Women struggle to join £100k club

June 13, 2002

The number of people in Britain earning six figure sums has increased by almost 50% in the past four years, though for women in business the glass ceiling is still very much in evidence. Despite government efforts to get more of them into high-paying jobs, women are still a rarity among senior management and are being outpaced by their male counterparts when it comes to grabbing £100,000 or more. The percentage of women in the top rank of wage-earners has hardly moved in the past four years, according to figures from the inland revenue. This year an estimated 326,000 people in this country will earn more than £100,000 of whom 41,000 - or 12% - are expected to be female. Four years ago there were 222,000 people getting six-figure pay packets but again 12% or 27,000 were women. Denise Kingsmill, drafted in by the government to report on the gap between the salaries of men and women last year, believes Britain is losing out by not promoting women into the premier league. "It's a huge cause for concern, it points to a waste of a national resource. Women are outperforming men at every academic level but if they are not reaching the top of organisations, as these figures suggest, this is a national scandal and a huge waste of the investment in women's education over the last 20 to 30 years." Britain's top earners are to be found in City jobs and senior management positions predominantly in the south-east. In the male dominated world of the City, women such as fund manager Nicola Horlick and Carol Galley, former joint head of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, make the headlines mainly because of their rarity rather than their business acumen. Women are even rarer at the top of British businesses. Marjorie Scardino, the chief executive of Pearson, owner of Penguin and the Financial Times, recently topped a Management Today table of Britain's 50 most powerful women, but she sits alone as the only female boss of one of Britain's top 100 publicly quoted companies. Baroness Hogg is one of the few women to have made it to the post of chairman of a FTSE 100 company, investment group 3i. A report last year by Cranfield University's school of management found that the number of female directors involved in running British business had actually been falling over the past three years. Among the companies listed on the London stock exchange only 57% had any female representation on their board last year, compared with 64% in 1999. When women do get a place at the boardroom table it tends to be as a part-time non-executive director. Denise Kingsmill believes that British business is engaging in tokenism. "There is still a tendency to think if you have one woman on the board then you do not need any more," she says. "This is holding back British business. It means companies are not focusing on getting the best people." Other experts believe that the lack of women among high earners owes much to theBritain's working culture. "Women tend to take on more caring responsibili ties and find that they cannot progress in their careers at the same pace as men once they have had a career break," said a spokesperson for the equal opportunities commission. "There is still this misconception that you can only reach the top by buying into traditional working culture which demands excessive hours. This culture means that businesses lose out as they are denied women's talents and skills at senior decision-making levels." In March the EOC published research showing that as men and women progressed through their careers the pay gap widened. By the age of 35 women earn a third less than their male colleagues. For some women in the City, taking a lower salary means getting a better style of life. Ruth Lea, head of policy at the Institute of Directors, spent six years in the City working for Japanese and American banks. She is in no doubt that many women place other priorities above earning bumper salaries, especially as they get older. "I left the City and took a drop in salary - it was career choice for me, it was not that I felt I had been discriminated against," she said. "A friend recently told me that if I went back I could earn five or six times my salary and for half a millisecond I thought 'hmmm perhaps', but I could not do it again. I have decided I would rather enjoy my life." She believes that arguments which suggest that the country is missing out on a tangible return on the investment made in education miss the point. "Why do we have to look at education in terms of financial returns? To have a very educated woman who, for example, is looking after children is a return and a half." Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001