Good morning and welcome to the ninth meeting of the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work Committee. First of all, I invite our guests with us today. I remind everyone sitting in the public gallery or otherwise to turn off electrical devices or turn them to silence so they don't interfere with the work of the committee. First of all, item 1 is a decision by the committee to take items 3 and 4 in private. Are we all agreed? Yes. Thank you. I might turn to our panel of witnesses today and introduce them from my left to right. First of all, we have Professor Gillian Hogg, who is Deputy Principal External Relations at Heriot-Watt University and is here representing University of Scotland. Welcome today. Next, we have Katie Hutton, who is director of national training programmes, Skills Development Scotland. Welcome to you. And then Talat Ykuwb, who is director of Equate Scotland. Welcome again. Shona Struthers, who is chief executive of colleges Scotland. And Tanya Castell, who is non-executive director and CEO of changing the chemistry. Welcome to those two guests. For our panel members, the sound desk will operate the microphone. If you wish to come in on a question, please simply indicate by raising your hand and I'll seek to bring you in at an appropriate moment. You don't have to answer every question, but we try to let things flow as the discussion develops. Now, as I think you'll be aware, what we're dealing with is a gender pay gap inquiry. The remit for the inquiry is to explore the effect of the gender pay gap on the Scottish economy with a particular focus on business performance, the Scottish public sector and Scottish Government action required to address the issue. I wonder if I might, just to start off, have one or two comments from a few of you on that. General introductory comments that you would like to make and then we'll move into questions from committee members, so I'm not sure who would like to start us off on that one. Shona Struthers. Good morning. In colleges, we have a pay structure that has been reinforced with national bargaining and it is not based on gender, it is around a fixed pay for a role, so it is irrespective of gender. If there is any pay gap, it is down to a relative number of the gender in that pay structure, so it is more likely that if there is a difference it is because there are men in more senior roles, so if you think about the majority of lower paid staff as female because they work in things like cleaning staff etc. The other point to think about in colleges as well is that some of the more senior staff have individual contracts which can then impact on the gender pay gap. Okay, anyone else wish to come in? I'm so equate Scotland's working on science, technology, engineering and the built environment and we come at this from the perspective of the impact of occupational segregation. We have only 18 per cent women in tech jobs, we have only 2 per cent in construction and 9 per cent in engineering. Women tend to be only 12 per cent of management roles in those areas, so we're looking at a double ceiling, if you like, of not being in those professions in the first place, not being in those careers and then not getting to the top. All of our responses from equate Scotland's perspective has been the impact that can have on the pay gap by tackling this occupational segregation and getting more women into STEM. The Deloitte report that was released last year also indicated that the fastest way to overcome the pay gap is to tackle occupational segregation through tech jobs, so just to highlight that particular perspective that I'm and equate Scotland are coming at it from. Perhaps one other contribution at the stage, Tanya Castell. Changing the chemistry comes at it from a slightly different perspective. We are focused on changing the chemistry in the boardroom, so we're trying to improve diversity in the boardroom but very much from a perspective of making work a fairer place and hopefully changing the environment because, as already mentioned, you have some structural elements where you have a lot of the women working at the lower level which increases the gap. By focusing on how to address things such as unconscious bias so that you can get a greater proportion of women at a senior level, then hopefully ultimately the gender pay gap will disappear over time. I think we'll now move on to questions and our first question is from Bill Bowman. Thank you, convener. We've been asking the panel the same question. Why will we hear opinions and comments from you? Do you believe that there is a definitive set of statistics in Scotland on women's pay, earnings and employment that we can base basic information on? I think that we're all on edge to say something there. I don't think that the statistics that we have currently are comprehensive enough for us to work from. The statistics that, even this morning when looking at the Scottish Government website, are based on full-time work. That is not a reflection of women's work. They are the vast majority of part-time workers. Within that, we don't have intersectional data. We don't have data that tells us about women from black minority ethnic backgrounds, disabled, LGBT, immigrant women. We're not able to learn about what is happening for women who are likely to be furthest away from opportunity. I think that the data needs to be more comprehensive. I think that the data needs to include part-time work. I think that it needs to be intersectional for it to work for organisations like Equate Scotland who are trying to better the outcomes for women. Does it also depend on statistics about the age of those in different sectors of the workforce in terms of the different positions in those coming in as well? Absolutely. I would say that that is part of intersectional data. It would include age and where women are, how long it takes them to get to a senior position in comparison to men as well, what age that takes. I think that that would be part of what is our more robust set of data. Do you have some sources that are not the Scottish Government that you use? All our work is based on Scottish Government data, but it is an appreciation of the fact that we can see that there are gaps here. Of course, we are looking at the Scottish Labour market, so it makes more sense for us to use Scottish Government data because we need to be aligned with what it is that the Scottish Government is saying. It prevents us from doing our work as well, because we can only use the data that is available. I will move on now to a question from John Mason. I hesitate to speak for my female colleagues, but over the years that I have been involved in politics, I get the impression that there has been a kind of change. I think that maybe 20-25 years ago, there was a kind of thinking that we do not want quotas and targets and all that kind of stuff because we would rather just everybody came through in their merits, etc. I think that because we have made so little progress, I am convinced now, and I think that a lot of other people seem to be that we do need quotas and targets. I am interested in your feelings. Do quotas and targets work? Are they necessary? Are they desirable? Where are we going with that? Tanya Castel, and then Shoniff's brothers. From my perspective, thinking about the board level, certainly we do support quotas. You are right. You would like to think that they should not be necessary, but if you look at the data around unconscious bias and how bias impacts all the decisions we make, regardless of gender, you might have heard the example in orchestras where they introduced blind auditions and the success rate of women. It was not actually about women. They did it because they were worried that too many musicians were coming from certain teachers. The success rate of women went up 50% at first audition and 300% at final audition. There is also research done by Harvard around private equity. We are doing Dragon's Den type pitches where the same pitch, all you have got is a video and a different voice, a male voice or a female voice, men were just slightly more than twice as successful at pitching for the same pitch. To my mind, to overcome the bosses for a short time, I think we need targets. My view, they shouldn't be their long term. Once you've overcome those bosses, hopefully you can get closer to being a true meritocracy, in which case they should go away. I think we need them until people get more used to that mix. If you look at anything that you want to improve, you never really improve anything unless you set yourself a target and you monitor it and you measure it. While we might think that you shouldn't have to do that, I think that you absolutely do. I would cite two examples that are currently happening in the college sector. The college sector is signing up to the gender pledge of 50-50 board members by 2020. I personally have been a board member. I wouldn't like to think that I was on that board just because I was female. The reality is that I think that you need to target to make you aware of it. It's about raising awareness. I would like to think that if a woman was successful, it was because of skills, talent and experience as well. The other thing that I would like to cite to you is the gender action plan, which is a huge initiative that has been started by the funding council that goes across colleges and universities. I am sure that my colleague will pick that up. In there, again, it's about raising awareness, but it's a deliberate policy to set targets that we can measure. It's about closing the gap where there are some of the courses like care, for example, there's 4 per cent of men are in care courses and in engineering, 4 per cent of women are in engineering, so huge gaps. The only way to close those gaps is to raise the awareness of the gap and set a target to try to meet. There's a target set by the funding council to close the gap to at least 75 per cent, so reducing that huge gap to less of a gap. I'm a great believer that you need to put those targets in place if you really are going to try to change anything. I think that targets can be useful. I think that what you've also got to think about then is the timescale for them, for instance, and also maybe the consequences of them. For instance, if you look at occupational segregation, unlike the funding council in the colleges, we've got an equality action plan for modern apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are reflective of occupational segregation. They are a job with training, so they do reflect that. That doesn't mean that you don't do anything, you actually try and affect it. I think that your previous witnesses have gone on about the sort of complex forces that play here in terms of how we end up with the workforce that we do. Part of it is about the systemic nature of our societal attitudes, etc. To affect what's happening in the workplace, you have to start early on, so it takes time to see that coming through then in terms of change in the workplace starting from primary school. If you're looking at targets, you should look at how long does it take for something that has to happen early on so that attitudes can change, etc. To then what happens within the workplace. I think also the consequences. For instance, if you set quotas for specific places, then you have to accept that if individuals, because their attitudes haven't changed, etc, don't come forward to those places, then those places are going to be unfilled. I'm saying that targets can be good, but you've just got to think about the practical consequences of it and also sometimes the timescales. Professor Hogg, in the university sector, we're very aware of the fact that it goes back into schools, so yes, we want to close the gap, but if girls aren't taking physics in school, they can't apply for physics at university, so you have to look at it across the piece as to write throughout the educational timeline. How do we encourage more girls into the kind of subjects that will lead to STEM at university, but also we're very aware of the fact that male representation at university is falling. Over the past few years, we've had 40 per cent of males approximately and 60 per cent of women coming to university, but they are then going into gendered subjects when they're at university, so very few women take computer science, very few boys take psychology. It's quite a complicated picture, it's not just one target, it's a target within subjects as well. That leads me on. Are we just, clearly, Tanya Castell saying, set targets for the board? Some of your answers are making me think that we should set targets for physics class and S5, so we should have equal numbers of boys and girls in the physics class. That would be the way to force it through, would it not? I don't know whether you can actually force people to take physics or maths at school. I think it's more about the culture within the education system that encourages getting away from gendered subjects. We know that the number of boys taking languages is falling, whereas obviously you can't come to university to study languages if you haven't got a higher in languages. It's about a culture throughout the education system, rather than saying, we'll set a quota at university if we don't have a pipeline for people coming through. Quotes isn't targets work. They've been shown to work, particularly at board level and leadership roles. From Quate Scotland's perspective, yes, they work. There's evidence right across Europe to show us that it works. Quotes isn't targets work when it's an evidence base and there is essentially an action plan as to how you can stop using them in the future so that it is changing culture and changing attitudes. At SQF level 6 and 7, we only have 23 per cent of the pupils are girls. If we were to set a quota of 50 per cent without doing attitudinal change, without tackling gender stereotyping and having training for teachers and parents, starting at that early age of what subjects are wanted to be taken, those quotas or targets would not only prove to be ineffective, but there might be hostility towards them. There has to be an approach that is holistic and I don't think an approach on quotas in primary and secondary schools where there isn't an evidence base to say where they've been successful is necessarily the correct approach. Where we have boardroom targets that's been proven across Europe to create change. What I would suggest is that there needs to be a lot more investment in cultural and attitudinal change across from early years right the way through at the end of secondary school and when university choices are being made. Perhaps I could just follow up one or two points because I think it was touched on by Professor Hogg. My understanding is that in the university sector there's a difficulty now because roughly 62 per cent female students get my figures right here. 42 per cent male and that's an issue that the Scottish funding council has asked the universities to address going forward. In regard to two things, one is the male, female and balance and also the issue of specific subjects and the suggestion I think from the Scottish funding council has been that 75, there should be no more than a 75, 25 in any subject by a certain date. The colleges sector, the overall picture I think is roughly representative of what we see in the population. I think slightly more female students than male but not a lot so roughly reflecting the population. Then apprenticeships we have a different, perhaps the opposite to the university or even more pronounced gender imbalance. Now what I want to ask for your comments on the universities that was an issue that was certainly focused on for a while to change the balance but now it's gone in the opposite direction. If we look at apprenticeships there's