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: 9780008220662

Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008220648

Version: 2019-12-10

Dedication

For my parents, Shama and Tazi

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

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 early career years • Processes that build confidence • Re-establishing yourself after breaks from work

Speaking Up

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

Standing Up

Body language • Occupying space • First impressions

The Digital You

Social media • Women in technology • A more representative internet • 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 • Holding 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

Authority, purpose, confidence, looking like the person in the office who is clearly going places – if there was one thing I wanted to achieve in writing this book, it was to inject a ‘how’ into statements about the workplace based around those words and ideas. How could they be translated into the day-to-day reality of an office, a job interview, a board meeting or a speaking engagement?

I wanted to use the tools of my own trade of broadcasting to answer that question, especially the pressures and perils of live work. But I was also conscious of the gulf between how people in jobs like mine are generally perceived – unencumbered by doubts about their performance – and my own experience of what it can be like in reality. I worried that when teenagers I spoke to in schools told me ‘You must never get nervous’, that was an assumption that might lead them to conclude that a path like mine could only be for someone blessed from birth with an unshakeable belief in their abilities.

I also knew from my own life how self-doubt can make you baulk at opportunities that – were they presented to anyone else – would be perceived as a no-brainer. When the incoming editor of the Today programme asked if I might be interested in becoming one of its presenters, baulk was exactly what I did. Despite nearly twenty years as a journalist, and a long-held ambition to present one of the BBC’s flagship programmes, I could only think of 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 any of our children ducked out of a potentially great opportunity by saying it would 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, always worrying about what might go wrong and agonising over everything that I did. But then came a moment of change – a point from which my experience started to feel different. Although an element of apprehension remained about what the working day would bring, that worry started to feel manageable and something I could channel. Looking back, it is easy to see that over time I grew into the role and began to feel more at home in it. Yet to me, at first that outcome was never a given. I find myself wondering now, what if I had bailed sometime before that moment of change? I’d be looking back and probably perceiving my uncertainty as evidence that the job wasn’t right for me. I would never have discovered what I can now appreciate – that the passage of time, perseverance and an increasing familiarity made an immense difference.

Along the way I have learned a lot about how more difficult tasks develop your capabilities, and about scrutiny and resilience. My work is on public display, with the low points as well as the high 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 quickly absorb large quantities of information. The end result is all about conveying that information in a form that best serves the audience – getting the most salient and important facts, thoughts and opinions out of interviewees, and being as clear as possible in your own thought and speech.

However much that is at the core of my working life, I have always found it much more difficult to convey information about myself, particularly in the way that is essential in the workplace. It starts with how you present your skills and aptitude at an interview and goes on through promotions and appraisals to getting the senior-most positions. As time went on, I realised I needed to deploy the essential tools of my trade – choice of words, body language, ability to distil information and deploying facts – towards my own career development as well as on the television and radio. In an age where myriad information sources and social media mean that attention spans tend to be short, those messages about yourself need to be ever more instantly understandable and memorable.

Why did I find these conversations and messages trickier than my day-to-day work and shy away from anything that I perceived as showcasing or selling it? I had certainly grown up with a strong motivation to be the best that I possibly could be – largely stemming from being the daughter of immigrants and seeing how my parents had uprooted themselves from all that was familiar, strongly driven by wanting to do their utmost for us children. 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 – back in the 1930s, in what was then British India, my two grandmothers were enrolled on medical and nursing courses respectively. In the 1980s, it was the desire for me to have the best possible education that made my parents opt for an English boarding school rather than have me stay in Saudi Arabia, where we were then living. It was a decision that meant difficult airport goodbyes and long separations. Years later, I discovered that quality of schooling was not the only factor. As a teenage girl in Saudi Arabia I would have had to wear the long black abaya, or cloak, and a headscarf every time I left the house. My parents worried that being subject to those constraints as part of my daily life might fundamentally alter my sense of what I could go on to achieve.

All of this support helped to propel me forward through my teenage years, but sometime during university I think I became less sure of myself and more self-conscious. I would have gained so much more from the experience of university had I been more willing to ask questions, to take risks and to test out arguments in front of my lecturers and fellow students. Instead, I was rather too cautious, apprehensive that I might have misunderstood, misjudged or appear uninformed. Something of that persisted in the first part of my professional life, when I was a producer first at Bloomberg TV and then at the BBC, before getting into presenting at the age of twenty-seven. 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 and 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, forcing me to trust my instincts and judgements and helping to give me a new-found courage.

