 Welcome to the 8th meeting of the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work Committee. May I remind everyone to turn off any electrical devices that may interfere with the sound systems and otherwise to turn to silent? Today, we welcome three witnesses. Anna Ritchie, Alan project manager, closed the gap. Emma Ritchie, executive director of engender and Chris Oswald, who is the head of policy and communications equality and human rights commission for Scotland, being introduced in no particular order. May I ask members to keep their questions succinct and also if the witnesses could try to keep their answers focused in the limited time that we have? Also, witnesses may not wish to answer every question and if they do wish to come in, I would ask them simply to raise their hands so that I can bring them in. No need to worry about the microphones, they are dealt with by the sound desk. If I might start with a fairly general question, we are here about what is called the gender pay gap and I thought it might be useful to ask each of you how that looks in your own organisations. I do not know who would like to start responding to that. Chris Oswald, perhaps? I must admit that I had not anticipated that question and I had not prepared for it. We do have, from memory, a gender pay gap. I think that it is about six or seven per cent. I can come back and give you the exact figures and correspondence. We do have the data. I was not anticipating that question. That would be helpful. If questions are asked and any of you wish to come back to the committee in writing on particular matters, if you want to bring back the detail to us, please feel free to do that. Indeed, the committee may write to clarify certain matters later. Annie Ritchie Arlan? We just have women in our organisation. Right. Emma Ritchie? The same. Women tend to be the majority of the workers working on the issue of gender inequality, so we have a pay gap of zero because we have no men working for gender. I see. Are there similar organisations addressing the issue from a man's point of view who likewise only have men working for them? Not that I'm aware of. I think men into childcare. Organisations and initiatives that work on the issue underpinning the pay gap absolutely would tend to employ men. Men into care initiatives, there's a men into childcare organisation in Scotland. I think the Allen Plus initiative, which was funded through European funding, employed men to do that work. Fathers Network Scotland, I think they solely employ men. As do other organisations, working around men and gender, abused men in Scotland spring to mind as a male only employer. Okay. Well, this is perhaps not the expected or the best first question, so we'll move on to other questions now. Dean Lockhart? Thank you, convener, and good morning to our guests and thanks very much for coming in. I just wanted to start with a sort of definitional question. When we talk about pay, I would like to get your understanding or further my understanding of what do we mean by pay. Is it basic earnings or does it include other things such as overtime and possibly bonus so that, perhaps, that's a good place to start so that by comparing pay in some sectors or between genders, we're comparing like by like, so I'd perhaps like to get each of our guests' view on that question, please. It depends on what context you're talking about. In terms of overtime, when you're calculating the gender pay gap, the public sector equality duty, for example, which requires listed public authorities to publish their pay gap, requires that that is calculated on average hourly earnings excluding overtime. In the context of equal pay legislations, if you were taking an equal pay case, a claim, that would look at pay in the broadest sense. It includes all elements of pay, such as pension, overtime entitlements and basic pay. Perhaps, just going back on that, depending on which definition you use, do you therefore come up with a different level of gap depending on which criteria you use to define pay? The calculation that you use to calculate the pay gap, if you use different formulations, if you use the mean, for example, or the median, is that what you're hinting at there? Yes. Okay, so there is no consensus on whether to use the mean or the median. The argument for the median is that, in general statistics terms, its acknowledges being more robust because it excludes the outliers, so the very low, for example, the very low earners and the very high earners, but close the gap, for example, gives preference to the mean because the pay gap itself is gendered by its nature. Therefore, if you exclude the very lowest earners and the very highest earners, those particular earners are the crux of the problem because men are overrepresented among the highest earners and the lowest earners are overwhelmingly likely to be female. Thank you. That's helpful, sorry, convener. Yes, I think that Chris Hoss will have wanted to. I think that it just underlines some of the complexity and the differences between pay gaps and equal pay. A number of equal pay cases will rest on issues about who gets bonuses and to what extent, who gets overtime and to what extent. Again, I suggested that that can be very gendered. We did work a few years back looking at the financial sector. What we saw was pay being affected by occupational segregation, where women were being channeled into or were perceived as being lower risk areas of activity, perhaps around insurance. Men were in the boiler house end of the organisation and were attracting higher bonuses as a result of that, the value that was ascribed to the type of work that was being done. In an individual basis, making those type of comparisons, you can see quite stark differences. Equally, if you look across the average, you get a different type of result, but overwhelmingly, it's a gendered environment that we're working in. Thank you. For the purpose of today's discussion, we will be assuming that we're working on the mean figure. Would that be a fair assumption in terms of—if we look at the 15.6 per cent pay gap in Scotland, is that based on the mean calculation? The 15 per cent is based on the mean calculation and includes the overall figure, so it includes full-time and part-time workers, which is an important point because some organisations will default to the full-time pay gap. However, the problem with that is that it excludes just under half of working women, so 42 per cent of women work part-time. If you look only at the full-time figure, which is lower because part-time pay is on the whole lower, you exclude the experiences of those women in the pay gap. Just to find a question on that. In looking at the pay gap in this context, is that how other countries do it just so that we have a good idea in terms of international comparators? We have evidence showing pay gaps in Scotland compared to other countries, so it would be good to know that we're comparing like with like. The mean is the global standard, so it affords comparison internationally. Bill Bowman. Just to follow up on Dean Lockhart in the sense that he was talking about the principles of the calculation, are the panel members confident that there are a definitive set of statistics on pay, earnings and employment for women that all those calculations can be taken from? The figures produced by the Office of National Statistics come from the annual survey for hours and earnings, which is based on employer survey data. Employers are asked to provide information on pay about their designated employees. The challenge with the annual survey for hours and earnings is while it provides a fairly accurate reflection of the gender pay gap, it doesn't capture other protected characteristic information. We have to look at the intersection of gender and, for instance, race and disability. Other characteristics need to rely on the slightly more inaccurate labour force survey, which does gather that information about protected characteristics, but is based on surveys administered to individuals about their own recollections of pay, which is therefore understood to be more inaccurate than the information that is drawn from payroll systems provided by employers. That is one weakness with the current annual survey for hours and earnings that engender would identify. Anna Ritchie-Allan. Just to add to that, it is patchy overall and it is more likely to get data that is produced regularly at the UK level rather than at regional, i.e. Scotland level. In particular, there are gaps around skills under employment, whereby women's under employment entails their skills and qualifications as a significant problem because so many women find themselves having to reduce their hours to undertake caring responsibilities. However, because part-time work is concentrated in lower paid undervalued jobs, many women are working below their skill level. The problem with that is that there are not official statistics gathered on skills under employment, but we know that many women are working below their skill level, so that is a significant gap. I agree with what Emma said about intersectional data. That is a particular problem. Lastly, we are looking at the public sector equality duty, which falls across about 250 public bodies in Scotland and requires them to produce annual data on pay gaps. What we have observed in looking at that is that there can be a wild variation inside a sector, which is to do with how individual bodies have chosen to calculate the gap, who they exclude and who they include. Anna, myself and Emma have all been working on with the Scottish Government to try and get agreement on how that should be done, but I think that sometimes the variations can be explained by the method. At the moment, there is no definitive set. Is that the conclusion? I think that it would be really helpful to ask even just one person from the panel to explain to the committee what you define the gender pay gap as being. I think that that is something that we need to get out there on the record to avoid any confusion about what it is and what it is not. The definition of the gender pay gap is essentially the difference in pay between men and women, so look at all men compared with all men. As I mentioned, you measure that by comparing the average hourly pay of each in terms of the causes. Is that also what you were? Yes, not in terms of the term of a woman's career path and the issues around achievement and destination in terms of women as opposed to men in various sectors. There is a common misconception that the gender pay gap relates only to pay discrimination, which is exacerbated by stories that we see in the press about the gender pay gap, but there are a number of interrelated complex factors that contribute towards the gender pay gap. Occupational segregation is a cradle to the labour market problem. We know that gender norms and stereotyping about girls and boys' interests and capabilities result in them eventually studying different subjects at school in further and higher education in modern apprenticeships. That becomes further entrenched until you reach the labour market and we see women concentrated in low-paid, undervalued jobs in sectors such as care, admin, retail and cleaning, and men far more likely to be in more technical positions and also at senior management level. Women still have the disproportionate burden of care for children and for older people, sick people, disabled people. Because there is a lack of flexible working overall, it is difficult to balance work and family life. Many women then have to take a part-time job, but the only part-time jobs that tend to be available are in the low-paid, undervalued sectors. The impact of working part-time on your career longer term has a long-term scarring effect on your pay, on your promotion prospects and, ultimately, on your pension contributions. Then you come to the pay discrimination element, which is often not deliberate and instead is based on the design of paying grading systems that are the way that they consider the different jobs that men and women do and the different skills that many women have to do, which often result in women being paid less for equal work. It is an economic issue as well. I would be interested to know what you all think about the effect that it would have on the Scottish economy if we were to close the gender pay gap. Cllyw of the Gap has done some great work on that. There have been efforts made over the years to calculate the return to economies that could be realised if we just removed the barriers to women's labour market participation fully. Cllyw of the Gap has estimated a return to the Scottish economy of £17.2 billion. That would be the result of resolving this question of allocative inefficiency. At the moment, we have people working out of their skillsets. We have women being significantly underemployed. We have girls not pursuing their preferences in education, and they are often because of socially constructed ideas about what girls, boys, men and women should be doing. All of that comes at a significant cost to the Scottish economy. I think that there is a pre-conception by businesses that address the issue that it is going to be problematic. I have heard that it is the case that the companies and organisations that are addressing things around the gender pay gap perform well in terms of productivity. Has that been your experience? Chris Halls, what one? Yes, I think that there is evidence to show that. If I could perhaps just go back a step, and one of the things that I think is instructive is to look at the narrowing of the gender pay gap over time in Britain also as in Scotland. A lot of people would argue and I would very much agree with this that the narrowing of the gap has got more to do with the reduction in men's pay than it has to do with increasing women's pay or women particularly penetrating into other areas of the economy where they are better paid. It is a volatile statistic. Sometimes it is not as obvious as saying that the gender pay gap is narrowed, so that is a good thing. It is narrowed because men's earnings have come down and women's earnings have not risen as a result of that. I would also say that there is a product of segregation and of other aspects of the economy that is as applicable to disabled people and to some minority groups as well. It is about the extent to which they work, whether they do or themselves are valued quite crudely in this situation. If we are talking about a drag in the economy, then what we have is a drag under utilisation of skills and that by maximising people's participation in the labour market at their highest possible level, that is the benefit that we see to the economy. As much as we are measuring it in pounds and pence, it is about people being able to advance and reach their full potential and what Scotland is missing as a result of not being able to do that or achieve that. There is a lot of evidence around the business case where businesses that have taken steps to advance gender equality and who treat their workforce or have firm, flexible workforce policies are more likely to see improved morale among the workforce, higher productivity. We also know that, when there is gender balance, particularly on senior management teams, that is likely to lead to greater levels of creativity and innovation. You are more likely to design products and services that are beneficial everywhere because men and women bring different experiences to the table. When it comes to designing those products and services, businesses and public sector organisations are more likely to be designing services and goods that meet the needs of a wider client or customer base. It might be helpful if you were able to write into the committee with reference to particular studies or reports that have been done into the area, particularly in Scotland, because there may not be as much for a small country like Scotland, but anything that you are able to feed into that, which you referred to as evidence, that would be very helpful. I will move on to Andy Wightman. Chris Olds has already touched on the question of the pay gap in Scotland vis-à-vis the UK and perhaps one reason for that, but does the panel want to reflect on why the pay gap is lower in Scotland? It is not a great deal—it is lower, 15.6 per cent compared to 18.1 per cent. What has the trend been historically for that difference? It is really hard to model pay gaps. It seems like it should be something that is relatively easy to answer. What proportion of the pay gap is attributable to what set of factors? There has