Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Mishal Husain 2018

Mishal Husain asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Graphs here, here and here redrawn by Martin Brown; images here redrawn by Joe Bright.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008220631

Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008220648

Version: 2018-08-16

Dedication

For my parents, Shama and Tazi

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

My journey to this book • Overcoming doubt • Finding my courage

Where We Are

Representation of women • Understanding the gaps • Socialisation

Growing Up Female

How we talk about girls and women • Stereotyping • Imagery • Reclaiming ambition

the skills

Planning

Longer working lives • Role models and inspiration • Five-year plans • Learning from those around you

Preparation

Information-gathering • Critical thinking • Challenging your beliefs • Evaluations and judgements

Starting Out

Navigating the first years on the career ladder • Processes that build confidence • Breaks from work and re-establishing yourself afterwards

Speaking Up

Voice, clarity and emphasis • Public speaking • The written word

Standing Up

Body language • Occupying space • First impressions

The Digital You

Social media opportunities and pitfalls • Women in technology • Making the internet more representative • Trolling

Keeping Sharp

Apprehension and anxiety • The importance of practice • Focusing on the immediate task

Owning It

Big moments and high-pressure scenarios • Appraisals and evaluations • Making a pitch

Rising Up

Developing authority • Mastering your brief • Demonstrating your knowledge

Resilience

Dealing with scrutiny and criticism • Knockbacks and failures • Learning but not losing your nerve

Balance

Managing the different elements of your life • Banishing guilt • Thinking long-term

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Notes

Image credits

Epigraph sources

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

Direct, persistent, purposeful. Or: uncertain, uneasy, doubtful. One of these sets of words reflects what is required to succeed in my line of work, especially amid pressure to generate new information and understanding quickly. The other reflects what I will most likely be experiencing in reality. After more than twenty years in broadcasting it’s a gap I know and understand – the difference between how everything appears on the outside and how I will be feeling on the inside. But it’s also the gap that led me to write this book, out of a desire not only to be honest about doubt but about channelling it and carrying on regardless.

One particular moment in my own life encapsulates what can happen in the opposite scenario, when doubt takes over – or comes close to it. In 2013, the newly appointed editor of Today, one of the BBC’s most prestigious programmes, asked if I might be interested in putting myself forward as a possible future presenter. You might think the answer was obvious – the role is, after all, one of the most coveted in my profession and I had by then spent seventeen years in broadcast news, thirteen of them as a presenter. Why would I not want to throw my hat into the ring? In the event, however, all I could think about was how hard the job would be – the precision required, the pressure, the scrutiny, the pre-dawn starts. I went home and told my husband it was a nice idea but I couldn’t imagine going for it. He looked incredulous. What would I say, he asked, if one of our children responded to a prospective new challenge by saying ‘Great opportunity but it will be too hard’?

I knew the answer to that one, and it pushed me to go for it. But for the first three years on Today, I fretted about almost every shift. I could not feel at ease in the role, worrying about what might go wrong and agonising over the things that did. And then, in a way that only became clear to me later, a moment arrived when it started to feel different. There was still an element of apprehension about each shift, but the sensation began to feel less like abject fear and more like something I could channel.

To anyone else it would have been easier to appreciate what had happened – I had grown into a new role, gained new skills and begun to feel more at home. Yet to me that outcome was never a given. I now look back and wonder: what if I had bailed out after a few months, or a year or two, and thought that my uncertainty was evidence the job just wasn’t right for me? I would never have discovered what I now know – that time, perseverance and an increasing familiarity made an immense difference.

The experience made me reflect on how often we look at people doing striking or difficult jobs and think that they were in some way born to them, that their performance is the result of innate ability. I am often told ‘You must never get nervous,’ and each time, I marvel at how far it is from the truth. We know, of course, that even the most experienced of actors can suffer from stage fright, we see how athletes psych themselves up as well as train hard physically, we are aware that even the most natural-appearing politicians will have been coached and participated in role-plays before big moments. And yet we can still be convinced that individuals achieve solely because they are in some way gifted, rather than because they have developed their capabilities.

That in turn can be a barrier to seeking new horizons – precisely as I experienced. Decisive for me was not only the simple fact of practice – each shift giving me more exposure to a variety of stories, interviewees and types of on-air conversations – but also the broader lessons that come from the nature of my work. It is on public display, which means the low points as well as the high ones are subject to immediate and sometimes fevered comment. It is often intense, both because of unusual working hours – a regular 3 a.m. alarm call – and the pressure that comes from having to absorb quantities of information in a short time-frame. The more I thought about what I consider to be some of the essential tools of my trade – speech, choice of words, body language, distilling information and deploying facts – the more I saw them as key to being effective in any line of work and at any stage of life. They become even more important when short attention spans and the pace of working life make it ever harder to get a message across in the way you intend.

And so the idea for The Skills was born, out of a desire to pass on what I have learned, much of which I wish I had figured out earlier in life. It took me a long time to find my courage, despite the steadfast encouragement and support of my parents. Both came to the UK from Pakistan – my father as a young doctor and my mother when she married him a few years later. There was never any question of me, as their daughter, being perceived differently from my brother; for both of us, the arrival of school reports sparked a gathering around the dining table where my father would read each entry aloud. As long as we appeared to be doing our best, he was satisfied: ‘Aim high,’ he would say, ‘because if you miss what you are aiming for, you’ll still end up in a good place.’

In both my parents’ families, mine would be the third generation in which women had had educational opportunities comparable to men: in the 1930s, in what was then British India, my two grandmothers were enrolled on medical and nursing courses. When it came to my own education, there would be some hard choices. Rather than send me to secondary school in Saudi Arabia, where we were living in the 1980s, my parents decided I would be better off in the UK. But that meant boarding school and long separations. Years later, my father told me that the motivation wasn’t only a desire for me to have a British education, but also a worry that remaining in Saudi Arabia, where I would have to wear an abaya or black cloak in public, might fundamentally alter my belief about what I could achieve in life. I know that had it not been for that decision, which in turn meant I stayed in the UK for university, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

With all of this support, why do I say my courage came later in life than it might have? Partly because when I think back to my university years, I know that I would have gained so much more from them had I been more willing to ask questions, to take risks and to test out arguments in front of my lecturers and fellow students. I was simply too cautious, too conscious that I might have got the wrong end of the stick and appear silly or uninformed. That caution persisted in the first part of my professional life – I was a producer at Bloomberg TV and then at the BBC, before getting into presenting at the age of twenty-seven – when I would mull over running orders and scripts, in search of the ideal turn of phrase or link between one story and the next. I would approach new projects, such as working on the Olympics, almost like an exam – setting aside time for preparation, making extensive notes in advance, trying to cover every base. Working on Today knocked that search for perfection out of me for the most basic of reasons: the shortage of time focused the mind like nothing I had previously experienced.

That’s not to say there is no longer a structure to the way I work – quite the opposite, because when time is of the essence, it is vital to have figured out the techniques that suit you and stick to them. For interviewing, much of my own method goes back to what I learned from studying the law: having the evidence to back up any assertions, knowing the arguments on the other side and being able to compare situations and ask if what happened in one case might apply elsewhere. I try to keep the focus on what I do know and how I can use it, because focusing on what is lacking can take you perilously close to losing your nerve.

