fact that tackling the gender pay gap would be something good for their organisation. You've already received evidence in previous sessions from people who are far more expert than I am, but if there is, you've got global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank to say that positive gender balance in a company correlates positively with a better return to equity, then I would have thought companies would be intrigued. You've got gender balance and you get a better return on capital investment, correlates positively with increased profitability, correlates positively with increased productivity, which is a fair work convention finding for Scotland. I think that those are high-level macroeconomic business benefits. We can also look at the microeconomic level that if you're giving Scottish Enterprise data back in the 1990s, which shows that people in low incomes spend their money in a way that creates 50 per cent more jobs than people in high incomes. Mark Harney's point about the gulf in prosperity and the growth of inequalities between the very rich and the very poor is not making sense from a capitalist perspective, that if people in low incomes don't have money to consume the goods that the economy is producing, then you have a risk of stagnation which, if your economy was more equal, you could avoid. It makes good economic sense. Low-paid people spend their money on local goods and services because they've got unmet needs for day-to-day products and services that they can't buy because they haven't got the money, so that you can put money into the economy and therefore create a culture of economic growth. I think that McKinsey is saying that we can get 15 billion increase in GDP by 2025 if we address gender inequality, and that's partly through pumping money into parts of the economy where people's spending power creates jobs, grows demand, all of which is good for business. You then have a social policy spin-off, which is not your question of conscious, but increased prosperity for women has a direct effect on child poverty. The best way to tackle child poverty is to address the poverty and inequality that is faced by mothers, not fathers. If we then look into the education reforms, which I think we're all wanting to see improved attainment, there's a close correlation between economic stability in the family unit and educational attainment, so there are a variety of virtuous circles or positive benefits that can be achieved by addressing it. How we get people to engage with that agenda is difficult, although all the statistical evidence there, macro and microeconomic evidence, is there. In terms of bringing it down to our natural organisational level, I think that there's real benefits to be discussed around eradicating gender pay gap, around reduction in sickness leave, for example, or staff turnover, and I'd like to give you the opportunity to be able to talk about how, I mean, Mr Hardy mentioned that you were doing a study with Napier University. Is any of this being evaluated when you have organisations that are tackling the gender pay gap so that there is actually a model out there for other organisations to look at to see that this is actually a cost benefit? I was going to answer in a slightly different way to Peter in drilling down into two areas that I worked in extensively over the last 10 years. One is in the electricity sector and the other is in heavy engineering in shipbuilding. If we take the Scottish distribution system, over the next 10 years, 65 per cent of the staff will need to be replaced. Demographically, it is a largely white male, ageing population with not really that much incentive to work on past 60. One of the reasons given for women not going into that sector is the gender pay gap. If you want to recruit 65 per cent of your workforce over the next 10 years and actually it's going to need to be over the next seven years in order to get people up to speed, if you don't fix the gender pay gap and therefore disenfranchise people from coming in at 50 per cent of the population from coming into your work, then that seems to me to be economic suicide. There is a clear correlation there. If you fix the system, you take away one of the reasons why women say, I don't want to go and be a jointer, I don't want to go and be a linesman, I don't want to go and be a first engineer or second engineer, then you will start to recruit because this has been known for the last 10 years and the recruitment figures are still not great. The same applies in shipbuilding. If I look at the west of Scotland around shipbuilding and ship support on the Clyde, again, ageing white male population with some issues around gender pay that comes out of our surveys and part of the pushback to those companies that we're saying is that you need to fix it because you're disenfranchising a whole group of people who may want to come and work in your industry. As Peter said and as I mentioned earlier, that link of if women attain better academic grades, then you really are cutting off your nose to spite your face. The work that we're doing with Equate at Napier is quite small scale. It was a pilot project last year, we've just got funding for a second year but that has been positive and we have had buy-in from companies like Scottish and Southern and Scottish Power. It's reaching out beyond into those companies where there's no collective bargaining, where there isn't a champion to encourage those organisations to change but there are clear operational reasons to spend the money to fix it because it's a disincentive to recruitment. There's a mirror between the skill shortages in the economy and the STEM sectors but also in technical, managerial and leadership roles where we have skill shortages and the areas where women are excluded from the economy. Part of what the McKinsey report is saying is that the dividend comes from addressing the inequality in order to be able to fill the gaps where the skill shortages are, as simple as that. Just to pick up on your specific point about the benefits, I guess broadly it comes back to the fair work objectives as well. What does it mean to feel valued at work? Pretty broadly being valued at work means being paying the same for doing the same level or standard of work as your male counterpart. What isn't there is the systematic collection of evidence that you're talking about. For instance, certainly in the civil service isn't the systematic collection of the reasons why people leave the civil service and they do leave. We charmingly call it turnover but exit interviews that used to be conducted with staff who are leaving are not conducted anymore. It's a really interesting point that you raised about the direct link between eradicating the gender pay gap and the benefits that you get in terms of attendance, recruitment and retention. It's a piece of work that doesn't exist. It's a piece of work that clearly should be done. In particular, when you look at the increase in pension age and the impact of an ageing workforce, which is something that trade unions are going to have to pick up as well as employers, there has to start with the conducting of full equal pay reviews that don't just look at headline gender pay gap issues but look at all kinds of allowances that are paid, working patterns, people's access to training and promotion. Those are not being conducted across the Scottish sector at the moment. There hasn't been a full formal equal pay audit in the Scottish Government for eight, possibly nine years. It will be having its decade birthday soon. Again, without that proper systematic collection of information, we're never going to be able to give you a positive answer to that question other than anecdotal evidence that we have from a trade union perspective. One of the things that you said, Gillian, is this issue about whether there's actually evidence or not. I'm not sure that I don't know what the evidence would be that reflected increased sickness patterns, for example, as a result of a high gender pay gap in an organisation. I haven't ever seen anything that comes at it from that point of view. Quite often, anecdotally, women will be at their work when they probably shouldn't be at their work, as sometimes is the case with men. There are other issues around sickness pattern at work. I was talking about the mechanisms to eradicate the gender pay gap, for example, being flexible working. People are probably more likely to take sick leave if they don't have flexible working for reasons that aren't about sickness or caring responsibilities or other issues in their life. In terms of how flexible working is applied, one of the discussions that we've been having quite a lot as trade unions is that flexible working is important. The regulations in the law are obviously optional, but it also individualises the problem. It's to try and get back the balance of how you then have that discussion about what maybe is a repeated individual request like. Why is the work start time being changed so that it doesn't connect with any of the childcare facilities locally or the bus service? It will come up as an individual problem, but it can be resolved and discussed through collective discussion. I think that that's quite important to get hold of. The bigger question about respect and treating workers and paying for the rate for the job, irrespective of gender, is linked to a whole lot of other things that we have at the moment such as job security. The traditional way that people feel if they go into a particular employer, they would be a career path there or they would stay there or be in the local government wherever, but they would work and they would have job security and they would have a pension. Those things are what are fragmenting all over the place just now. That makes it very difficult when you're trying to take what one organisation is doing just to pick up on the point that we had at the very beginning. We're going to have to identify trends but recognise that because it's no longer going to help a smaller number of people addressing one organisation's practice to mean it's like we need to look at how that's going to roll out because there are big long-time life questions which I can see you've discussed in previous committee meetings, how those things impact over your whole lifespan and the job security that was a familiar experience for a lot of people in the past, men and women, is gone or is going and that's what I think I'm interested in looking at when we get that back because then we can use those tools to make sure there isn't discrimination in the workplace, in a framework that's steady. Does the panel believe that the Scottish Government's 50-50 pledge on gender equality for public boards by 2020 will be met? Perhaps more importantly, what impact will the actual policy have, whether it's met or not? I think it's important. I would like to see it met. I think that the devolved power in the most recent Scotland Act in relation to promoting gender equality is very positive. Having