not been up until now any modelling of the pay gap in Scotland, although close the gap has commissioned some and that work is under way, which I think is extremely helpful. When we look at decompositions done by Willoughby and Olson for the Equal Opportunities Commission and the EHRC, we see that there is quite a lot of unexplained chunk of the pay gap still. I hope that the work in Scotland will lift the veil on some of the things that we do not understand. Widely speculated on is the notion that it is because of the city of London. We know that the financial services sector has one of the largest pay gaps that usually sits just behind manufacturing in the size of gap. It is especially large in those sectors of the financial services sector in which large bonuses are paid and in which bonuses represent a significant proportion of salary. Many of those types of roles are found within the city of London. The shorthand explanation is that the city skews the rest of UK pay gap and particularly the pay gap is wider in London. That is the best intelligence that we have at the moment. You mentioned the city of London. Is there good data on regional pay gap variations across Scotland or are we getting to a smaller level with the statistics that we have available? I mean it is a difficulty with regionalisation and because of the way the annual survey for hours and earnings works, the smaller region you are trying to describe, the more difficult that becomes and the less robust the figures are. There are other kinds of pay surveys that have pitched out throughout the year which attempt to answer some of these questions but they are not based on the rigorous methodology of the annual survey for hours and earnings and so I would treat them with caution. You occasionally see figures decomposed for local authority areas and for other sub-national geographical areas but I would treat those with extreme caution. It is possible to look at the factors underpinning the pay gap and to take a view on, for instance, if you know that a local authority area has an extremely large proportion of jobs in say farming and tourism, you could take a view on what impact that is likely to have on the pay gap but in terms of hard figures they become increasingly shaky as you look at smaller regional areas. Getting back to my original question about the pay gap vis-à-vis Scotland in the UK, what has been the trend over time with regard to the pay gap? Narrowing in terms of the full-time pay gap but not much movement overall. In terms of the variation between Scotland and the UK? Remaining roughly the same. I would note, as other colleagues have said, that the pay gap is a very top line and a very lagging indicator of what happens within the whole of the labour market and so is affected by a lot of trends. Particularly recent narrowing could more fairly be attributed to men's precarious low-paid, underemployed work, more than any underlying effects in terms of women's labour market participation. How far back can we go and get reliable statistics on the pay gap? At least 20-ish years but the measure has changed over time so there has been a move within the United Kingdom between the median and the mean and between the presentation of full-time and part-time. It is possible to dig back into those figures but the official ONS statement has changed its methodology during that time. Just as an illustration and again this issue about the narrowing of the pay gap, what we saw post the 2008 recession was that men were displacing women in what you might describe as traditionally female occupations in terms of care or things like that. Women were not displacing men in traditionally male areas so we still see areas like construction, manufacturing, where there is a male dominance. Again, the figures themselves are influenced by other factors. I think that Emma touched on some of the challenges with looking only at headline pay gap figures. The challenges in particular are that businesses and policy makers do not look below that headline figure because, for example, you could have an organisation that has a 0 per cent pay gap but yet you still see stark segregation in all the women clustered in the lower grades and all the men clustered in the higher grades. It is important to see what are the causes of the pay gap, where are the gaps across the organisation and where are men and women distributed across the workforce. Gil Paterson wanted to come with a short supplementary and Richard Leonard. On that point, when you see these clusters, is there something with regard to time serve, knowing that women maybe have babies, take time off, maybe wait until child goes to primary school, so that is another gap? Therefore, if a business or a company has a policy of rewarding for people who have stayed with them, does that come into play there? I think that sometimes it does come into play when it should not come into play. There are cultural presumptions around women having primary responsibility for childcare and for long-term care and that undoubtedly severely impacts on their ability to progress within the organisation and to re-enter the labour market if they have a career break for caring reasons or any other reasons. I think that there are a lot of assumptions made by employers about women and whether they are not going to have children and how they are perceived to be less committed to an organisation if they are not able to be present at their desk for long hours. Many employers will wrongly equate presenteeism with commitment to an organisation. There are a number of different factors. There are some quite discriminatory practices undertaken by employers about assumptions about women and men's lives. If I could perhaps just come back to the situation that I described earlier about the financial sector where we saw really quite stark occupational segregation about women being placed into particular lower risk and therefore lower bonus-attracting types of work and a perception that men were better placed in the kind of boiler room part of the economy, the risky part, which links to things like presenteeism, long hours and so a bias in the way that the organisation perceives itself and how it values its staff and the roles that it then ascribes beyond that. I have a quick follow-up on that. Certain jobs now do not require physical presence because of the internet, so there is possibly more opportunity for people who cannot have that physical presence at a workplace because they can do remote working now. Is that helpful in this area or have you seen much evidence of that? I think that there are definite opportunities and we do see the take-up of flexible working increasing, but there is still a big mismatch between the number of people who want to work on a flexible basis and the availability of flexible working in that there is just not the demand there. We still see cultural presumption against flexible working in some organisations where we know that businesses that operate flexible or agile working are more productive when employees are able to work in a way that suits their lives. I take it that you would accept some jobs though require someone to actually physically be present. Sorry, Emma Rich. I was just going to comment on the procurement of IT systems that may or may not enable home working and something that I have seen in working with large private sectors around the question of what barriers there are in place to women's progression. That has been identified as a factor that is often not considered when the procurement of IT systems are happening and so it would be possible for workers to work from home to work flexibly and potentially to meet business needs by being available to clients through a greater proportion of the 24-hour global working cycle that some enterprises are involved with, but actually during the procurement of IT systems the question of home working, the question of how that might advance gender equality, wasn't taken into account and so there was no reason for it but it just hasn't been included in what the company has decided to do in terms of its IT solutions. I think that it does speak to the need to meet for companies to be taking a kind of gender mainstreaming approach to systems procurement, which I think is not in evidence across all enterprises in Scotland. Chris Huzzle would want to come in and then welcome to Richard Leonard. Perhaps a positive example of that is some of the work that BT have done where they have quite a large home working employment group, which benefits women, it benefits parents with young children, whoever is looking after the young child, it potentially benefits disabled people as well. There are strong economic reasons but it needs to be a conscious decision to do this rather than a consequence of something that has been arrived at. The investment in IT to be able to work from home but also accessible IT, which disabled people can use. We have very high levels of unemployment amongst people with sensory impairments. If we have proper IT systems, people will be enabled to work from home equally just in terms of the economic exclusion of disabled people. The reason why something unable to work could be to do with their transport. Again, it is not anything to do with their skills, it is the fact that they cannot physically get to an office, so home working is a very attractive option if the infrastructure is there to support them. In 30 days' time exactly, new gender pay gap reporting legislation will be enacted. Do you think that it will make any difference? It is a welcome first step in the right direction. It is something that we have been looking to see for a while. From April, large private and third sector organisations in the UK will be required to report on their gender pay gap and their gender gap in bonus earnings. It is welcome because at least it brings private and third sector organisations larger ones in line with the accountability that we see in Scotland's public sector. The main flaw in the regulations is that there is no requirement in employers to take any action to address any pay gaps. You can publish your pay gap and that is it. There are concerns about compliance and enforcement, which Chris Scott might want to pass a comment on, but the proof will definitely be in the pudding. Certainly, one of our concerns is that, as we are planning to close the gap, what work will undertake to assess Scottish companies who are required under the legislation is that, at present, the database of employers that is available, you cannot search for Scottish companies within it, so it makes it difficult to identify who exactly is required to report. I would very much agree with that. I think that there is also an issue about the model of change that is being employed that, if you believe that transparency in itself will result in organisations changing their behaviour, one of the fears is that if a fine system or even a name and shame system is put in place, is that going to be effective, particularly if we are talking about relatively low levels of fines? There is still some uncertainty at the moment. I have to say about the enforcement of the new regulations coming in. Obviously, a large number of companies are suddenly coming in to the area and there is an issue for the commission in terms of our ability, frankly, to be able to monitor an extra one and a half thousand companies in Scotland. Seven or eight thousand, I think, is across Britain. It is a huge area. I would love to believe that transparency in itself would work in that situation, but I do not see a lot of other examples of that. I think that it is instructive to look at the low pay commissions work in this area, where, again, they have been quite rigorously identifying cases and bringing companies to account, rather than relying on the companies to disclose themselves. Given some of the difficulties that we have already identified about how the calculation is made, how quickly we will get to a point where we are confident that the figures are reflective of what is happening inside companies is, again, an issue that will take some time to bed in? What I would say is that the regulations are much clearer than the Scottish specific duties about how to calculate the pay gap, which is really helpful. However, our experience of attending employer briefings that are organised by lawyers is that there is already widespread tuition, shall I say, on how to see loopholes in that you can divide your company up so that your partners are not included in the gender pay gap figure and segment your workforce so that your pay gap is lower? I will bring Ash. I mean, reflecting on your experience and you have all mentioned that in previous answers, reflecting on your experience with the public sector duty, is there evidence that that has made any difference whatsoever that they have to annually report that equal pay information has the gap closed in the public sector in the last six years? The assessment work that closed the gap has done, so we have done two assessments. We are just approaching the final reporting period of the first four years of the public sector equality duty. We have done assessment of the first reporting in 2013 and a follow-up in 2015. I think that we were being quite disappointed about performance, which has been over the board quite poor. We have seen an actual regression in performance. Two thirds of the organisations that we assessed achieved a lower score in 2015 than they did in 2013. That already was poorer performance than what we have seen under the gender equality duty. I think that there is a sense from organisations that work on gender, such as Ingender and Scottish Women's Aid, who also do some work on the public sector equality duty and the EHRC, that we need to see some concerted efforts to increase compliance across the public sector. The other thing to point out is that we are 30 days away from the end of the first cycle of the public sector duties. The commission will be doing a very in-depth assessment of what the impacts of that are, which we suspect should be available in August, September. It is possibly too early to judge at this point, but I very much agree with Anna's observations that it is taking time for this to bed in. We will get the first indication of the first four-year cycle in about 30 days' time, but we need to be conscious of the real value of the duty. It makes organisations conscious of what is going on inside their organisation, which previously might not have been. It also requires them to do something about it. What do they do about it is as interesting. When we are looking at the data that we will be gathering from the start of next month, it will be very much less perhaps about how has the pay gap narrowed, but what have you done, how conscious is the organisation, and how has pay gap thinking influenced its approach to policy, to recruitment, to other areas of the activity? Occupational segregation has been touched on by most of the panel already this morning as a factor in this. Chris, you mentioned women being funneled into certain roles. Anna, you spoke about this starting quite early with girls choosing certain subjects at school, so I suppose maybe avoiding maybe math, science and computing, those types of subjects in preference for other things. I am just wondering, is there any evidence that that is changing? It is a long time since I made my choices, say 30 years ago I was choosing what subjects to study. Have things improved in the past 30 years? No. Probably one of the key challenges is the lack of gender mainstreaming across the education and skills system in particular. Solutions that we have seen so far in the form of myriad interventions about, for example, getting more girls and women into STEM subjects, which are laudable, of course. They tend to evaluate very well, but the problem is that they affect just a very small number of girls and women. They are usually quite intensive, they take a lot of resources, and you might end up with a smallish number of young women going on to study engineering, but they are very expensive, so they are difficult to scale up. What organisations working to advance gender equality advocate is gender mainstreaming, which is a requirement of the public sector quality duty, but overall we do not see that at all. What we need to see is that every primary secondary school, every early years provider needs to consider gender segregation and then also in further and higher education to consider how every single policy that they have can work to reduce gender segregation and therefore occupational segregation, and we are so far from that just now. Just as an indicator of the intransigence of this problem, New York University put out a study this week that said that girls as young as six believe that brilliance is a male trait and that that has a projected impact on their participation in school and then, as Anna says, progression on through some of these coded male subjects, science, technology, engineering and maths. We have been talking to the Equality and Human Rights Committee about the issue of sexualised bullying in schools, which has a very clear link with girls' participation in the classroom and thereafter. 