For this book, I wanted to gather together approaches and ideas that have helped me, as well as the views of others. And I wanted to write from my perspective as a woman, because we’re at a point in time when it is clear that we need some better ideas about how more women can advance to levels comparable with men. In some countries girls and women face reduced educational and employment opportunities, but even in the most progressive nations, too many companies and workplaces can be gender-mapped into a pyramid shape: women and men represented in equal numbers at entry level but the presence of women tailing off dramatically the more senior the role.1 At the beginning of 2018, just seven women were leading FTSE 100 companies, fewer than the number of men called David occupying the same positions.2 A century after the first woman was elected to Parliament at Westminster, two-thirds of British MPs are men.3 The pattern is the same for partners in law firms in England and Wales, where only a third are women.4

Imbalances prevail on the airwaves, too. On the UK’s six most prominent broadcast news programmes, a 2018 study found that 2.2 male experts appear for every female one.5 It’s a situation that many editors and producers are now actively trying to change – striving for a fifty-fifty gender balance among contributors, wherever possible. Rather than the same guests being booked time and again, it means they might begin the search with the ambition of finding a man and a woman to speak on a certain topic. And that starting point can make a powerful difference – the search becomes wider, with new expert voices often discovered in the process.

We live in an age of much greater consciousness about the importance of representation, but I still find myself in settings that are overwhelmingly male. All-male panels – or ‘manels’ – remain commonplace at some conferences, and even where high-profile events such as the World Economic Forum in Davos have strived to achieve a better gender balance, it’s still apparent when you go there that many of the women present are journalists or conference staff. One year, during an off-the-record media session with the Iranian president, I realised I was one of around ten women in a gathering of well over a hundred people. As the president’s speech ended and the questions began, I mulled over what I might ask. And then it struck me that given the tiny number of women in the room, there was a strong chance the session might end without a woman’s voice being heard at all. Suddenly, the principle of participation seemed far more important than the actual question. I stuck up my hand and spoke.

Uncomfortable truths can emerge even when women are in prominent positions. Why was Claire Foy, who took the lead role of Queen Elizabeth in the hit television series The Crown, paid less for her work than Matt Smith, in the supporting role of Prince Philip? In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the actor Emma Thompson was one of the first to say that the shocking details emerging were part of a deeper malaise. ‘In our systems there are not nearly enough women, particularly in Hollywood, in positions of power. There aren’t enough women at the top of the tree – in the studios – who could perhaps balance everything out. There aren’t enough women on set. This is part of our difficulty,’ she said. ‘This is a gender dysfunction.’6

Today when I hear people say everything’s going in the right direction, that their daughters won’t experience the same barriers, and even that women hold all the cards – I am not convinced. Of course it’s true that my generation has had opportunities that most of our mothers did not, but we’ve also come up against obstacles that many of us expected would be gone by now. Work and childcare remains a difficult balancing act for too many women and the bulk of home responsibilities are also mostly ours. Gender pay gaps illustrate the paucity of women in higher-paid roles while equal pay claims raise questions about how they are perceived and valued in comparison with male colleagues.

Perhaps part of the answer lies deep in our subconscious. I know that when I close my eyes and conjure up an image of someone at the top of my own chosen profession – a main presenter or a prominent interviewer – I see a man. I see a white man, as it happens. It reflects the reality of the world that surrounds me, but the permutations of that subconscious image can be far-reaching. They might seep into judgements I make about people performing that role – do they fit the picture I have in my head? If not, perhaps I will perceive them as having less of a right to be there. And what about an internal effect – how might that image affect the way I view my own potential and chances of progression?

Just as I was writing this book, the emergence of #MeToo and #TimesUp made me look back on my own experiences and think anew about their impact in shaping my sense of self. I’ve been flashed at and groped in public places and know how vulnerable it can make a girl or an adult woman feel. At work, there were times early in my career when I felt my suggestions weren’t taken as seriously as a man’s might have been (‘Stick to what you’re good at’ was one comment from a manager). At Today, there have been occasions when I had the distinct impression that a prominent contributor walking into the studio was looking across at my co-presenter and wishing he was doing the interview with them rather than me.

None of this has held me back, but I do wonder whether men set off on their careers with an expectation of advancement, while women can feel under pressure to prove themselves. I’m also struck by the tricky transitions in and out of the workplace that are par for the course in most women’s lives – and the worries that come with them: will their maternity cover be better than them? Will the juggling of career and family work out?

Bearing the weight of childcare responsibilities can also reduce women’s ability to take advantage of job offers that might boost their salary, because they’re more tied to their commute, working hours and keeping their routine unchanged. And when they take up part-time and flexible working options the result can be a disproportionate wage penalty, a promotion penalty or simply a perception that priorities now lie elsewhere. Ellen Kullman, who was one of the most powerful women in American business when she was running the corporate giant DuPont, has said that during her time there women were being promoted every 30–36 months, while men were moving on every 18–24 months. The perception seemed to be that the women needed longer to show their capability.7

Phase one of my own working life began when I got into broadcasting in the mid-1990s. I felt an immense thrill at getting a foot in the door of the industry, although this period also included working overnight shifts, when it was hard to feel optimistic or energised about anything. Not long afterwards, however, I got a break into live presenting, which came while I was working in the BBC’s business and economics unit. Producers would sometimes have the chance to give a brief on-camera summary of the day on the financial markets, and after doing this a few times I was offered some reporting shifts. One week, there was a gap in the business presenters’ rota and I was asked to fill in, my knees shaking as I did so. But one thing led to another – I never went back to being a producer and later moved from business coverage to the international channel BBC World News.

That is how what I now think of as the middle phase of my career began, coinciding with an intense period in my personal life – twenty months after the birth of my first son, I had twin boys. Returning to work after my second maternity leave proved a fine balancing act, in which the overriding concern was to keep life as simple and manageable as possible, rather than trying anything new. Gradually, though, the domestic rhythm became more settled and I started to wonder what the next stage of my career could potentially involve. As Radio 4 had been a companion to my life from the age of seventeen – when a wise person advised me that listening would be good preparation for university interviews – I knew I would love to work there. But I had no experience in radio production or reporting, let alone presenting. The only way I could gain some, and get my voice on air, would be to use my days off to do occasional shifts, filling in on news and other factual programmes in the hope that it might stand me in good stead for any future opportunities.

None appeared to be forthcoming. I was fortunate that the BBC was a large enough organisation to have a variety of internal possibilities to explore, which meant I could dip my toe into new waters and gain exposure while still having the security of my main role as a news presenter. But it was an odd and often disheartening time, as I made ad-hoc appearances on unfamiliar programmes, wondering if I was in danger of becoming a jack-of-all-trades. What motivated me was the strong sense that I had but one life to see how far I might be able to progress – I didn’t want to look back later on and wish I had tried a bit harder.

I realised, however, that there was a downside to how opportunities had come my way thick and fast a few years before, when I started presenting. I had been asked to do one interesting thing after another, been based in Singapore and Washington, and reported frequently from other parts of the world too. I had rarely had to push for a particular opportunity or project, with the result that by this stage I was missing an essential skill: being able to make a pitch for myself. I went to see one BBC editor or executive after another, asking if they might try me out, but found I was lacking a compelling answer to the inevitable question: ‘What is it that you want to do?’