said that, I'm concerned. If you look at what's happened with the Enterprise and Skills review, which I think has become a bit of a political football, the governance arrangements for the Enterprise and Skills body are absolutely vital. If we are going to align those agencies to influence, respectively, higher education, further education, modern apprenticeships, all those key labour market influencers, so that when you have, for example, a direction from the minister to universities, which I thought was a perfectly sensible direction, the minister expects higher education institutions to deliver certain labour market requirements amongst all the other things that they do. That intervention by the minister is attacked on the basis that it is an erosion of academic freedom. The minister, to my mind, did not say anything about what people should think, what they should research, what they should teach, what they should publish. It looked to me, from the outside, as political opportunism to undermine what's a perfectly legitimate, and in the context of this discussion, a very important direction. We need those institutions to be led and governed in a way that, among other things, has a very close eye on gender equality. If initiatives like that become the focus of attacks of that nature, when we're trying to reform governance and leadership in the public sector as a whole, then the answer to your question might be, no, we won't meet it, which will be disastrous. We're not opposed to it. The STUC has, within its own governance arrangements, since the early 1990s, had a mechanism that means that at least half of the general council of our organisations is female. There are ways in which that works and tries to promote women's representation more through all the affiliated trade unions. Trade unions are working hard in their own structures to try and improve women's representation at all different levels. I don't think that it can be a headline and it will make some difference, but there are the deeper problems that the committee has been concerned with, which will change working people's lives and rebalance equality in society. It's really important to say that, as with all people, all women are not the same. There's a whole thing about disability, black and ethnic minority representation and diverse women's representation. I hope that, as the boards are reconfiguring themselves, men will be changing as well and we'll see a more diverse representation from all of our society in public bodies and on public boards. I'm not wanting to cut the question off, but we do have a number of questions that we want to cover, so perhaps if we could move on to the next one from Bill Bowman please. Thank you, convener. If we can perhaps raise our sights to the horizon and maybe beyond it, are you aware of any innovative practices that have been adopted by other countries to support the reduction of the gender pay gap? I don't have the details. There are other Scandinavian examples, as I understand it, but I don't have the details in front of me, so it's not the best use of the committee's time. That's fair enough. Would anyone else like to contribute on this? This isn't a practice from another country, but as long as we continue to have pay freezes and pay restraint, we're not going to eradicate the gender pay gap and I think it'd be remiss to let that go by without saying that. I'll move on then to a question from Dean Lockhart, please. Sorry, Bill Bowman, did you want to come back on that? Right, I'll move on to Dean Lockhart then. Thank you, convener. I'd like to get the panel's view on the role of older women in the workplace and the challenges that this group faces, and in particular I think it's been touched on before but not in detail what actions are most effective at enabling women who take a career break for whatever reason, what actions are most effective in enabling those women to re-enter the workforce in a similar role, the same role or at a level that they can really contribute in a similar manner as before. I'll try to be quick. I think that this is a massive issue. If you look at automation and the rise of the robot, of all the occupations that are likely to be affected by automation, large concentrations of women, admin and clerical processing, food manufacture, they are a target group. We already have a problem that the age variation in the earnings of manual women is the worst of all four categories. Non-manual female workers can expect their income to rise as can manual men and non-manual men. Manual women's earnings peak in their early thirties and just plateau. There's another problem there. Low-paid women and manual jobs will not be able to afford care provision for children or for dependent relatives. We now have this kind of care sandwich, where perhaps children take a long time to grow up nowadays. I think that 30-35, by which time elderly relatives are requiring care so that low-paid women are kind of sandwiched with this care commitment. I was going to come in to Gillian Martin's question earlier on some fantastic work being done at University of West of Scotland about a different approach to flexible working, particularly in response to the needs of dementia care. I won't go into the detail on that, but it picks up Anne's point about moving away from individualistic responses to shared responses. It's a really important question because older women, many of whom are trapped into the labour market because they don't have the pension provision, which is something that we've not discussed at all this morning. The pension gap, which needs to be measured and tracked separately, is a major problem, which is already a significant cause of inequality between women and men. It's likely to increase. That then taps into all the points that we made earlier on about the economic cost of failing to deal with inequality because that burden falls on the state, either in in-work benefits for late-life working for older women or pension top-ups. That's an area where your question is a very important point where urgent attention is required for a variety of reasons. To follow on from that, if we tackle low wages and poverty pay, and other witnesses have referred to that in previous sessions, it could have the most significant impact on some of those longer-term problems. I don't think that older women in the workforce can be a pretty good thing. That's what we've decided working amongst a lot of older women. We think we're quite good. One of the things that I would say is that we've been doing quite a lot of work with the trade unions, partly because there have been problems emerging with performance management issues, workers struggling to adapt to new technology, different issues, menopause, different health and safety requirements that employers and trade union reps are not well trained in. The profile of the workforce is obviously not what it was in the 1940s, so there's some catch-up to do there in terms of issues that should be talked about to create a health and safe working environment. However, some of the things that I see in the trade union movement has been women moving from part-time to full-time work because their immediate family responsibilities are over, or because of the other thing that we've not discussed is how the changing profile of households and the increasing number of single-person households or adult with children, but one wage earner in the house. That means for the longer-term labour market as well. In our trade union reps, older women have masses of experience, real tons of experience, know the job inside and out, know their company really well and have more time once some of the childcare responsibilities have passed. There's got to be a different and better way of managing the whole lifetime of work, rather than focusing only on what are perceived as a difficult couple of years with young children. I do hope that all parents will find a way—or all people with child or caring responsibilities—of looking at their own work over a whole lifetime, rather than focusing only on that one year where there's a crisis or they need to leave their work. We should be able to manage keeping the skills in the workplace in a way that benefits everybody over a longer period of time. The work with older women will help to contribute to that. Richard Hardy I think that if I deal specifically with engineering and technology, I'm referring again to the work that we've done with Napier, and I'm quite happy and convenient if you wish to provide a copy of the documentation around that to the committee. Firstly, around flexible work, if you can bring flexible work and get a greater buy-in amongst employers, flexible working can be achieved not just in the admin sections of their employment. That creates the occupational segregation that we've all mentioned before. That's an engineering job that needs to be done nine to five. If you want to work flexibly, take this admin job in central office and you can be more flexible. In terms of reskilling or regaining confidence, for example, a civil engineer or an electrical engineer with an HND or a degree has all the basics. They take a career break. The world of work changes. It's changing ever and ever more faster since the days when I used to be a computer programmer. I'd hate to think how badly I'd make a mess of that going back nowadays. It's addressing how companies or indeed the Government or third sector organisations can be incentivised to reskill or reconfidentise, if that's indeed a word. Women who have the basics have that basic underlying technical engineering, managerial knowledge, but are worried about how the world of work has changed while they've been out and how they make that step to come back. The work that we did with Equate has been through seminars, webinars, mentoring, all the things that employers should be doing to encourage people to come back. That's a pool of people that they don't even have to pay to train. The retraining is a lot less than getting somebody through an HND or an HND or a degree. There are some really basic things that can be done, for instance, just keeping in touch with people when they're on a career break. It's not really basic, but it doesn't happen in a lot of organisations. Instead of the onus being on the individual, I think that organisations should take responsibility for that in terms of valuing that employer. We're starting to see the emergence of health and wellbeing policies, which sound really positive and can be, but there's a focus there on your own personal resilience rather than on the organisation responsibility for assisting you through that. I do think that it's really, really important for people to be able to increase and or decrease their hours and sometimes to do that for a short term to help them through a particular kind of period. The answer to that needs to be yes, we can do it, rather than no one hears why we can't, which is what we increasingly hear as well. Again, I think that some of this is about cultural