25 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds told Girlguiding UK in 2015 that sexual harassment stops them speaking out in class. There is an enormous challenge to tackle some of the toxic environments in which we are expecting girls and young women to learn. We would also want to see some of that bringing forward of the age of interventions into some of Scotland's policy spaces, taking a mainstreaming approach, as Anna outlined. Developing Young Workforce, for example, focuses the gender equality actions within it, which are enormously welcome on the modern apprenticeship programme, which has long been totemic for gender advocates. That is helpful, but also on higher and further education. That is simply too late. If we are not in this in early years and beforehand, then we are missing vital opportunities to take a gendered approach to education. I was going to ask as well, because we have spoken about this before, and we were talking about biological sciences. Even if women are studying these academic subjects and they are graduating, often with very high marks, and they go into that sector, there are very few of them to be found about 10 years later. Can you explain what the workplace factors are there? I think that within a lot of sciences there is held to be something called a leaky pipeline. You have girls achieving at school and university. It is widely reported that girls are achieving more qualifications, although in different subject areas. Those are non-traditional areas. The hard sciences tend to detach at each stage in larger numbers than their male colleagues. They disappear through further degrees into PhDs and postdoctoral research, and there are very few in far between in professorial and also commercial science roles. There are libraries full of information about why that should be. The academic environment can be quite challenging for women in terms of, as Gil Paterson talked about, combining that with having children. Your assessment of research output and the whole approach of doing that does not sit very well with maternity leave. Women's research contributions are often not counted. A system in which somebody has to be identified as a principal investigator on a large piece of research is often not given to women because you cannot change the principal investigator in some research council-funded work. The risk of women having children is seen to be too much. There are a wide range of other factors in hospitality of working environments. All of those factors together, systemic and cultural, combine to make science not the warm and welcoming place to women that it should be. That is a problem for all of us because, as Anna described, diversity of thinking around the table leads to diversity of ideas and diversity of products and services and innovation. I wonder what scientific discoveries Scotland has foregone because we have not yet got a grip of this issue. John Mason. John Mason, I think that it is particularly evident when you look at the key sectors of the Scottish economy that are identified by the Scottish Government and the potential opportunity there through putting some conditions around economic development, aid or procurement that we could actually start to push the issue. It is depressing to look at areas such as life sciences, biopharma and perhaps alternative energy, which, potentially as new industries, you would hope might have new thinking but have a tendency to aid some of the worst aspects of the traditional economies. We are in a programme at the moment of building 50,000 new affordable houses in Scotland, 17 per cent of the construction industry as jobs are with women. There are real opportunities to increase the benefit, the pull of labour and the economic benefit of significant investment. It is not no one thing is going to resolve this. If there were a magic bullet, we would have found it many years ago. However, it is a co-ordinated set of action, and I think that seeing things like procurement and economic development aid having conditions around equality, as we are seeing around social deprivation and inclusion of people, there to see that thinking expanded to gender, to race, to disability would be extremely welcome. John Mason. Thanks, convener. Following on, the same kind of themes. I get the impression sometimes that the schools are doing their best and the schools have got the children for six or seven hours a day, but the families can be very resistant to a girl studying physics or going into engineering, and they have got the kid for 16 hours a day, so the family wins. How can we change that if it is a kind of cultural or background bias or whatever we want to call it? I suppose that I would push back slightly on the idea that the schools are doing the best because they are not, frankly. However, I take on board your point about parental influence, because we know that Close the Gap has a workstream that works with children and young people to try to address gender segregation called Be What You Want, and we have done some work in schools and with teachers and with careers advisers. Confirming what we knew is that children are influenced by the world around them, so it does not just come down to say parents, for example, but parents are massively influential in children's lives, but so are their peers, teachers and careers advisers can be, given that they only have a limited time spent with children. Children are also massively influenced by the world around them, so the media sends very clear messages to children and young people about what girls and boys position in the world should be and what their interests and their skills are. However, engaging with parents is a tough nut to crack. If you look at Sweden or Scandinavia, there are better role models for young women there, because in those countries there has been a conscious investment in childcare, so it makes it possible for women to go into the labour market. Again, it is about stretching what seems to be possible in that terms of aspiration. I was just going to note that Sweden also has cracked the tough nut of boys' achievement in education by taking a gendered approach right from early years through to education, which looks at the question of segregation and masculinity and good classroom conduct, literacy and a whole range of other things that we think might be behind boys' relative underperformance in schools. It might be helpful for the committee to note the evidence that exists that suggests that tackling gender, taking a gendered approach all the way through the educational pathway, is good for boys and good for girls and ultimately may lead some years hence to producing young people and then workers who have less stereotypical assumptions about what boys and girls meant a woman should be. Can I just ask you what you mean? I am not an expert in all this gendered approach. What exactly does that mean? They have essentially looked at pedagogy within the classroom, how things are taught, what content of books is, what content of lessons is and tried to remove the unwitting sometimes gendered messages that that sends. For example, the Educational Institute of Scotland did some research over a decade ago looking at children's books and what they said about the roles of girls and boys within them. They discovered a preponderance of princesses, ballet dancers who were female and the boys and men within the children's books were pirates, spacemen, adventurers, had a wide range of doctors, had a wide range of roles and sadly we see that kind of unwitting gendered messaging still occurring in children's literature today. In Sweden they took for example an effort to try and remove some of that to provide balance in the books they read, children, to consider the ways that teachers and educators spoke to the young people about their future prospects and that has made a significant difference in how the children behave in the classroom, how they learnt and also the outcomes for those children and young people. We are just running a bit short on time so I want to move on to a question from Gordon MacDonald if that is all right, Deputy convener. Thank you very much, convener. The point that was touched on earlier, there was a report in 2016 by the TUC that suggested that in the UK by the age of 42 mothers who are in full-time work are earning 11% less than full-time women without children. Now, how do you close that gap? Because presumably that gap exists because the women that have chosen not to have children are being awarded for their experience or for their continued professional development, their investment in time and that. How do you close the gap with those two issues? I was looking at it from the other aspect. It is about not penalising women who do choose to have children and who go on maternity leave and also looking at the cultural presumptions about who takes care of children on leave. There have been some tentative steps in the implementation of shared parental leave and an attempt to try to rebalance the caring responsibilities with very limited success for a number of different reasons, which is probably part of another discussion. Supporting—in fact, Chris will have something to say about this—the HRC has done work on pregnancy and maternity discrimination, which is the crux of the issue here. I think that quite simply, it is fascinating that men do not have the same economic penalty through having children as women do. There is something really stark in that. On pregnancy, we have been doing a lot of work on pregnancy discrimination. Our research, which has been updated from 10 years ago, demonstrates an increase in pregnancy discrimination. About 5,500 women a year in Scotland, we believe, are losing their jobs either directly or being feeling pushed out simply because of pregnancy and maternity issues. It has thrown up a lot of issues about good practice, but there are a lot of issues about confusion amongst employers. To be fair, the vast majority of employers in Scotland appear to be doing the right thing. There is about 20 per cent of employers where we have a particular concern, and it is two different groups. Again, it is how these things fall. Younger women, often in unskilled or unionised and casual employment, are being sacked when they say that they are pregnant. Older women, in more professional situations, are being passed over for promotion, not getting training, not having the same sort of investment. Again, it is these perceptions inside industry of value and worth and commitment. You come back to the fundamental point, men simply do not face the same penalty that women do through having families. You have rightly identified that women carry out most of the childcare, but looking at the PEWC women and work index that just came out last month, it looks at the top three countries, Iceland, Sweden and Norway, and there are less females in part of the workforce in Scotland than those three countries. More stark than that is that women in full-time employment are a proportion of all females in employment. In Scotland, 58 per cent, in Iceland, 76 per cent, in Sweden, 82 per cent and in Norway, 72 per cent. Is there a cultural issue here that we are missing? Emma Ritch has wanted to come in on that. I think that that point is well made. There is not a cultural question, I think that there is a systemic issue of where those nations have invested and what they have done is they have invested in childcare. We have a presumption, I think, in the UK that the way we have organised our economy is almost inevitable and we have a 1.5 breadwinner model within our families, essentially, where it is most usual, although not universal, that we have a male full-time worker and a female part-time worker. I absolutely agree that maternity discrimination is a big deal, but I think that a lot of that 11 per cent will be because we simply do not have part-time work available at the same level of skill and therefore pay as we have full-time work. In the three countries that you have listed, they do not have a 1.5 breadwinner model within their families. It is vanishingly unlikely that anybody works part-time unless they are either a student or they are tapering their employment on the run-up to retirement. Women with children and women without children both work full-time and the way that they can do that is because they have childcare that enables them to do that and a cultural presumption that childcare is as good as any other form of care. They have a professionalised childcare workforce that is paid at an appropriate level to their skills and experience and knowledge, and that is how their system operates. We have a very different system of childcare, even noting recent improvements and commitments to provide more in Scotland. I am sorry to give you a final point. I reportedly came out this month from the Faucet Society gender pay gap by ethnicity in Britain. You mentioned cultural presumptions. The opening sentence of that summary says, Faucet Society research has shown that the gender pay gap in Britain is shaped by racial inequality. It highlights that black Caribbean women reversed the gender pay gap with black Caribbean men. Chinese women in Britain opposed their gender pay gap with white British men. There is another example about Irish women. How can we have cultural differences in our different ethnic groups? We are saying that there is not a cultural difference within the main population. I am not sure that I understand that point. Reflecting on what you said, there is absolutely no one single experience for all women. The different groups of women—black and minority ethnic women, disabled women, LBT women—all experience multiple and complex barriers in different ways. We really need to take an intersectional approach if we are going to close the pay gap and reduce the barriers that different groups of women experience. Right. Thank you very much. I am afraid that our time has gone. I think that the committee will probably come back on one or two issues to ask for further submission and writing, and you may wish to yourselves put in further comments on some of the questions and issues that have been raised. Perhaps there is a final and very quick question, what can the Scottish Government do about all of this? That is perhaps a very unfair question to be dealt with in a minute or two, but that might be something that you would like to come back on in terms of your further written comments. However, I am happy for you to give a quick comment each now, if you wish. Develop a national strategy to reduce the pay gap. We have never seen that. We have just seen bits and pieces of quite piecemeal action that has not resulted in any substantive change. We would support that entirely. Note that, apart from anti-discrimination law, Scotland has the power to act on all the causes of the pay gap, so we would want to see a concerted push on this single indicator that has been too persistent for too long. Being more Scandinavian, Scandinavia has consciously chosen a path that we have not, and that is the real distinction. I thank all our witnesses and will suspend the session for five minutes to change over to our next panel. Welcome back to committee members and welcome to our new guest. This is a round table format that we have here in this particular session. In the interest of hearing as much as possible from witnesses, I would ask members of the committee—that includes myself—to keep questions succinct and to-the-point. If anyone wants to come in and simply raise your hand, the sound desk will look after the microphones. I would ask our guest now to simply give us their name and a very brief introduction of who they are. Perhaps I could start on my left with Dr Irina Mercariva. I am a lecturer at the University of St Andrews and I am a Labour economist working on the intersection of retirement and gender issues. Emily Thomson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Law, Economics, Accountancy and Risk at Glasgow Caledonia