Over time, there were some valuable lessons: I learned to be straightforward and clear about what I was asking for; to be ready to turn my energies towards a new avenue if the first one didn’t work out; to keep an open mind and explore multiple options, even though that sometimes felt overwhelming; to do my best to express my hopes and ambitions without apology or diffidence – even if it felt excruciating at some moments and pushy at others.

From there I started to think about a set of skills relevant to career troughs as well as peaks, adaptable to different settings and transferable even in the event of a complete career change. Every projection about the future of work suggests that mobility will be increasingly important – perhaps the disruption will even bridge some of the workplace gender gaps we see today, if it becomes more common for men and women to shift gear, go part-time or take time out to retrain or for family reasons.

There is more to do to help people achieve their potential at work. But when I contrast my experience of working life with that of my mother, I feel a deep gratitude. For all the emphasis on education in my family, the idea that it could be used to forge a career and for that career to exist alongside motherhood, is a novel one. My mother gained two degrees in Pakistan and became a producer at Pakistan Television when it was first set up in the 1960s. But all around her, it was accepted that marriage and motherhood were more than likely to bring any nascent careers to an end.

Her own marriage brought her to the UK in 1972 and I was born in 1973. With my father working long hours in the National Health Service in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire, I was her full-time job. She told me years later that there were times when she would watch the Asian programming coming out of the BBC in Birmingham and long to be a part of it, to use her experience and have an identity in this new country beyond that of wife and mother. It was never going to be possible – she had a baby to look after and any family members who might have helped out were far away. Childcare and travel costs would have been an unjustifiable addition to an already tight household budget.

It is not in my mother’s nature to be bitter about what might have been, but her experience reminds me not to lose an appreciation of the doors that have been open to me, one generation on. Changed attitudes to women and to ethnic minorities have both played a key role in my life chances – not so long ago it would have been hard to imagine someone with a name like mine fronting a national news programme. That is not to say that I find my own combination of motherhood, marriage and work easy – or even always manageable. But I often think back to what I heard the then head coach of UK Athletics, Charles van Commenee, say just ahead of the London Olympics. Having coached many athletes to medals, he said he always tried to make them appreciate that pressure would be an ongoing part of their lives. ‘I tell them – it’s uncomfortable out there,’ he said. The words resonate with me because alongside the many privileges of my job are the difficult aspects – in particular the scrutiny. I cannot have one without accepting the other, and I have but this one life to make the most of what comes my way.

Where We Are

Each generation must create its own reality and find its own identity

Camille Paglia

If I feel fortunate to have been born in a time when my opportunities have been so much greater than my mother’s, it is also true that the advancement of women has not reached the point I would have imagined it might when I left university in 1995. By then, both the UK and my parents’ country of origin, Pakistan, had elected female prime ministers and, if asked, I would have said that spoke volumes about change and progress.

More than twenty years on, I now see that while we owe a great deal to those who smashed glass ceilings and led the way, the follow-up – assuming there is one – is vital. It was Norway’s Erna Solberg, the second woman to be elected prime minister of her country, who brought this home when she told me why she likes the ‘second woman’ role: ‘It means the first was not a one-off.’ Even her country, known for being one of the most gender-equal in the world, has not reached a fifty-fifty split in Parliament – although with 41 per cent women, it is still doing better than most.1 In India, women make up only 12 per cent of the Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament, while in China a woman has never sat on the Communist Party’s most powerful decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee.2

Interestingly, the picture for Chinese business is considerably better, with women holding 31 per cent of senior leadership roles. It’s a proportion matched in Africa and exceeded in Eastern Europe, but in businesses in the European Union, women hold 27 per cent of senior roles and in North America, just 21 per cent.3 The study, by the accountants Grant Thornton International, noted that those countries with the most policies in place to promote equality – equal pay, parental leave, flexible working – were not necessarily those with the greatest diversity at the top of business. Policy alone was not producing large scale change, they said, while stereotypes about gender roles were still a barrier to progress. That is a conclusion that perhaps makes clearer where the focus for my generation and younger women should lie – we need to think about individuals as well as institutions.

We can take heart, however, from studies that have compared companies’ records on diversity and their performance – one analysis of more than 20,000 firms in 91 countries found that the presence of women in corporate leadership correlated positively with profitability.4 Another, from consultants at McKinsey, reported that a correlation between gender and ethnic diversity and financial performance generally holds true across geographies. While they couldn’t say that one caused the other, they observed a ‘real relationship between diversity and performance’ and said the reasons for it would include ‘improved access to talent, enhanced decision making and depth of consumer insight and strengthened employee engagement and licence to operate’.5

A broad perspective on where there’s been progress – and where there are gaps – comes from the World Economic Forum’s annual analysis of gender-based disparities. In 2017, it reported that the 144 countries studied had made great strides in two key areas – health and educational attainment. The major gaps lay in two others – political empowerment and economic participation and opportunity – with particular concern that the average earnings of men were rising faster than those of women.6 It also highlighted how women are likely to be affected by key future trends: automation will significantly affect industries in which many are currently employed, and they are under-represented in high-income and high-growth fields such as technology and science. Even countries where women have made great strides cannot be assured of future progress, explains the organisation’s head of education, gender and work, Saadia Zahidi: ‘A lot of advanced economies have stalled as they were riding the wave of the education boom among women, but if the responsibility of home and childcare is still on those women, there is a limit to how much they can do in the workplace.’7

In India the growth in girls’ education hasn’t resulted in women entering the workforce in the numbers you might expect or hope for, especially in a growing economy. In fact, according to the Harvard economist Professor Rohini Pande, female participation in the Indian labour market has been falling, down from 37 per cent to 28 per cent between 1990 and 2015. It’s not a lack of political will to get more women into paid employment, she says, or a lack of interest from women themselves. Instead, there is a significant role being played by social norms – among parents, husbands and parents-in-law – about appropriate behaviour for women. Pande’s research also suggests that while low pay is the main reason for Indian men to leave a job or not accept one, women cite family pressures and responsibilities.8

Those pressures might relate to taking care of the household, but also basic mobility – requiring permission to go out, for example. As Professor Pande says: ‘It’s pretty difficult to look for a job if you can’t leave the house alone.’ Even in India’s urban areas, she and her associate Charity Troyer Moore found female workers struggling to access male-dominated networks. ‘Women often end up in lower-paid and less-responsible positions than their abilities would otherwise allow,’ they say, ‘which, in turn, makes it less likely that they will choose to work at all, especially as household incomes rise and they don’t absolutely have to work to survive.’9

Nonetheless, the experience of a country like Bangladesh, with similar social and cultural norms to India, shows that there are ways such barriers can be tackled. It has a higher proportion of working women than India, largely thanks to the development of its garment industry, where 80 per cent of the workers are female. On a trip there in 2015, I saw for myself the difference that a job in one of these factories can make to an individual’s life. In a room packed with rows of women at sewing machines, one young worker’s ID card, hanging around her neck, bore the photograph of a young boy on the reverse. She was a widow and this was her only child. His future was her biggest motivation and she was able to pay for his education thanks to her job – without it, they would both be dependent on the mercy of relatives. Indeed, Pande and Moore say the garment sector has been important for Bangladeshi women’s empowerment far beyond the factory floor: ‘The explosive growth of that industry during the last thirty years caused a surge in large-scale female labour force participation. It also delayed marriage age and caused parents to invest more in their daughters’ education.’10

In the UK much of the conversation about the workplace gaps remaining between men and women has focused on pay, largely due to a 2017 law requiring larger employers to reveal the difference in the mean and median pay of their male and female workers. Because gender pay reporting is based on averages it is in some ways a crude calculation – the airline easyJet, for example, reported a particularly large gap because men dominate its cohort of pilots, who are paid considerably more than the mostly female cabin crew.