still the problem. I mean if girls for example do better academically than boys at school it might seem to some people logically they're likely to go to university. If the places at university are filled by female students the male pupils may then end up in apprenticeships things like that. I'm just wondering the suggestion has been that quotas may work and I'm just wondering whether that is borne out by the evidence of what has happened in the university sector over the last few years or whether or not sometimes by trying to do these things we imbalance things further or in fact create a new problem. So is there an overall strategy that can be adopted right across the three sectors that I've mentioned to try and ensure that we don't run into imbalances which were perhaps not intended in the first place but then may have consequences or effects now that were unintended. I don't know who would like to show us struthers. I mean I think some of the panel have already raised this. I think it's actually wider than just looking at apprenticeships in colleges and universities. It's got to be well before that. You have to be looking at a cultural change that goes right back into early years and in fact goes into the family home. So it's much much wider. I think if you just try and say how can we shift the balance between apprenticeships, colleges and universities then I think we're missing a trick. I mean you're talking about societal cultural change and it has to be embedded and I know for example in the college sector we do have a gender action plan and there's some fantastic bits of work that go on in there but that has to be across all institutions, parliament, businesses, families. I think there's certain elements of that so it has to be sustained, it has to be resourced, it has to be about raising awareness, it has to be about having role models. There's lots of different elements that we can share. There's loads of information that we can share but it has to be across the piece and I think if we just look at not including the full education spectrum for example and I think we will not be successful and we could well then create imbalances that we don't quite understand how they've been created because we were trying to do something else. And also perhaps throwing in the question of individual choice into the mix. People do choose to do certain things just want to know.  I think sometimes when you look at the outputs of an education system and also what's happening in the workplace generally looking at the symptoms not necessarily part of the cause and it is about societal attitudes. One of the big projects that we've invested in over the last couple of years to try and create this pipeline towards apprenticeships and also non-gender choice within FE and HES around working with the Institute of Physics and what we did there is it's about a whole school approach to looking at gender balance and it's about both influencing the kids at school and also influencing the influencers and that's the parents, the teachers etc and looking at unconscious bias that's going on in terms of how lessons are taught, looking at the curriculum etc. We allied that deliberately to the Education Scotland 6 STEM cluster areas because what we wanted to do was see this be sustained and also disseminated working with the inspectorate to make sure that we could learn the lessons from that and what we've done as a result of that and it's in second of its third year has used the resources from that and Education Scotland are now going to disseminate that across Scotland so I think that's got a better potential of being anchored within the school system because you've allied it to the work that Education Scotland are doing. But there is all these other influences that's going on and that's what you're fighting against all the time and so a holistic approach yes but it is difficult. I think what we're talking about is either having the status quo or quotas and I don't think we're talking about what actually happened in the middle so I think there's right places for quotas to exist. I think there's evidence to say that targets can exist right across the pipeline because I think what Shona said about having something to aspire to creates change and creates a strategy I think that's important. But there doesn't need to be, there's space in between and good practice examples of positive action measures that are being taken by a range of different education institutes particularly in the college sector. So we work with City of Glasgow College and they have pioneered women into construction, HNC and women into engineering and it's all women for the first year and then they move into a mixed group. But the idea for that is to have a safe space to be able to pursue a subject that you perhaps were stereotyped into not taking and that has been proven to be really successful and it's oversubscribed. So there's clearly appetite for women to be in these subjects if we are innovative in the approach that we take to get them there in the first place. Now City of Glasgow College is an example of a college that has put targets in because they want to have a certain number of women in their mainstream engineering subjects but the innovative approach was to have this first year which was based on positive action for women only. So targets work and there are innovative ways to pursue them that I think we need to be reflecting on a little bit more. There's a little bit of a reluctance to pursue positive action measures despite them being evidenced and legal and the right way to go and what I would love to see out of this committee is an encouragement to pursue positive action measures and case studies into how that can happen. Jackie Baillie wants to come in with a question. Very quickly because it's relevant to what's been discussed. I'm fortunate to have a STEM hub at St Patrick's Primary School in Dumbarton in collaboration with the Glasgow Science Centre and I went there and it was just tremendous to see all these young people, P2s, engaged in science activity. So much so that there's interest from the parents and the parents will be going in of an evening. So I wondered is that the right age and stage to actually capture them or do we actually even need to do something with pre-fives as well? Tanya Castel. I mean my view would be certainly the younger you can start. I mean there was some recent research published saying that even between the age of five and six girls already start thinking themselves as not as brilliant as boys and that boys, it was some research done in the states. But it was a five-year-old boy, they see themselves about the same, you get to six, they're already absorbing stereotypes and I think I meet lots of very able board members and they say they're very aware that they want the right person for the job and I totally support that. But I meet so many people who are not aware of unconscious bias and not realising that they think they're recruiting the right person but not necessarily so. So I think that as soon as we can start trying to address what's being referred as a cultural issue at the stereotyping and the biases developed from a very, very young age. Katie Hardin. I think absolutely the younger the better and I can use my own example. My daughter went to nursery school and when they were passing out, it was the nursery schools they do these days having graduation ceremonies, they were asked, I said to what you're going to say, what job would you want to do when you grow up and then I was giving her ideas and she said no that's a boys job and that just showed you even from so young people and we had not bought her dolls or anything like that, you know there was just no but it's around us. Ash Denham. I was going to ask on the back of this idea of the fact that we need to do better at getting girls into choosing STEM subjects and we're talking about the younger ages. Is there any other countries or how are other countries doing on this subject? Is there some examples internationally that we can look for good practice on this? Yes. The statistics that we have in Scotland and the UK are one of the worst in Europe, I'm afraid. We are making progress, particularly in engineering and civil engineering. However, we are behind Cyprus, Croatia, Egypt, India, Turkey and there's a whole lot of evidence that I'm afraid I don't have with me but I'd be very happy to provide to the committee as to what is going on. What you will find is that there is a cultural and attitudinal difference towards the value of certain jobs. Where we have, to be perfectly honest, a lot of imagery about engineering and construction is a white older man in a hard hat, which is about 1 per cent of what engineering is actually about. It's creativity, it's artistic, it's changing everything around us and there is an appreciation for that depth of engineering in those other countries. It is an entire cultural change about how we value those jobs and what we think of those jobs and then coming a lot closer to mainstream and an appreciation of the engineering that goes into everything that we do and the artistic creative side of it. I'm so happy to provide that to the committee and I can provide international statistics as well, but what you'll find is attitudinal difference towards the STEM subjects, which is there's not one silver bullet that I can say that they're doing that we're not doing, I'm afraid. I just wanted to slightly widen it to say that it's not always about stereotyping for female or women. There's also the care sector, which is very much like we need to encourage men to join that. I wouldn't want us to leave this morning thinking that this is all about trying to get women into STEM, it's actually much wider. There are bias on both genders and then a further point would be isn't just gender, it's actually much wider characteristics as well. We should be thinking about it, so I'm sure there'll be questions from the committee on that. Okay, we'll move on now to a question from I think Jackie Baillie. Can I just observe how welcome it is to have an old woman panel? I don't think we've had one yet, but that certainly is welcome. You'll all be aware that we're soon to have legislation on the pay gap and pay gap reporting. Do you actually believe that's going to make any difference to reducing the pay gap? I think it's a start. I mean, I think some of the boards that I'm on, you can see that people are having to think about why it looks the way it does. And I think just by having data helps, you know, it makes it easier to set targets and it just makes it much more transparent.  No, they've got 25% of the FTSE 100, which is just 100 companies in the whole of the UK. So I think, you know, having that data so that you can look at it more carefully and then understand it, I think is a step forward. You again got to address some of these structural issues where, you know, why are people in the jobs they are? And again, how can you, one of the reasons changing the chemistry is very keen on making boards more diverse is that hopefully you make the workplace a place that works for everybody and therefore you get more diversity throughout it, not just at lower levels, which tends to happen today. Professor Hogg wanted to. The universities have had to publish their equal pay data for a few years now and it is very interesting. It is perhaps a perfect feature of what gets measured, gets managed, but it does, I think, highlight very starkly where our pay gap is. I think, like a lot of universities, we actually have quite a dramatic pay gap because we have not within grade, but across a structural pay gap, across our grades. The universities have some very highly paid academics and they have cleaners and housekeepers, so we do have that starkness of that. And I think universities, by having to publish that, have started to work on it quite systematically and I think that's been important. Sometimes it's the language as well that you realise that you're using. So, for example, we have in the university housekeepers and they're all women. If you call them building managers, would more men apply for those jobs? So you start thinking about the language that you use and what your culture is within the university, so I personally find publishing the equal pay data has been important. Can I just follow that up, because obviously this applies to companies with 250 employees or more and Scotland, as we know, is typically an SME-driven economy. So I'm wondering whether you think this should actually be extended and if it should, what do you think the threshold should be? I think it should be extended and I think it should be something that is part and parcel of being an employer. So if you're an employer, publish your pay gap so that you know that this is something that you have to work on. I'm not entirely sure why the threshold is there. At the end of the day, we're trying to create fair workplaces, so whether you have five or 250, both of those workplaces should be fair and equal. So I think that's something that we need to consider. The reality here is that whilst publishing pay gaps are welcome, they're not going to create radical change in the existence of the pay gap when it is such a culturally entrenched and complex issue. I also think it's important that we have some level of balances and checks in place as to what exactly is being reported, how that data is being collected and along with a pay gap a strategy on how you're going to do something about it. This is not my area of expertise, but I'm aware of the fact that when you're talking about a pay gap, particularly in small companies, you're really talking about reward more generally. If you have very small companies, how individuals are rewarded, it's not necessarily just on the hourly rate. I think that if you are going to go to small companies, you need to think about the broader context in which that company operates. Andy Wightman is a follow-up on animal. We heard evidence last week that a witness, Anna Ritchie, Alan, who was attending employer briefings that were organised by lawyers, was talking about widespread tuition to find leap-loop holes, where, for example, a company can be divided up so that the partners are not included in the gender pay gap. Have you got any evidence of that kind of activity? I know that Tenure can still want to come in, but perhaps that's in the previous point, although you're welcome to come in on this question. Otherwise, tell that to your coob. Sorry, Tenure. I mean, I can certainly say that not that they're trying to evade it, but they are slightly maybe in some places taken aback by what the data looks like, partly potentially from the structure of the organisation in terms of say if you've got a small company that grows and it's established by a key number of partners. That's, you know, back then would have been male. You clearly, so that data can look terrible. So I think it's just giving them a bit of a shock, but I haven't come across anyone actually trying to get through loop holes. I mean, I think, you know, in terms of going to smaller companies that the bit I was just going to add was, I think maybe not the tiny companies, but I find that with a lot of people I talked to about the benefits of diversity, there's still a lot of people who think maybe it's only about being fair, and actually they don't necessarily totally appreciate the economic benefit or the diverse teams perform better. So I think by bringing it a bit further down, you help get that message there. Again, you'd have to address that cultural point of people understanding, yes, there's a fair piece, but actually you'll get better results if there's a benefit to Scotland as a whole. I think Talat, your coob wanted to know. Given the fact that we work so closely with employers, I don't think any employer