University. I work closely with the Women in Scotland's Economy Research Centre. My previous work has been around gender and modern apprenticeships and evidencing the business case for gender equality measures. My name is Ian Wall. I am the chair of the STEM education committee, which was established some six years ago by the Scottish Government as an independent committee. I am Patricia Finlay. I am Professor of Work and Employment Relations at the University of Strath Clyde, where I am the director of the Scottish Centre for Employment Research, which has, as one of its core themes, gender and equality and regulation issues. I am also wearing another hat. I am the academic adviser to Scotland's Fair Work Convention. I am Professor Fiona Wilson. I am Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the University of Glasgow in the Business School there. I have been working on a couple of research proposals on equal pay and also recently published a paper on the topic. I am Wendy Loretto. I am Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Dean of the University of Edinburgh Business School. My research area is on the intersection between gender and age over the life course, with a particular focus on later working life. Thank you very much. Just a general starter question. I suspect the academics here, and our guest that is, will be familiar with the Scottish Funding Council report, the recent report in August last year. I think what it brought out was the fact that the gender balance of Scottish domiciled undergraduate entrance to university in 2014-15 was roughly 58 per cent female and 42 per cent male. In the introduction to the paper, what was said was this, that their ambition was that by 2030 the proportion of male students studying at undergraduate level at university will be at least 47.5 per cent, or to put it another way, the gap between male and female participation will be reduced to 5 per cent, and that no college or university subject will have a gender imbalance of greater than 75 per cent of one gender. I suppose that there are two aspects to that. One is the gender imbalance and the larger proportion of female students, and then this issue of specific subjects having a gender imbalance greater than 75 per cent. Perhaps one or two of our panel might like to give some general comment on that. I do not know who might like to start. Professor Loretto? Speaking from business, we have been going through Athena Swan, which is promoting gender equality in academic subjects started off in the STEM subjects, moving to wider subjects, including social sciences. We have slightly more women than men coming into education, not just at undergraduate level but also at postgraduate level. As you alluded to in the question, that is the subject choice. In terms of a challenge for us, it is making sure that we are not so much in-take, but what we do with the students when they are with us is to ensure that we are getting equal achievement amongst men and women, because women are outperforming the men in terms of their achievement. It goes back to some of the questions that we heard from the first evidence session or some of the responses about different forms of learning and having a pedagogic adjustment to the ways in which men and women learn. That is as much of an issue in further and higher education as it is amongst school education, as we heard earlier. Thank you. Thank you. I absolutely agree with what Wendy is saying about the pedagogical approaches within different subject areas. On my subject area, I teach economics, business students and social science students. In that, there are issues around perception of certain subjects and understanding what subjects are about. Within economics discipline, there is the perception among students that it is very technical, very hard and scientific. It can be, but there is also more to it in those senses. My sense is that that might be similar in engineering and science subjects that is about changing perceptions. The panel earlier on, we are talking about coming at it from an early age, and I think that that is really important. Once we get to the higher end further education scenario, most of the opportunities have been missed in terms of challenging perceptions and challenging those gendered norms around pedagogy and subject choice. I think that, just picking up on the Athena Swan experience, I think that it is instructive in that respect as well. Athena Swan was first introduced in 2005 and it was voluntary, but then two research areas made it mandatory that I'd have silver or bronze. Up until then, what had been very patchy in its take-up suddenly became very enthusiastically taken up by the university because otherwise they wouldn't get their research grants. The conclusion I draw is that encouragement is good but compulsion works. I was going to move on to our first question on statistics. We are now moving to Dean Lockhart. I just wanted to get feedback on the best form of statistics to look at when we are looking at the gender pay gap. We heard from the previous session about the median approach and the mean approach in terms of how we calculate it. We are looking at pay, which is an arithmetic sum. I would like to get our guest's views on the best measurements that are available either in Scotland or a UK-wide basis in terms of how we can most precisely calculate the gender pay gap. Professor Findlay. I think that my answer would be that there is no best measurement, but there are a set of measurements that are helpful in different circumstances, and it partly relates to what it is that we want to uncover. I am sure that you heard this morning that when you look at the median gender pay gap, you are interested in what is the broader experience of most people. When you are looking at the mean, you are trying to take into account some of the really particular problems at the higher pay desail area. I think that the issues around whether you use average pay or hourly pay—again, it depends on what your objective are. If your objective is, for example, to look at differences in the pay gap as a rate for the job, that is a different objective to whether or not you are looking at differences in women and men's earnings. It depends on what your question is. I think that there are a suite of measures, and the measures are largely agreed in the sense of what their composition is, although different bodies use different measures. One of the big challenges is how you translate those measures into something that is applicable within workplaces. I do not think that there is a great deal of disagreement about what the options are or the suite of measures are at a national level and at a research level. I think that the issue is how do we get measures that people can understand and then translate into something that impacts on workplace practice? Professor Loretto, I would like to argue for more comprehensive measure that takes into account pension entitlements and contributions. Pensioner poverty is a number of women who are in pensioner poverty and far exceeds the number of men. Thinking about auto-enrolment, which has been a very good introduction and very good initiative, but the number of women, particularly women working part-time, that fall beneath that threshold in order to be able to be involved in auto-enrolment is still very high. The TUC did a survey a few years ago, where it said that up to half a woman working part-time were below that auto-enrolment threshold. If we do not look at that in terms of calculating gender pay, what we are looking at is future generations being put into poverty far beyond their time in the paid workforce. Emily Thomson, I would add to that bonus pay and overtime pay, because I think that we have some evidence that men have more access to this within the labour market. I think that the tendency to use the median headline figure in comparing full-time hours underplays some of the structural barriers. The fact that some of those high-earning outliers are almost exclusively male if we take the labour market as a whole and that women are overrepresented at the lower end of the pay distribution is not reflected in reports of median full-time comparisons. If we compare men's full-time earnings with women's part-time earnings, we see a very big gender pay gap start to arise. Of course, we know that women are much more likely to be in part-time employment. I think that it is around 41 per cent at the moment versus about 12 per cent of men. Some of those headline measures can really underplay the structural barriers. I personally like to see both the mean and the median reported where possible, so we get a fuller picture. Within each category, the median and the mean, how definitive are the numbers in terms of surveys, audited financial statements from different companies or the public sector, if I could get a bit of some feedback on that question? The most definitive account that we have of hours and earnings is from the annual survey of hours and earnings, which is carried out through using HMRC records. It takes into account 1 per cent of businesses in terms of their HMRC reports. In terms of robust data, that is very robust. Ash, it is good for Scotland because, when you start to disaggregate it, you do not start to lose sample size in the same way that you do sometimes with, for example, the labour force survey. I think that Gillian Martin wants to come in. Professor Wall, do you want to make a quick point on the previous before Gillian? Just to say, the wider issue, when Emily talks about the bigger picture, is that Scotland is really poor in statistics and it is very difficult. This is wearing a different outer debut of the SCDI, and some of our members are concerned that we do not have enough knowledge of whatever judgments you might draw from it. Although the statistics that you refer to are easily, there are other British-wide statistics that are very difficult to interpret for Scotland, and then there are whole areas that are not kicked or touched upon at all. Particularly when you talk about the questions of intersectionality, which are raised at the earlier session, you need a lot more figures than just the wage. That is an important place to start, but it needs to be wider. If the committee were to give consideration to the sort of knowledge it and the Parliament as a whole requires in order to make a contribution to really understanding Scotland and improving it, that would be very valuable. May I ask, does sectionality include the differences in different age brackets? Because earnings opportunities can vary markedly, can they not? Yes. Professor Wilson and then Gillian Martin. I think that I raised about the intersectionality. There is some very interesting new research, which is now raising the issue of class, so those who come from better backgrounds are earning higher wages in, for example, law, and so there are issues right across the spectrum of where inequalities can happen. Gillian Martin. We have heard that women achieve better at HE, FE, postgraduate level. They do very well, but they are still not reaching the same heights in terms of the career progression, or the pay levels of their male counterparts as they go through a career. The problem, for me, suggests that the problem is with the workplace, but what I want to ask anyone who wants to come in, companies are missing a trick here, aren't they, if they are not realising the full potential of the female workforce that they have on offer? For me, that is the crux of the matter. You could put all the legislation that you want in place, but this is an economic opportunity that companies in the Scottish economy are missing. I wonder if anyone wants to give their view on that analysis. Professor Wilson. In September 2016, it argued that narrowing the UK pay gap has the potential to create an extra £150 billion on top of the business-as-usual GDP forecast in 2025 and create 140,000 additional female employees. There are organisations such as McKinsey and Deloitte that are big consultancy companies that are laying out facts and figures about what the business case is for greater equality in terms of pay, and the messages are very strong and very clear. Professor Findlay and Emily Thomson want to come in on that. It is a similar point in the sense that there are estimates that you could add around 1.3 to 2.4 per cent of GDP if you improve sex discrimination within organisations, but to come back to your original point, I think that there is a huge issue within the workplace. We know that the gender pay gap is multi-dimensional and we know that it is caused by factors that predate the workplace. The chair's first question raised some issues that we did not discuss around the different pipelines into how women get to the workplace and men get to the workplace and experience different things, but the reality is that a lot of that plays itself out in the workplace. One of the things that I am very struck by is that, as women have increasingly improved their own human capital, the argument was always that women did not invest in their human capital to the same extent. As women have increasingly improved their human capital, they have not been paid back for that in terms of the workplace experience. The issue becomes how do you then influence and change workplace practice and workplace experience to affect those outcomes? The workplace is absolutely crucial. A few points that I would like to add to what Patricia has said. In terms of the business case, there are two dimensions to the business case. There are the macroeconomic arguments that have been mentioned in organisations such as the IMF. The World Economic Forum publishes lots of statistics and analysis that indicate that, if we could close those gender gaps, we could increase GDP and make the most of our economy. For individual companies, there is quite a lot of academic evidence that suggests that there is cost minimisation around eliminating discrimination, protecting against litigation that is costly in the workplace, etc. There is also the idea of making the best possible use of the talent available to companies. Particularly in terms of vertical segregation, so looking at the underrepresentation of women on company boards, for example, there is really quite robust evidence that correlates the presence of women or the gender balance in the boardroom with economic benefits in different measures of performance, return to equity, return to sales, etc. Those that have been mentioned in the session earlier on, building better teams, making better decisions, but also representing marketplaces and proximity to markets, so that women are more able to market more effectively to female consumers. On Patricia's point about human capital, that is absolutely accurate. We used to have the approach that women choose to be overrepresented within the low pay because they expect lower returns on their human capital investments. We know now that they do not get the returns on the human capital that they perhaps deserve. It is about the workplace, and perhaps, as was mentioned in the panel earlier, childcare has something to do with that. We know that there is a link between those that are doing all the unpaid caring in the economy and not having access to paid work. There has got to be a link between those two things. If you are doing a lot of unpaid care, you do not have the same time and energy left over to engage in the labour market in the same way. Therefore, I think that we need to think about the childcare infrastructure as being crucial to addressing those workplace issues. We also have to think about data in terms of unpaid work, because we do not really know a lot about what is going on in the household. Sorry, that was a very long question. I want too much time, but recruitment practices as well would have an impact. For example, we mentioned flexible working, which has never really been advertised. It is something that you have to ask for when you are actually in work, which marks you out as needing special treatment. Would that make an impact? I think that it probably does. We see not very much quality part-time employment available in this economy. As Emma Richard mentioned earlier on, we have a 1.5 model of familial current configuration. If we had more quality part-time jobs available, that would be helpful. You are not often seeing very high-level management jobs, for example, available as a job share or on a part-time basis. I think that that could be really helpful if this was something that we saw more often. Dr Merkireva wanted to come in on this as well. On several issues, I