The system does, however, lead to questions being asked about how women might be better represented among the higher-paid roles, which is why the director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, Carolyn Fairbairn, welcomes it: ‘This is about fairness but it’s also about productivity in our economy and how we have businesses that have all the talents. We do not have enough women who are pilots, or CEOs who are women, or enough top senior consultants in hospitals who are women. These are issues that we now need to really grip.’11 Others believe the obligation to report has transformed companies’ conversations about gender. ‘When we’ve talked about the pay gap before, the response has always been “That must be happening somewhere else”,’ says Ann Francke of the Chartered Management Institute. Now, she says companies are being forced to confront their data and reflect on the picture it paints.12

As well as patterns evident within companies, there are others which emerge in comparisons of pay for men and women working within the same occupation. Data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics shows considerable variation in average hourly earnings between, for example, male and female financial managers and directors. Full-time men in that occupation earn an average of £35.52 per hour (or £72,000 per year), while the average for women is £24.29 per hour, translating into an annual salary of around £43,000. In the same 2017 data set, male town planning officers earned an average of around £20 per hour, while the figure for women was £14.50. Most of the roles where the gap disappeared or was reversed, so that women were earning more (secretaries and fitness instructors, for example), had hourly earnings at the lower end of the spectrum.13

It is possible that these comparisons mask variations about the work done within the different categories: the scope and responsibility of the roles, whether the jobs were in the public or private sector, the region in which they were based and the skills, experience and competence of the individuals whose information went into the data set. But like companies’ gender pay gap figures, they can be a valuable starting point for a conversation about disparities. Perhaps the women had previously taken time out from work or been part-time for a period – but would that, or should that, fully account for the gap with comparable men once they returned to full-time?

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, part-time work can have a striking effect in shutting down normal wage progression. In general, pay rises with experience, but part-time workers, who are mostly women, miss out on these gains. ‘By the time a first child is grown up (aged twenty), mothers earn about 30 per cent less per hour, on average, than similarly educated fathers. About a quarter of that wage gap is explained by the higher propensity of the mothers to have been in part-time rather than full-time paid work while that child was growing up, and the consequent lack of wage progression,’ said a study published in early 2018. In what they called ‘the long-term depressing effect’ of part-time work, the authors also reported a significant impact on graduate women. ‘It is now the highest-educated women whose wages are the furthest behind their male counterparts,’ said IFS Associate Director Robert Joyce, ‘and this is particularly related to the fact that they lose out so badly from working part-time.’14

At Harvard, the economist Professor Claudia Goldin has examined the way different jobs are structured in order to see how this sort of pay penalty might be addressed. She’s pointed to how some occupations – including within business, finance and the law – generally pay a premium for people working longer hours. A lawyer expected to be readily available for clients and working sixty hours per week, for example, is likely to earn more than double the salary of a comparable colleague working thirty hours a week. Professor Goldin says this ‘non-linearity’ arises when the job is set up or has historically been done in a way that makes it difficult for workers to substitute for one another. Within this environment, those who work shorter hours will suffer a disproportionate wage penalty.

She contrasts that with what has happened in the United States with pharmacists, a high-income profession in which women are well represented. In the 1970s many were self-employed and the sector was dominated by small independent pharmacies, but now the majority are employees of large companies or hospitals. Part-time working is common, but pay tends to be perfectly in line with the number of hours worked – those who do fewer hours are paid proportionately less. Goldin attributes this to the ease with which pharmacists are able to substitute for one another – no single person is required to be available for an extended number of hours or for certain hours of the day. ‘The spread of vast information systems and the standardisation of drugs have enhanced their ability to seamlessly hand off clients and be good substitutes for one another. The result is that short and irregular hours are not penalised.’15

Professor Goldin says this structure helps to make it worthwhile for women to stay in paid work rather than leave to care for families, and that other professions could learn from the example of pharmacy. There will still be roles where employees won’t easily be able to swap in for each other – the founder of a business perhaps, or someone with unique and non-replicable expertise – but these should be fewer than is the case at present.

Elsewhere there is other evidence about how changing systems and processes could make a difference in areas where there are significant gender gaps – bonuses for senior doctors for example. When a BBC investigation showed that 95 out of the 100 highest-paid hospital consultants in England were male, ‘additional pay’, such as overtime or bonuses for clinical excellence, was a considerable factor.16 One consultant, Mahnaz Hashmi, told me what applying for the bonuses involves: ‘You have to fill out a lengthy form within a short time-frame of a few weeks, showcasing your achievements and providing evidence for them. If you are part-time you will have less to put down. In the early stages it feels like a lot of effort for relatively small bonuses, but they become more valuable as they accumulate over the years.’

The NHS process has also been based around consultants putting themselves forward. ‘Women seem to do this less,’ she says. But she also believes that achieving recognition in the system demands a willingness to put in a lot of your own time – for example by serving on awards committees in years when you are not yourself applying, thereby making sure you are up to date with the latest criteria and scoring schemes. ‘It’s difficult to do when you are part-time, and if you come back to full-time later you usually find there’s already a wide salary differential between men and women consultants.’ My BBC colleague Nick Triggle says he was struck when working on the data by the self-perpetuating nature of the system. ‘Those working in the NHS told me younger consultants often only go for the awards after prompting from older ones, and there was a sense that senior figures are more likely to do this for those who remind them of their younger selves,’ he says. ‘The culture created, perhaps unconsciously, is one where men encourage other men towards the pay awards.’

In the summer of 2017, my own workplace was the setting for what turned out to be a lengthy row sparked by the BBC disclosing the salaries of the highest-earning on-air ‘talent’ – including presenters, contributors and actors – paid directly from the licence fee.17 The list, which included me, generated intense interest and comment: few people from ethnic minorities were among the ninety-six names, while people who went to private schools were over-represented, compared to the population as a whole.18 Most of the scrutiny, however, was focused on gender – the top seven earners were all male, and in some cases, there was a marked difference between the salaries of women and men appearing on the same programmes. The leading businessman Sir Philip Hampton, chairman of the drugs giant GSK, wondered why women broadcasters had let it happen. ‘How has this arisen at the BBC that these intelligent, high-powered, sometimes formidable women have sat in this situation?’19

The truth is that we didn’t know the picture until it was revealed. The disclosure sparked unprecedented conversations between colleagues, with women and men starting to share information about their salaries and, in some cases, their efforts to be paid equally to their peers. Some were in pay brackets that put them above the national average, others were not. And we wondered: if the system wasn’t treating women with agency and clout equally to men, what did that say about what might be happening to women elsewhere?