change, but I absolutely agree with Anne. Having older women in the workplace is a real bonus and it's something that we should certainly be seeking to encourage in the future. We now have a question from Richard Leonard. I'd like to take us back as we draw towards the end of the session to somewhere where we began, which is on the question of low pay. We know that the five Cs occupations, cleaning, catering, clerical, cashiering and caring tend to be performed predominantly by women. They also tend to be occupations and functions in organisations that are contracted out. My question is about the supply chain and whether you have any observations about the extent to which those jobs are contracted out and the impact that that has on the pay rate in those occupations. Secondly, whether there is something that either a private corporate who is contracting out or indeed the public sector which is contracting out could do what action could it take to try to raise up the hourly, weekly and annual rate of pay of those low paid women workers. Procurement and tighter regulation around contracting services could help. I think that there could be conditions included in procurement contracts which were far more specific on rates of pay for the job. I think that the whole thing about that, even just that language around the five Cs and how we value those jobs, I just really come back to what I said earlier as we need to look at our own practice as well. The Scottish Parliament itself contracts out its catering services and I don't know the information off the top of my head about the rates of pay and the pay gap in the organisations to which the Parliament contracts its one services. The members of the Scottish Parliament have budgets for getting your office cleaned and so on. I think that there is a whole thing about how we demonstrate and live by our own aspirations and how we rate those jobs in a way that values the work that is done. Are we sure that there is pension entitlements when services are contracted out by public bodies? Are we sure that agency staff are not being used excessively? There are a whole number of questions that we should all be asking. The services that we all use and our families all use and public money is being used for when policies are decided and agreed by the Parliament. How is the money being spent? I agree with the direction of your question, Richard, that more questions should be asked and there should be more transparency and more public accountability in how that money is being spent. You raise a very important point. There has been a sense in the conversation so far that the gender pay gap is a kind of neutral problem which has been stubbornly resistant to our best efforts to eradicate it. Not so. Successive UK Governments, different political parties have either failed or deliberately intervened to undermine the position of low-paid women within the labour market. The Tupe Directive, which is where I have addressed your point, was due for implementation before Labour lost the election in 1979. They did not implement it. The Conservatives delayed implementation. When they did implement it, it was implemented for commercial undertakings only. Public sector privatisation went ahead. Equal Opportunities Commission identified in 1995 that it had a direct correlation with increased low-paid women. Nothing was done about that. We have had abolition of wages councils, reduced redundancy and dismissal rights for part-time workers. The systematic undermining of the position of that group, which is then fed directly into their pay. The only upside of Brexit is that we can now write our own procurement rules. For example, if you look at the procurement guidance for social care, you have an interesting opportunity. Donald McCaskill is saying some very interesting things about the need to invest in social care and change the way that it is valued in order to address a recruitment and retention crisis in social care, with consequential benefits for service users but also for NHS cost management in terms of delayed discharge. We have the beginnings of a framework there. The workforce matters, which can now be competently evaluated, including equality and fair work within procurement processes, unison published some research last month, which reveals that some local authorities in Scotland weight or value workforce matters as low as 4 per cent or 5 per cent within the evaluation process. Quality and price occupy 94 per cent or 95 per cent of the evaluation. Workforce matters, fair work, equality and pay will have no impact on the procurement decisions of those authorities. There is no substantial monitoring and evaluation of whether or not the reported fair work practices of those organisations are actually delivered. We have the potential to do things very differently to ensure that the problems in, for example, social care or other purchased services are addressed. At the moment, we are considerably short of what we need to do. A very helpful finding from this committee would be to review how effective the revised procurement regime has been in the last 18 months and what more needs to be done in order to deliver that step change in the quality of the employment experience. We will come now to our final question from Andy Wightman. I will allow each of you an opportunity to answer this one if you wish to. I am just wondering whether you have any views on what specific actions the Scottish Government could take in the next few years to reduce and ultimately eliminate the gender pay gap. I am thinking particularly that unison's evidence touched on the fair work convention and less so perhaps in the Scottish business pledge whether there are existing initiatives that could be improved. We need to have a strategy. We do not have a strategy. People see that as being a devolved issue because equal pay legislation is reserved. Not so. Promotion of equality is devolved within Scotland Act 1998. We need to grab that. We need to have a strategy and people need to buy into that and to be held to account for what they do under that strategy. The powers of the EHRC need to be reviewed. We have the devolved capacity to enhance the powers of the EHRC, particularly in relation to public sector quality duty. The UK Government has trumped the Scottish Government in relation to pay reporting. That is a gap that should not be allowed to persist for any longer. We should review the public sector quality duty in relation to equal pay reporting against the experience from the pay transparency regulations. We need to review the impact of pay restraint. Pay restraint obviously hits the lowest paid workers. Cheryl has made the point that it needs to be emphasised. We need to look at the impact that has had on pay equality. We have touched on the procurement point already. I will close with the enterprise review. I am concerned that it has been treated as a political football. We have well respected, well established agencies. The purpose of the review is to align them towards particular objectives, one is greater efficiency, one is greater investment and all the rest of it, but one is fairness and equality in the labour market. If the enterprise and skills review is derailed as it has been attempted so far, we will miss the opportunity to muster the key resources that we have in the pursuit of higher equality and therefore higher profitability within the economy. At the beginning, we were talking about data and the need for a bit more information. I think that the Scottish Government has to do some more work to get below the economic inactivity figures. Who are they? I am sure that they are not inactive at all. Generally speaking, it is because some other reason has caused people to leave the labour market. We need to get in and around that and see what the gender differences are and what the implications are. I know that I have made repeated references to the expansion of the early years in childcare workforce, but it is a key pledge of the Government, one to which we are committed, trying to deliver as well. It cannot be done cheaply—that is the bottom line—and the biggest message and intervention that could be made over the next five years to contribute to tackling the pay gap would be to significantly invest in the workforce. I am not talking about the living wage. People still live in poverty on the living wage. I cannot remember the figure, but there is a significant number of children in poverty stats with parents who are in work, many of whom are receiving the living wage. That is not enough. It needs a far more serious injection of funding and resources that will deliver high quality, good jobs with career prospects and pension payments and security of employment for thousands and thousands of, at this point, primarily women in Scotland, which would be fantastic. I am uncovering what Annan, Peter and I have said in terms of the Scottish Government and looking at the Scottish Government as an employer is to lead from the front. I am going to steal some of Cheryl's thunder, I am sure, but Cheryl has already touched on it and Peter has as well. An ending of pay restraint, the carrying out of an equality review within the Scottish Government and the Scottish Government suite of employers, so that employers, when trade unions or activists in other employers go out and talk about equality, you have not got that ability to hide and say, well, the Scottish Government is not doing it, why should they be enforcing it on us, which we do occasionally see, and be an exemplar. That is what I would say. That is fine. Thank you very much to all of our witnesses. I will suspend the meeting at this stage to move over to our next panel. Thank you again for coming in today. Welcome back to the committee members and welcome to our second panel of witnesses here today. I will start in no particular order again. First of all, I welcome the Equality and Diversity Committee of the Law Society of Scotland. We have Kevin Burnett, who is president of the Aberdeen Association of Civil Engineers in Scotland. Dr Donald MacAskill, chief executive of Scottish Care. Last but not least, Professor Katrina Paisey, professor in accounting and finance at Glasgow University and member of the ICAS Ethics Committee. Welcome to all of you. I might start the session by turning to Bill Bowman, who has a question. We usually begin by asking the same sort of question to the panellists. Do you believe that we have a defined set of agreed statistics on female economic activity in Scotland and the pay gap? Is there enough evidence at industry level on female participation and the pay gap at industry level? I should say that the sound escos operate the mics, so there is no need to press any buttons. You do not have to come in on every single question, but I am happy to bring anyone in who indicates by simply raising their hand. Who would like to start us off and answer to that question? The statistics, particularly in construction, are not too good. It has to be said that specific