is going to put their hand up and tell us that that's what they're doing. So I can't give you a case and point of that happening, but yes, that is what we've heard anecdotally and Anna's right to point out. I think that's what I was getting at when I politely said checks and balances in how it's reported and where the data's coming from and how it's collected. Just asking employers to publish their pay gap, whilst they all might be doing it differently, doesn't create any kind of coherence and doesn't actually benefit the cause at all. I would also just like to add that sometimes it's more than just pay. I'm thinking about working practices, so if you have perhaps an array of flexible working practices, that can often help tackle gender imbalance as well. So if you don't, for example, allow part-time working or flexible working or flexi-time, then those things can also impact. So it's wider than just a pay-gender gap. I had inadvertently passed over Richard Leonard who had some questions to ask relating to public boards. So my apologies to Richard Leonard and perhaps you could come in at this stage. Yes, I accept your apology. I just want to look at the public sector, the role of Scottish Government and public agencies. I'm going to look at a specific example but I think it maybe draws out some general points and I'm looking at Katie Hutton because it relates to the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board structure. At the root, to some extent, of the whole debate about occupational segregation and apprenticeships is one of the areas where I think there's general agreement on we need to do more work to try to diversify the channels, the jobs, the occupations, the apprenticeships that young people go down. But when I was checking fairly recently and I looked at the composition of those people who populate the advisory boards, when I looked at the employer equality advisory group, 70 per cent of those were women, but when I look at the main advisory board, which is the principal vehicle for advising skills development Scotland and the Scottish Government, it turns out that it's the complete opposite. In fact, it's worse. Nearly 80 per cent of the composition of the main advisory board are men and just 19, 20 per cent are women. Doesn't that tell us something a little bit about where we're missing the target as far as representation quotas, targets, getting our resources and our brains in the right place? I would disagree with you that the staff as it stands is a collective sum of its parts. Every bit of it is important, to be honest, because we see those bits about frameworks and standards and equalities and employer engagement being there. To a certain extent, you're right on the gender balance of the advisory board, which is kind of reflective also, because we deliberately targeted CEOs to try and get employers to take a real interest in driving apprenticeships forward, because we always talk about being employer-led and it's important to be there. We set it up and it was also a function of who said they would come on it as well, because clearly CEOs, our chief financial officers as well, are clearly busy. Even in the qualities advisory group qualities part of it, we've also recognised that now that it's been set up and running, maybe we have to look at who else we need to bring on to these groups as well. That's certainly something that we're alive to and we should be doing something about. I mean, I don't know whether any of the other witnesses have got views in a more general sense about how it seems to be. It's certainly my experience that if it's an equality issue, there'll be probably more than disproportionate representation of women on it, but when it comes to some of the main decision bodies, that's where the deficit exists. Is that people's general experience? I can quote you some statistics from the college sector in terms of our board gender split. We're actually 60-40, so not a bad gender split on boards, and when you take that through into senior management teams, it's actually the other way around, so I think in the college sector we seem to have quite a fair balance. However, I could draw your attention to the chairs of college boards, and when you look at that, there is a disproportionate number of males to females in the chair position, so for me it's an observation more than anything, but if you think of our regional chairs and colleges being publicly appointed, this is something that's within the mandate of the public appointments process. There, we've got a 23 per cent female to the rest being male in regional chair public appointments, so it's not particularly representative of the sector as a whole because actually the gender balance is good there. Who makes those appointments? The regional chairs are publicly appointed. By the Scottish Government. Thank you. Tanya Kistel. I think there is, in terms of your question, there is certainly on a lot of diversity events, one recently with the Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands Islands Enterprise, you do get more women, a majority of women versus men, so there is still something about how you engage men. There are obviously a lot of men here, I hope I'm not offending anyone, but I think there is something about quite a lot of people get men turned off by the diversity piece, which for me is why it's so important to promote the benefits to business or organisations, it's not just commercial businesses, that you do have those different perspectives and therefore you do get better performance. I mean, I think the Scottish Government public appointments team have done an amazing job in terms of improving on gender diversity, what they've done, changing the chemistry, I should say it's been working with them, so possibly slightly biased, but and it has definitely been improving and I can say I'm on a public sector board and we're 50-50, so in Scotland. Right, thank you. Now we'll move to question from Ash Denham. Thank you. My question was around occupation segregation, which I know we've covered in parts of your answers already, so clearly we need to do more at different levels, so apprenticeships, we've touched on that a little bit, further education, higher education, and Talat, I think it was you that mentioned the idea of positive action measures that they work, that there's case studies and women in construction, that course, was that a further education course that you mentioned already? So, could you give us some more examples of other positive action measures, maybe at these different levels, that's things that we could be looking into that, you know, we have evidence that they do work? There's an opportunity for me to plug Equate Scotland's recent report rising to the challenge, it's filled with case studies, specifically on positive action. Equate Scotland, the mass majority of our work is trying to get employers to take positive action measures. One example of this is our career wise project, which is a women only placement, paid placement in industry for third and fourth year undergraduate students. Where we have in a year around 40 placements, we will have up to 300 young women apply, there is demand there, it's just another example of positive action working. Every year we've had more employers take part and it's in year three now, so it's working, but it's about getting employers to recognise that positive action doesn't need to be frightening, you can get support in it and it's perfectly legal. There is a misunderstanding between positive action and positive discrimination, which we need to overcome because it's preventing employers from taking part. The career wise project includes a whole set of organisations, computer application services, which is a Scottish SME, for example, and we can provide you and the committee with a whole range of case studies on that. West Lothian College is doing something similar to the City of Glasgow College, which is about getting women into engineering. There are the two positive action examples that I can give and I know that is being pursued even more with the gender action plan as well. There are also other small positive action measures that can be taken about, and it's what Professor Hogg referred to, about changing language. For example, for a case study that we were putting together for the tech sector, job descriptions that, looking at Indeed.com, putting in technology and putting in the word aggressive gave me 9,500 jobs to choose from. Looking at the word dominant gave me just over 2,000 jobs. Having conversations with employers about how they market themselves and what language they're using is fundamental to creating that change. Just on occupational segregation, it's also really important that, despite being a STEM organisation but being a feminist, the other part of this is the undervaluing of the work where women are now. In social care, in teaching, in cleaning, in administrative services, where women are is undervalued. Whilst we're trying to get women into STEM, there also needs to be equal push to value the work on the other side. Otherwise, why would men pursue those jobs and how can we then value the women who are there and overcome the pretty significant occupational segregation? I think there's examples across the universities in Scotland of how the universities are working with schools. Some really good examples of trying to encourage more girls to take STEM subjects, but I agree with Talott. We have to look across the piece and all of the way that we view particular roles. I'm the college sector. We've heard some of them this month. There's some amazing examples. I'm listening. I've got loads of examples here. I'm willing just to share them with you rather than go into any detail, but there's loads of examples. I can quote things like this girl can as an initiative to show what women can do. There's this man cares, which is to try and encourage men and men in the mirror, which is around trying to encourage men into beauty and those types of careers. Again, I think someone mentioned the schools. It does go right across the schools. There's loads of initiatives. The energy skills partnership did a great piece of work with the blood town challenge. I don't know if you're aware of that, which was to encourage schoolchildren. It was about how to make a rocket car and then race it. That was really evenly balanced between boys and girls. I think there's a plethora of examples of great work going on. I suppose it's how do you take all of that and build it in and make it sustainable and make it resource it. You absolutely have to resource it, so it's not a fad. It's got to be built into the way that things are run normally, otherwise things just come and go. I'm also interested in this idea, expressed as if you can't see it, you can't be it or worse that effect. Recently, I visited the BioCaution of Saulted Edinburgh University and they were doing an outreach project to a local school in my constituency.  Then one of the girls asked if she could come in over the summer and do a kind of a work experience thing. I met her and she said to me, I thought I was going to become a hairdresser but now I've been in the lab, I'm going to be a scientist. I just thought, wow, that's really amazing. That's quite a change. That ties into what you were saying about engineering, that people don't understand what engineering is, what's involved in it. Are we missing something at the careers advice stage where we're not explaining to kids, to girls, to boys what these jobs are and how it might match up with their skills? Is there something more that we could be doing there? Katie Atten, first. We're responsible for the careers guidance service in schools and we've done a lot with our own staff around unconscious bias things as well. To be honest, you will see your careers guidance member of staff but you're also your guidance teacher, you'll see more of your teachers, I think it has to be wider than that, that we talked about this holistic school approach. I think in terms of trying to anchor everything that Shona said about making sure that it's systemic within the school system and even down to nursery, you have to think about the leavers that are there. In terms of how is a school inspected and I know that Education Scotland has looked at equality as an aspect within the inspection service as well, you've got to look at how the curriculum is delivered and developed and what does that do about engendering particular attitudes etc. So I think you've got to look at all your leavers as well as the specific careers guidance inputs but also what's there in terms of how things are delivered in the school system and outweith. I think there's been improvements in careers advice over the years, I don't think it's where we would want it to be. We hear a lot of anecdotal evidence of the careers advice that students were given when they were in their first year of university and how they were told are you sure that engineering is what you want to pursue, it might be really difficult if you're only one of two girls in the room. Now I think really if we are looking to get more women into STEM we need to have a focus on saying yes you can do this, we'd like to support you to do this, hear our support systems when you get into university and college, not just to get you there but keep you there right the way through to the end because retention is an issue as well. So I think there's definite improvements that can be made when it comes to challenging gender stereotyping within the school setting but also with parents and so those attitudes are challenged and changed at school and then reinforced at home. I'm not sure where the child is meant to go if they're getting conflicting messages so there needs to be a real holistic approach to this and I think a few examples of people doing it right. EDF and Shell are examples who have done girl only outreach in schools and invited them in to do site visits and it's only for girls and they do development activities and other example of positive action and yes what we see are more girls getting rid of the myth of what actually being an engineer is. And then pursuing those subjects so it works but we need more of it. Professor Hogg. I was just going to mention that there was a 2014 so it's not that recent Institute of Engineering and Technology study which identifies that only 1% of parents would encourage their daughters to be engineers so we have got to think about the whole environment that girls are being brought up in. I think also you tend to find that girls apply for university courses that they recognise from school. So if we're not teaching engineering as such in schools that they don't apply for engineering they apply for something that they recognise leaving medicine and law aside obviously but if you're studying business management in school I'll go and study business management at university. So how people perceive what engineers are is very important. Just to just looking into that there's a great example at Fife College of changing of the titles of HNC and HNDs to include the words creativity and art and they've had an increase in the number of young women who apply so having something that says technology or software design rather than software development and it's words that feel more approachable and that are recognised in the work that you've done in school means that you're more likely to apply in the same way. Job adverts work in the same way so at Fife College it's a really good example of them looking at the prospectus and changing the language so that it feels more accessible and welcoming to young women. I just have something we've talked a lot about going in at a young age and so forth but I think protected characteristics are mentioned one of the ones that wasn't was age and I'm just wondering how that