I look back now and wish that I had kept hold of my self-belief all along the way. Instead, somewhere between entering the workplace and having to rise to the challenge of a particularly exacting role, it took a back seat. The socialisation of girls and the way they can then end up deferring to their male peers was certainly a factor, but later on it was also hard to hold on to a sense that I could make it into senior roles through the intense periods of pregnancy and early parenthood. The top of my chosen field, as in many others at that time, was one where women were under-represented, and women of colour more so.

Even today, and 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, around two-thirds of British MPs are men,3 with a similar picture among partners in law firms in England and Wales, where only a third are women.4 On the airwaves, a 2018 study of the UK’s six most prominent broadcast news programmes found 2.2 male experts appearing for every female one.5 In some professions, even the entry level is seriously out of kilter – only around 12 per cent of all engineers in the UK are female.6 After the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the actor Emma Thompson called the lack of women in the film industry a ‘gender dysfunction’, part of a malaise within the system. ‘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.’7

I still find myself in settings that are overwhelmingly male, often at conferences – including the high-profile World Economic Forum, in Davos, where many of the women present are journalists or conference staff. It can be intimidating to look around the room and become conscious of being one of a small minority. Or you can see it as a galvanising moment. At Davos, I was once in an off-the-record media session with the Iranian president when, as the questions began, I debated whether I had one worthy of asking. And then I realised that as there were only about ten women in a gathering of well over a hundred people, if I didn’t speak up, the session might well end without a female 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.

We are in a time of increased awareness about the importance of representation across so many groups, but when I hear people say confidently that their daughters won’t experience the same realities and the same barriers, I am not convinced. 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 remain 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 women are perceived and valued in comparison with their male colleagues. Those gaps can be there even when women are in the most pre-eminent positions – such as Claire Foy in the lead role of Queen Elizabeth in The Crown, who was paid less than the male actor in the supporting role of her husband Prince Philip.

It seems to me that men set off on their careers with an expectation of advancement, unburdened by the questions or worries that can dog women – especially what may lie ahead of them in terms of juggling a career and family life. Bearing the weight of childcare responsibilities can reduce the ability to take advantage of salary-boosting job offers, because women are 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 their 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 in that company, women were being promoted every 30–36 months, while men were moving on every 18–24 months. The women seemed to be regarded as needing longer to show their capability.8

Perceptions can also be a barrier to women’s own sense of their potential. I know that when I close my eyes and conjure up an image of someone at the top of my chosen profession – a main presenter or a prominent interviewer – I see a man. I see a white man, as it happens. This reflects the reality of the world that has surrounded me in my time in broadcasting, but there is an internal effect, too, which makes it harder to imagine yourself in those pole positions one day. Early on in my career, there were times 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 when I offered an opinion beyond my core brief). And even now, there are times when a prominent contributor walks into the studio and looks across at my co-presenter, and I imagine them wishing he was doing the interview with them rather than me.

It has taken me a while to feel I have a right to be in that room, in a position that allows me to question some of the most powerful people in the land. It’s what I think of as the third phase of my career. During the first, when I got a foot in the door of the news industry, I felt an immense thrill – although there was also a period on overnight shifts when it was hard to feel energised about anything at all. I certainly didn’t think about a future as a presenter, which was a world away from my life at that time. However, the business programme I was working on at the BBC sometimes got producers to do short on-camera wraps of the day on the financial markets. After doing this a few times I was offered some reporting shifts. Then, one week, there was a gap in the business presenters’ rota and I was asked to fill in, my knees shaking under the studio desk as I did so. I never went back to being a producer and in the next few years the opportunities came thick and fast – I had a stint based in Singapore and one in Washington, by which time I was with the international channel BBC World News.

Then came what I now think of as the middle phase of my career, 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 was all about keeping the show on the road – life needed to be as simple and manageable as possible, in order to meet the needs of the family and keep my hand in at work. As the domestic rhythm became a little more settled and just a little less intense, however, I started to wonder what the next stage of my career could involve. Radio 4 had been a companion to my life from the age of seventeen – when a wise person advised me that listening to it would be good preparation for university interviews – and I knew I would love to work there one day. But I had no experience in radio production or reporting, let alone presenting on this medium. The only way I could gain valuable experience 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, though, and this was an odd and often disheartening time – making ad-hoc appearances on unfamiliar programmes, wondering if I was in danger of becoming a jack-of-all-trades. What motivated me to keep going was the strong sense that I had but one life to see how far I might progress – I didn’t want to look back later and wish I had tried a bit harder. I realised, however, that the speed with which my career had taken off when I started presenting on television meant that opportunities had come my way without me having to push for them. I had got used to that, and I was now lacking an essential skill: being able to make a pitch for myself. I went to see one BBC editor after another, asking if they might try me out, but I found myself struggling with straightforward questions about what I wanted to do. In my quest not to come across as unrealistic or full of myself, I failed to have compelling answers that were true to who I was and where I wanted to go in my career.