statistics on the gender pay gap are not good. That is the number of women to men in engineering and construction disciplines. Those statistics are available and they are not particularly good within the STEM sector, as I am sure you are aware. What will come about is that major companies are now gearing up and we are encouraging them within the institution to be publishing those statistics, precisely those. I work for a major engineering consultancy in London-based. We employ about 300 staff in Scotland, so I know the statistics for the number of females in my company. The institution of civil engineers will tell you the statistics for the number of females chartered engineers in the UK, which is less than 4 per cent. However, when you get to the numbers of under 40, that may jump to nearer 20 per cent, but those statistics are hard to come by at the moment. If you want to set targets, you have to know where you are standing and a plan to get there. That is obviously part of the issue right now. From the Law Society's perspective, we have carried out a census of the profession and the last one that we did was in 2013. We have over 3,000 responses to that. That provides a reasonably accurate depiction of what the earnings levels are within the legal profession in Scotland. We have been very open and honest about the fact that we have quite a sizable pay gap at 42 per cent. That was something that we came out with publicly in 2015, with a view to doing further work around that and implementing voluntary equality standards to try and get the profession to address this. Certainly, within the legal profession, we have a lot of data in relation to earnings. If I can talk about accountancy, there is data. It is not always joined up data, I think. The reason for saying that is that there is data, first of all, from the financial reporting council on the professional bodies. I can give you ICAS data, for example. ICAS has roughly 21,000 members, about a third of whom are female. That percentage will rise over time because, in the early years, there were very small numbers of females joining the accountancy profession. We are now at a situation where, over the past four or five years, the number of trainees has been roughly in a ratio of female, around about 41 per cent to 44 per cent, out of the total. We are not at parity, but we are approaching that sort of level. The figure of one third females will increase over time as those people progress through the profession. In terms of pay gap, it is difficult to get completely comprehensive information. As members of the committee here may know, accountancy tends to be dominated by four large international firms known as the big four. Those are PWC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG, and they publish their pay gap data. At the moment, that pay gap tends to be between about 15 per cent and 20 per cent when you just take average male versus average female earnings. They also disclose it on a different basis when they compare across grades. If they will compare trainees or newly qualified people, managers, directors and so on, when you look at the pay gap grade for grade, the gap comes down to something between 2 per cent and 6 per cent. I think that there are a number of issues going on. There are obviously some structural issues within that pay gap. In terms of your question about the reliability of data, we have some data from professional bodies, some from large firms, but a very large number of accountants do not work in professional practice. Twice as many people work in industry and commerce as in public practice. For them, it is very difficult to get data because their data will be wrapped up in the individual companies and organisations in which they work. In social care, as members will know, we have an 86 per cent female workforce. We have clear evidence that there is not a substantial pay gap. The pay gap, which exists, is a gap between reality and practice. As we at Scottish Care have said, on a number of occasions in a predominantly female workforce, there are real challenges of horizontal segregation and occupational discrimination, which negatively impact on the ability of women to continue to work in social care and on the ability and desire of men to be attracted to come into the sector. I think that we have found elsewhere that there are pockets of data and that trying to correlate them is a challenge that we need to address. Now to Jackie Baillie. I accept a lot of what Dr McCaskill has said, but let me nevertheless look at pay gap reporting legislation, which is due to come in shortly and just to get the panel's view on whether you think that this will be useful, whether it will make a difference to the pay gap. I asked that in the cotton text that Scotland is largely an SME-driven economy, so we will have typically less than 250 employees, which is the threshold. In commenting on that, would you also perhaps tell me whether you think that there is scope to do more in Scotland than is currently proposed across the UK? I will take you in any order. Who would like to start? Dr McCaskill? Respond to that. As Ms Baillie knows, the social care sector in Scotland is predominantly SME with one or two larger corporate bodies both in the care home and in the care home sector. Despite what I have just said about the lack of a real, what we might describe, a classical pay gap, there is concern among some that the 250th level is not going to get as to where we want to after several decades of equal pay legislation, but given the context of social care, that is perhaps more of a challenge for other sectors than it is for us. I think that we have a situation in which we have evidence from other examples that disclosure does work and does bring change. If I think back to when I was training as a chartered accountant, for example, we had hardly any social and environmental reporting whatsoever. Now virtually every organisation over a certain size produces a sustainability report, environmental reports, social reports and so on. We are now starting to get human rights reporting, which again you just never saw a few years ago. To answer the sort of question in principle that does disclosure affect circumstances, I think absolutely yes. I think that once an issue becomes visible, then people will want to start to tackle it. I do think that the requirement to have gender pay reporting is going to be very useful. In terms of the Scottish situation, some of the big accountancy firms are UK-wide, so they may meet the threshold of 250 employees on UK-wide bases. If we just looked at the Scottish situation, there are only five accountancy firms that have more than 250 employees. If we dropped that requirement down to 200 employees, that would still only take in another two accountancy firms. The Scottish situation makes it difficult because of the fact that lots of firms have significantly lower figures than 250. I think that the changes are welcome, the visibility is welcome, but I do not think that we should overstate the effect. I think that we are still only going to be seeing the very top of that pyramid. I think that from a legal perspective that definitely it is that whole adage into what gets measured, gets done, and I think that I am sure that you will have heard that in the year. I think that it will be very helpful to actually see figures and for people to, in a legal profession, to actually have some sort of comparative analysis against their peer group. I think that the fact that they will have sector league tables will certainly be helpful. We were discussing before we came in today about whether we had that information that you have just said in relation to how many law firms would be captured at 250 plus. The law society only records in relation to lawyers, so we do not know how many other employees. We are not able to see x amount that is going to come under the legislation at 250. What I can see is that when we developed our own voluntary standards, we put the benchmark at 150. I certainly know that within the Scottish public sector it is 20 now that has been dropped to. I think that there is potentially scope to go below that 250. I think that from a UK perspective that they said when the regulations came in that it would only cover 34 per cent of the UK workforce as a whole. Translating that into the Scottish economic model, I would imagine, will reduce further. That might be something that we see going forward, whether that level reduces. As a first step, I think that it is really important because I do not know of any law firms that currently report on their gender pay gap, so I think that even getting the larger firms to do that will actually be helpful as a sort of step forward. I think that in the construction sector and in engineering generally the high level of subcontracting will cause an issue here. Not many companies, maybe larger consultants, but even the largest contractors in Scotland, many of them will not employ above that threshold. I think that there is a case for the threshold to be reduced, similar to what Valle was saying. I am not aware of any companies yet who do issue that information within construction and engineering, but I do know that a large number of them are gearing up for this. We are encouraging them to do it voluntarily and we are encouraging them on the basis that understanding the issue, they can start to do something about it and there are clearly tangible effects, advantages in doing something about it and closing it down. I think that there is a significant issue with what is being brought in in capturing enough information for it to be valid within construction and engineering. We have talked about statistics and Gillian Martin has a question about productivity that would be good to bring in at this point. It comes off the back of what Kevin Burnett just said about tangible advantages. I would like to ask each panel member why is it in your sector's interests to tackle the gender pay gap? It is not just the right thing to do in terms of equality. It has tangible effects on your sector, so I would like to give you the opportunity to outline them for your sector for me. Occupational segregation is opposed to gender pay gap for Mr MacAskill, potentially. Who would like to go first? I am learning the process. There is industry advice that clearly a more equal, diverse and inclusive community performs better across a whole host of metrics. That has to appeal to private sector companies, and private sector companies are aware of that, certainly within our company. It is there in, again, major contractors, I would suggest. They understand that some of them are struggling to believe it, but a more diverse community makes for a better community. We are absolutely convinced of that within the institution, and there is a real requirement for cultural change. There are a lot of arguments to be made on that point. Profit levels are the ones that speak loudest, and there is evidence from various sources that your profitability will go up. That is the hardest hitting message in certain circumstances. There are a lot of other metrics that count beyond profitability. One of the biggest drivers in any EDI community that you have in your profession or company is that staff engagement is clear. When staff are engaged, they will tell you that message first and foremost, that that is what they are looking for, is more cultural balance, more equality, more inclusivity. They will start to tell you the benefits of that, and you realise them for yourself. We have in our company seen the benefits of it, and we can drill in to well-performing teams on that basis and give examples of that. The more diverse a team is, and it is not just the gender balance, the better it tends to perform. In the legal profession, one of the particular issues that we have discovered from doing the profile of the profession is the problem in relation to female progression. We do not have the same issues as construction in terms of entry-level into the profession. 