What does Dagenham have to do with the Higher Education sector?

This week sees the release of the film ‘Made in Dagenham’ , a film about a group of women sewing machinists at Ford in Dagenham who went on strike to get equal pay with men doing the same job. And it raises the question, is equal pay the right target? Anne Perkins in the Guardian has used the film as a basis for saying ‘it’s the wrong cause at the wrong time‘ to work to close the gender pay gap. Germaine Greer, also in the Guardian, seems to believe that focussing on the idea of equal pay for equal work has meant ‘a generation has been sent off at a tangent’. Are they right? And why should that matter for us in Higher Education?

My university is one of the few in the UK that publishes its Equal Pay Review (e.g.2009 report).  To my mind this is a crucial first step in establishing what is going on in any organisation, but it is only a first step for many different reasons.  Esther Haines has taken this debate about equal pay (though not in the context of the film) through a statistical analysis, and concludes ‘an institutional gender pay gap is an incomplete and ambiguous measure of inequality.’

Absolutely true, the figures in themselves – like any statistics – cannot be used without thought and interpretation about what they mean. There will almost always be vertical segregation in a population such as a university – in other words women are over-represented in the bottom grades which include cleaners and clerical staff, but under-represented at the top where senior professors and administrators are overwhelmingly male. Different numbers and different proportions in the various grades can distort the value of the ‘gender pay gap’ in several misleading ways.  So, such an equal pay review must simply be used as a kicking off point. Nevertheless, it is predicated on the basis that people should receive ‘equal pay for equal work’, exactly what those women in Dagenham fought for and for which we in the 21^st century should be grateful.

The reality is that they didn’t actually succeed, they had to settle for receiving 87% of the men’s rate, an increase equivalent to a mere 2p an hour, but they did make a real difference. In part this was because they provided ammunition for Barbara Castle to move towards the 1970 Equal Pay Act.  Just like Rosa Parks they awoke consciousness in places not awake before and started off the politicians – and society – on a long, tortuous path which appears still to have no ending. I find it rather patronizing to be told that this was the wrong cause, because to my mind that is looking at it from the (relatively) comfortable position of 2010 and shows little recognition of the 1960’s reality when there were, for instance, entirely different pay scales for men and women. Equality was so far away it must have seemed unimaginable in a way that is hard to envisage now.

So why do I believe Dagenham is relevant to the Higher Education sector? The mathematician in me tells me that equal pay for equal work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for equality, despite the limitations that are implicit, and the myths that Esther Haines identifies that have become associated with the phrase.  For academics it is actually quite easy to see that rather simple ideas and hypotheses can be examined in some cases. At lecturer grade for instance, the gender of the lecturer is irrelevant, the work is ‘equal’ for all and we are not trying to compare sewing machinists with spray painters as at Ford in the original case.  So, if there is a gendered distribution in pay, that must be telling us something about the organisation’s practices.  Perhaps men are systematically being appointed at a higher point on the pay scale; or women are progressing more slowly through the grade (you will note I am making the tacit assumption that women are being disadvantaged if there is a pay gap).  Identification of any pay differential should enable us to analyse why, and in principle do something about it. In practice, in Cambridge University if I am interpreting the tables correctly – and the payscale here is sufficiently complex  (even if formally transparent) that I should issue a health warning – there is less than 2% difference. This is sufficiently small there is no statutory duty to do anything about it. But we can still just pause and think if there is an underlying issue we need to consider.

However the problem for academic pay here – and I would hazard in most universities – lie at the upper reaches, where the number of women in the professoriat are small, the bands cover a wide range and we have market supplements on top of this which can be negotiated to aid recruitment and retention. All of this information is publicly available as statistical information, but of course not the details of any actual deal. When numbers are small it is extremely difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions, except that the numbers are small. But we cannot readily say there is anything systematic about the way women are or are not rewarded.  A lot more work needs to be undertaken (and will be) to explore that.

I also believe that there will be issues within my own university (and I doubt it is alone) about non-academic pay where it is not so easy to see if there are systemic problems because of our grading system. In particular, historically there were separate pay-scales within the University for clerical and technical staff.  In practice, of course, women populated the former pay-scale much more than the latter though this didn’t add up to actual different pay-scales for men and women. These pay-scales have now all been assimilated onto the single spine, but one can imagine that in some way this assimilation may have continued to favour the historic assumption that technical staff ere ‘more skilled’ than clerical staff. This situation is much more closely equivalent to the original Dagenham case; at that time the crude view was undoubtedly that anything a woman did was inherently less skilled than a man, and this was a view the Unions at the time fully supported (a  useful description of this position is presented by Beatrix Campbell in the second half of the article I mentioned above).  So here, even more than in the academic part of the university workforce, there will be a need to monitor, gather data and then analyse to see whether a substantive pay gap exists and if so why.