think that relative to everything else, we are doing fairly well at recruitment stage. One reason is that it is better than in other areas. It is fairly observable. You often have very comparable skilled workers, and it's easy to offer similar terms and conditions and avoid the pay gap. We have a lot of evidence that in contemporary world, a lot of difference accumulates post-recruitment over the career time. It's not just so child care and child-bearing age and so on. This is all very important, but unfortunately, that's not everything. Single women, women who never have children, still diverse from their male peers. One piece of evidence that we have is negotiation of paying conditions in the workplace. It's experimental lab evidence that males are more likely to be aggressively involved in negotiations. Women would take both their initial offers and renegotiation at later stages, take it or leave it offer. There can be some easy, straightforward interventions. One way to think about it is that a female worker is more satisfied with the status quo rather than considering a progression path. You want to stimulate people to think what other functions and be more proactive in terms of taking these functions upon themselves. That's an intervention that has been successfully implemented here in Scotland, for example, for unemployed workers. Transitioning from looking for vacancies that are very closely related to a job that you've lost to vacancies that are in broader areas that pays back a lot. Similarly for female workers focused on a particular set of functions that are moving towards soliciting extended range. That can also be an intervention that helps so that this life is going on. I think that Jackie Baill wants to come in and then Professor Loretto and also Professor Findlay wanted to comment on this. I'm enjoying the discussion, but I've got a table in front of me that doesn't quite fit with what's being said. It's taken from Ash and it's pay gap for full-time earnings by age group in Scotland for 2016. It tells me that for the 30 to 39 age group is the only age group in Scotland where women have a higher median income than men, yet that doesn't really fit with our discussion about childcare responsibilities. I'm trying to understand what's going on there. Do we understand it? Professor Loretto. I'll come in on my original point, but it does relate to that, and it's about age. Those figures will show that the gender pay gap gets bigger over time. I'll come in very briefly on the business case and then I'll come to that point. I asked about the business case that we're just now really waking up to. I'm doing some work currently for the Scottish Government talking to a range of employers in Scotland as part of that work. It's really the untapped potential of older women. This has started to be picked up in some of the statistics, but I think that it's really now been picked up by employers as well. We heard earlier about the leaky pipeline, so ensuring that we keep women in the workforce for longer is a key part, as we have ageing populations and keeping people in work for longer, and ensuring that we don't discriminate that we keep those women in the workplace is going to become increasingly important. Coming back to Jackie Baillie's career about the 30 to 39, partly that and other colleagues can come in here as well, but partly that is the rising age in which people have children. That is starting to see some of the motherhood penalty that comes in discrimination and pregnancy and then coming back to work afterwards is kicking in slightly later. I think that we are seeing now some of the better educated women and the gap closing in there, but certainly one of the most shocking things is that the gap still opens up after that. We are not necessarily looking at a cohort issue, so it would be lovely to say that that narrow gap, in fact closing gap, would continue as those people get older, but unfortunately the signs are that the gaps open up, because we see discrimination coming in particularly as a result of some of the pressures that Arina raised earlier. Sorry, Professor Findlay wants to come in on the last point and perhaps on this point. Probably both points. On the issue of age, we know that there is a variation by age, and we know that there are some statistics for some years in which the 16 to 19-year-old group do not look very different. One of the issues about young workers is that they tend to be paid minimum wages, so at the lowest pay decile, you also find one of the lowest gender pay gaps, because the reality is that people have to be paid the national minimum wage, or at that age, still the national minimum wage, not the national living wage. In that sense, that narrows the opportunity for a pay gap to emerge. We did some work a few years ago for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission looking at the financial services sector. One of the things that is very interesting was how quickly the pay gap emerged for young women and men who entered the sector. There was some variation at the beginning, which reflected the issue around negotiation. A lot of the recruitment was informal, it was word of mouth, it was through networks, and people negotiated an individual salary rather than there being a graded salary, which is what they were allocated to. Men tended to negotiate that salary at a starting point, much better than women did. Within three years, a gap had emerged across that cohort, so it very quickly started to emerge. That means that it is not necessarily connected to come back to Jackie Baillie's point. It is not necessarily connected to the fact that people have children. It is just connected to the fact that they might have children. It is not age-related in that sense? Well, it is age-related in different ways at different cohorts. It gets bigger as career progresses, but I think that that is not necessarily an age effect. It is a cumulative effect of the discrimination or the other factors that push the gender pay gap. On the financial services sector, the gender pay gap for bonuses rather than hourly pay was 83 per cent. Most women who took time out to have childcare lost their clients, lost their portfolio of activities and came back to not just much lower salaries but much lower bonuses. Is that in London or UK-wide? That was for the UK, including Scotland, and significant responses from Scotland given the size of the Scottish financial services sector. Do we have any breakdown of that for Scotland? We do in the report, but I can send it to you. Thank you. Jackie Baillie, you wanted to come back. I remain curious, and I do not think that I have had an explanation in detail about why we have a position where, actually for age 30 to 39, it works to our advantage and it is nowhere else. I genuinely do not think that there is that many women age 40 and over having babies at that stage in life that would make such a huge difference to that pay gap. So, if we know what is working there and what is not working elsewhere, then surely we can spread the effect of it. I am curious as to why that just seems to be an outlier compared to the others. I think Dr Amakariva wanted to come in on this. I think one way to look at it is to check the profile of lifetime earnings, and in general, when we look at page gap, it is important to understand what the split around is, and generally the biggest gap is between the slow-skilled female dominated sector and the high-skilled top management financial services male dominated sector. If you look at the lifecycle profile of the top earners, you will find out that 30 to 39 is still the age of accumulation for this cohort. They peak much later, they would peak probably by their early 50s, and that is when they are going to overperform their female colleagues who did equally well at, let's say, mid-career posts between 30 and 39, but the females by the time would stay at the mid-career and the males would go away ahead. That is my view of one way of explaining those numbers. Right. I want to move on to a question from Andy Wightman. Thank you, convener. Mainly perhaps for Professor Patricia Finlay, you advised the fair work convention. I mean, to what extent is this a prominent issue within the work of the convention? It's a very prominent issue within the work of the convention. One of the things that we have done from the outset and in constructing both the definition and the framework for fair work is to make sure that, in every dimension that we look at, we analyse the existing evidence base by all of the protected characteristics. If we were looking at the access to voice, for example, or the extent to which you get access to skills and training that provide fulfilling work, then we assessed all of that in terms of the evidence base by saying, how does that affect people differently across the Scottish economy? It's clearly the case that, if you are likely to be disadvantaged on one area of fair work, as women often are, then that has impacts across other areas of fair work. That doesn't just apply to women. In the sense of how we constructed the framework and looked at the evidence, the idea of gender and other protected categories was immediately at the heart of that. In terms of the consultation that took place over the first year of the convention, where we spent a lot of time across the length and breadth of Scotland talking to people about their jobs and their experiences of fair work and their expectations, we had very significant representation from women in that, and we had particular concerns raised by older women, predominantly in the care sector and in the banking and financial services sector about some of their experiences at different parts of their life cycle. It's a very prominent part of what we do. It's also a very prominent focus of the convention's current activities, because we're focusing at the moment on the social care sector, which is predominantly occupied by women. We're focusing on the particular experience of older women, so it's very central to what we're interested in. Are you confident that this work is going to lead to change? I think that the last time that I appeared at this committee, I've been very clear that the job of the fair work convention is to do what it can to act as a catalyst for change, but there are many players in this landscape, and that change would have to be driven by a multiplicity of players. It includes Government, employers and campaigning organisations. It includes trade unions. There are a variety of places in which we might improve the experience of women in the Scottish economy, but that's a very complex and broad ecosystem or landscape, but we would hope to, because otherwise, why would we try? Richard Leonard I've got a question about the gender bias as it affects women as workers. On whether you could share with us any research that you've done or any reports that you've published on, first of all, the impact of a sustained period of public expenditure restraint, how that's affected the position of women in the workplace, both in the public and the private sector, and secondly, looking forward, how do you anticipate and have you done any work on the expected impact on women workers of automation? Professor Loretto Perhaps first, and then Emily Thomson. I can comment on the second part, but on the first, I think that this is the relationship with care and unpaid work, more generally unpaid work, and I think that in terms of particularly again, if my own area looking at over the life course and towards later life working, one big area is grandparenting. The number of older men and older women who are caring for grandchildren in order to let their usually daughters enter the economy, so I think that there's an intergenerational transfer here that is pulling older women, but also some older men out of work earlier than they might have otherwise done so in order to be able to let their, and it is predominant to let their daughters work and to younger women work, so I think that that is quite a big effect, noticing I'm doing a couple of projects in this at the moment, and I think that that is going to have quite renowned implications for future working amongst women of all ages. Yeah, again it's on the first point rather than the second. So the public sector spending restraint in the wake of the great recession is really impacted on women in two ways, I think, as workers within the public sector, so they're overrepresented as public sector workers, and as service users, so where we see cuts to local services, particularly in terms of social care, so if social care is being defunded or has less funding available, that care still needs to be done, and we have a little bit of evidence that it's going out into the informal care sector, as Wendy's pointed out, so people still need to be cared for, elderly parents still need to be cared for, but when the state isn't there to do that work, it goes out to women who are doing it on an unpaid basis. We don't really know very much about what goes on in the household in terms of unpaid work and unpaid productive work, but the ONS published the household satellite accounts for the first time in 10 years in October of last year, which showed that childcare and elderly care was the biggest component of the unpaid work that was being done within households and that that had increased in the wake of the recession, and it's not that the number of caries, if you like, people being cared for had increased, it was that the hours that was being done had increased, so I think that the impact has been to kind of move some of that caring work out from the paid economy and into the informal unpaid economy, and that has impacted more on women because of structural expectations around who will do that care. Thank you. I was going to move on to Ash Denham. My question is about how we alter the occupational segregation landscape in Scotland, so women choosing or being funneled into certain types of work, and I know that Emily Thompson has undertaken some work on the modern apprenticeship gender split, so I'd be interested to hear about that work as well. Absolutely. We've been working on gender and modern apprenticeships for some time now. The first was the Equal Opportunities Commission's General Formal Investigation into Segregation and Training Work, which was published in 2005. The modern apprenticeship programme is publicly funded and, as such, has a real opportunity to impact on gender segregation, but what we see is that the traditional apprenticeships, the areas such as engineering, construction and manufacturing, where the notion of apprenticeship training is much more embedded rather than the non-traditional, more service sector-based apprenticeships. Of course, that was the whole idea about modern apprenticeships. They were modern because they were in the more prevalent sectors of the economies that have restructured. There's a real difference in terms of the quality of training that was being offered in those two different splits. We have had some limited evidence as time has gone by around the pay gap in apprenticeships, which was really very large. The female dominated areas were being paid much, much less and had much less returns on that human capital investment than the traditional sectors had, such as engineering, construction and so on. Emma Ritchiex described it as a totemic issue of the modern apprenticeships. We have so much evidence of what the issues are in terms of occupational segregation and because it is publicly funded, we could take some steps towards change in that sector. I think that the issue around procurement that Chris Oswald from the EHRC had mentioned earlier on is perhaps a key lever in that issue. However, in the time that I have been working on modern apprenticeships, which has been a good 10 to 12 years, the representation of women in those traditional frameworks has really not shifted at all. In years it hasn't shifted at all? No, no, no. There has been very, very little progress. We have seen a massive expansion of social care apprenticeships, but there is very, very low male representation within those apprenticeships. That is definitely part of the issue. We see more work being done to get women into the traditional areas but less being done to get men into the non-traditional areas. It can often be a hard sell because they are generally quite low paid. There are lots of intractable issues within that, but it is an area that we could really make a difference. Just as a very brief adjunct point to that, one of the areas that we haven't spoken about is women in self-employment, because