51 per cent of the profession are female and 60 per cent are under 40. When it comes to the partnership level, it is only 28 per cent of partners are female. Our issue is about going up the way and the pipeline, so we have a lot of women at the traineeship level, assistant and associate level and less at the partnership level. If you put it in that sort of parlance, the vertical occupational segregation is the kind of issue for us, so we want to see action and taking steps in relation to that. If you are making the argument for law firms to address the issue in terms of cost benefit, what would you propose? The issue is that we lose female talent if we do not continue to keep them into partnership levels. That is the main driver in terms of going forward. If we do not continue to have women working through to this very senior level, then what is happening at the senior associate level through these surveys is that they are quite often going into in-house roles or going into public sector roles. There are undoubtedly economic benefits in relation to being an inclusive workforce, but it makes absolutely no business sense to have women working for 10, 15 years and being incredibly successful, but losing them at the partnership level. There is a real talent issue for the legal profession. That talent issue is the same in accountancy. It is an odd system where lots of people come in at lower levels, but they are not represented at the same proportions higher up. There is something going on there, so talent is a real issue. Within the big four accountancy firms, there is a strong interest in diversity. It is not just gender, there is a lot of work going on at the moment in things such as social mobility, ethnicity, age, factors, disability, a whole variety of things. It is certainly very often said that a more diverse workforce is a better workforce, a more profitable workforce. I am not absolutely convinced that we have hard evidence for that. I know that it is often said, but I think that it is difficult at the research level to unpick whether it is the fact that it is a diverse workforce or whether that company just has other attributes that make it do well, that are driving greater profitability or whatever. I would say that diversity is just one of a package of things that companies can do, but I would be reluctant to say that if you have a more diverse workforce, you will increase your profitability. I do not think that it is as straightforward as that, but certainly the firms are very aware of the fact that they want their workforces to be more inclusive, to be more representative of the general population. I think that there is this huge concern with this talent wastage that Val has talked about, so I think that that is something that probably applies across a lot of professions. I think that it applies in teaching, for example. There was just something last week about the fact that lots of teachers are female, but actually there are still more heads who are male in proportion to the total workforce. The social care desire and need to diversify the workforce is not because of the profit line or to increase capacity, but it is to maintain survival. We have, as I have already stated, an 86 per cent female workforce. That workforce, on average, is over the age of 45, predominantly a significant group over the age of 50. Literally, unless we begin to recruit a much more diverse workforce and that includes women, despite the 86 per cent, then we will not be around in 10, 15 years' time. The UK statistic is that we need 700,000 additional social care workers, even with the progression of technology-enabled care, 700,000 by 2037. The Scottish equivalent of that is roughly around about 80,000. I really do not know where they need to come from, I do not know where they are going to come from, because at the moment we are losing workers because of age, because of lots of reasons that I have spoken about elsewhere in terms of workers' stress, etc. It is not an option, it is a fundamental need to diversify the social care workforce. We will come on to questions from Andy Wightman. A couple of questions. First, following Jackie Baillie's question about the new legislation, we had a previous witness, Anna Ritchie Allen, from Close the Gap, told us that she had attended three employer events delivered by law firms in relationship to the new legislation. Each event included informal advice on how restructuring an organisation into corporate groups would reduce the employee headcount and therefore avoid the regulation that does not require companies structured into corporate groups to use the overall headcounts. That allows them to avoid it, and employers could consider promoting higher-paid employees into an LLP, as is often done in law firms, and therefore they would be excluded. Is that advice that you are familiar with that would appear to undermine the intention behind the new legislation? I can certainly speak on that. I have certainly not seen anything like that. I work in a large law firm that advises clients in relation to the regulations. That has certainly not been any of the views that I have seen in relation to it. I think that most people, even on the cusp of the threshold, are looking at it with a view to reporting that that seems to be the direction of travel and that transparency is really here. That is something that they want to apply. I have not seen any kind of attempts at all to try and get out of that situation, but I do not know that. I would endorse that. I have certainly not heard of anything of that nature within accountancy. I think that there is concern that there are gaps. The big four accountancy firms have voluntarily disclosed some information. It is obviously not as extensive as it will be once we get the full reporting regime coming in. I sense a willingness to look at the issue. As I said before, it is not just gender, but there is also a willingness to look at other aspects such as social mobility and other diversity issues. I have certainly not heard of those sorts of manipulative behaviours. I can think of people coming along to our seminars who were at the 200 mark and were very much thinking that they were going ahead because their peer group were. They did not want to be left behind. I think that if we start to shift the mindset, the default, that transparency is the norm, then the sort of view will be why aren't you doing it. That has certainly been their view. They wanted to get a grasp on it because they were going to do it themselves. I have certainly not seen any kind of avoidance measures. I think that that would be quite complex to go and set yourselves into a different sort of corporate structure just to avoid reporting. My next question is about your own gender pay gap for your own industry. I think that the Law Society has provided us with a figure of 42 per cent for full time. If you cannot provide the figure now, I wonder if you could perhaps apply it to the committee later across part-time, full-time, all workers, mean and median. That could be quite challenging in the construction sector. I am here representing the institution of civil engineers, the institution of mechanical engineers, the institution of electrical engineers, et cetera, chemical engineers, ad infinitum. It is quite a siloed sector. At the moment, I cannot give that. It is interesting that we were discussing that metric. Amongst civil engineering sectors, there seems to be a slight pay gap in favour of chartered female engineers over chartered male engineers, but that may be because the group that you are selecting is so small that it may come out with a statistical variance. My understanding is that, for example, the institution of mechanical engineers, the pay gap is 11 per cent in favour of females. Getting that across a sector is difficult, but for the institution of civil engineers itself, we should be able to do that. Certainly companies will be able to do that, individual companies. I was going to just very briefly quote the women in science and engineering advice. There is a 10-point plan that we are trying to encourage all our member organisations to adopt, and some of them are already doing it. One of those 10 points is to understand the starting point so that you can monitor progress. If you are not prepared to understand the starting point, you can have no progress. I echo what the other speakers have said. The example that you are giving seems to be a very retrograde step. It is not something that we have seen. In terms of social care, as I said earlier, the size of the sector is such that it is difficult to gather that sort of data because it is not really an issue. The issue is occupational segregation. Where there is a pay gap, and if I speak to front-line workers, the gap that they talk about is the gap that I receive as somebody working for a charity or a private organisation for doing the same work that somebody down the road is working for an in-house public authority. That is where the gap exists. In account, I quoted earlier global figures in terms of the big four firms reporting a gap of something in the order of 15 to 20 per cent, but once they adjust those by grade, it comes down to something like roughly about 2 to 6 per cent. At the beginning, we were asked if data exists. Beyond that, it is difficult to get further granularities. We do not have data in terms of splitting gender figures by grade, by age and other factors full-time, part-time, as you said. As with construction, I think that employers will undoubtedly have this information. Individual CA practices or other companies, whether it is financial services or whatever, are employing large numbers of accountants. They will have that employment information, but I do not think that the professional bodies have that information because they are not the employer, they are the professional organisation but they are not the actual employer of the individual. We will now come on to a question from Ash Denham. I am interested in hearing what your