fits into the whole picture because of course people at later stages in their careers or indeed young people may choose to go into a particular course, start work in that, decide it's not actually for them because I'm just wondering how that fits into this picture. People's changing choices or changing understanding of what they might have thought they wanted to do and then later in life career changes or how age fits into this. I don't know who would like to comment. The college sector, although predominantly focusing on young people, is encouraging for the adult learner and specifically women returners. It's one of the only avenues that can encourage women back into the workforce for example. I recall we used to have back in the day women's technology centres. I don't have anybody's aware of them. I personally served on one of the boards of a women's technology centre and what they did was encourage women from regeneration areas who had no qualifications at all and actually didn't have the confidence to go to college or anything. We're making an assumption that women returners will actually go to college. There are some groups that you need to reach that are harder to. I don't think that any women's technology centres left any more, which is a real shame, but they did low-level qualifications and just got people back into studying. They went on and studied more and got further qualifications or joined the workforce, but certainly the college sector is an avenue to encourage returners and adult learners and to reskill and upskill because often if you get made redundant in your 40s or 50s, sometimes there are no obvious avenues where to go. Keeping the college sector open and available to the adult learner and not just for young people is absolutely vital. I think that colleges are a space where that happens now and we can take a lot of good practice from. The city of Glasgow College Women's Engineering, HNC, while there are 18-year-olds, young women who are 18, there are also women who are 40, 50 having a career change there. I think that there are good examples that we can take from that. I do think that there needs to be a focus on young people coming in, but if we go to what Ash Denham said about what you can't be what you can't see, if you don't have women role models then you are less likely to stick around. An example of the work that Equate Scotland is doing is a women returners programme, which is to get women who were in the sector in STEM but left for a variety of reasons, whether they found the environment hostile, whether they couldn't go back with caring responsibilities. We are doing paid placements with employers to get them back into work and get them contributing to the STEM sector once again. I think that it is vital that we take a whole pipeline approach and that it is not as 16 to 21 or early years, but it needs to be interventions right across the pipeline over a period of time for there to be any demonstrable change. Gillian Martin has a very short supplementary point about apprenticeships. Apprenticeships have not been doing as well as they could be in attracting women into apprenticeships, but also what we have just been talking about, about older women returners, there is surely an open goal there about getting this whole thought about apprenticeships but not just being for young people but for being older people too. To cover the kind of thing about not being as successful as they could be, they do reflect that they are a job with training so they are reflective of what is happening out there in the world of employment. You have to remember that apprenticeships, in terms of how it is funded, is prioritised against particular sectors for economic reasons. Some of those sectors are ones that traditionally boys will do engineering and will say construction. It does follow what jobs are also available. Also what we said about what happens earlier, if less girls will apply for engineering, less girls will apply for construction because of the attitudes that are formed much earlier down. That is why we have published our Equalities Action Plan and we have undertaken a lot of work. We have worked with Equate, we have funded Ayrshire Girl Can, Ayrshire College and with colleges to try and stimulate a lot of activity from the school system, working with Education Scotland and partners. We do think that other educational partners need to keep taking that work on. Last week, you will have seen and thanked everybody who participated in the Scottish apprenticeship week. It was much appreciated. Those iconic images of girls that you would have seen in Waverley and Central Station, trying to break down those images about girls who can only do the five Cs that they call them in terms of caring, cashiering and all that sort of stuff, but also trying to break those moulds. In terms of age as well, the funding out of all our starts about 20 per cent is targeted towards older age groups and it is targeted on engineering those kind of occupations. Therefore, again, you have the same issue. It is symptomatic of the attitudes that are formed and that is why you have the figures that you do at the moment. Unless those things have got to change and that is why we are working with a range of partners to try and address what the underlying issues are. Dean Locker. Thank you. Just following up on the different age groups and the pay gap within different age groups, some recent data that we have looked at indicates that in Scotland the pay gap disappears for women in the age bracket between 30 and 39. In fact, there is a positive gap of 0.4 per cent. I just wanted to get the panel's view on is that something that you recognise in terms of the data that you have looked at or anecdotally is that something that you have come across because it is the only age group within which there is a positive pay gap because after the age of 30, 39, the negative wage gap reappears in Scotland to be 8.8 per cent. I just wanted to get your views on is that something that you recognise and if it is what you think the reasons are for this apparent spike in or equality at this age level and then fall away after the age of 39. Thank you. Who would like to try that one? For me it would have to be just be anecdoto which is around women returners and it being flexible working patterns that perhaps are not there and it just does not encourage people to come back and at the same level in the workplace but it is purely anecdoto. No other takers on that one. We will move on to questions from Gordon MacDonald. Just a very quick point to go back on in relation to STEM subjects. There has been a couple of comments I have picked up that we need to deal with the attitude problem and get people at a young age and we need role models. My question is the majority of nursery teachers are female. The majority of primary school teachers are female. The secondary school teachers are about 50-50. Is it a cultural issue or is it an issue that because the people that are teaching our youngsters haven't actually raised their horizons or dealt with the problem because it's not a priority? How do you deal with it when the role model is female throughout most of their education? Having role models who are nursery teachers, teachers in primary or secondary school, the majority being female is a cultural problem. I don't think that those can be separated out. A cultural problem of women being more likely to be pursuing jobs that are about care that are involved with children, the consequence of that is more women in those roles. If you ask children who looks after you, they will refer to women around them. I think that this comes back to the point that I was making about while we are working on and rightly focusing on for the sake of economic growth on STEM, we can't ignore the other side where there is a disproportionate number of women in care or teaching or at nursery level. I think that what we should be doing is elevating those careers, valuing women's work and similarly to the way that the gender action plan is working, getting men into those roles and taking on a level of care responsibility and being involved in caring, whether it's teaching or actually as parents doing more caring is I think fundamental to tackling the occupational segregation. Some of the evidence that we received said that females whose degrees subjects had been in mathematics or science earned more than their male counterparts. This points to the importance of encouraging girls to study subjects such as maths and science at school and university. Are we saying that the teachers themselves are not doing enough sign posting or is it not their role? I think that it is their role. I think that it is absolutely their role to do more sign posting. I think that we need to be supported to do that. Before we point our fingers at teachers and say that we need to do more, I think that we need to support them to be able to do that in the first place. Where that means training, tackling unconscious bias, whether that is working with careers guidance, whether that is taking a more strategic approach and a whole school approach, but I think that teachers can only do that if they are supported to do that. They have the training and the backing to enable them to do that. I agree with that and that is the purpose of the improving gender balance approach that we are taking with the schools. It is about supporting them to challenge their own assumptions, to challenge that unconscious bias. You mentioned nursery care. One of the things that we challenge around looking at the numbers in child care, looking at who is involved in that and the jobs that are there and apprenticeships. One of the barriers is the cultural attitudes of parents who sometimes are not happy about a man working with young children. It is part of that wider cultural thing that we have all talked about today. I would draw the committee's attention to our College of Scotland submission and the funding council submission around the gender action plan. The five key elements that are in there could be used holistically across. If I look at things that you have talked about influencing the influencers, you are talking about parents, teachers, staff in colleges, schools and universities. Employers have got a big part to play in this. Current students. For example, you have the world skills, which is a competition for schools. In there we had a female who had a construction. They get a medallion of excellence. You deliberately take something that you do not expect to see because we are culturally biased. When a female does particularly well, it is about promoting that. It is raising awareness to say that you can do this. Perhaps you have just been ingrained to believe that you cannot. A lot of it is absolutely right through our whole society. I do not think that we are aware of it as much. I do not think that we think about it until you do something like this and you realise just how ingrained it is. I wonder what views the panel has on the initiatives that the Scottish Government has taken. For example, fair work and the Scottish Business Pledge include elements of closing the gender pay gap, but perhaps not as robustly as it might. We have had evidence from Engender Scotland saying that the questions around gender balance and diversity in the Scottish Business Pledge are almost meaningless. In your own evidence, you talk about the Scottish Business Pledge and the Fair Work Convention having the capacity to do a lot more than it does. Would anyone like to reflect on that? I think that the Scottish Business Pledge was well intentioned. It does not give businesses enough to work on. I can only see it as an introduction to the topic. That is what the Scottish Business Pledge feels like. There is space for it to be bolder. The aspect that is about gender is about balancing the workforce. You sign up to it and say that you will do something about it. Are you asked for a strategy? Is there accountability as to what you are doing to create a balanced workforce? Is there monitoring and evaluation? Will anybody be checking in to check that what you have pledged you are doing? I am actually asking the women, with those employers, is that making any kind of difference? It cannot be seen as anything more than a softer touch introduction. There has to be a lot more bolder intervention if the business pledge is going to do what it intended to do. What exists there are vague sign-ups. There needs to be targets and specifics about the expectation from employers if they sign up to such a pledge. To be clear, are you suggesting that those bolder ambitions could be embedded within the Scottish Business Pledge? As it stands, I do not have any evidence to be able to say that the Scottish Business Pledge has created a balanced workforce going in the right direction. I do not know where the evidence will be coming from or how data collection is being carried out with the Scottish Business Pledge. If it is to be something that is an intervention that will create change, then it needs to be specific, target-driven, bolder and has accountability in monitoring and evaluation as a core part of it. You are also saying that there is space for the Fair Work Convention to have a bigger impact. We had Patricia Finlay last week, who is the academic adviser to the Fair Work Convention, saying that it is a very prominent part of what we do. In the same way as the Scottish Business Pledge, what we need is to close the gap and engender in both of their responses. We agree that there needs to be a national strategy around how we tackle the pay gap. What we have talked about on this panel and every question is the complexity behind it, the fact that there needs to be interventions right across the pipeline. What is missing is whether you have the Women in Work report, the Fair Work Convention and the Scottish Business Pledge. We have lots of interventions, but those are not necessarily coherent. They are not strategic. They do not encompass themselves in a way that employers can look at and know where to go for support and what change to make. We completely back close the gap and engender in calling for a strategy that brings these things together, that is coherent, specific and target-driven. In that strategy, do you think that there is any role for the legislation or is that something that we should inquire of elsewhere? I think that there could be a role for that. I would refer to close the gap for advice on that rather than for myself. I would support what Talott said. I think that it could go a lot further. I won't repeat what she said, but I wholeheartedly support that. Again, providing that rationale, what I said earlier, just about helping businesses understand that this ultimately is a benefit, that it's not a pain in the neck for them, that they will get some result out of it. It's not just about being fair. This ultimately is better for Scotland. It comes across too many times that people are not aware of that difference of getting that diversity of thought into organisations. Emphasising and pushing that makes sense. I would just add to that as well. The gender action plan, which the funding council has just rolled out across colleges and universities, is embedded in their outcome agreements, so it's picking up all the points that you make. It's a strategy, it's measurable, it's specific and it's there to see, and that's absolutely what you need. Just coming back to the point that you made, Tanya, about the evidence for the benefits to the Scottish economy, to any economy having greater diversity and making employers aware of that. Is that kind of evidence in the kind of format that it would be easy to convince employers about, or is it too generic, too macro? It's hard, because clearly if you're talking about the format, there's clear evidence that diverse teams