By Sarah Corney, Head of Customer Experience, CIPD
The CIPD has an interesting and inspiring history. Founded in 1913 as the Welfare Workers Association, it was originally set up to improve the working conditions of female workers in the UK’s factories. Five years before women in the UK won the Vote, many of the founding members of this Institute were women.
As we know, the journey to female equality in the workplace is a very long one, and a fight that’s still not won. The 1970 Equal Pay Act prohibited less favourable treatment between men and women in terms of pay and conditions of employment. Almost 50 years on and there is still a significant gender pay gap and an underrepresentation of women in senior roles across every sector. In 2015 it was reported that there were more men called John leading FTSE 100 companies than female chief execs on the list.
Let’s take the people profession and the CIPD as an example. The people profession is still – 106 years since the founding of the Workers Welfare Association – a predominantly female profession. Office of National Statistics data tells us that the ratio is 60/40 female/male. The CIPD’s membership split is 79/21 female/male. But there are more men who are Chartered Fellows than women, suggesting that men are in more senior roles. The CIPD was one of the first 250 employers to publish its Gender Pay Gap Report in 2017. With a commitment to fair employment for all, and with a workforce of around two thirds female, women’s earnings at the CIPD are still lower than men’s by 15.7% (mean hourly pay). (There is commitment and a number of initiatives in place at the CIPD to close that gap, see our Gender Pay Gap report for details.)
In 2018 it was reported that more people called Dave and Steve lead FTSE 100 companies than women and ethnic minorities. What about women from BAME backgrounds? I’m guessing that number just got smaller! Or LBTQ women from BAME backgrounds? I am a woman. But I’m also working class, university educated, British, an EU citizen (for now at least), lesbian, cancer survivor. Rarely do people fit into one box.
Friday 8th March is International Women’s Day, and it’s important to pause to celebrate women’s achievements and remind ourselves of the many battles still to be won. But women’s equality is only part of the struggle for a fairer society that treats all of its members equally. As Peter Cheese writes in 2018’s Gender Pay Gap Report, gender parity is only part of the story in building a diverse and inclusive workforce.
Every day should also be International Human Day, where we celebrate and support diversity in its broadest sense and fight for social and workplace equality for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, gender expression and identity, religion, race, educational background, class, neurodiversity or nationality, life experience, caring commitments or disability.
This may seem like a liberal, utopian ideal to some. To my mind it is the right thing to do morally. But it is also now well established that diverse teams are more creative. Modern innovation frameworks (such as Design Thinking) use divergent thinking to spark creative ideas and alternative worlds to see things from a new perspective. Organisations that cannot innovate quickly die. Diverse teams bring a richness of experiences, perspectives, challenges and ideas that enhance the innovation process immeasurably.
The rise of AI in recruitment worries me. The idea behind these programs is that a good prospective employee looks a lot like a good current employee. But in a workforce that still disproportionately understands a ‘good employee’ as male, white, straight, middle class, and non disabled, when AI turns that data into a score and compares it against prospective employees, who do you think misses out?
106 years on from the foundation of the Workers Welfare Association, the CIPD today is concerned not only with women workers rights in the UK's factories, but – through the work of our worldwide community of over 150,000 members – with creating Better Work and Working Lives for everyone, no matter what their background. Because the 21st century workforce needs to be agile and adaptive, and that only comes when a diversity of backgrounds is fully represented at every level of an organisation.