that is an increasing area. What we do know is that women in self-employment are much lower paid, so in terms of the gender pay gap, that is a big area that really is a crime mix, some exploration that perhaps links back to automation. Why do people leave employment and take up self-employment? Are they driven out? How much of a conscious choice is it? That is an area that would be really helpful for the committee to do a bit more investigation of. Professor Findlay. I think that there is some coming back to modern apprenticeships. There has been some work done around, and we did some work a few years ago in the manufacturing subcluster in Scotland. It is partly about, as Emily says, access to modern apprenticeships and the terms on which you get that access. There is also a really important issue about the level, the qualifications level of modern apprenticeships. If you look at manufacturing in Scotland, we find that women are less likely to undertake modern apprenticeships. Even when they undertake them, they will be at a lower level. Part of that will be not just that women are being offered a lower level apprenticeship but that they are in the lower paying parts of the manufacturing subsectors. For example, they are in food production. It is not just about getting the same number of women into apprenticeships challenging, though that undoubtedly is, but it is about making sure that those apprenticeships, because, as we will know, the qualifications framework spreads quite high now, making sure that women get access to apprenticeships at a comparable level. I am just wondering, and then we will come to Emily Thomson, the point mentioned about self-employment as someone who has been self-employed myself. Does not personal choice come into some of this? It does get rather complex, does it not? As a self-employed person, you are making decisions about all sorts of things in a business context. I am just wondering, as well as paid employment, how much that can come in and influence or affect things. I think that we have touched on some of that already. There are a couple of points there. To make the committee aware of work that is being carried out, Aheria Watt, led by Professor Mike Danson, on poverty and self-employment, the early findings that are coming out from that work and that research is that there is an element of free choice, yes, but in the wake of the structural changes to the welfare system, what we are seeing is not necessarily a move towards entrepreneurialism or an entrepreneurial spirit, but it is survival strategies. It is people who are trying to scratch a living when they have perhaps been sanctioned, and that has a gender dimension because the issues around low and parenthood come into play there as well. We must recognise that people do have free will and they do have free choice, but those choices are being made under conditions of considerable constraint and the interaction of the welfare system with paid labour markets is one of them. The other issue is that the ash data that we have around pay will not reflect earnings from self-employment, so we do not really know what those issues are around how much people are earning when they undertake self-employment. I gave evidence to a committee inquiry into under-employment in 2013 that was looking at the issue. 60 per cent of the new businesses that had been set up in the wake of the recession were female-owned businesses, but, again, they were very low-paid and they were not earning enough to pay tax, which has an impact on the tax revenues available to Scotland as well. There is a lot of work to be done around that, I think. You mentioned tax. Tax is part of the equation in terms of how much a person pays in tax, presumably. Is that taking account of when we look at the figures that we are considering in terms of the gender pay gap, the actual tax burden paid by the individual, or are we just looking at gross income figures? I think that the ashes based on HMRC data, as Trisha Findlay had outlined earlier on, might have a more detailed look. It is based on gross earnings and there is no difference in the taxation profiles of men and women in that sense, so your personal alliances are the same. If we want to supplement the knowledge of self-employment, we can relate to some extent on household services that would have a measure of earnings for both self-employed and employees. The evidence is quite clear. I would probably parallel the developments in self-employment to what we have discussed about part-time and full-time employment. The differences are exactly the same. They are very polarized. You can think of it as there can be self-employment and there can be part-time employment that is a coping strategy. Once a person was displaced because of automation or anything else, you come up with alternative pathways. You can think of a similar looking on paper, part-time employment and self-employment as an income effect. An older worker who has enough income to cut down on hours and open a business, think of a high-level consultancy or something to enjoy the work rather than cope with the difficulties and so on both part-time and self-employment. Gil Panason wanted to come in with a question, then Professor Loretto. Professor Loretto would comment first and then we will come back to him. It is. It is just to pick up on the choice that you mentioned, chair. I think that it is really important to say that choice and the opportunity for choice is very gendered, particularly when we look at when people lose their jobs slightly later on. I am talking here about over 50s, and we have evidence that women find it particularly difficult to, I mean both men and women find it difficult to go back into employment, but women do face additional challenges of that intersection between ageism and sexism and going on then to take up self-employment. It is a choice, but it is a choice that is very severely constrained. Given the partial evidence that we do have at the moment, there is a question to the extent to which self-employment is actually disguised unemployment. In some cases, again, I am talking here about the over 50s, it can be a face-safing measure, so actually looking at the hours that people do, they are very small, it is very partial work, so there is a huge under-employment issue here as well, and that indeed is gendered from what we can find. Further to that, is there any evidence to suggest that some sectors, people have been encouraged to be self-employed, so there is less liability on the rural employer? In other words, the job is available, but only for self-employed people, but on a contractual basis. Professor Findlay? There are undoubtedly the development of business models in particular places, which rely on a much more distanced workforce, and that is a development that we have seen over a number of years. For the classic example, which people cite, is couriers. Most couriers are not directly employed, they are self-employed and they are subject to quite challenging contractual arrangements with the companies that they contract for. In that sense, it picks up on Wendy's point that there is an issue of bogus self-employment, and there is an issue of whether self-employment masks under-employment. The issue of why people end up in self-employment and what it produces is a complex one, but we know that the gender pay gap persists, and we know that the issue about women who are self-employed work fewer hours in self-employment than men, so we know that there are different choices being made. I always like to think about choices being places that people make a choice on a normal distribution, but we would not expect to see differences across the genders. If we are seeing them, we are seeing them for a reason. Gillian Martin wants to come back to me. A small supplementary question following on from this. Presumably, people who are almost forced down to self-employment are less likely to have pensions, but pension contributions as well. Are we storing up a problem of elderly poverty for women because of this as well? I think that we could be. Part of my point is that we do not have the good systematic evidence. I think that we are storing up a problem in all women in increasing pension or poverty for women if we do not address the gender pay gap, because this issue, as I said earlier, is very much an employment. The self-employed are still a relatively small number in terms of the whole labour force. It is not said that they are not important, they are, but I think that this issue about storing up problems for pension or poverty affects everything employed and self-employed. If I could start off with something that Emily Thomson said, which was referring to the idea of getting men into sectors where they are not traditionally been, and that maybe that is not very worthwhile if it is low paid anyway. That is not exactly what he said. I am just slightly being provocative, as usual. Based on what we said before, getting more men into nursery care, for example, would strengthen the argument to pay nursery workers better, though maybe that is not the way that it should be done. Is that something that we should be aiming at? Is it something that is important? Does it matter that kids in nursery and childcare have male role models and all that? That goes right into primary school. That is an area dominated by women teachers. There is the financial question, but there is also the wider question, is that inherently a good thing or a bad thing? I will just respond to that. I think that it is a very worthwhile thing to try and do, because I think that the more men that we see in the traditional female-dominated caring type roles will help us to break that ideological link between women equals care, or female caregiver, and I think that that seems to me to be at the crux of quite a lot of the arguments that we have heard around childcare, for example, about unpaid work that underpins women's inequality in the labour market in a wider sense. It is a low-paid sector because the market tends to devalue or undervalue work that is dominated by women, because the skills that are needed to be a childcare worker or a nursery worker are seen to be somehow naturally endowed to women by their biological characteristics, so that the market does not reward them in the same way. I think that it is very important that we try and increase the male representation in the female-dominated areas. I think that that would help to increase the wages in those sectors. Yes, primary school teaching is dominated by women. The classroom assistants are overwhelmingly women in some of the lowest-paid jobs in our economy, but even within the female-dominated primary school teaching, we see many more male head teachers. Even though the workforce overall is dominated by women, we see a male overrepresentation at the higher areas of that. I think that it is incredibly important to try and increase the representation of men within female-dominated areas in our economy. Is there also a problem here that society treats a lot of men with suspicion if they are interested in working with childcare? Yes, that is very true. When we did our original work on modern apprenticeships, we could not get any male childcare apprentices to talk to us as part of our research. There were only two or three in Scotland at the time. Now there is more. I think that there is roughly around 100. I might not be 100 per cent sure in childcare apprenticeships in the economy at the moment, but there is definitely that purchaser barrier to having men working in nurseries. Generally, employers were reporting that parents did not like it, that parents were suspicious of men working in nurseries and in childcare. That is incredibly sad. I think that we could do something about that if we had a concerted effort to increase the numbers of men that were working in childcare. It is good for children and their development in terms of role models to challenge that gendered expectation that women are the only ones that do the caring in the economy and do the caring in society in a wider sense. I think that it is incredibly important, but there is a lot of work to do. Okay, thanks. Is there somebody else on that point? Sorry, Professor Finlay. Yes, could I just pick up on two points arising from what Emily said? If you look at the category of nursery nurses and assistants on the most recent statistical data, you will find that women are under a gender pay gap of 4.5 per cent in the UK, in an industry or in occupation, sorry, where women hold 98 per cent of the jobs. Even in something that is completely dominated by women, you have still got a gender pay gap of 4.5 per cent, which translates into salaries of 15,286 for men and 12,000 for women. That is still a really significant gap in a sector in which women dominate. I think that that takes us back to the issue of horizontal segregation. It is probably playing a role in that, but it also takes us back to the issue of poverty. One of the single things that we could do, which is to reduce the gender pay gap, is to reduce low pay. If we look at the low paid workforce in the UK, women make up 60 per cent of the low pay workforce. If we look at Scotland, 20 per cent of women earn less than the living wage compared with 14 per cent of men. Actually, not just tackling the gender pay gap directly but tackling some issues of low pay would automatically impact on the gender pay gap. We saw that because we saw the introduction of the national minimum wage having the biggest impact in any year on the size of the gender pay gap in the UK. In those occupations, it is not just about tackling segregation in the gender pay gap, it is about tackling poverty wages. If I could switch to the academic, the other end, the universities and things, is there discrimination there? Obviously, here at this panel we have more women than men, but overall in the universities, I think that we had some research from Yale that suggested that there was bias against women in the academic world. I think that the Yale research is really very interesting. Briefly, job applications were sent to senior people who appointed jobs, male and female, identical, the same jobs, just different names. The outcome, and this was thought to be a true experiment, the people who were doing it thought that it was all real. The outcome was that less women than men got offered jobs. It was worse than that. Those women who did get offered jobs were offered less money in the first instance and less mentoring. You see the picture right from the very beginning. It is not even though the two-thirds, one-third enter on equality, there are already the women below and they are giving less support both in income and in mentoring before they have even started working. If you look at the bigger pictures for academia in general, there are graphs in the most recent Stemic report of last year to the Scottish Government. It starts with women, as we have discussed earlier, being 50% or more in a large number of disciplines and they just slowly fall off the edge so that the higher you get up the tree, the less there are and it becomes self-reinforcing. We have not yet touched on the question of institutional sexism because academia particularly is an area where the questions of sexual discrimination have been discussed at some time. All the employers are completely committed to fairness and all the rest of it and yet, nevertheless, we still see this happening. There are institutional structures here and behaviours that are encouraged and supported by the institutions that bring it about and these need to be tackled in a strategic way. Inside academia, the Ross side of Edinburgh produced a tapping all our talents report in 2012 and that was adopted by the Scottish Government, but it might be interesting for the committee to explore how the Government has taken this forward in a different way. There were three committees that were given different parts of that as we go into the detail, but I think it would be very instructive to see how far the Scottish Government has taken in either adopting itself or encouraging the organisations that it funds to take on the proposals inside tapping all our talents. I think that academia is illustrative of some of the hidden reasons for the gender pay gap where you have a system of reward that is very much based on the individual performance, which ostensibly, at face value, seems to be fair. You know that you are rewarding the individual for their performance, their attributes, et cetera, but actually can really hide the fact, as we heard earlier, that women may be rewarded for