perform better, to have different perspectives, more creative, more innovative. If you're talking about actual businesses, if you're talking about commercial organisations, the research shows that there is correlation. You cannot prove that it's because you've got more diverse teams at the top, that it's a direct connection, but there is a high correlation. There's been a lot of research done by McKinsey, Credit Suisse, that you get improved profitability if you have more diverse management teams and boards. That is relatively compelling. You just can't say absolutely, because there are two elements of it. One, you have a more diverse board, but actually are you saying something going back to the points we've already been talking about, about the culture of an organisation that enables you to have a diverse board? Therefore, again, when we're talking about the gender pay gap, because you have a better culture, actually people want to stay. We were talking about that drop-off earlier at 39. There is more research out there that shows that you get to a stage where women just quite often don't want to be there. They step out. I mean, I guess I stepped out of my exact career, full-time exact career in my 40s, because you just will say, well, actually, that's not the way I want to play the game. I don't want to work 24x7 and actually have that aggressive nature. So, there's two elements. Yes, it performs better, but that could be because the culture of the organisation is different, and therefore you get a better quality of organisation, better output. In response to my question that you talked about, the evidence relating to management and boards, that's a tiny fraction of the workforce. So, if that's the most compelling evidence, that's not going to do much for... No, it's not the most compelling. I mean, as I say, there is research that a diverse team will come up with better outcomes, but I'm talking about when you're trying to measure diversity of organisations, they've tended to focus on at the top. And I would argue that if you make it the whole organisation, then you're going to get even better performance. Because when you're trying to look at a compelling economic environment, you're having to look at the bottom line. And I guess a lot of the researchers focus on the board level as it does that make a difference. But yeah, there is other research, which is just saying, does a diverse team perform better? And that does exist. I think Tala, Yr Cwb, and Katie Hutton wanted to come in on this. Just to drag me in, Equate Scotland's work is all about putting forward that business case. So understanding that there is inequalities in social responsibility, because I wouldn't want it to be only on the business case. I think there needs to be a responsibility and a social act involved in this as well. So we talk about both science when we talk to employers. And actually most of the time we're not talking about boards because other organisations are doing that. We're talking about diversity in teams. And where it works especially well, just to give you an example, is when we're talking about diversity in technology and engineering, because you are creating things for our customer base that is more diverse than your team. Just an anecdote to explain this. Apple produced the health kit, which was an all-encompassing health check that looked after every part of your health and your body. When they produced it, it was an all-male team. And what they forgot was menstruation and reproductive checks. So they forgot that that existed, even though this is a whole health checking app. So when we talk about things like that, it becomes about reputation as well. And that created quite a lot of reputational damage. So we tend to pull out that example as often as we can. But in tech and engineering, it's very clear and easy to talk about the need for creativity between diverse minds when it is a diverse customer base. Some of us may be sceptical about what use these apps are generally for health anyway. But Katie Houghton. One of the things that the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory on Equalities has said that they will work with us on is exactly about selling the message in a believable way that will be accepted by colleges. We've run some things past them and they said, we'll work with you on providing that message on a thing that's meaningful to employers. It's tough that Talot was talking about as well. So that will be part of the work of that group going forward. Bill Bowman and Richard Leonard wanted to come in with brief supplementaries. Thank you, convener. Just to follow up on what Andy Wightman and Tanya Castell were saying, you said they'd been researched by McKinsey and Credit Suisse on diverse boards performing better. Have they actually identified these companies and we can see they are outperforming the markets, for example? The Credit Suisse one, I'd have to go back and check the exact companies, whether they listed them. There was a 2012 report and they looked at listed companies, so they were looking at the return on equity. The McKinsey report was, I think, 389 companies. I'm just trying to remember if they list them in the back. Certainly they know who they are. So they're across the Latin America, US, UK and Canada, I think it was. I would seem that if you have this information, then why is that not out in the market? Why are the fund managers not using this to improve the performance of their investments? I want to go into the fund management space. There's a lot of debate on fund managers now. Is that not the fundamental of looking at the performance of a company? It is one aspect. That's why Credit Suisse did it. But it doesn't seem to bring it out into the clear daylight. That's just two. There are a lot of different reports. Catalysts have issued reports. Quite a lot of people have tried to do that evidence-based to say that they're having to do correlation because clearly there are multiple factors that impact the performance of an organisation and its profitability, of which that is just one. But no, the way that McKinsey did it, and they actually looked at ethnic diversity and gender diversity, and it was within your sector if you had a diverse management team slash board, your return on equity improved by, I think it was roughly 10%, if you had a gender diversity in the top quartile. Interestingly, for ethnic diversity, it was a 35% increase in the term of equity. I suppose my point is that doesn't seem to have stepped actually into the active investment management market. I think some people are aware, but again, it is only one factor. So it's not the only factor that's going to promote performance because regulation changes, markets move, commodity prices move. I think there's more discussion, maybe it says something about the fund management industry. Possibly. Perhaps we could come to, sorry to tell that, do you have a comment on that? I just wanted to point out the fact that part of the reason why that perhaps isn't filtered down is a point that Jackie Baillie made about our economy being small and medium-sized employers and all of this data is very large employers. I think when we're talking about the business case and we're talking about diversity and what impact it has, what we need is reporting an analysis of smaller, more accessible employers and what impact diversity can make there. I think that that would make our case a lot stronger and I think that that might be read by and taken on board by a lot more of employers that would make our job a lot easier. When I'm looking at the McKinsey report, it is very large employers that are looking at where you can identify where a lot of work is already happening. Richard Leonard. It's just to go back to the point about the gender equality plan that was mentioned and the five Cs has come up quite a number of times in the evidence session and my experience and I'm sure lots of other people's experiences in the public sector quite often two of the five Cs cleaning and catering staff are outsourced and therefore don't always come within the scope of a proper gender pay evaluation. Is that the case with these gender equality plans and the account taking of the fact that people might have different employers but are performing those kind of jobs? Can I ask for clarification? Do you mean as in how can the public sector and government hold them to account because they are employed by somebody else? My view would be that a responsible public sector organisation would include in those lower paid workers albeit that they may be employed by a different outside agency. Is that what's happening here? I don't have that information with us but I could certainly look at the college sector and see if that's how they calculate it. I don't have that today. Yes, perhaps that's a point for all of the panel members. If issues have been raised that you would like to come back in writing on that you've not perhaps anticipated here and not had the detail to your fingertips then please feel free to do that. The committee may indeed write to you with a few additional questions perhaps for clarification. Do you feel free to respond? I would just add to that though that something that's just recently been discussed with the colleges is around a living wage accreditation which has actually taken your point entirely about low paid roles like catering and cleaning and making sure that at the very least you're being paid the living wage so that's something the college sector is actively pursuing around living wage accreditation. Good. We are living wage accredited employer. Right, well may I think all of the members of our panel we're now coming to the end of this session so thank you very much for coming in and I'll now suspend the meeting to... Sorry, was there another question that a committee member wished to ask? Thank you, convener. I'm feeling a wee bit panicky there. We've mentioned talking about the business case around having more gender equality throughout a lot of areas. One of the issues that I have found about the regard to STEM is that when you get more women in to study in STEM at university and college and schools and whatever but they are not staying in STEM jobs so there's issues around the workplace.  What do you see has been the issues there? Okay, so according to the Tapping All Our Talents report by the Royal Society of Edinburgh 73% of women who graduate with STEM subjects do not stay in STEM industries in technical roles. That's a huge drop off. That has an impact on the creativity on the investment in those young women as well by university and colleges. When we have done data collection from those very women it's a range of things. One is the lack of part-time flexible work in those areas, in those industries. We work closely to help employers pursue flexible work and part-time work. It is a struggle. There's not enough equality part-time work in those sectors available. The second is something that we refer to as microaggressions. The everyday hostility of being the only woman in a male-dominated environment. For example, what we'll hear are anecdotes from women about it being presumed that you're going to take the minutes in the meeting because you're the woman that you're going to go and get the lunch, that you will presume that you will have caring responsibilities that you need to leave for the drip-drip effect of casual sexism and that impact meaning that women leave that workplace. What we, like I said, refer to as microaggressions. Then there's another part of it which is about a lack of progression routes. You stay in the sector for say five years, you notice those around you progressing and you aren't being given the challenging projects or the progression opportunities. A lack of progression and promotion, a hostile work environment and microaggressions and a lack of quality, flexible work in the sector. Coming back to the business case, losing good staff is bad for business. Absolutely. A message that I'm interested to hear, things like flexible working is not a cost to a business necessarily. It's a way of retaining talent. Would you agree with that? You mentioned flexible working and job sharing and having those things in place as a norm. Absolutely. It's not just necessarily about having them in place. It's having a culture where they're acceptable and that people want to take them up. You can have a very good policy but if there is a culture in the workplace that people feel that they're not encouraged to do that or if they do it they'll be marked out as somebody who's different then the policies themselves are not good enough. So it's the culture in the workplace that's important rather than the policies that organisations have. I have to take some positive action there to deliberately create joint roles and I know the funding council submission, for example, talked about a joint director role for two females to share who perhaps are curing. So it is about deliberately doing things to get away from the issues around inflexible. It's not just about having a policy it's about deliberately doing things that show that you're willing to be flexible. Presumably not saying that flexible women are just for women. We try to find culture as well. That's one thing that we're very clear about. Everything that we do benefits the whole university community because it's not just women who have caring responsibilities so we put in place lots of interventions that help both men and women and try to ensure that the culture supports family, family and friendly working across the piece and not just seen as a woman's thing. I will be very quick. Bill Bowman was saying about actual evidence for business performance. Is anyone aware of any evidence around the unseen costs of having to recruit because you're losing people on businesses as a result of not having these policies in place? We are working with Skills Health in Scotland to put together a best practice guide on the issues for the tech industry. I don't have it to hand, I'm afraid, but I will send it to you directly which is about the cost of recruitment, training and getting somebody at the level of somebody who has been there for two years and left. We've got that data in reference to the tech industries but I can send that on. Unfortunately, I don't have it with me but I'll send that to you directly. Thank you. I will now suspend the meeting and we'll move to our next panel of witnesses. Thank you very much again. Welcome back to everyone to our second panel of witnesses. Good morning. Thank you very much for coming in to see the committee today. In no particular order, we have with us today Alison Wilson, who is a partner in EY, Debbie Crosby, who is chief operating officer and executive director in the Clydesdale Bank, Gillian McClellan, who is a partner in CMS Cameron McKenna LLP and Debbie Miller, who is the inclusion manager at Royal Bank of Scotland. Welcome to all of our witnesses today. Thank you for coming in. We'll start with a question from Bill Bowman. Thank you, convener. We're here for the whole session. You'll know that we like to ask about the basis that we draw the statistics from and whether you believe that there is a defined set of agreed statistics on female economic activity in Scotland and the pay gap. Tricia Nelson. I did listen to the last session so that was useful but I do concur that when a lot of the data is based on full time, permanent is not as inclusive as it could be. And I think I've yet to be confident that there is a definitive body of data. However, I'm hopeful that that's what we're about to embark upon. Yeah, I would concur. I think that the data question is very important actually and I think that the changes that are coming to pass offer a great opportunity to start. The more that organisations can be encouraged to provide data