What’s stopping women from reaching the top?

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘What’s stopping women from reaching the top?’

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Fifteen years ago, we were saying that college education would be the thing that would fix the gender pay gap. And now we have women in the US earning four-year degrees at significantly higher rates than men but the gender pay gap hasn’t budged.

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times with me, Isabel Berwick. Today we’re asking what’s stopping women from getting the top jobs in the workplace. That voice you just heard is the FT’s Taylor Nicole Rogers, and we’ll be hearing more from her in a moment.

But the context for today’s show is that wage growth for women in the US appears to have stalled, and progress on closing the gender pay gap there has seen little change over the past 20 years. Here in the UK, meanwhile, more women are being appointed to boards, but not so often to other leadership roles in large companies. And in fact, the latest data show that around 80 per cent of UK employers pay men more than women on average in their organisation. So what’s the best way to make further progress for women on both pay and promotion?

I’m joined by two of my colleagues who’ve been looking at the latest data on these issues. Taylor Nicole Rogers is in New York. She’s the FT’s US labour and equality correspondent. And here in London, I’m with Financial Times business columnist and associate editor, Pilita Clarke. Taylor, Pilita, great to have you both on the show.

Taylor, you’ve been looking at the numbers on the gender pay gap in the US. Could you explain to the listeners what that concept means, ’cause we hear it a lot, but sometimes it’s not really explained. And then maybe talk to us about how women’s pay is compared with men’s.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Absolutely. So here in the US, we tend to think of the pay gap as being the best way to measure women’s progress in the workforce. And that just means we take the median earnings of women in the US and compare them to the median earnings of men in the US. And the gap is the pay gap. So right now we’re at about $0.82 to $0.83 on the dollar that men earn, just depending on who you ask.

Isabel Berwick
So women earn $0.82 for every dollar that men earn.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Pretty much. And there’s a lot of explanations for that. Some of it is that women tend to be in lower-paying jobs, whereas men tend to be in higher-paying jobs. But the gap still exists when you compare men and women who have the same level of education, the same role and the same amount of experience, which is what leads us to think that there’s still some kind of ongoing discrimination that we’ve yet to solve.

Isabel Berwick
And we’ve heard that the closing of the pay gap has stalled. Why would that be?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
No one really knows, which was something that was kind of frustrating for me when I was reporting on this. It seems like a lot of the answer goes back to that question of why are women not moving into higher paying roles, whether that’s professional fields like law, business, accounting, etc, etc. But a lot of it also seems to be like women that are in those fields are having trouble getting to the C-suite.

Isabel Berwick
And Pilita, here in the UK you’ve been looking at progress for women on being appointed to jobs at the top of companies. What have you been focusing on?

Pilita Clark
So I’ve been looking at something called the FTSE Women Leaders Review, and it’s a government-backed campaign. It’s been going since about 2011, and it’s had a really terrific rate of success when it comes to getting women on to boards. Women here in the UK now hold 40 per cent of board seats in the top 350 largest UK-listed companies. And that’s a milestone that the people behind this campaign didn’t really expect to reach until 2025.

But the interesting thing was when I spoke to the organisers about this level of success and looked at some of the data behind it and report, it turns out that only about four of the 250 largest listed businesses had both a female chief executive and a female chair. And it kind of takes you back to, do you remember when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked when are there going to be enough women on the US Supreme Court? And she said, well, when there are nine, because for most of the court’s history, there’ve been nine men. Nobody blinked an eye. And once you’ve kind of heard that, you can’t really unhear it. And then when you look at this data, you’re just thinking, hang on, what? So most of these largest companies are still when it gets to the highest executive and boardroom levels, they look pretty much like the US Supreme Court’s always looked.

Isabel Berwick
And what about women sort of bubbling under below board or exco level? We call that the pipeline. Can you explain that a bit? Because that’s a bit of a jargon word that we use, but I’m not sure it’s that familiar to most people.

Pilita Clark
Yeah. So the pipeline, when it’s used in this context, is really what we’re talking about is the group of women whose careers are allowing them to move gradually up to a position where they could take a leadership role in the organisation, whether it’s in the senior executive team, perhaps at board level in their own or another company. You know, so it’s basically saying, you know, we want to make sure that we’re not just plucking a whole bunch of women from around the City and putting them on our board. We want to be generating our own internal talent and we understand that the only way to do that is to have a pipeline of people, of women who are going to be in a position to take on these more senior roles.

Isabel Berwick
So this pipeline idea is absolutely critical, actually. Otherwise, we’re just talking in isolation all the time.

Pilita Clark
Absolutely.