rather different behaviours from men. I think that some of the issues of tackling the hidden reasons for the gender pay gap come to light through academia. One classic one is international mobility, for example, whether that be being able to travel internationally the number of conferences, visiting professorships or indeed just mobility to shift between jobs to drive up pay. That is obviously very gendered and I think that that is really just now starting to be tackled in academia. I think that as we see more women come into senior roles, that is key in tackling institutionalised prejudice and discrimination but also enabling different pathways to be opened up as well. I think that academia is a bit of a lens for other systems that have that system of reward and promotion as well. You said that it is beginning to be tackled, so if we just give it a bit of time, is it going to work itself out? No. I think that that is the issue. As we have heard more generally about having, you know, encouraging more women and enabling more women, not just encouraging but enabling more women to get into these positions, enabling the voices to be heard. Someone in this committee is incredibly welcome for that because it is enabling these voices, enabling the research to be heard and enabling indirectly the voices of women who are not coming along to committees such as the low paid, low skill that we have heard about but other ways in which their voices can be heard more directly, not just indirectly, through us here. I think that it is important, so thinking about trade unions and other bodies as well that represent these women directly. Dr Merke Riva. General academia provides numerous case studies that illustrate many of the gender issues. In economics, the Royal Economic Society has a committee on women that follows up the data on economic faculty in the United Kingdom. Generally, the conclusions are that even after completing a PhD, there is still a leaky pipe, so women don't make it to the professorship. Moreover, we have a number of examples of what would seem to be obvious good solutions that did not work. One example that did not work well in the United States, which are particularly bad in terms of maternity leaves, numerous universities introduced equal rights to extend tenure track for male and female faculty, which was a great move in equality. After several years of observing the outcomes, it turned out that actually this equality move had a negative effect on the achievement gap, so women ended up being in worse positions than men. Generally, the reason is that for each child that was born over the tenure track, you would get one extra year to get your publications done. Men managed to use this extra year or several years if there are numerous children to their advantage. Women had to use this years while taking care of the kids and then facing the same previously available reduced tenure track period. A well-intentioned move that is totally welcome in terms of equality ends up not playing a role in achievement and pay gaps. Professor Finlay and I think Professor Wilson. Can I make two very quick points, which I think draw on the experience within academia, but also are pertinent to broader professional work. There is quite an interesting American Economics review paper that looks at the allocation of tasks within academia to men and women differentially. One of the issues that arises is that women are more likely to take on those tasks, which are less visible and less measurable. They might be very important to the quality of our students' experience or the type of research that we undertake or the institutional maintenance of our organisations, but they tend to be less visible unless the things that are counted when it comes to promotion. That is also the case in financial services, so revenue-generating functions, rather than other kinds of supports or institutional functions, are allocated differently across the sexes. That is about the operation of who does what in the workplace. There is a second issue, particularly for professional and managerial workers in the UK, which is about work intensification and particularly work to life spillover. If we look across Europe post the global financial crisis, work intensification lowered in most countries. For many occupations, if we look in the UK, it increased, and it increased particularly for professional and managerial workers. If you are a higher-level professional worker, your work to life spillover is now higher than it was before. That is a disincentive for women to enter into higher-level professional occupations or managerial occupations. Those jobs have become more demanding. They take up more time. They are now more amorphous, partly by the use of technology. That makes it much more difficult to deal with the sort of work-life balance issues that people talked about earlier. I am just wondering the last question about if you take steps to try to address something that sometimes has, I think, the opposite effect, which is what Dr Merkureva was talking about. Going back to something that Emily Thompson said about care workers, we heard evidence in another inquiry from the care sector, and there was evidence of the fact that the sector is something that is not as highly valued as it ought to. I am not talking about money terms, but the work that is done, and partly we were told that there is a social attitude problem, and that is why there is not enough people even going into it. I am just wondering if looking at the issue that we are addressing now, that is part of the problem. When we say undervalued, is it just about the pay and the money, or is part of the root problem going back to the types of career that people socially value or rate in terms of other than money? Is that part of it? I am just wondering if Emily Thompson had any comment on that. There is almost a kind of a dilemma there that there are many jobs in the economy whose value is more social or spiritual or is around children's development, for example, but it does not mean to say that those jobs should not be remunerated in terms of money at the same time. It boils down as well that it is not just about the paid jobs, but about the unpaid jobs. Our gross domestic product figures, for example, do not tell us anything about the distribution of who does unpaid caring roles within the economy. I think that that is really something that has to address, but our value system is very much marketised. There needs to be a challenge to that, I think. At the same time, it is not fair that the people that engage in care work are living on poverty wages. There is a social justice issue there, so I think that there is kind of a conundrum there. There is a bit of a dilemma around saying that there are many, many jobs whose value is more than can be expressed in market terms, but at the same time, there is a justice issue around the distribution of those jobs and those roles. I am not sure how we get around that. Gordon MacDonald Scotland's median pay gap is 15.6 and its mean pay gap is 14.9. Is there any countries of a similar size to Scotland that has better figures than that that we could be looking at to see how they have closed their attainment gap? Professor Findlay? The Scandinavian countries have lower pay gaps. There are lots of international comparative work done around pay gaps. I came on at the end of the discussion this morning when people were talking about whether or not that reflected a cultural issue in other countries, particularly the Scandinavian countries. I would strongly advocate that it reflects institutional approaches. People raised the issue of childcare this morning, ensuring that access to supply routes into different kinds of work is more appropriately dealt with in terms of gender. There are issues about access to training and development, and there are issues around access to voice, which are much more characteristic of those economies. We know that with the gender pay gap is lower in organisations, for example, where a trade union is present, and we know that those economies have much more systematic forms of voice. There are institutional features in other countries that can reduce that lower pay gap. One of the things that somebody quoted Iceland this morning, I think that it might have been yourself, one of the things that Iceland did for a very long time, up until a few years before the global financial crisis, was that it published everybody's salary. There is a huge issue in this area around transparency and what people know. You might look at aggregate figures about the gender pay gap, but you do not know what it is for your occupation. Even if you know what it is for your occupation, you do not know what it is within your own organisation, and it is not easy to find out. Transparency in a public level or an organisational level is one of the institutional factors that can really support people understanding whether or not they have been discriminated against, understanding whether or not there is a gap. There is a long step between that and having a remedy, so you have to be able to know about your problem, you have to be able to affect that remedy, and there are real challenges around that currently in Scotland and the rest of the UK. However, some of those institutional features of other countries are things that we could learn a lot from and we could understand how that might impact on reducing the gender pay gap in Scotland. You mentioned Scandinavia, I just need to be clear on this point. I am looking at the PwC women and work index, and the top three countries are Iceland, Sweden and Norway. The median pay gap between female and male is 16 per cent in Iceland, and 14 per cent in Sweden and 15 per cent in Norway. If my understanding is correct, Scotland's median pay gap is 15.6. Those are close enough for there to be issues about statistical variation. It has also been different over time, but those are the economies that people tend to talk about as having lower pay gaps. Professor Wall wants to come in on this point. At the end of the last session convener, you asked what could be done in some respects. One of the very powerful tools that the Scottish Government has is procurement policy. Although there is a good deal of sophistication, it is not at one level crude, but there is no reason why government policy should not say that firms cannot win public jobs if their gender pay gap is bigger than a certain amount. At the same time, over a period of time, that is going to be reduced, so if it is 15 per cent at the moment, it will be 14 per cent in two years' time and 12 per cent in five years' time. You can argue about the figures, but the point is that once you start a trajectory like that, it becomes to some degree not self-fulfilling, but it becomes much easier to get going. It comes back to the point that I made earlier about the experience of Athena Swan. I mean, the discussions that we are having have been had for decades in my own personal experience. At some point, someone has to say, enough is enough and we are going to start legislating or structuring the way we operate our systems to ensure that it does not happen. I offer that as one practical possibility that the committee could explore. Is there any countries that have introduced legislation of that nature regarding procurement, or is there any other best practice across the world that we could be looking at to try and close the attainment gap? Is there any other best practice across the world that we could be looking at to try and close the attainment gap? I myself am not aware of that, but I am sure that my colleagues could identify some with this meeting. One question, Professor Walden, on that point. Would it not depend on EU procurement rules as well, which might cause slight difficulty in taking that approach, at least at present? I do not have the expertise to say, but in my experience you can always find a lawyer who will find your solution to write it in the way that you want. I am quite serious about that. I have done lots of procurement for most of my professional career. If you want to get an objective, there is a way to get it. You just have to find out how to draft it. I suppose that that may be a problem in the area that we are involved in here. I think that Professor Findlay wanted to come in—sorry, I beg your pardon—Professor Wilson and then Professor Findlay. I just wanted to say that I have a report here on closing the pay gap and what other European countries have done. I would also like to pick up the point that Professor Walden makes about what we are going to do or what the Scottish Government can do. In the news recently, there has been talk about naming and shaming 139 companies who have not been paying the minimum national wage. I am never sure about that terminology, but those 139 companies have been named and shamed. It turns out that HRMCs are collecting the data, which allows them to know what companies are failing to provide the minimum wage. The data can presumably relatively easily be collected on pay gaps and then fines imposed. There are a number of different ways forward. I am sure that the gap is closed and that it is not simply a case of making companies more accountable and then leaving it at that, which is very much the case at the moment. If I pick up on the procurement issue, the current Scottish procurement regulations allow for an equality clause, so there is an equality element in procurement. That is a very far step away from understanding how people perceive and operate in relation to those guidelines. For example, there is also a commitment to fair work in the current procurement guidelines, but we do not know an awful lot and we are trying to get behind how people operationalise that. Does that really make a difference? It may be that you can push that a lot further than perhaps the Scottish Government is comfortable with. It is clear from the European regulations that, for example, it is not appropriate to say that you have to pay the living wage in a contract that is secured under European procurement rules. There are some areas, but there are some areas that are very clear that you cannot use procurement to address, but that is an area that you could explore thinking about how not just procurement but business support services might also be ways in which you would encourage people to address issues around the gender pay gap. Coming back to the naming and shaming, as a convention, we talked a lot about the issue of naming and shaming. It is a challenging one. It is used by the HMRC in relation to the national minimum wage, and that is available because you can find a particular example. Ash would not give you the composition of a business's gender pay gap. Part of the challenge is that, for individual businesses, they are sometimes not necessarily good at calculating or understanding what their own gender pay gap is, so that is a first step. There are lots of services out there from ACAS and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and I am sure that any university that we want to chat to will send you a researcher who will come and calculate your gender pay gap. Lots of businesses find it very challenging when they have complex grading structures and different pay arrangements to understand how much of a pay gap they really go. I was interested in Emily Thompson's comment about care workers being paid less because it is her perception that their biological characteristics lend themselves to that work, therefore they deserve less. Men working in physical manual work are not taken, generally speaking. We often talk about the gender pay gap and why women are paid less. We tend to talk less about why men are paid too much. I am 20 to what extent that is fundamentally about patriarchy. Emily Thompson, Professor Finlay and Professor Loretto, I think that we have a few interested parties, so carry on. Yes, I think that it is. I think that patriarchy interacts with markets and how they value certain skills and jobs. I think that job evaluation schemes within organisations can be subject to gender bias, and some of those assumptions are very, very entrenched in people's psyche and in our collective psyche. I am not sure where we go from that, but I think that at least trying to talk about caring responsibilities and caring roles as being skilled in the same way that we might talk about manual labour, for example. I have never really thought about male-dominated roles being overpaid, but I suppose that that is a potential. In terms of the gender pay gap, if we look at individual organisations and look at their pay