that can provide a baseline, the better. I think that it's really important that when companies publish data they're forced to talk about the improvements that they'll make on data and then I think it gets much less confusing about how different people tend to present different figures. And I think that industry's got lots of experience of being forced to publish data in certain standards and I don't think there's any reason why there shouldn't be a really good opportunity to standardise as much as we can but for me it's about improvement in the data and not just the publishing of it. Just to add to that if I can, one thing that we're often saying in this subject is it can be death by statistics. So is there one set of conclusive data for Scotland that is comprehensive enough? I think the answer has to be no. I think the other thing as Debbie has said, it's very important we have legislation coming in. It could be a turning point but there's a huge amount of discretion for how people implement this legislation and how they report. And therefore guidance to give employers clarity so that there's a level playing field in how people report and so you can actually carry out like for like comparisons. It's going to be incredibly important as a measure for comparison. I agree in terms of what we're going to see next April will be a start and I think that transparency is good but I think the way in which we're being asked to report by legal entity will over, you know, it will complicate it. So from an RBS perspective, for example, it will be really difficult to define the kind of border in Scotland and the rest of the UK and into the global position. So I think it's a start but I think there will be more work we'll have to be done in the back of that to interpret the data. And thank you then just to follow up we will probably be relying a lot on the Scottish Government statistics but do the large consulting companies have their own sort of global databases that you might have some more information that might be useful to us? I think you're looking at me there. Certainly I think that the gender pay gap for us is an output. It is one measure in a much, much broader conversation. So when we look at our data which we are happy to share with you lift different lenses such as background disability education, LGBT, it's all really, really important. Gender pay is one part of that and yes, there is a body of evidence. There's world economic forum research, our own women fast forward campaigns all that data we can happily provide afterwards as well. But I do think the broader discussion is really important on gender is one aspect in the gender pay gap I believe is an outcome and I'd be happy to give evidence and talk about the things that can be done to avoid that gap in the first place. Again I think there's a danger if we go back to why we started working the gender pay gap it's very much about or designed to improve the balance of women at the top so if you start to look at all the various component parts alongside the data I think that's where it becomes helpful and meaningful. As important as the data is I think that the commentary on people's commitment to improve is far more important because I think lots of large organisations can use different methods to present data no matter how clever the Scottish Government is yet about how specific it will be so I think that forcing people to talk much more specifically about their action plans from improvement and tracking their commitments to improvement for me is really the nub of this issue. Thank you. We'll move on to a question from Richard Leonard. It's just to follow up those points Debbie Miller first of all are you suggesting that the RBS will publish data for Scotland data for the rest of the UK or will it just produce one figure for the whole company? At the moment we are working through our analysis so we're well ahead of the curve we've actually got a site for a first set of analysis which I'm sure you'll appreciate we'll have to share with our internal stakeholders first of all but as per the guidelines we're required to report by legal entities which don't often correlate well to how our organisation is constructed so things that will mean things to you and I in the public so do we have the option to cut it in different ways or will we do that? We'll wait until we've got our whole story and see what's the most meaningful to people out there but to the point that was made earlier it's the narrative that supports that that will enable us to do that and paint a very accurate picture a very transparent picture not just about what the gap tells us but what we're doing to address it It's a point that's been made already isn't it? Even at this stage it's important that we're going to have consistency of presentation of those stats which we really need to and can I ask Debbie Crosby a more specific question as well because I visited the Clydesdale bank a couple of months ago and met with both the senior managers but also Unite the Union and I was introduced to some what I thought was quite pioneering work which the bank does with the trade union in reviewing its annual pay settlements and putting that through some kind of gender equality audit could you maybe share that with the committee please? So we before the legislation comes in we've been committed to doing gender equality pay audits for some time as you've outlined and we do share that data with the union and we share our action plans with the union so I'm very proud of the fact that we are proactive in that having said that I think that in order to ensure that all organisations face into the issue in the same way I do come back to the point that if board directors have to commit personally to the commentary I can assure you they'll be much more interested in it than if it's happening at a lower level so as proud as we are I think we've made a very good start and I would encourage all organisations to take those steps I think that to get it on the agenda you have to force accountability at the board and you have to make sure that the board directors are in a meaningful fashion and that's about actions that really count they're not about actions that present statistics to present the organisation and the light that's convenient for whatever public face they want to present Can I just press you just a bit more detail because as I understand it this is built into the collective bargaining process with the two regions isn't it so when we go into our pay negotiations it's absolutely part of the transferent on that audit the outcomes of the audit and of course the actions to the audit Thank you and Gillian Martin wanted to come in with a supplementary I'd like to supplement Richard's line the question and since you've mentioned what you're doing in this what business benefits have you seen as a result of taking this action? I think that's challenging to be very specific I think that there's lots of studies in our session that do suggest that when you treat people culturally it's an inclusion culture you want to do the right things you want to encourage talent and you want great people to stay with you then of course it's good for business it's very difficult to draw a very specific correlation and I think it really is important that organisations from the top right through the senior management because there's plenty of studies that people can produce that can contradict evidence but I think as one of the largest employers in Glasgow and one of the largest employers in Scotland it's really important to have that inclusion and that cultural aspects at the heart of what you do and I was very interested in some of the questions about why it's not more prevalent discussion in fund managers actually having just finished a round of Western meetings I can tell you that more and more fund managers and analysts are interested in what the culture is in organisations how inclusive the culture is they are quite challenging on how diverse your board is and they are asking a lot of questions not just about gender diversity about the skill sets the experience and the capability of the management team and that capability I think needs to be presented in the broader sense and the culture that you're trying to promote in the organisation the interesting piece as is the investor so we've continued to make progress in the RBS and our pipelines have increased by 12% in the last couple of years and we're still dealing with a legacy situation in terms of us as an organisation we are making money but from an investor perspective we had our first investor last year packs elevate purely on the basis of our gender work and at the tail end of last year we were approached by Bloomberg so another kind of organisation who were I guess appealing to the investor market so when you look at how they've actually shared the evidence of what employers are doing it's very much to attract potential investors so it's something that we've got on our radar now very encouraged by packs that elevate but certainly by the end of this year we'd like to sign up to us pure on the basis of the work that we're doing but on our wider inclusion agenda I wanted to ask you about the women in finance charter and whether you thought it would support the pay gap reduction so again RBS we're one of the early adopters of the women in finance charter last year and it was a very easy one to sign up to her targets in place we've got an exact sponsor and we are transparent about those targets again going back to the point that was made earlier I think it will help the gender pay gap but the gender pay gap is an outcome of doing the right thing so it's that compound an integrated approach around treating our people how we would want to be treated that will help address things like the pay gap will help address the same issue we were talking about earlier will help address the better balance it's that compound effort so I think yes the transparency will help but it won't be the only thing do you think that the charter is actually strong enough because one of the points that it asks companies to sign up is to have an intention to ensure senior team pay is linked to the gender diversity so I mean is it strong enough and if it isn't strong enough given the importance of the finance sector to Scotland's economy should we have a charter of our own I think it's something to think about so again our targets are linked to pay so we have three people measures and gender balance gender targets is one of those so it does have a direct link to the pay of our CEO and direct school board I think you're right in terms of your observation it was very it was open to interpretation in terms of how people responded to that and some organisations have chosen to be very over others less so it's something we've fed back so I think it could help so a personal view I think it could help as long as it drives the right behaviours If I can add to that I think one thing so I don't speak from a particular financial services organisation but we act for a lot of financial services organisation so it's taken a step back is that the charter has put this in headlights it's increased sort of focus on the issue and that in itself has to be a good thing while the charter, yes, the language you could say is not the strongest but those who have signed up to it I do see it actually generally speaking doing more so they are actually making the commitment it's almost like this is the signal this is the way we're moving forward then they put some resource on it and do something more concrete If there be any indication of what proportion of finance companies have actually signed up to it I couldn't give that statistic today it will be available but I couldn't give that statistic So I believe in 71 firms have signed the charter today and Clyde's Deal Bank is going to join it in the second I mean, look, I think these things are positive I think you have to be very careful that often if they're not strong enough they offer large organisations good things to talk about without actually really changing what they're doing I would encourage anything that promotes awareness of the issue but I think you have to be very careful that you allow or you encourage people if they sign up it has to be a full commitment and that commitment has to be earned and it has to be monitored and it has to be managed otherwise you just allow firms to talk about things they're doing without really making a difference Yeah, but could that anything that makes the conversation more open, more transparent more permissible and encourages women and men to have the debate conversation I think is a really positive thing I agree with Debbie in the sense that the longer that we have soft measures that can just be good PR, that's not good I think there's a very clear distinction between very specific action oriented with measurable outcomes that we can talk about today versus PR which says the right thing and there's a lot of both of them and I'd like to see us spend more time seeing the wood for the trees if you like How would you strengthen it without discouraging companies to sign up to it? Well I think and again I've listened to this morning's sessions I think if you think about the questions on quotas and enforcement I'm a changed person in the background I think if you force something you'll get a result but it'll be short term of who we are as a country and what we stand for that won't change the way every man, woman, child, teacher, nurse or caregiver addresses the challenges that I believe all formulae and a result in a form of gender pay gap I think the point I wanted to make was a difference earlier mentioned in his equality of pay which is legislative versus gender parity in a much broader discussion I think that's something I would encourage the committee to be really really clear on because I'm constantly seeing confusion in the two not saying that one is completely dealt with by legislation but there are quite different things I'd like to pick up that point I think they're very important I mean I think that equality and pay can be dealt with much more straightforwardly than the former and I think it's a bit like you have to make progress and lead with the things that you think are tangible we'll start people thinking about things differently and I've got quite a strong view that if you legislate strongly and you encourage people to think very carefully about the importance of equal pay in the sense of women being paid equally for similar roles I think you begin to open a much more helpful longer term conversation about I think which is a much more complicated issue about why women don't have the same level of ambition to find themselves in more senior roles down the line and I think structuring the conversation almost to deal with some of those more immediate issues may help the traction on the much more complicated issue Perhaps I could ask you talking about women in more senior roles but how do your companies approach or your organisations or firms approach your whole approach to business so for example taking as an example we have two representatives from two of the major banks and if we think in terms of local bank closures and centralisation of banking services in terms of the physical location of the workforce which may be a decision taken for business reasons but what thought does a bank put into the consequences for its workforce the accessibility to jobs of women and indeed men as a result of these business decisions so we're talking more about perhaps employees not at the top of the corporate structure but the employees and other roles I think it's a really good point in terms of it's not just about the women at the top it's about the full organisation and certainly within I think the other point is it's not about fixing the women that's