Isabel Berwick
So, Taylor, we’ve been talking to two women in traditionally male-dominated corporate fields. How are things looking there in terms of the pipeline?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
It seems like women are climbing up to a certain level and then hitting, you know, the so-called glass ceiling, where it’s harder to move beyond a certain point. And it’s hard to say why. I mean, one thing I heard a lot about when I was talking to women in the US is that we lack a lot of the social supports that allow women to advance their careers, whether that’s because our childcare system is broken and we don’t have the ability for people to take long caregiving leaves, etc, etc. That it seems like women are frustrated because they’ve done everything that we’ve told them to do. Women are now earning college degrees at higher rates than men. They’ve got mentors. They’re coming to work even when it’s optional. And people still aren’t getting promoted. Women are complaining that they get to a certain level, and it’s hard to advance beyond that, whereas men continue to go. And you can see that when you look at pay data by age.

Pilita Clark
Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting point. I mean, there was another big report that came out around International Women’s Day that looked at the number of companies with adequate paid parental leave policies as opposed to maternity leave or paternity leave, but just basically paid men and women sufficiently to make sure that neither really were likely to suffer when it came to career advancement after having a child. And it’s really interesting. So this report by Equilar was saying that there should be at least 14 weeks of primary carer leave and at least two weeks of secondary carer leave paid at around two-thirds or more of employees’ regular salaries. And in a country like the UK, just 23 per cent of companies meet those standards. But it’s interesting, you know, this one group, this financial firm, Aberdeen, that offers all staff 40 weeks of paid leave, so that’s men and women are basically eligible for 40 weeks of paid parental leave. Interestingly, guess how many women and men it has on its board? It’s got five women and six men. So it’s, I mean, I’m not saying that that’s necessarily what happened, but it is really interesting that, you know, basically out of all of these hundreds and thousands of companies, you know, there’s just one that really stood out in this report. Anyway.

Isabel Berwick
I just wanted to go back to something we’ve talked about before on the podcast, the difference between mandatory and voluntary numbers, you know, targets in countries like Norway. Norway went very early on a mandatory target for numbers of women on boards. I think France now has that too. Pilita, what’s the evidence on, I mean, it obviously works, but what’s the long-term evidence?

Pilita Clark
It’s so interesting. So I always thought nothing would change unless you had quotas. I was convinced that I actually went to Norway and reported on their amazing-sounding quotas when they first introduced them years and years ago. Anyway, it turns out that in France and Norway, as you say, they’ve both got quotas — 44 per cent of board seats in France, France’s biggest companies, and 39 per cent in Norway are occupied by women. But the UK, which has not had quotas, has 40 per cent, so it’s just ahead of Norway. Australia, also without voluntary quotas, has 38 per cent and that puts it just ahead of Belgium, which has quotas. So it’s really interesting what can be achieved without quotas, it turns out.

Isabel Berwick
Taylor, how does that pan out in the US in terms of voluntary targets and quotas?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Well I mean, it gives me no pleasure as an American to say that from the data that I’ve seen, we tend to be towards the end of the pack when it comes to everything involving women. So there’s quite a large population of people in the US who would say, maybe we need a quota to get closer to where the UK, where France, where Belgium, where Australia is at. But when you look at the US culture and our current political regime, it seems pretty unlikely. So what I would say is if we could do something around paid leave, something around childcare, that might help us more than perhaps a quota would.

But you know, we have business leaders who are still saying, well, just give us more time, we can fix this problem on our own. And we’ve seen some really innovative schemes come out. Like Salesforce, they go through and they manually look at every single employee’s salary every year and adjust for the gender pay gap and try to balance everything out. But what’s telling to me about that plan is that they go and they fix it every year. They come back and look at the next International Women’s Month and the problem is there again. So that makes me think that perhaps this is a problem that business leaders in the US are not able to solve on their own.

Isabel Berwick
No, that’s fascinating. And I wanted to ask Taylor about the pipeline, you know. Is there something here around women making the decision to drop out of the corporate workforce or to work for themselves, you know, to not go for the top jobs? Do you think that the idea of ambition has changed?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I think so. We’ve heard a lot about that over the past few years, about how the pandemic has changed, what people want out of life, etc, etc. But I will say, when I talk to women that have dropped out of the so-called pipeline, usually it’s not because they have lost their ambition. It’s because they got frustrated. They could see that there was no path ahead for them so they felt the need to switch organisations or switch careers, or maybe they decided their time would be better spent elsewhere. So while the conversation about ambition, I think is one that we need to have, especially in this labour market, I don’t think it is a valid answer to explain what’s going on with the gender pay gap in the US.

Isabel Berwick
So actually, a couple of quite simple things like paid maternity and paternity leave and better childcare might actually be at the root of solving all of these things. Would you say that’s possible, Taylor?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
You know, I really, really hope so. But the thing that gives me pause is that, 15 years ago we were saying that college education would be the thing that would fix the gender pay gap. And now we have women in the US earning four-year degrees at significantly higher rates than men, but the gender pay gap hasn’t budged. So I don’t know if there is a silver bullet out there, but I don’t think I’m gonna get my hopes up with parental leave. But it sure would be nice to have.