It’s happened even in companies which were sure their ethos would have guarded against any question of unequal pay. In 2015, the chief executive of the tech company Salesforce, Marc Benioff, was approached by his human resources chief about conducting an equal pay audit for its thirty thousand employees. Benioff thought it unnecessary, telling CBS News later that his company had a great culture: ‘We don’t play shenanigans paying people unequally. It’s unheard of.’ Yet he agreed to the audit, which went on to reveal not a few isolated cases but a persistent pay gap between men and women doing the same job. ‘It was through the whole company,’ said Benioff. ‘Every division, every department, every geography.’ Salesforce ended up giving 10 per cent of its female employees pay rises, but when it conducted another audit, the results showed that further adjustments were needed. ‘It turned out we had bought about two dozen companies. And guess what? When you buy a company you also buy its pay practices.’ Benioff concluded that there was a much bigger issue afoot. ‘I think it’s happening everywhere. There’s a cultural phenomenon where women are paid less.’20

Not everyone agrees with that, instead emphasising choice and its implications – for example, women deciding against pursuing time-intensive but financially rewarding career paths.21 But in Iceland, the government is placing a legal obligation on any employer of more than twenty-five people to undertake a similar exercise to Salesforce’s – a comprehensive assessment allowing them to be certified as paying equal wages for work of equal value. The process requires individual jobs to be analysed and scored against a list of criteria, including education required, level of responsibility, how demanding the role is and its value to the employer. The scores across the company or organisation are then compared and any gap between two jobs with the same score but different pay must be addressed. When Iceland’s Directorate of Customs piloted the system, the results included the role of statistics analyst being judged equal to that of a legal adviser, which had previously been higher paid. The statistics analysts were given a rise. The head of human resources, Unnur Kristjánsdóttir, said there was a wider dividend too: ‘We have a happier workforce, knowing that the salary system is something they can trust.’22

The new focus on gender is adding an urgency to questions being asked in many different settings. For two of the world’s top universities, regularly in the spotlight over admissions of poorer and minority students, that also means questions about a gender gap at the highest levels of academic attainment. Both Oxford and Cambridge have been puzzling over disparities in the proportion of male and female undergraduates gaining first-class degrees in some subjects. In 2014, Cambridge’s results in history showed that in the first part of the degree course, 88 per cent of the firsts went to male students, despite there being near equal numbers of men and women enrolled.23 At Oxford that year, 35 per cent of men but only 21 per cent of women studying English gained a first-class degree and there has been a persistent gender attainment gap in chemistry, too.24

At both universities, all students would have entered with excellent exam grades, and the effort to understand the gaps is made more complex by the range of subjects involved: from the essay-based humanities, where marking is more subjective, to the exactitude required in the sciences. At Oxford, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Advocate for Diversity Rebecca Surender told me they have been looking at everything from pre-university education to the admissions process, exposure to female role models and the style of teaching, for example the often intense interaction in weekly tutorials. ‘The kind of degree you get matters and we don’t want women to be disadvantaged when they leave us and go into the world,’ she says. ‘Preliminary results suggest that there is no single explanation but rather a set of interactions between wider socialisation and what happens before women get to us, together with some environmental factors in the institution.’

At Cambridge one study investigated the relationship between exam structure and performance. Academics in the physics department set up a mock exam for first-year undergraduates in which, for some questions, the usual format was replaced with a ‘scaffolded’ version, broken down into sections showing the marks available for each.25 This style is closer to what those undergraduates would have been accustomed to in their school-leaving exams, and while it resulted in improved performance for all candidates, the women benefited more than the men. On average their marks increased by more than 13 per cent compared with their previous exam performance – while for the men the average increase was 9 per cent.

Dame Athene Donald, one of Cambridge’s most senior female professors and a physicist herself, told me a close focus on the beginning of the university experience was vital: ‘If women come here and struggle in their first year, they may never gain the confidence to proceed. In a subject like physics, where the percentage of girls is only 20–25, and you will be conscious at some level of being in a minority, it can feel even more threatening. Sometimes young women don’t like to say “I’m struggling” because they think that’s an admission of failure, so they struggle in silence.’

She wonders about the impact of stereotypes – perhaps young women don’t expect to do well in a mathematics-heavy subject such as physics – but also why more progress hasn’t been made since her own days as an undergraduate at the university. ‘In my final year class there were eight women out of about 100. But one didn’t expect anything else. I knew perfectly well that there were only three colleges that could admit women. What I find shocking today is that despite all the changes, despite the fact that we are fully co-educational apart from three women’s colleges, we still have these issues.’

At Oxford, one of the studies overseen by Rebecca Surender has focused on academic self-concept, or the belief in your ability to succeed in a particular subject area. Given that this tends to correlate with academic achievement, the aim was to establish any differences between men and women on arrival at the university and how their academic self-concept might change during the first year of study. She told me the findings showed that from the beginning of their course, male students had a higher perception of their own competence in their subject compared with their female peers, but for both sexes the level remained stable over the course of the academic year.

For the university this is of course a welcome finding because it suggests that the difference exists before students arrive. This is despite the fact that for the seventeen years up until 2017, girls in Britain had outperformed boys in getting the highest A level grades in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.26 I also can’t shake off the suspicion that there is something in particular going on at these two universities, because in UK higher education as a whole, the same proportion of women as men gain first-class degrees.27 I certainly remember times when I found my weekly supervisions at Cambridge intimidating. It wasn’t that the academics leading them set out to make them so, but there is a weight that comes with the history, tradition and reputation of excellence that surrounds you in these places. The Times journalist Sathnam Sanghera, who was born into a working-class Sikh family and went on to read English at Cambridge, remembers ‘negative feelings of unbelonging’ while he was there.28 If academic self-concept is the key, how much might it be affected in people who have a nagging sense that they don’t quite fit or fully deserve to be in such a celebrated place?

Other thought-provoking evidence on socialisation and confidence-building has emerged from a different university environment. Researchers Sarah Eddy and Daniel Grunspan were interested in how peer perception and gender influence students’ assessments of each other’s mastery of a particular subject – in this case biology. They asked students to complete surveys, getting them to highlight those they felt were particularly strong in their grasp of the material studied and those they thought would do well on the course.

The researchers found that male students were much more likely to rate other men as knowledgeable, a tendency that lasted throughout the academic year and persisted even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. Female students showed no gender bias, nominating both fellow female and male students. The authors also found that there were some students who stood out in the eyes of their peers and were nominated multiple times, and that these students were always male. It wasn’t as though there weren’t women with similarly high grades in their classes, who also spoke up frequently and demonstrated their knowledge, but somehow they never gained the same ‘celebrity status’ as their male counterparts.29

When I read this study I started to imagine what the scene in the classroom might have looked like. The ‘celebrity’ students would no doubt have been aware of attracting their peers’ attention when they spoke – heads would have turned to listen to them, perhaps nodding in agreement. It’s a good experience to have, one that’s certain to make you feel more at ease, happier with your command of the subject material and probably spurred on to make further points. Could these apparently small interactions build up and develop capacity in a subject so much so that attainment is higher – or the chances of further study or a career in the field are increased? I started to think more and more about expectations of behaviour – whether in a classroom, smaller tutorial-style gatherings of students, or the first day in a new job. If we grow up with assumptions, even ones of which we are barely conscious, that men will speak first or take the lead, that can easily turn into a pattern that validates and reinforces those assumptions.