a debate that we hear time and time again around what we're doing to fix the women it's not about fixing society it's about fixing the culture and having an organisational wide gender plan which looks at all of our processes and practices so everything from organisational design through to leadership development through to engagement, reward etc etc so to answer your question around job closures branch closures for example it's part of our organisational design test we do have a question in there around how has this positively impacted your gender balance so it's something that's part of everything that we do in terms of making decisions we have governance in place in terms of resourceing for example to ensure that we have females in short as an interview panels so it's threaded through all our people processes and it's led from the top led and role model from the top down but all the way through the organisation we have far more women in junior positions than we do you'll be surprised to hear men and women right throughout when you examine role profiles the more senior roles you'll not be surprised to hear the fewer women we have regardless of the person's gender whenever we are involved in job losses we go through as you would expect a very considered and structured process to make sure whether it's a male or a female we offer people as best we can opportunities regardless of their location I think the bank is trying very hard to make sure that we do promote women through the ranks and it is very difficult like everybody else in the first evidence session we are very challenged by getting women through those more junior roles middle management roles, senior management roles on to the board and we've put a lot of effort into it I think it's a very complex issue and I think it's very difficult we do offer flexible working I'm a great example of someone who I'm a main board director of the bank I spent five years of my career in the bank I think I was the first executive to work part-time and I worked part-time in a real job I ran IT when I worked part-time so I think the bank was incredibly forward thinking and supportive of allowing me to do that but the reality is it's very challenging for people and you know offering flexible policies is very very different from creating a culture where people feel truly they're supported and able to take those opportunities up and I think that's really important for large organisations it's not just about the policies, it's about enabling people to feel able to work in that environment I was perhaps more interested in the structuring of the business and how that affects people's ability to partake in the jobs available sorry Tricia Nelson wanted to come in it was building on that point rather than your specific question but I think the flexible work in one maybe covers both in a sense so I think going back to the fact we're now going to measure the gender pay gap which is an outcome and it will be a point in time and there will be forced reporting so that will be one degree of visibility we've been tackling this in EY for a number of years now and a number of the campaigns and positive interventions around moving women through their careers from when they join us from what used to just be graduates but now school leavers and apprentices all the way through flexibility again can be one of these PR campaigns but to really bring that to life 84% of our staff survey recently worked flexibly so that ranges vastly from feeling empowered and feeling like you have the right and ability to be able to do your job the way that you feel it can be done a framework where you're supported you are progressed whether that be in a client facing world such as my own where you're having those conversations with other peers and other organisations so I think one of the days where it's about physical recognition of a quote in the back of the chair and being in an office environment and I've seen my world change vastly in the last six years in that respect you look at technology the introduction of internet, mobile working I think the last question that starts to hint at that which is business is changing shape all over the world and within Scotland we have to respond to that we have to respond to that with flexible working policies that actually work that I have the same challenges as many of the witnesses gave this morning around that drop off at particular ages and particular seniority specific campaigns targeted at that I'll give you an example last September we launched a campaign called Reconnect specifically targeted at women professional women who had taken a career break of between two and ten years that is a really daunting prospect if you have and I'm a mum so I can speak from first hand experience taken a gap and then you're looking to re-into the professional workspace that you were in prior to either having a family or having a career break for a number of different reasons so there are very very specific things that can be done that will result in your staff your employees feeling like they can work flexibly and then I think as Debbie Millar mentioned is the organisation's responsibility to structure those opportunities and possibilities around whatever the business needs to thrive and survive because if the business doesn't thrive and survive then we're kind of hiding to nothing that point was around flexible working versus agile working so I think it's about a lot of people still think about flexible working as working part time whereas actually to help address when we're closing branches or relocating etc we've enabled over 65,000 people to work from another location so it's having the technology so that investment up front to allow people to work in a different location so when those unfortunate situations do arise where people are looking at losing their jobs it opens up far more opportunities regardless of gender but it allows them to look at other opportunities that might not have been available before so I think it's that broader concept of agile working as opposed to what we've traditionally thought about when enabling it OK, thank you I'll move on to John Mason OK, thanks I think following on from some of the things Gordon MacDonald was saying and focusing on the women in finance charter quite a lot of the discussion has been around we need to change the attitudes we need to change the culture all of that kind of thing long term and I totally get that the question asked in the previous session our own party, the SNP and I think other parties are similar have kind of changed their attitude from saying some of the women have got to the top and therefore other women can but we've got stuck for a while it seems and so now we are saying no there will be quotas, there will be targets, there will be whatever so around that area my understanding is the women in finance charter has a target of 30% of women in senior positions by 2021 and I suppose that immediately contrasts with the public sector that boards should have 50% women on the boards by 2020 so should we be having targets at all or quotas or what so I've gone through a whole personally a whole range of emotions around targets versus quotas we had an aspirational commitment in place a number of years ago 2012-2013 to get to 30% I remember 30% was chosen because it represents tipping point of culture change so some of the research that was talked about earlier we actually made some progress and we actually moved to above 30% an aggregate level however we wanted to make it more authentic and real for our organisation so at the end of 2014 we put informal targets in place and these targets are the ones that I mentioned earlier linked to our executive's pay which means that each part of our business has got to get to at least 30% by 2020 and then 50-50 by 2030 so do I agree with that but it's helped to focus leaders on the size of the challenge and the quantum of change required but actually the shift in our numbers is down to actually us doing things differently so the gender plan that I referred to earlier where we have things in place all across the employee life cycle is helping our leaders to do things differently and applying consequences where these things are not adhered to I think it has helped so I'm somebody who has moved from not particularly being bought into the whole target to seeing it's actually made a difference so I think the transparency I think the focus has really really helped Can I just clarify, when you say parts of the business are you meaning like different kind of sectors or are you meaning like at the junior level there'd be 50-50 at the middle level so it's an organisation where 50-50 overall if we can do it I can straight split down the middle but as Debbie was talking about earlier we've got a pyramid as in most organisations the number of women kind of reduces but when I was talking about the different component parts we have three different franchises with an RBS we've got an investment bank, we've got a retail bank and we've got a private bank we've also got different functions areas such as HR finance etc so each one of Exco has a target to get there part of the business in 2020 and the important point that we've done this year the important thing that we've done this year is that there is significant variance across our functions and franchises so as you would imagine we're really struggling in an investment bank so not dissimilar to the STEM challenges we were talking about earlier but then we've got areas such as HR we've got the reverse challenge so our HR chief operating officer also has a target in place to increase the number of men in HR so it's actually about applying that lens in a different way when we need to do that too right and would you do it with middle management as a kind of you know even though they're in different sectors could you say that you would also be aiming to have them 50-50? it will happen actually through that kind of 50-50 middle management are already in over 40% so by pulling through more into the senior levels what will start to see the triangle becoming a rectangle so that will happen by default okay that's very helpful thank you don't know, anyone else wants to come in? I think again I think as a woman you don't ever want to think that you're in a position because you're a woman you're the best person for the job all of the evidence in my organisation looks at the things that we can do at every stage so you may start off with 50-50 male female graduate split easy to measure, easier to encourage and the drop off happens for a lot of different reasons as people's careers progress we've publicly stated our ambitions around 30% of our partnership being female and that drives the behaviour I do believe but at every level underneath that is all of the things all the points in someone's career where you can make a decision for them I think there needs to be a lens whether it's a target is a different conversation but I take that from recruitment through to performance ratings at the end treatment of women pre and past maternity leave including women in promotion grounds while the still in maternity leave so some very positive examples of how that can change not just the culture but change the way other leaders behave and the decisions they make two examples being to the women in my team or HR business partners in their job share I could have easily made a decision not to do that so we encourage our leaders through inclusive leadership training to really put a spotlight on the decisions that they make where they've got a chance to set an example through role modelling or a very physical representation in roles such as that one including the conversation for women who go in maternity leave which is where we have some evidence that drops off that women are less likely to return and progress their professional careers and I see that evidence around about the senior manager or a director level having the conversation with the women about what they're going to do when they come back before they go is a very physical stated objective so that may sound really simplistic but those of you around the table that have had a baby you think your old is going to be like you actually don't until you've joined that club so you can have all these ideas about my world's not going to change my career's not going to change you might not want it to change but until you're in that conversation it's very different so those are less about targets but much more about making sure that every single woman who's in that situation and actually taking that further to make the parenting debate gender neutral so that includes the men in that conversation men who become fathers also go through that change now shared parental leave is great progression we're nowhere near where we want to be on that but I think there are a number of different targets we tend to think about quotas and boards I'd like to see us talk about targets of retention, returning to work people at certain age groups from lots of different backgrounds generally I'm up for it because it drives some change just to move slightly at a different angle that is all you're part of a huge organisation and you've got people thinking about this and presumably you're thinking about it a lot of the time but are there other lessons can smaller companies learn some of that or is it just impossible for them? No, my background has mainly been in small medium sized companies before and actually one of the things that attracted me to my organisation was some of the things I'm talking about and what I've seen happen over the last six years has been a real groundswell of change in terms of the way people work the way clients work with us clients are demanding this now so our clients I think there's a perception into this discussion I don't think that's true I think most of the organisations that I work with look for suppliers, partners from every aspect of the economy to represent society so that's one step in the right direction in terms of small businesses I would love us to see mentioned Jackie Bailey earlier about the SME population within Scotland I think we could do a lot of partnering together I think we could learn some lessons from small organisations who I think sometimes are more adept at informal flexible working that has its own challenges I'd like to see small businesses and if we're talking to 50 employees up that doesn't really define small that's quite large actually for me there are a lot of small organisations underneath that that can either get help or be helpful but I do think that some of those cultural imperatives about inclusive responsible leadership applies much to a small company, it's a big company I actually argue from my experience it's harder to implement in a big organisation than it is a small one Thanks very much, thank you Gil Paterson John Mason raised and Trisha Nelson had given part of an answer and you said it was a drop-off when women were having their baby and I wondered what childcare would have in that regard when there's a progression there seems to be a drop-off and no progression so how important is childcare to impact on that? It's fundamental but I think we can't the thing I've learned is you can't make you can't make somebody's decision for them so what's right for one family unit no matter what the shape of that family unit and remember they won't just be traditional family units we all know that here won't be right for another so that's up to me my partner and our kids environment to figure out what works for us I think what's really really important is what's available for people at different stages in their career and of a variety of backgrounds and income and that I still see as a big challenge working in industry when I had my first child my goodness you look at how much it's going