Isabel Berwick
It very much is nice to have, Taylor, speaking in a country where we do have it. And Pilita, looking at how successful, you know, targets or quotas have been in terms of boards, are a lot of companies also using those for their sort of top executive positions?

Pilita Clark
Actually, not as far as I know. I’m not aware of any, to be honest, that have actually adopted anything like a mandatory rule. I mean, not to say that there aren’t any, but I think we would know if that had been the case so it doesn’t seem as though that’s . . . I’m not sure it’s likely, I mean, you know, this group that has had such success in promoting the idea that there needs to be more women on boards. They are now turning to this and they’re just going to be using the same process that they’ve been using for the last 12 years or so. They’re gonna be nudging and prodding and saying, you know, can you not look hard and are you sure that there’s nobody and, you know, we need to be actually doing a better job of putting women into these positions. But they’re gonna be doing it very much on a voluntary basis.

Isabel Berwick
And Pilita, you talk a lot with company leaders. I’ve heard people talking about things like diversity and gender equality falling down the agenda as they start to get, you know, money starts to get tight. Are you seeing evidence of that?

Pilita Clark
Not sure I’ve seen evidence of it, and I can’t think of any companies that would publicly admit that that was the case. But like you, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that that’s the case. And I think, you know, when you’ve got a pandemic, war in Ukraine, energy crisis, and you know we are living in a stage of permacrisis as we kind of have been. It’s inevitable that, it’s difficult to keep all the balls in the air, and I think people’s time does get stretched. And I’m not, you know, it’s not to excuse it, but inevitably some things that shouldn’t fall down the agenda do. But I couldn’t say that I’ve heard or seen any evidence of it happening on a really large scale.

Isabel Berwick
No, me neither. Taylor, have you been talking to companies about what’s going on with diversity and equality or equity, as you might say, in the States?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Well, as Pilita was saying, very few companies are admitting to cutting their programming, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence, like indicating that that is the case. Glassdoor, which is an employer review website, sent out a survey asking workers, you know, how many programs do you have that support diversity, equity and inclusion. And the numbers have fallen this year after two straight years of gains, which indicates that these programs are losing funding or just disappearing. Another thing is that several of the tech companies that have done lay-offs recently, including Twitter, including Meta, have laid off substantial portions of their diversity, equity and inclusion teams. And also, a consultancy firm that tracks the amount of donations that companies make to Black Lives Matter and similar organisations has seen that those are kind of falling off a cliff as well. So it seems like here in the US, some of that attention has waned as the economy is changing.

Isabel Berwick
Goodness. That’s depressing.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Very.

Isabel Berwick
I wanted to wrap up by asking you both what’s the one thing that you think could unblock the pipeline? Pilita, I’ll start with you.

Pilita Clark
So what I would like to say are these “use it or lose it” paternity leave policies that some Scandinavian countries have had for many, many years. And so basically, if a father, a new father, doesn’t decide to take up this policy, they lose the opportunities, but take month after month off work (laughs) on a fairly generous pay. And I think it’s a great system. It’s not cheap, I suppose, but you know, it’s getting towards the sort of thing that I think could really help to unblock the problems that we’ve been talking about today.

Isabel Berwick
Thank you. Taylor, how about you?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I think it will be really interesting for the US to try quotas.

Isabel Berwick
Yes. I’d be very interested to see what happens there. Taylor and Pilita, thank you so much for joining us today.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Thanks for having us.

Pilita Clark
Thanks so much, Isabel.

Isabel Berwick
I worry that some women will listen to this and think we’re still being shafted by the system. And, it’s true. Progress has not been as fast as I would have liked it to be or any of us would have liked it to be. But there are things happening, including the British government introducing a new childcare scheme in the latest Budget. But some of these structural things are really pernicious. Childcare, maternity leave, fair pay and promotion — these are all structural issues that haven’t really been addressed and still are not being addressed. And women have dropped out of the workforce in huge numbers since the pandemic. So I think some of the positive things that Pilita and Taylor have talked about have been really encouraging. The number of women on boards in the UK has really gone up. Maybe we could look at how that’s worked and transfer those kinds of targets into senior executive roles, because something has to change. We can’t be here in five years’ time having the same arguments. It’s crazy.

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My thanks to the FT’s Pilita Clark and Taylor Nicole Rogers for joining me for this episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And please do get in touch with us. Email us at workingit@ft.com or I’m Isabel Berwick on LinkedIn. If you are an FT subscriber, please sign up for our Working It newsletter, with the best workplace and management stories from across the FT. Sign up at ft.com/newsletters. This episode of Working It was produced by Audrey Tinline and Lulu Smyth. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa with mix from Jake Fielding. Thanks for listening.

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