organisations and sectors are currently doing in order to address the situation and try to see some improvements. I noticed from the submission that we received from the Law Society that several things have been done, so a campaign on progression to get women into more senior positions, interviews with senior women as role models to see if that would help. For you, do you think that value might be able to share with us if you think that those things have been successful or if there are other things that you think could be more successful? We have done that, but we have also published the equality standards, which is a sort of framework for law firms to sign up to. That contains within it an idea of having an equality elite. That idea of accountability at senior level and having an equality strategy. It is setting out an action plan for what you want to achieve. It has time standards. Within that, it has the gender pay gap standard, which applies to firms with over 150 employees. It goes slightly further than the UK regulations by asking for reporting at part-time and full-time and at various levels of seniority. That was introduced voluntarily in 2015. That has been one of our main focus in trying to push firms into signing up on a voluntary basis to try to take action. So far, 21 firms have signed up to that. We did that in 2015. That is under review next year. We are obviously hoping that with the UK regulations coming in that a lot more firms will be caught under the 250 thresholds, so we will see further measures taking place there. There have been a variety of voluntary initiatives that we have looked at. We also do training for the new partners, so they learn about the equality standards to try to embed them in their firms as well. We have a couple of equality events coming up, one in May and one in June, about women in legal profession and equality within the profession. There are lots of things that we are trying to do. This is very much on our radar as a profession. With all of these things, it is about taking time for it to have an impact. Within accountancy, there are a number of things that are happening. In terms of progression through the ranks, not just the big firms but other firms are concerned to make sure that there are pathways right up to partner level. If we look at the big four firms at the moment, something between 13 and 17 per cent of partners are female, and those firms have set targets over the next two or three years to get up to something like 25 per cent. 25 per cent is still nowhere near where it ought to be given the numbers of females coming in to the profession initially, but it would be a step change from where we are at the moment. There are various strategies going on to try to facilitate that, such as mentoring, leadership programmes. That is happening. The targets that have been set for percentages of senior managers are now more or less met, where the targets still have to be met at the director and the partner level. Some progress is being made. There are other things, too. If somebody takes a career break, for example, the firms have introduced return to work schemes. They will often have paid internships for perhaps 12 or 16 weeks, something of that nature, and people are able to apply for positions at the end of that. There are a number of things going on, but one of the things that I think is quite difficult in research shows that often the catalyst for differential career progression is if a woman has a maternity break. There are positive and negative stories. There are some very positive stories of very good conversations taking place between women in that position. There is an employer where they can discuss what the career aspirations would be, what kind of work the women would like to do, and they can put together a package that probably has a little bit of flexibility in both sides, which is designed to work for the individuals who have those kinds of arrangements. However, there are also negative stories where people say, I asked for part-time or whatever and I was not allowed to get it. One of the things that the research shows is a real problem. If a woman takes time out for a career break to look after her children, if she then wants to go back in a part-time capacity, those kinds of jobs simply are not advertised. Often part-time work is something that people negotiate when they are with an employer, so they might say, I would like to come back, but could I come back working mornings only or three days a week or whatever it is? You can often do that if you are negotiating with your current employer, but if you take time out completely, then jobs are simply not really advertised on that basis. It is quite rare to see an advert where it will say that flexible working is suitable in this particular post. I think that that is something that probably requires more cultural change, but I think that it would be useful for employers to make it clear that there are many jobs that they have that can be done on a flexible basis, but people feel that they cannot apply for them because the job is advertised on a full-time permanent basis. Where companies, firms or organisations can evidence it, it is very powerful. If you do not mind, I will quote Carillion, who managed to increase their maternity return rate from 76 per cent to 96 per cent by introducing more flexible working, agile working practices. That included home working, parental leave, greater part-time working, special leave and time off for dependent care. Those are the sort of practices that are introduced that can give a clear metric as they have just done. It does not tell you in what capacity the maternity returners came back, but they will quote that 84 per cent of their staff, by having staff engagement survey, which is absolutely critical, will recommend Carillion as employer and they are on target to increase the women in leadership positions within that company to 30 per cent by year 2020. I keep going back to the same thing, which is having the metrics in the first place and showing it, but that is on the face of it a clear success story, which follows on exactly from what Katrina was saying. It is a bit different in social care. The last substantive bit of research showed that nine out of ten people thought that it was okay for a man to do a job of care. However, the same research showed that two thirds of parents would not encourage their son to enter into a career of care and that a third of the 16 to 25-year-olds, when asked would you want to work in care, said no. Then another third did not know what social care was, so there are huge issues around societal stereotyping and gender stereotyping around social care. Obviously, as an organisation, we work very hard to dispel the myths that men are unable to care, are unable to offer dignity to an individual at the end of their life and are unable to be sensitive in terms of somebody's individual personal needs. However, those are very deeply rooted societal assumptions. It is okay to have a male doctor or a male psychiatrist, but a male care worker seems to be a step beyond. Unless we bridge that societal stereotype, then we are really in social care going to be faced with massive challenges in the very near future. Perhaps I could just clarify something, and this is directed to Val Duggan to do with the Law Society and the Solicitors profession. The Law Society paper comments on the Equality Act and I think you've referred to what's set out as the simplistic notion of formal equality, and then this being said to be compounded by a number of factors, one of which is occupational segregation. So would you agree that occupational segregation can cause a difficulty in terms of this area? In our profession, it's obviously different from Donald's situation. It's the vertical segregation, so it's very much about how the women are distributed in the legal profession. That is definitely a major factor in why we have such a large gap. That 42 per cent is because we have fewer women at the top and a great deal of them at the bottom and the mid-tier, and that's having that impact. That's what I'm really wanting to look at, how the situation will unfold going forwards, because your intake—I'm just taking the figures from your annual report—I think the figure of female solicitors in Scotland has gone up to 52 per cent, the 2016 report, newly admitted solicitors 65 per cent or female and only 35 per cent male. So looking to the future, the problem is not going to be that there's not enough women in the legal profession, whatever happens with the pay structure, but ultimately does that not mean that the solicitor's profession in Scotland will become a segregated profession, predominantly female? Does that not cause problems going forwards if we think of studies that have identified falling pay, as a recent US study being associated with sectors that become predominantly with positions occupied by females? I'm just wondering what the Law Society is doing or its approach, because I think it's recognised with Scottish Government, Scottish Funding Council and I think even the Law Society, I think your colleague Rob Mars wrote an article, which I think you refer to in your submission to this committee. He identifies some of the problems that, interestingly enough, are similar to the problems but the opposite way around that Dr McCaskill referred to, being young males don't view the laws being a profession to go into, which is the opposite of the problem suggested. We have an interesting situation there and that was actually one of the points that was raised in our Let's Talk progression campaign, which was not just obviously looking at the gender imbalance that we have at the moment, but do we need to get to a situation where we are actually actively encouraging men into the profession, which will be something that we potentially have to look at going forward? It's been this situation now for quite some time that we have this imbalance at entry level. That is something that is within the society's viewpoint and we do acknowledge that going forward might be something that we have to look at. However, I certainly haven't had any discussions about what the increasing feminisation of the legal sector will bring towards wages. That's not something that's really within. That would be a question of looking at the content of fees or possibly even legal aid fees and other fees that are paid to solicitors now for particular lines of work, would it not? It's not something that I would be able to comment on in terms of earnings at this stage. Fair enough, I also ask about the question of paralegals. Do you know what percentage are male, what percentage are female? I think that the annual report, certainly the web version, indicated that there were 434 paralegals, as opposed to 11,500 roughly solicitors. I'm just wondering whether that disguises another question about percentages and who has paid what for work that is essentially legal work that, 25 years ago, would have been done by qualified