to cost for a start so I think there's an awful lot more we could do from a policy and economic point of view to make it financially attractive to go back to work so there is a reality where I know a lot of women who have been in this position and they will have sat and done the numbers and gone do you know what that's the culture we need to break we need to attract people back into work by making sure and I do believe in Scotland we're probably quite far behind some other European countries in this respect but I would be very surprised if it didn't end up being a work stream of activity out of the gender pay gap report in for Scotland I'd just like to pick up on that point because I think it's vital I hear a lot of people tell me that women have made the choice not to come back to work I mean the reality of that situation is they don't believe they have any other viable choice because they're in a role that means that they're going to end up working incredibly long hours stressing the family and upsetting the routine but because of childcare costs it just doesn't make any sense so I think that the more that can be done centrally to provide realistic options for parents and nobody wants to feel that they're going to leave their child in a situation where they can't be all the things that a parent expects to be and I think for far too many women that choice is just too difficult so they opt out well sorry if you'd like to come in I think we can look more broadly though because I think we typically talk about childcare we think about the early years primary school age children I think the challenges get harder so there's something about that wrap around care because there are still a lot of employers who work 905 or who are customer facing but schools don't so I think there's something there but also to take the whole caring responsibility further than just childcare because of the changing demographics we've got a lot of men and women who are now looking after elderly or perhaps need full time care and I just don't think the support around there is strong enough not just in Scotland but across the UK so I think there's more consideration around what can we do to help people with caring responsibilities for say a bit broader than just kind of preschool I was just building on the comments it does mean that people make decisions and there is an element of choice in it we should make sure people have options and then make the right choice for them but inevitably for some people that choice would be to take a step back or that choice would be to take time out and that's why the whole idea of return ships and things to bring people back in is so important it's almost come sometimes a bit of a bad word to say that people make choices but they do and they have to for different reasons so it's not something I see as often that clients are implementing but I think it's a fantastic idea and we were talking about your organisation I was just observing that there is actually a barrier for women because time serve for instance rewards are there because you've spent so many years within the business it's like a natural thing that happens because women have got domestic expectations placed on them by society that then there is a natural break there and it's how to overcome that so that they progress back into the workstream again If I may I think you're absolutely right so you've got a double whammy really haven't you you've got the fact that in the first place society and as a couple maybe the partner or the mother in the family has chosen to take chosen to take a different path and then when she wants to return to the workplace we know that working below skills level is an issue for women within certain years and the older that women gets the harder it is and we will all know friends who have trained in a certain career and then when the children come along they go do you know what I'm not going to do that anymore it just all feels too hard and that's what the reconnect programme I was talking about is designed around now it's early days but it's gone well but something that specifically says it is okay and I think in an earlier debate it may have been last week when I read some of the transcript there are women who will work for MD of my own company on a career gap to kind of hide it and we want to make it okay to have that conversation says you've taken a career gap you now want to re-enter the workforce we have to make that much more appealing for women to say you know this is what I did and I had a great time but I'm ready to now come back can you work with me to make it flexible enough that you're lucky enough to get my talent and we've got to reverse the conversation Dean Lockhart I'm coming up on this point about the senior level of female staff who may not return or return to a different position after having a family in the first session I asked a question about some figures we've seen showing that the pay gap actually doesn't exist in the age bracket 30 to 39 based in Scotland but it then reappears in the age bracket 40 to 49 at 8.8% and based on your own internal numbers is that something you see in your organisation and are there other reasons in addition to women deciding to have a family and perhaps either not returning or returning at a different level in the organisation is that due to full time employees only it's pay gap for full time earnings by age group and I think that's part of the issue hence the point earlier about the data if the data and I've heard the jargon out whether we report mean or median you know if you go from median statisticity yes it's robust but you will miss the outliers if you go only for full time you will only get full time equivalent you won't get the richness of the employee inspection within Scotland so I couldn't really comment as the answer but I'd really love to see the data I'm really surprised because that doesn't resonate with me and I suspect what you, by excluding people in that age bracket you'll have a lot of mothers who've either gone part time or they're returning and I suspect if you included that you would probably see a gender pay gap the same as you see other areas I suspect we're still very early days in terms of interpreting the analysis as part of the gender pay gap guidelines within our RBS but again in the early statistics I've had in our organisation and it is early, I wouldn't recognise that if I may the only other point I would say is that the evidence that a women's career slows down when she does return so that would be another factor I'd be very keen to look at is that progression through so they may come back on a working pattern that suits them but their progression through then those next senior levels we know is slower that's what we're trying to speed up make it okay to have the conversation and actively target different groups of communities so working for supporting women who do return after having a family to a full time position what have you found in terms of what's been successful in transitioning women back to either the same level or a similar level to where they were or would have been hadn't they taken a break? It's a very good question so I think there's a number of different campaigns which we will follow up in writing giving the evidence on those but if I pick a couple of examples they're returning to work with so again we talk we fixate an awful lot on the women themselves and actually this is a much broader conversation so a women coming back to work and progressing through a career that has active sponsorship is working with men and women because men are incredibly important in this debate and them taking action around that person and making it okay to have the conversation around what am I going to do next, I'm still ambitious I'm back, I've got toddlers or I've got a lot of work there for it, it's really really fundamental but it's cultural so you can't go on a training programme and just change that overnight I think the second part is that it's very specific things like Career Watch is a programme where every woman has a specific sponsor he doesn't normally work with her so somebody who will come at that very objectively and who will challenge because they don't know the norms within that women's own working environment has proven to be really successful I benefited from a lot of these activities myself over the last five years I think another one is we look at the way we resource our client jobs so if we have a client situation where it requires a team to go and do a job of 10, 15, 20, whoever many people then making sure that the person responsible for compiling that team isn't just looking through one lens but they're looking at BMA, they're looking at diversity they're looking at gender, they're looking at flexibility of working because there's such a lot of evidence that the higher performing teams are made up of a, it's not just with all due respect white men who've got degrees in account, this is your technology or whatever that make up that skills base the team will work differently so I think there are many different lenses and you can definitely apply this to smaller organisations and John Lasson's questions in terms of what you can apply any teaming situation needs to be rich to get the right outcome I just build on that I think sponsorships incredibly important and we should also remember that there are a number of women who don't have children or who have different experiences that also have unconscious bias so this is not just about men I think the second thing that I'd pull out is networking support for women is really important a lot of women miss out on opportunities because they don't know they're available because they don't have the same networks they don't have the same opportunity to network because of caring responsibilities so I see a number of examples of opportunities or they're introduced to people who can open doors for them that women just because of their circumstances don't have access to so encouraging women to find ways to participate within their pattern that suits their family circumstance I think it's very important I was going to build on that there isn't a silver bullet it puts in place really good people management and having the systems and infrastructure around that so for me you wouldn't treat women any differently to anybody whether that be sick leave career break or maternity leave and I think it's about maintaining that dialogue should the individual want that because some people do want a break it's about little things we've done in RBS we're looking at simple things helping people retain systems access because we automatically switched off and that doesn't work for everybody now getting through regulators and such has been quite a challenge but it's little things like that having that dialogue training whatever is right for that individual but it's just good people management it's good people management keeping these doors open Just a final point strikes me what you're talking about is leadership and is driven by culture and you probably can't legislate for this I would disagree because I think you can motivate a lot of behaviours having been in business for a long time you push targets and you force people to perform against targets you change behaviours I think that's unfortunate and I'd love us all to have a very nice conversation about encouraging and training and developing for me unless you want the pay gender gap to exist in 20, 30 years from now I think you're going to have to be much bolder much more specific unfortunately there is a bit of motivation required that may have to be not all about telling all the good stories I think there's occasions where it has to be pointed out quite clearly where people aren't complying with commitments that they've made I think it's about the conversation you have around the target so just imposing a target is just one one sledgehammer if you like I think culturally we underestimate that we can have great people management but actually comes down to the individual and I think if we have a combination of visibility of performance there are a number of different lenses of which gender pay gap is one and then get underneath that I think I agree you'll have a movement if you like so has there been progress undoubtedly is there a huge way to go absolutely It's quite interesting that the regulations that will come in don't really have one of the criticisms is they don't have teeth there's not really a very easy enforcement mechanism but I'm sure that some of the countries that have enforcement sanctions quite significant financial penalties to the likes of France they haven't reduced their gender pay gap any faster so I think there are parts you can legislate for but it's a bit like everyone has said today in an earlier session that's the output and there's a much much broader base below that be it culture be it people management which I think it's hard actually how would you even start legislating for that but there are elements of it you can pick out and build good practice round Thank you Well may I ask as a white man who doesn't have an accountancy degree just looking at this from the point of view of again not the top levels of companies and large companies but small organisations, small companies you know they've a shop that is five employees a small firm with 12 employees how are these firms meant to cope with the reality if one of the workforce is away on maternity or paternity leave the work has to be done they need to replace that, that's a cost obviously is it realistic to expect these firms to comply with this sort of way of thinking what is out there to support them or does this mean that we move to a society that we're only very large companies who are able to absorb the sorts of costs and deal with these sorts of issues by having programmes to get people back into the workforce when they return what is the position for the small small firms, small companies I think you've got to be realistic about the level that you can legislate this at and I think for a bank that supports many many SMEs they tell us that they find the burden of legislation very very difficult to deal with so I think I don't know what the right number is but I think you have to be pragmatic I think what you should expect though is if you set cultural norms from very large organisations right down to a realistic level then what you will hope is that with all of the other good work that was talked about today about proactive action etc etc the way that we do business and I think anything that can be encouraged to motivate SMEs to do that I would welcome but I think you have to be very pragmatic and realistic about the level you would legislate this to I would agree but I think there's also a role that big employers can play in helping to change society in helping the smaller businesses so within RBS we've got a couple of schemes that I'm happy to share some information on around helping women in enterprise new entrepreneurs and in as well as helping them to set up their business we also offer out some support around how they might want to run their business which we touch on topics such as this so I think there's an opportunity for us to help affect the culture in the way that we want it to be moving forward would be anything that economically penalises a smaller organisation to follow legislation doesn't feel right so I think there's something about the business community and their voice in what would work for them because I do believe that most smaller organisations including the size that you've given 5 or 10 in startups when they want to comply but if it feels overbearing at times and over costly then it's a hindrance but do they want an inclusive workforce and often small startups and small organisations are really really rich and diverse because it's