gaps, I think that that is part of the story, but looking at horizontal and vertical segregation is really important in trying to understand those gaps. We have not said the other word, which I think is feminist, a feminist analysis of these economic issues, and I think that that would recognise that patriarchy is something to do with these structural issues. Professor Finlay? I suppose that the short answer is yes, of course, that it is about patriarchy, but that in a sense does not necessarily take us terribly far, it does not take us to something that we can action. As Emily White rightly said, patriarchy interacts with markets and organisational factors, so there is a complex interplay between those things. I do not think that we should get ourselves in the position where we are saying that the fact that male manual workers are overpaid, the fact that there are pay disparities and differences of pay evaluation across different categories of workers does not necessarily lead you to that conclusion. It is undoubtedly the case that some of the arguments that we have around the gender pay gap and gender disparities detracts from some of the challenges that face other people in the economy, so we talk, for example, a lot about women's boardroom representation. That is probably not of great interest to many people at the lower end of the occupational spectrum, male or female, so we have complex intersecting factors here, and we do not have to have a binary approach whereby we say that if care workers are being paid to two little male manual workers, they are being paid to too much. I do not think that that takes us further forward, but, yes, I think that it is about patriarchy and markets. I much agree with the colleagues, but I will not come in on that. The current work that the Scottish Government mentioned is talking to some employers in the care sector. Obviously, there is a key shortage of employees in that sector, and there is going to be an increasing demand for more people in that sector. Actually, the employers that I have paid are now paying the living wage. I have seen an increase in the number of men coming in to take-up positions, so it is part of the business case that we heard earlier and it has been able to release that capacity. Professor Findlay, I think that you want to come in on this one? No, fair enough. Sorry, I beg your pardon, Doctor. I was just wondering in terms of trying to make a bit of a step where do we go from there after we all agree on the issue, and I think part of it is a matter of opportunity. So, if you take a low-paid job, the question is, well, okay, if you don't take it, what do you do next? And we see that it's easier for males to move to a female-dominated sector, let's say, care, rather than the other way around, so it comes back to education and to expansion of the opportunities that female low-paid workers have to walk out of those arrangements. Bill Bowman, can I go back to a question or answer that came earlier? I thought that it was quite interesting when we were talking about the self-employed and we said that we had no information at all on entrepreneurial differences between male and female as to how they may or may not contribute to whether it's earnings or GTP. Is that the case? Professor Loretta. It's not that there's no information, sorry, Ms Lent, that it's actually that there's much more limited, and in terms of the systematic, and as we've talked earlier, about the sources of information on pay that comes from employed, we don't have that similar information on self-employed, so we are relying on self-report data, meaning from labour force survey and other similar sources, so it's much more unreliable. Is there something that you could say? There is, and the problem with those surveys, and we heard this earlier as well, when you start to try and break down, even to get Scottish figures, for example, out of the whole of the UK, it starts to become quite unreliable, so breaking down in terms of sector, then by gender, etc. The numbers just are not big enough at the moment to be able to do that analysis. Any other comment on that from any of our guests? Fair enough. Could I go back to something, Professor Findlay, that I think you had mentioned, at least in passing, I think you referred to protected characteristics, were you referring to the equality act definition? What I wanted to perhaps ask was the following and how this may fit into the fair work convention, or the work that you do, and what your comment might be on this. One approach to trying to assist women in the workplace is to have childcare provision to enable them to return to work at a point that they consider appropriate. But if we look at the protected characteristics, religion, for example, is one of the protected characteristics, so some women from a number of religions may feel or choose, because of their religious beliefs, that they should look after their children to a certain age, whether it's two, whether it's five. Others may not, even from the same religion, people of different viewpoints. I'm just wondering for women who make that choice to take a certain amount of time out before resuming their career, childcare provision will not assist them. I'm just wondering how that fits into the puzzle. I mean, it may be more about the returning to work element and how they're brought back into the work stream rather than the reason why they choose to make the choices that they do. Okay, I'm not sure that there is much evidence that suggests that there are big religious variations in that. I think that there are undoubtedly broader cultural and family structure factors which impact on whether or not women are more or less likely to return to work. Part of the issue is around what is available to women in terms of maternity leave. If you have a long period of funded maternity leave, then the chances of you—the length of time of that funded maternity leave is very different across different countries, and therefore you might be more likely to return back. Quality childcare, I think, is part of the answer, but it's not the only answer, because it doesn't take into account the fact that people will make men and women, parents of all kinds will make different choices about their relationship to market and non-market activities. Part of what we need to do is to have childcare that allows women to engage appropriately in the labour market where they choose to and in the form that they choose to. We also need to have a labour market and organisations specifically that are catered to the needs of families and not the other way round. I tend to worry that we have a debate in Scotland, particularly where we focus very much on childcare, and I don't want to underestimate how important I think good high-quality childcare is in supporting parents to go back to work and also in supporting children's life chances, but I do think that we have to see that as being a sort of dynamic relationship. We want families to be able to respond through childcare to what the labour market and organisation needs, but we want organisations to respond to what individuals and families need, and it's not all about changing the one direction. Issues around flexible working, issues around the type of maternity leave, issues around ensuring that work is not so overbearing, that people can't balance it with family life—they are as important in my view. What happens in that workplace is as important as the availability of childcare? Those are supply and demand factors that need to be looked at interactively. I'm just wondering if it's perhaps a broader issue. Are there other countries that we can compare Scotland to of a similar size and how they approach those sorts of issues that we could learn from? I don't have anything to hand in terms of what countries present. We know that countries that we don't want to compare ourselves with, so we know that in the US the experience of women at work is much more challenging in terms of, for example, things like paid maternity leave. There are usual suspects countries where we can say that we get a two-year maternity leave in Sweden, but we don't get that in Scotland or we certainly don't get two years paid maternity leave. That's quite significant because that might reflect different time periods in which people will be willing to leave their children, but there are lots of different configurations there. In and of itself, part-time work doesn't have to be a problem. I suppose that it comes back to the issue that was partly raised in relation to digital working earlier. There's no reason why working part-time and combining work and family life should be as disadvantageous as it is. I think that many of us might want to work fewer hours and spend a bit more time at home, but the choices are constrained by the fact that the options available for part-time work and how that part-time work takes place in practice does impose a detriment on part-time workers in general, but particularly on women as the vast majority of part-time workers. So there's no reason we couldn't change that to make that different. Thank you. I think that Professor Loretta wanted to come in on this. It's just asking about countries. Norway is interesting, and this came for the Centre for Senior Politics, so it's actually not a gender source, but it's aged and keeping people in work for longer. I'm thinking about a life course approach to say that if you allow people to work more flexibly at earlier stages in their life or, indeed, as Trisha was saying, that attention is given to the work-life balance and spillover throughout the life course, actually you don't tire people out and keep people in the workforce for longer. Again, there's a particular gender aspect to this, which is keeping women in the workforce for longer than they currently do, because they still do retire earlier than men, despite increased life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. John Mason had a follow-up question. To supplementary to what Professor Finlay just said, how do we deal with that then if part-time people are being paid less well than full-time? Should there be legislation on that that you have to pay the same for every hour, whether the person's full-time or part-time? There is, so there is part-time workers regulations that require you to pay the same for part-time work. The issue is less about the hours on the job and much more about what are the opportunities for work that are available on a part-time basis, so that's about defining which work is capable of being undertaken part-time and also the opportunities that are available to part-time workers. Part-time workers, for example, are less likely to get access to training opportunities, they are less likely to get to career development, they are less likely to be promoted. There are lots of sectors in which part-time working is, if you look at the retail sector, part-time working is very common. We know that lots of people work part-time in the retail sector in order to be able to balance work and family life, but when you start to move into promoted posts, team leaders, first line managers posts, they are much less likely to be part-time. Is there any particular reason why that's the case? You can't see on the face of it that the nature of the work requires it to be done full-time. In fact, for lots of work, it's very difficult to see why it can't be done full-time, but it's about the opportunities that are available for high-quality work on a part-time basis. Maybe then women and men could equally opt to engage in part-time work. Follow-up from Dean Lockhart. He was on this point about helping women to return to work after having children or for other reasons. Traditionally, in the past, I believe that women have benefited from part-time college courses to update their skills, which they have been able to take back into the workplace. We have seen quite a big cut in part-time vocational college places. Does that have a disproportionate effect on women returning to work? Should we be looking to reinstate some of those vocational-based college places to assist women and others returning to work? I don't know if I've read anything that gives me any evidence on that. Most people who are returning to work are returning to their original employer. In a sense, there have been things put in place at UK levels, for example, like return to work days to try and keep people connected to their organisation. I don't know of the impact on people who are returning to a different employer and would require some kinds of skills upgrading or skills retention. I would like to ask a slightly related question. Is there any research to show gender pay gap according to social background in terms of disparity of wealth? I appreciate that statistics are limited, but is there any research to show that the gender pay gap may be different according to the wealth background or social background? I think that Fiona referenced earlier the fact that there are different things going on at the lower pay desiles. If you look at the lowest pay desile, that is where the lowest gender pay gap is. We will assume that people in the lowest pay desile are also likely to be disproportionately from a working-class background. Therefore, there is a lower gender pay gap because what you have got there are effectively regulated wages by the national minimum wage. As you move up through the occupational hierarchy in the different pay desiles, we see a class effect—I think that Fiona might pick up on that—but particularly relating to professional work, so we know that there is a class effect in relation to professional and managerial work. People with the same qualifications, occupying the same jobs, are likely to be paid less. We do not protect for that very well in the UK. I have just been given the answer, thank you very much. Perhaps you can share that with us later. We are coming towards the end of our time here today, but I thought that it might be throw this open to all of our guests. The question is, what is the single biggest issue that in your view is preventing greater economic participation of women in the Scottish economy? I do not know who would like to come back on that point. Emily Thomson, first of all. That is a hard question, the single biggest issue. I can only answer from my own perspective, which, as a feminist economist, is about how we value market and non-market work. When we talk about economic participation, we want more women to participate in the economy. I would like to see as recognising that women are participating in the economy, but that their contribution is not always paid. For me, it is about trying to change those structures and our value systems that could make more recognition of the productive work that women are already engaging in the home. Professor Wall. That is a difficult question. There is not the answer that you are looking for, possibly. As the discussion around the table has indicated, what is required is a systemic response that, of all the issues that have been picked up, because it is not only that there are lots of issues, those issues themselves reinforce things. The discussion that was had around wages of nursery workers and gender representation, you get into a series of negative circling down or positive circling up, and you need to tackle everything systemically. The great strength of a committee's piece of work like this is that it can come up with a series of interlinked systemic recommendations that, as they are implemented, start doing things in a much better way. Thank you. Any of our other guests would like to come in. Professor Loretta. I would very much like to endorse what Emily Thompson said. I think that that is absolutely the main issue across, but if I can just stick to the later life working at the moment, it is the lack of flexible working opportunities at later working life that recognise the changing balance between paid and unpaid work. Dr Merkeuver. To me, it is not an immediate solution, but the first thing that comes to my mind when we talk about gender gap is the stereotypes that we are feeding to our children. I think that it is a long-term solution, but that is where we have to start. Once you expose children to stereotypes, you planted the seed and from that point on it only grows. Any further comments from our panel members on that point? And no further questions from committee members. Thank you very much. I would like to thank all of our guests today for coming in, and we will now suspend this session and move to private session, allowing time for the public gallery to clear. Thank you very much.