solicitors. There is a sizable shift in the profession that's not something that we hold information on. As I said, the information that we gain in our census relates to the returns from solicitors. I can certainly ask and that might be something that we might be able to follow up in writing but it's not something that I have available to me just now in terms of paralegal information. OK, that would be very helpful if you could follow that up. I think that Dr Macastle wanted to… Just a general comment. We often hear the term feminisation of the workforce addressed to social care. I think that it's unfortunate that we equate and associate feminisation of our workforce with low terms and poor terms and conditions. Much rather, we would want to see in social care the fact that our workforce is not truly representative and sufficiently diverse is in itself because of the low pay and the poor terms and conditions. I think that when we have discussions around gender pay gaps, we have to be very careful that we don't equate a female-dominated workforce with a workforce that should be paid less because, unfortunately, after 30, 40 years since the establishment of the NHS act created home helps, that's what we have unfortunately seen. That is precisely what I was trying to get at because the question in particular was if one has segregated workforces one way or the other rather than more balanced workforces if one can put it that way, whether or not having more balanced workforces would tend to assist in ensuring fairness of working conditions and pay conditions. I think that I said when I last appeared before the committee that if the social care workforce in Scotland was more balanced and more representative of the community, or dare I say, like the legal profession at the moment and some elements more male dominated, we wouldn't be a low paid profession. It's really picking up on the horizontal segregation, which seems to exist in some other areas. I think that perhaps many professions have that within accountancy. I can think of some research that one of my colleagues at Glasgow has done, for example, looking at the insolvency section within accountancy. There are some very clear gender issues there and often women don't choose not to go into insolvency. Perhaps it doesn't always suit their lifestyle. You might be suddenly told that you've got to go hundreds of miles away in the next hour because a firm has got into difficulties. I think that there is some horizontal segregation within accountancy. People always used to say that tax was something that was more typically done by females in insolvency by males. I think that these are generalisations and obviously the situation changes all the time, but I think that within the subsections of probably lots of professions there are certain areas that prove more attractive to one gender rather than the other. Are the panel confident that the 50-50 target for gender diversity on public boards will be met by 2020? Since this is a public sector, what do you think the private sector will react to? In terms of the private sector, I think that this is a very live issue. I wouldn't like to say that they'll make 50-50. I know that there are international examples. I think that Norway led the way, but there's now something like 10 other countries where there's a real concern to balance boards. Y ICAS has done some research on balancing the board, but it has looked at other aspects as well, not just gender but also agent and ethnicity. All companies are working on that. Within the various debates that take place, there are two arguments. Some people say that there should be positive discrimination in order to make those targets. Other people say that they want people to be appointed on merit, but they want to make sure that if there are structural constraints that stop certain sections getting into those positions, things ought to be done for that. If you look at FTSE 100 boards, there's a concern that females are coming on to boards, but very often in non-executive roles rather than in executive positions. That's another form of segregation that needs to be tackled. It's not just a question of balancing the numbers, but it's also a question of looking at the roles that people are undertaking when they're on those particular boards. In the construction sector, that would be a difficult target. I think that your question was about the public sector, wasn't it? There's a public sector, but of course the fact that there's a target and there's a work towards that, I'm just wondering if this will encourage the private sector to follow suit, maybe more rigorously. I certainly think that it will encourage the target itself. I know that within my own company we have 28 per cent of all technical staff are female, but at the top grades of the company that falls to 9 per cent. The targets that are set are not 50 per cent by 2020. That would probably be in most companies. I would hazard that. That might be considered an unrealistic target in the construction sector given the relative numbers. My opinion is that organic growth is the most stable. Organic ways of doing things, imposing measures and determining what measures are in position and what measures are organic is quite a key question. What is growth within the company and what is something that is seen as an imposition on the company? Elements of a company will always resist that, what they see as an imposition. Some of that comes into conscious biases. I think that it does depend on where you're starting from as well. As I understand it from the public boards consultation, I think that the public boards were sitting at over 40 per cent anyway. Reaching 50 per cent from that starting point on the face of it seems potentially achievable. It depends how often, how big the boards are and how many times vacancies come up. If you've only got a small board and you've got several years in terms of tenure, it might not physically be possible for a public board. I think that the starting point matters and certainly we've not seen the same sort of activity levels within the private sector. I do think that making those steps in the context of the public sector is really helpful because it raises the awareness and I think that's always a good thing. It will be interesting to see how many private sector firms sign up to the 5050 by 2020. That question for social care, where the majority are SMEs and many are not, don't have boards or limited companies. Given that so many SMEs originate and are managed by a woman director and are created by a group of women, there is a greater challenge to attract men into even serving in those boards and committees, which run organisations or charities. Question from John Mason. Thanks very much, convener. I was interested, Dr McCaskill, in your answers to some of the previous questions. If I understood you correctly, the issues in your being a primarily female workforce would be both societal and if there was more money it might attract more men. I suppose that I'm thinking now mainly of the societal side, how can we go about changing that and are schools part of the answer to all of this? I mean, we've got a bit of a tendency, I think, sometimes that every time we've got a problem we just ask the schools to fix it, which is a bit unfair, but do you think both on the STEM side the schools could be doing, should be doing more to encourage women down that route and on the care side should the schools be doing more to encourage guys down that route? The answer is yes, but it's not just given the proportion of time that a child spends in school compared to at home, it's not just down to education. A lot of the debate around gender pay gap and a lot of the debate around horizontal segregation hasn't really been properly informed by the psychology of discrimination and the way in which individuals develop their negative attitudinal frameworks and how early that happens. Now child psychology will teach us that a child by certainly two or three has developed a lot of the attitudinal framework with which they will journey through life. Now, if in those very early years care is seen as something which is female and nurture is an activity which is possessed by the mother rather than the father, it doesn't really matter what early year educators or indeed school educators do because those attitudes have been framed. So there is a lot which we need to do yet in education and there are good models where children are invited into care homes and to care at home companies to see the reality of what care is and that goes all the way through into secondary. But I think that there needs to be a much, much more fundamental discussion had in wider society about what are the values around care which are not suitable for a man or which are not deemed to be masculine because in the end of the day there is an increasing drive to technology enabled care and to technology to plug the gap with human absence. But if I'm dying, I don't want my hand to be held by a machine. I want a human being there. But that's only going to happen if we change our attitudes as a society. It's not just about money, it's not just about resource, though it is. But fundamentally it has to be about what value do we give to care and what price do we put on that dignity. There is a clear STEM issue. Labour markets survey 2013, 70 per cent of women with STEM qualifications are not working in a STEM related workplace. Three times as many boys as girls take up STEM qualifications depending on roughly in this country. In other countries it's different, so following on from what you're saying, there is a societal attitude to it. What the institution is trying to do, we are offering programmes to schools because we do understand that schools are resource constrained across a number of metrics. We offer STEM activity programmes where we offer going into schools, we do it in Aberdeen, we do it across Scotland, bridge building activities, one-hour activities, it ticks a curriculum for excellence and offering that. It does take financial support, which comes from within our industry, to try and encourage all pupils into STEM activity. However, there is a clear target to introduce at primary school, primary 5, 6, 7 girls in particular. We take it to a girls school in Aberdeen, for example, STEM activities, bridge building is a classic case. Dr MacAskill was arguing just now, it's very early that the kids are picking up about who cares and who's nurturing and all that kind of thing. Do you think that in your sector engineering it's actually a bit later on that youngsters are thinking about engineering for boys? I think that they make those decisions at a later date. I mean, I've been on these programmes myself. You do tend to see a difference between girls and boys who are undertaking these activities. The boys go forward. The girls at some things are a revelation to them. It's interesting to go into an all-female environment and get a completely different dynamic. Suddenly the girls all go forward