Over time, there were some valuable lessons: I learned to hone in advance exactly how I wanted to use each meeting and be 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 nurturing a set of skills that might be 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 for family reasons.

Today, 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 a career to an end. After her marriage brought her to the UK in 1972, I was born in 1973 and became 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; my father was working long hours as an NHS doctor in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire 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. 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’ tag: ‘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 higher than businesses in the European Union (27 per cent) and in North America (21 per cent).3 Notably, the study by Grant Thornton International found 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 recent years it has found that the 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.6 Its reports have 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

India is a country where the growth in girls’ education hasn’t resulted in women entering the workforce in the numbers you might expect or hope for. In fact, according to the Harvard economist Professor Rohini Pande, female participation in the Indian labour market fell between 1990 and 2015, down from 37 per cent to 28 per cent. 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, such as requiring permission to go out. 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 workplace gaps between men and women has focused on pay, especially after a 2017 law required larger employers to reveal the difference in the mean and median pay of male and female workers. As this 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.

It does, however, shine a light on representation and getting women into higher-paid roles, which is why Carolyn Fairbairn of the Confederation of British Industry 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 Some 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

Elsewhere, other data allows comparisons of pay for men and women who have the same professional occupation. A 2017 data set from the UK’s Office for National Statistics showed considerable gender variation in average hourly earnings in many of them. Among full-time financial managers and directors, for example, men earned an average of £35.52 per hour (or £72,000 per year), and women £24.29 per hour, translating into an annual salary of around £43,000. The pattern was similar for town planning officers, musicians, scientists and chief executives. 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 the 2019 study, highlighting what the authors called ‘the long-term depressing effect’ of part-time work.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 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 the sector was dominated by small independent businesses, with many self-employed pharmacists, but today 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.

Sometimes internal reward systems are worth re-evaluating, especially if they have been in place for years. When a BBC investigation showed that 95 out of the 100 highest-paid hospital consultants in England were male, bonuses for clinical excellence, accumulating over time, turned out to be 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.’

This NHS process was based around consultants putting themselves forward. ‘Women seem to do this less,’ she says. It also demanded a lot of the doctor’s own time – for example serving on awards committees, thereby making sure they were up to date with the latest criteria and scoring. ‘It’s difficult to do when you are part-time, and if you come back to full-time 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 answer is that we didn’t know what the situation was until the disclosure. It 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 including at two of the world’s top universities. Both Oxford and Cambridge have been puzzling over a gender gap at the highest levels of attainment – 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. I do wonder, however, if there might also be an impact from the history, tradition and sense of excellence honed over centuries that surrounds you in these environments. I certainly remember times when I found Cambridge intimidating. 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.26 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?

In one study, researchers used a different university environment to investigate how peer perception and gender might influence students’ assessments of each other. Sarah Eddy and Daniel Grunspan asked biology undergraduates to complete surveys, getting them to highlight peers they felt were particularly strong in their grasp of the material studied and those they thought would do well on the course.

The results showed 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.27

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 evidence on discrimination within 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.28 In 2009, research commissioned by the UK government 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.29

More recently, big data analayses have been used to look at information about individuals in new ways. 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’.30

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.

Instead, we need to be laser-like 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 evidence and illustrate patterns, but it is only that degree of clear-sighted focus that will lead 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? As a child I remember often being asked what I wanted to become, but a few years ago I started to guard against something that I realised was creeping into my own conversations with the young daughters of friends. Too often, I might include a comment on their appearance – something that seemed innocuous enough at the time but was 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, has raised the alarm over the entrenchment of gender stereotypes: ‘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

Often, 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. Melissa Silverstein, founder of the pressure group Women and Hollywood, says it is 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, but the mirror image 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. ‘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 frequently among those with a similar south Asian heritage to my own, where women can be perceived as deficient because their private lives are not in line with societal expectations. In Pakistan, there is even evidence to suggest that some young women pursue advanced qualifications, such as medicine, 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 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

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 a younger 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 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.

Where women and girls feel daunted by barriers, real or perceived, openness can be a powerful tool. 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.19

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 then appear exceptional, or ‘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.’20

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 appeared 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

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