Consider this alongside what we already know about what can happen in the workplace or before people even get there. One meta-analysis of studies conducted in OECD countries over a twenty-five-year period found that discrimination against ethnic minority applicants in the hiring process was commonplace.30 In 2009, a major study commissioned by a UK government department reported high levels of name-based discrimination when researchers sent out multiple applications for real-life openings. The main difference between the applications was the likely ethnicity associated with their name: ‘Andrew Clarke’ was used to denote a white British male; ‘Mariam Namagembe’ for a black African female and ‘Nazia Mahmood’ for a Pakistani or Bangladeshi female. White names were favoured over equivalent applications from ethnic minority candidates.31

More recently, the power of big data has been harnessed to take a broader snapshot of the workplace and analyse it in terms of promotion rather than recruitment. The US-based neuroscientist and artificial intelligence expert Vivienne Ming took a vast data set of millions of real-life professional profiles collected by a tech recruitment firm and used them to compare the career trajectories of software developers whose first names were either ‘Joe’ or ‘Jose’. She found that those named ‘Jose’ typically needed a Master’s degree or more to be equally likely to get a promotion as a ‘Joe’ who had no degree. She called this a ‘tax on being different’, because of the extra costs and time involved in gaining the higher qualifications.

When Ming then used her model to compare the profiles of software engineers with male names against those with female names, she also found a ‘tax’. Typically, women needed a Master’s degree in order to compete with a man with a Bachelor’s degree. No wonder people who face these extra hurdles sometimes decide it’s not worth pursuing a particular path, she concluded: ‘The tax comes from the cost of studying at more prestigious universities, on more and higher degrees, in increases in minimum experience, and more exceptional professional backgrounds.’ In the face of this, any decision to drop out is rational, reflecting ‘a cost almost entirely absent from their more privileged peers’.32

Having invested in recruitment and development, few companies or organisations would want to see good staff reach a conclusion like that, disappearing from career tracks they had embarked upon. When that happens, both the individual and the employer generally lose out, with evidence of wider economic impact too. Yet without a forensic approach to achieving progress and change, where we are now could easily be where we stall.

The best hope of avoiding that is probably to be as laser-like as possible about identifying where the pressure points arise and why. What is it that deters or derails people with potential, who have much to give, and what might just keep them in the game or at least reaching the next milestone? Data and new analytical tools should help provide the evidence and illustrate patterns beyond the individual experience. Only with that degree of clear-sighted focus are we likely to get to better solutions for the twenty-first-century workplace.

Growing Up Female

We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What do we see and hear, growing up as girls, that might have a lasting impact on our sense of self? I remember frequently being asked what I wanted to become, but a few years ago I realised that when it came to conversations with the young daughters of friends, I was doing something quite different. Too often, that conversation would begin with a comment on their appearance – something that seemed innocuous enough at the time but also unlikely to be said to boys. It started to bother me. If it would be odd for my sons’ hair or clothes to be the source of comment when they were introduced to another adult, why was I doing that when it came to their female peers?

We send messages about behaviour, too – expecting girls to be polite and well-behaved while making a fuss of boys when they are. And girls notice. Girlguiding UK, which carries out an annual survey of opinion among nearly two thousand girls and young women, aged from seven to twenty-one, said the overwhelming message from its 2017 results was the entrenchment of gender stereotypes in all aspects of life: ‘From a young age, girls sense they face different expectations compared to boys and feel a pressure to adjust their behaviour accordingly. Girls encounter stereotyping across their lives – at school, in the media and in advertising, in the real and the virtual world, from their peers, teachers and families.’ Among the seven- to ten-year-olds questioned more than half said gender stereotypes would affect them saying what they thought and how much they participated in class.1

One group of US researchers has suggested that six is a key age at which impressions about the different potential of boys and girls start to set in. In their study, groups of children were told a story about someone described as ‘really, really smart’, i.e. clever, and were then shown pictures of two men and two women. They were asked to guess who the story they heard was about. Among five-year-olds, boys were most likely to pick men and girls women. But when the same process was repeated on six- and seven-year-olds, the girls in that age group were less likely than the boys to associate brilliance with their own gender. The boys hadn’t changed their tendency to prefer men.

The same researchers then focused on the way two games were described to six- and seven-year-olds and how that might affect their interest. One game was said to be for ‘children who are really, really smart’ and the other for ‘children who try really, really hard’. When the children were then asked about which game they wanted to play, girls were less likely than boys to express an interest in the one said to be for the ‘really, really smart’. The authors said their work provided preliminary evidence of how gendered beliefs about intelligence develop and how they relate to young children’s decision-making.2

If this sort of perception takes hold so young, how much might it then be exacerbated by words we use differently for boys and girls and men and women? ‘Ambitious’ is usually seen as a positive if you’re male, much less so if you’re female. ‘Pushy’ is similarly negative for women, but tolerable in a man, an indication that he is going places. And then there are the flattering ways to convey respect and professional standing – by referring to someone as ‘distinguished’ or ‘esteemed’ – that are very rarely used for women.

In a striking visualisation, Professor Ben Schmidt of Northeastern University illustrated this in a study based on student feedback placed on the website RateMyProfessors.com. It revealed that words such as ‘genius’ and ‘brilliant’ were more likely to be used to describe male academics.3 Women, on the other hand, were more likely to be called ‘nice’ and, in general, described in terms that related to personality, attitude and behaviour (‘helpful’ or ‘friendly’), rather than purely to their academic or intellectual capability. ‘When we use these reviews and evaluations to assess people,’ says Professor Schmidt, ‘we need to keep in mind that the way people write them is really culturally conditioned.’4

Ben Schmidt did not find as much comment on female lecturers’ looks or clothing as he had expected, but in many instances details about women’s appearance and private lives creep into discussions that are supposedly about their professional abilities. Hillary Clinton once said that if she wanted to knock a story off the front page, all she needed to do was change her hairstyle, but it can get much more personal. Within hours of thirty-seven-year-old Jacinda Ardern becoming leader of New Zealand’s Labour Party she was asked in an interview whether she had made a choice between having a career or having babies. Sometimes, women’s achievements are described with references to their personal lives that would jump out as ludicrous if used for a man: when the businesswoman Rona Fairhead emerged as the preferred candidate to chair the then BBC Trust, one newspaper headline read: ‘Mother of Three Poised to Lead the BBC.’

Once you focus on the imagery we consume from an early age, other oddities become apparent. That was the experience of the Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis after she started to watch children’s television and films with her young daughter. ‘I immediately noticed that there seemed to be far more male characters than female characters,’ she later said. ‘This made no sense: why on earth in the twenty-first century would we be showing fictitious worlds bereft of female characters to our children?’5 Deciding that she needed data to convince executives that there was a problem, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004. Its studies have shown that even among animated family films, a ratio of three male speaking characters for every female one prevails and that two types of female characters tend to dominate: the traditional and the ‘hypersexual’. These girls and women might be unusually thin and in sexually revealing clothing, or in animated films they might be depicted with an unnatural body shape, such as an exaggeratedly tiny waist.6

Earlier on, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel had drawn attention to the portrayal of women in film in her own way, with a 1985 strip in which two women discuss going to the cinema. One has a rule – she’ll only go to see a film with at least two women in it, who talk to each other about something other than a man.7 It sounds basic, but once you start applying what’s come to be called ‘the Bechdel Test’, it is remarkable how few films pass it – only half of those that have ever won the Best Picture Oscar, according to a 2018 BBC analysis, and even then some of those had just one or two instances of conversation that met the requirements.8