together. There's almost a restriction among the classes. This is purely my personal opinion from having seen it, that girls will stand back and let the boys do it. I'm talking about primary school level. That starts to change when they get older. We have other programmes that we have targeting first and second year students. It's a disaster relief scenario. Again, it's hands-on engineering activities. Then suddenly the girls have seemed to have jumped. It's almost as though the girls who have decided that they will be engineers and it didn't seem to be quite a small percentage, I'm sorry to say, are pushing themselves forward to do it and get their hands on what we're offering them. My personal observation is that, at primary school level, it's almost like an acceptance that boys will do this and the girls won't. If you can get an all-girl class doing it, it's a completely different dynamic. How do we tackle that then? Do we change the teachers as a part of teacher training? It's part of teacher training. When you approach a school and I've done it, our engineering graduates and students do it, if you're lucky you'll get a teacher who's engaged with STEM activities. It tends to be the engineering sciences department, for example. Sometimes it may be a geography teacher or something like that. If you have a teacher who's open and willing to it, the whole school will take it up. We've seen it. Unfortunately, when that teacher moves from that school, as I've seen it happen at an academy in Aberdeen, the school stopped doing it, but the school that she moved to took it up and they took it up until she moved school from there and there. It's almost like there's tiny wastes in the desert of teachers who are willing to engage and take it on. That's very helpful, thank you. Questions from Richard Leonard. Thanks, convener. I've got a very specific one for Val Duggan in connection with the Law Society Scotland submission and then a more general one about procurement and outsourcing. There's a section in the submission of Val Duggan's contributory factors to litigation and you list from A to L a whole number of reasons why you think there has been an awful lot of litigation around equal pay, especially in local government and arising as you see it from the single status agreement. I actually thought that would be in the interest of your members to have lots of litigation, but nonetheless you seem to take a view of it. Under section K of your list, you point to what you describe as the failure of local authorities to outsource to genuine third parties pursuant to standard procurement processes rather than to external arms length organisations, arms length external organisations, allios, where the council retained an ownership or controlling stake or share. Am I right in thinking, though, that because these workers were outsourced to an allio, it then became possible for them to pursue equal pay claims because a court of session ruling deemed that the women working in allios would be allowed to compare themselves with men working directly for the council, in that case Glasgow City Council. Whereas had they been outsourced to genuine third parties, as you describe it, there certainly wouldn't have had any remedy in the law under the Equal Pay Act. I should say that I obviously didn't write that submission. Somebody else did. I'm obviously aware of the issues about equal pay in the public sector, but my role here today was more to talk about the legal profession and the gender pay gap within the legal profession. I'm quite happy to take any points away about the public sector and single status, but that's not really something that the society has a firm view on. I can obviously speak to the person who wrote that part of the report, because that wasn't me. We've found from some of the evidence that we've been given that outsourcing appears to be something that drives the gender pay gap even wider than otherwise it might have been because there had not been a remedy through the Equal Pay Act to address it. I think that what you can definitely say is that the Equal Pay Act and going into the Equality Act has been a very ineffective means of trying to drive equal pay. I don't think that anybody is going to disagree with that. The individual reactive legislation has not made a great deal of difference. One of the major problems around gender pay is that people conflate it with Equal Pay, and the two are completely distinct terms. One of the reasons why people in the past have been reluctant to understand what their gender pay gap has been is because of potential exposure to equal pay claims. I think that if there is one thing that we can do in terms of this committee and the work that comes out is the distinction between equal pay and gender pay and that people will be a lot more willing to tackle their gender pay because gender pay is so much more than pay. It's about the distribution, as we've heard. It's about occupational segregation. It has an element of pay discrimination within it, but it's so much more than that. If we can start to have a more informed debate about what equal pay is and what gender pay is, I think that it's better for pushing forward gender pay because people will stop being worried about this potential threat of equal pay and potential litigation. Equal pay in the private sector is few and far between. We saw a lot within the public sector in relation to single status and the second wave of claims, but that's finishing now. We've only seen a little bit in relation to the private sector coming out of the supermarket cases in Asda. There is a little that is still there, but things like tribunal fees have had a massive impact on litigation. I'm not sure if I can talk about particularities of almost, but I can certainly give a view on the distinction between gender pay and equal pay. Can I just probe with one supplementary? I do appreciate the difference between the gender pay gap and equal pay. Do you think that there is therefore not really a problem of equal pay in the private sector just because we've seen this mountain of cases in the public sector and very few in the private sector? Does that mean that the private sector has got it about right and the public sector has got it woefully wrong, or is it just that the torch hasn't been shined on the private sector sufficiently? I don't think that we know as a position. In the private sector, there is no transparency in terms of pay scales, so people do not know what their colleagues are earning. It's a completely different mindset. I think that when you speak to anybody that works within the public sector, they always find that quite strange because they always know in terms of gradings and scales. The fact that you can work in a private sector organisation, you have absolutely no awareness of what your colleagues earn. Previously, you had the ability to submit an equal pay questionnaire. Those aspects of the legislation have been pulled back, so you can't do that anymore. There are difficulties around that. There is a real cultural reticence about asking about pay. Although the Equality Act changed the legislation to say that you are no longer able to prohibit pay discussions, the removal of pay transparency, we just don't know what the issue is in the private sector. Possibly one of the things coming out of the gender pay gap reporting will be firms looking at what their pay gap is and drilling down to say, why do I have this gap and what does that mean? I think that they will really only start to understand that if they start to go beyond the statutory metrics and start to look at it at grade level, because I think that it's only really once you start to drill down at grade level that you start to understand what the distribution of your workforce is. That's potentially one of the limitations of the regulations. Drilling down to grade level is absolutely key. What that does is highlight if there's any difference within an organisation. Within accountancy, I don't think that you would find that many differences within an organisation in the sense of, for example, if you had a male and a female who both got a training contract with EY, for example, I'm absolutely sure that they would be paid the same rate. One of the things that I found quite surprising in some research that I've been involved in, which is reported in the written submission that I've made, is that what you can find within accountancy at the newly qualified level, which is a very early level where you wouldn't really have expected much in the way of a gender pay gap, is that there is a gender pay gap roughly of the order of 11 per cent, but that's not within individual firms. Within the firm, a male and a female will be getting the same. What we found when we drilled down into that data was that people who were working for small and medium-sized employers were getting less than people who were being employed by big four accountancy practices. That is not unusual in itself, but the reason for the gap is that more females were employed by small and medium-sized firms. The issue was occurring not within an organisation but across organisations. If there's a tendency for females to get traineeships with small and medium-sized firms and slightly more of a percentage of males going to the big four firms, that's going to exacerbate a gap simply because there's something at the recruitment stage that people are getting some jobs as opposed to other ones. I have to say that that was a very unusual finding. I was really surprised by that. I didn't expect it at all, but it's only when you are able to then compare one organisation with another that you start to see that coming out. That's not something that's going to be terribly easy to do, even with the new transparency that's going to be coming in. I'm anticipating maybe the question about procurement. Social care procurement obviously has its own statutory guidance, and that's a human rights-based set of principles, personalisation and involvement engagement. What we've seen in social care is a direct impact by the inability to implement that statutory guidance, which has led to increased negative terms and conditions in the non-statutory sector. One day, a local authority celebrates itself as the Scottish living wage employer, and two days later seeks to enter into a contract with a charity providing home care, which makes it impossible for that organisation to pay its workers the Scottish living wage. As somebody who sits on the Fair Work Commission subgroup on social care, there is a profound issue about the hypocrisy of publicly stating your Scottish living wage fair work employer and commissioning and procuring a third party, be it charitable or for profit, in a manner that prevents them from ensuring that they are able to diminish gender segregation and occupation segregation. I think that we've run out of time, I'm afraid, but thank you to all of you for coming in today and for your contributions, and I'll suspend the meeting now and move into private session.