The University has set up a Gender Equality Group, as a direct response to last year’s Equal Pay Review, to look at the full spectrum of grades across the university in order to assess how well we are doing. This work will, one hopes, ultimately provide the ‘sufficient’ condition to go with the ‘necessary’ element of equal pay for equal work. Maybe then, to continue the mathematical metaphor, we will asymptotically approach equality. In the process we should not forget or demean the original women at Dagenham who made a stand and made a difference.  I don’t think I need to see the film to understand that much.

The Advantages of Maturity

A final post on the Oxford meeting, before I go on holiday for the next week (no laptop, no emails and no posts).  This topic is provoked by some comments made to me by a mature PhD student attending the meeting.

These days we are much more organised about training PhD students than when I set out. However, what this woman remarked on were the advantages of advancing years in coping with interdisciplinary research.  This woman had recently come back to do a PhD in physics, although she is slightly older than me. Her take was that she would have struggled to cope with the need to interact with people in the different disciplines, challenge the less than ideal supervision she had – shared as she has been between 3 supervisors separated by geography and discipline – and generally take control of the project if she hadn’t had 30+ years of ‘real life’ to equip her to do it.  Certainly, at 21, our students have not yet had the opportunity to develop the sort of confidence in themselves and their interpersonal skills at a professional level that this woman was implying.  That is not to say some students will not arrive equipped with exactly these skills by virtue of their schooling, families or other background input, but most will lack the requisite experience, personal insight and confidence.

Standard PhD student training (at least in the UK) is likely to incorporate some elements of transferable skills training.  This might include presentation skills, scientific writing, maybe information on how to prepare your CV and interviewing skills, but almost certainly nothing about the lifeskills that this woman identified: dealing with difficult people, team working, knowing how to negotiate and having the confidence to ask awkward questions – and then keep asking them.  These skills are important in ensuring a successful outcome of research, and maturity does give the opportunity to develop them as well as the confidence to know that the sky will not fall in if you dare to challenge, if you misread a situation and put your foot in it or otherwise get it wrong.

More often than one would like, research students find themselves in unsatisfactory situations and for a variety of reasons. These might include having difficult peers and/or supervisors who go AWOL, make unreasonable demands on them or simply do not interact with their students or teach them anything. Increasingly universities and funders set up systems to try to ensure things don’t go awry, but since so often they go wrong for non-systemic reasons, life skills are also needed.  For example one practice that appalls me, although I have only heard of it occurring in the US, was that of a professor who set two students on essentially identical projects to see which came out on top. What a waste of time, and probably one student’s career, since the ‘failure’ was implicitly going to be dispensed with.  The trouble is that I am not convinced a university’s policies would necessarily pick it up as an example of bad practice.

Interdisciplinary research poses even more problems because you may have to deal with two lab cultures, two research teams and conflicting expectations and demands. Training for students maybe should be extended to cover these other ‘soft’ skills of confidence building (something locally  WiSETI tries to do through workshops for early career women researchers), conflict management and team working skills. As an example of lateral thinking to cure a people problem, I would cite a previous postdoc of mine who found a very effective way to speed up instrument making in the workshop – bake them a cake! Using whatever skills and native wit you have to make progress is what it takes to get on, after all, and thinking about how to make her requests literally more palatable clearly came naturally to her. These abilities may be more important than learning how to jazz up Powerpoint presentations, which most students will have learnt years before anyhow (though the same may not be true of the ability to construct a grammatically correct sentence). And of course, remembering my post on the deficit model, we should recognize it is not just the students who need training and by implication are at fault, but supervisors and their own line managers may also need such training.

Lawson, Willetts and Equality

Dearie me, it really is the silly season. Dominic Lawson, in today’s Independent, writes a perfectly sane piece about the fact that if more girls go to university than in the past, then necessarily there are fewer places for boys – of whatever social class – and so can have the effect of reducing social mobility. Bizarrely, though, the piece’s html tag is http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-feminism-is-the-obstacle-to-equality-2060177.html which is enough to get the blood flowing. He doesn’t say that at all, though, and sometimes the tag appears much more reasonably as http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-boys-learn-from-your-sisters-2060177.html , corresponding to the actual headline in the newspaper.  I think someone in the Independent must have worked out that actually the piece wasn’t about ‘feminism as the obstacle to equality’ after all and tried to change the tag. Unfortunately the original tag is now being circulated – eg by the UKRC in its daily update – with the headline Dominic Lawson: Feminism is the obstacle to equality .

Lawson does indeed ask equality for whom, citing Willett’s much trumpeted book The Pinch which has a chapter on “Feminism has trumped egalitarianism”.  Lawson neatly unpicks Willets’ apparent view that social mobility is equivalent to equality, whereas treating men and women equally would not be (I haven’t yet read the book, I am merely reflecting Lawson’s comments here).  But what are the implications for all the girls entering HE if Willetts really does believe this version of equality, rather than being sloppy in his writing?