Even where a film is based around a strong female protagonist, she may be outnumbered in terms of her lines. In a study of film dialogue, the data website The Pudding found that was the case in Mulan, where the eponymous heroine’s dragon has considerably more lines than she does. Overall, male characters dominated the dialogue in 73 per cent of Disney/Pixar films analysed, including family favourites such as Toy Story, The Lion King, Monsters, Inc. and The Jungle Book.9 And a study made of films across the world found that women not only have fewer speaking roles than men, but that their characters are less likely to be portrayed having an occupation than women in the real-life workforce of those countries.10

Thanks to sustained and detailed work by Dr Martha M. Lauzen at San Diego State University, we also know that there has been little change in the presence of women working behind the scenes in the film industry. Her data shows that the number employed as directors, writers, producers, cinematographers and editors hasn’t really budged in twenty years: today, just 11 per cent of directors and 4 per cent of cinematographers are women.11

Where films do have at least one female director, there is a greater likelihood of other women being employed – a correlation that makes all the difference to someone like Lucinda Coxon, who wrote the 2015 film The Danish Girl, and who needs to find enough work to sustain her livelihood. ‘Directors are really the top of the creative tree in film,’ she says, ‘and the presence or absence of women in that role has a serious knock-on effect.’12

Thanks to the Harvey Weinstein allegations, the entire industry is under a new degree of scrutiny, with Melissa Silverstein, founder of the pressure group Women and Hollywood, calling it rife with ‘toxic masculinity’. ‘This is an industry that is run by men and for men,’ she says. ‘The movies we see have mostly male leads. The women depicted are mostly young, scantily clad and have little agency – all too often they are glorified props.’13

One of Weinstein’s own accusers painted a chilling picture of how women are widely perceived and used. ‘In this industry, there are directors who abuse their position. They are very influential, that’s how they can do that,’ wrote Léa Seydoux. ‘Another director I worked with would film very long sex scenes that lasted days. He kept watching us, replaying the scenes over and over again in a kind of stupor. It was very gross. If you’re a woman working in the film industry, you have to fight because it is a very misogynistic world. Why else are salaries so unequal? Why do men earn more than women? There is no reason for it to be that way.’14

Lucinda Coxon believes that everyone consuming the output of this industry, one with the power to tell stories that engage and influence us, should think about the implications of its make-up: ‘The vast, vast majority of dramatic product that you, your friends, family and co-workers have access to, in the cinema or on DVD, Netflix or plain old telly has been shaped by – and often exclusively shaped by – men. And that results in some serious distortions.’ She points to her experience on a BAFTA jury one year, where she watched thirteen hours of prime-time British TV drama and saw female characters brutally attacked again and again, to the point where it was barely noticeable any more. ‘We need to start noticing again. We need to consider how little we learn and what a warped perspective we get on the world when the gender imbalance driving its description is so strong.’

Reese Witherspoon thinks you can often see the effect of the imbalance in the lines assigned to female characters. ‘I dread reading scripts that have no women involved in their creation,’ she said in 2015. ‘Because inevitably, the girl turns to the guy and says, “What do we do now?”’ She has a point – it’s happened in films from Gone With the Wind to Toy Story to Judi Dench as ‘M’, speaking to James Bond.15 Perhaps it is to make women more likeable, something the screenwriter Cami Delavigne says she is often asked to do in the creative process. ‘It is not “likeable” for a woman to say “No”, to say “You can’t do that”,’ she says. ‘That is not charming. That is not sweet.’16

When you grow up female all of this surrounds you, whether or not you are aware of it, but the mirror image of that is the effect of gendered beliefs and expectations on boys. ‘We stifle the humanity of boys,’ said the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a 2012 speech which was later sampled by Beyoncé and distributed to every school in Sweden. ‘We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability.’ For girls, the parameters are different: ‘Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage,’ she said. ‘I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a good thing, it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and not teach boys the same?’17

I see this overemphasis on marriage a lot in my own community, whether among those of south Asian heritage in Britain, or when I visit Pakistan. Women who have done extraordinary things can be perceived as somehow deficient because their private lives did not take a course in line with societal expectations. Sometimes those expectations are so internalised that young women pursuing advanced qualifications, such as medicine, can see them more as a route towards a better marriage than a professional future. ‘It is much easier for girls to get married once they are doctors and many girls don’t really intend to work,’ said one medical school vice-chancellor, Dr Javed Akram. ‘I know of hundreds and hundreds of female students who have qualified as a doctor or a dentist but they have never touched a patient.’

Today, while 70 per cent of Pakistani medical students are women, they make up less than a quarter of registered doctors. The barriers range from families frowning on daughters-in-law going out to work, to the practical – childcare, transport and security.18 Now, two entrepreneurs are trying to address the shortage of practising female doctors through an initiative called ‘Sehat Kahani’ or ‘Health Story’ – using live video to connect a doctor who is at home with her children to patients, often women in remote areas with little access to healthcare.19

In the West, too, there are generational shifts in women’s expectations. Gail Rebuck, the publishing executive whose company was behind Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, contrasts her experience with that of her mother. ‘For my generation it was all about escaping from our mothers’ shattered dreams,’ she says. ‘Most of them were products of the 1950s, intelligent women and absolutely capable, but the mores of the day dictated that as soon as they got married they would be at home bringing up the family. We grew up with that sense of unfulfilled possibility, almost a silent rage.’

Gail herself was born in 1952 and started her career in the 1970s, taking charge of a major publishing house in 1991. ‘When I was coming through I could only do my best and it certainly wasn’t perfect in many ways,’ she says. After publishing Lean In, she observed something different among Sheryl Sandberg’s generation – a sense of ‘necessary excellence’ and a feeling that they needed to be the perfect executive and perfect mother. ‘Today’s forty-somethings are often angst-ridden, partially empowered but conflicted because of the equal impetus coming from this notion of excellence.’

How true this rang for me, both in terms of the age group and the feelings. I had grown up with a stay-at-home mother but found myself making my way in the world with a different set of circumstances – wonderful opportunities and possibilities, but also being pulled in more disparate directions. I could not fully model myself on the example of motherhood that I had experienced as a child and concepts of excellence, perfection or guilt were more likely to hinder than help. What I found empowering was the simple act of being open about the juggling act: these were intense phases in my life and I was fortunate that that was due to choices I had made rather than adverse circumstances.

Openness can also be a powerful tool and motivator where women and girls might feel daunted by barriers or the lack of a female role model. In a 2013 study, researchers in the United States set out to test several theories on interventions that might encourage girls to consider careers in the physical sciences. They looked at single-sex education, exposure to a female physics teacher, bringing female scientists in to the school as speakers and class discussions on both the work of women scientists and the lack of women working in the field. That final intervention was the only one found by the researchers to have a significant positive effect. ‘Explicit personal discussions regarding issues that women face in pursuing the physical sciences may help female students realize that feelings of inadequacy or discomfort they might have stem from external norms and pressures rather than from their capabilities, interests, or values,’ they said.20

In other words, we need to talk about this, and we need to do so in a way that is not hinged on celebrating a few particularly successful women who are then perceived as exceptional, or as ‘superwomen’. When Helen Fraser was leading a network of girls’ schools she spoke about the pressures she witnessed, first on girls to have the perfect appearance, school record and friendships, and then ‘on young women in their twenties, who as they start to build a career, form a relationship and find a place to live, are told that they need to start having children fast, or their fertility will be gone’. Against that backdrop, she worried about the impact of an ‘inner critic’, holding girls and women back if they thought that what they had to say wasn’t good enough, interesting enough or valuable enough. ‘If the female half of the population are routinely censoring themselves,’ she said, ‘their great ideas aren’t getting aired or implemented and the world is a poorer place.’21

I think back to my own childhood and the frequent question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and wonder if, today, a better question to a girl might be ‘What is your ambition for when you grow up?’ It stakes a claim to a word so often used negatively for women. With only sons of my own, I have no real-world experience of looking close up at girls as well as boys at the age when the effect of stereotyping sets in. But in my sons I see a self-belief that I don’t remember experiencing at a comparable age. Moments after one first managed to ride a bike on his own for a few wobbly metres, he asked if he might do the Tour de France one day; another, on being told that Sadiq Khan, also from a British Pakistani background, had been elected mayor of London, said: ‘I think I’ll go for prime minister.’ Without really knowing the word ambition, they appear to set their sights high as a matter of course. Life will teach them in time what else is required, but it’s not a bad base from which to set out.

the skills

Planning

Progress depends on the choices we make today for tomorrow

Hillary Clinton

How should we think about the arc of our individual working lives, given the twin challenges that are disrupting the way they used to be understood? One is the reality of our longer life spans, the other the changing impact of technology on jobs – one 2013 study suggested that 47 per cent of total US employment was at risk from computerisation.1 We can’t at this stage know precisely how a field we are interested in or have already chosen will be affected, but somehow we need to get as close as possible to having both a short- and a longer-term horizon for what we want to do. It’s about having a purpose with what you are doing now and thinking about how to lay the groundwork and gain the right CV points either for your next role or further down the line.

For me, the most useful approach has been to think in terms of five-year plans – five years being a period of time that is reasonably foreseeable and easy to keep in mind. Not long after I started on Today, I mentioned my five-year approach in an interview, only to realise that, with echoes of the Soviet Union’s economic plans, it probably had a slightly sinister ring to it. What it meant to me was thinking about the possibilities of the future in manageable chunks of time.

When I first joined the BBC and found myself working in a very large organisation, it was a way to start mapping some sort of route through what felt then like quite an overwhelming place. I knew people around me were doing compelling work that I could see and hear on air, but I also knew I might never be a part of it if I didn’t figure out how to find my way around in a bigger sense than not getting lost in Television Centre.

For Professor Heather McGregor – who ran a firm of executive headhunters, became the Financial Times’s ‘Mrs Moneypenny’ columnist and is now dean of a business school – longer parameters are more valuable, especially at the starting point of a career. She advocates putting a ten-year plan down on paper, including the position you’d like to be in at the end of that time but also planning for an alternative result: ‘Write down the reasons it might not happen. Then work out how to deal with them. As a pilot, when you plan a flight to somewhere, you always have to name an alternative airport, in case, for whatever reason, you can’t land at your intended destination. Think about your career like that.’2

What you write down might be job-specific – a particular role, level of pay, or title – or broader, such as running your own business or working in a smaller company. After that, she says, you need to work out the barriers to getting there. ‘Quite often the barriers are financial. People get stuck in jobs and careers they don’t enjoy because they need to pay the rent or the mortgage. Sometimes you need to take risks to really change the direction of your career – rent your house out and go on a training course? Move to somewhere totally new? Take a step back in seniority to get into a different kind of work? Take that promotion even though you are unsure that you can really do the job being offered?’

What this process should make clear is what you need to do or think about now to try to make your ambition a reality. But whether your horizon is five or ten years away, there should be no doubt about the likely impact of global population trends on the working lives of those growing up today. The 2016 book The 100-Year Life was based on the premise that the majority of children currently being born in rich countries could expect to survive beyond their hundredth birthday. And yet our societies and the policies of most governments remain rooted in the way previous generations have lived.3 The gerontologist Professor Sarah Harper points out the profound change represented by the ageing of an entire population: ‘To grow old in a society where most people are young is fundamentally different from doing so in a society where most people are old.’4

That’s because of another shift taking hold at the same time – the decline in fertility rates that began in the richest countries of the world is spreading fast through Asia, Latin America and Africa. Women nearly everywhere are having fewer children and by 2100 those under fifteen are projected to make up less than 15 per cent of the global population. By 2050, when the UK is projected to have half a million citizens aged one hundred or more, Professor Harper says ‘old age’ will probably be a term associated with people in their late eighties or nineties and we will likely think less in terms of chronological age and more in terms of frailty or disability.5

The 100-Year Life co-author, Professor Lynda Gratton, agrees on the immense impact of these changes. ‘We need to move away from this idea that life is three stages: full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement,’ she says. ‘Instead, we should think of it much more as multi-stage, where we come in and out of work.’6 That could well mean a greater convergence between the working lives of men and women: as professional life is stretched out by a decade or more, periods of maternity leave or working part-time should start to appear more marginal. The intense period that many women experience in their thirties, as they feel the pressure to establish themselves professionally and start families, may ease. Perhaps we won’t think so much in terms of ‘a career’ at all, for women or men, but of multiple careers or simply applying experience and skills to different tasks and circumstances.

We may also have to think differently about the key moments at which to encourage aspiration and foster ambition, seeing this as an ongoing, almost lifelong mission. Nevertheless, it will always be one that begins with the young and we know from the science on stereotyping as well as from surveys how horizons can be limited early on. In 2018 the Drawing the Future survey, involving 20,000 children aged seven to eleven from 20 countries, highlighted how gender, background and ethnicity can play a powerful role in children’s ideas of their own potential. It found that jobs were often stereotyped by gender, career choices were made on the basis of these stereotypes and that children’s aspirations are most influenced by who they know – their parents and their parents’ friends – as well as by television and the media.7

From seeing the work of the charity Mosaic, I know how important it can be to provide first-hand accounts of the world of work that are wider than what children commonly see. Asking young professionals to volunteer their time, Mosaic sends them in to schools in disadvantaged communities where they mentor small groups over the course of an academic year. The task is to inspire the children about what their futures could be. ‘They are growing up in communities where the very idea of work is quite often limited to something others do,’ says Nizam Uddin, who leads Mosaic. ‘Even where there are adults in close proximity to these young people who are in work, these are not the jobs that inspire them or the ones they marvel at from afar.’ One British Asian mentor told me that the girls she worked with were amazed that someone from a background similar to theirs could grow up to be an independent woman, earning her own living.

The lawyer Miriam González Durántez founded an organisation called Inspiring Girls with a similar mission, taking female role models into schools. She thinks that the early teens are a key time to focus on girls. ‘No matter whether they come from a city or a rural area, from a well-off background or not, self-confidence is an issue. Something happens when they are twelve to fifteen that knocks their confidence down. In my view it is the result of sexism that they begin to notice from the age of six.’ She has also noticed how often she is asked about whether it is possible to combine a career and a family (she has three sons). ‘This surprises me because I honestly don’t think I was worried about that when I was thirteen. But they are already thinking about it and it is limiting them.’8 A Girlguiding UK survey from 2016 also suggested that as girls get older, they increasingly perceive boys to have a better chance of success in their future jobs. While 86 per cent of seven- to ten-year-old girls thought their chance was equal to boys’, that dropped to 54 per cent for eleven- to sixteen-year-olds and just 35 per cent among those aged seventeen to twenty-one.9

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