A bird's eye view

I consider myself a lucky person, in many ways. Lucky to do a job that I enjoy. Lucky to work with great people. Lucky to find myself working in a progressive and purposeful industry, where my efforts are recognised and the merits of my work are appreciated. I don't have to tick anybody's boxes or make up any quota, I am accepted for who I am and the work that I do, first and foremost. As I said, I'm a lucky person. But every now and then, I run up against a prejudice, a stereotype or an attitude that reminds me of how much further we all have to go as a society.

At 4.30am on Tuesday this week I found myself standing outside a hotel near Heathrow waiting for a shuttle bus to the airport for an early flight to Dublin, for a business meeting. As such, I was 'suited and booted', full face of make-up on and hair up, as is my preference for work. So far, so unremarkable.

When I got onto the hotel's airport shuttle bus, the driver looked me over quizzically and said 'you airline staff?'. My first thought, I have to admit, was 'wow, clearly I've done a good job with the warpaint this morning' - friends of mine who work for airlines being the most immaculately presented people I know (and frankly, I'm never usually up to their impeccable standards). Resisting the temptation to enquire if he'd asked the bloke in the suit already on the bus the same question, I took the remark as a compliment and replied 'No, I'm travelling on business' to which the driver replied 'don't you know there's a free shuttle bus that leaves over the road?' gesturing towards some invisible bus stop in the dark, over the other side of four lanes of motorway.

I get that he was trying to save me some money - ï¿¡4.50, which I could usefully have spent on a vat of strong, hot coffee - but I had a plane to catch and frankly, I just wanted to pay the fare and get through the joy of airport security unscathed. I explained to him gently 'I am a lone female, travelling in an area I don't know that well, and I really don't want to go hunting for a bus stop in the dark right now, thank you all the same'. Clearly he's never had to think twice about his personal safety walking down a dark street on his own, holding his keys in between his knuckles.

Over-entitled first world problems, you might be thinking, but it irks me that the default view of a man in business attire near an airport is 'there on business' or 'pilot' and the default view of a woman in business attire in an identical situation is that she could only be there to serve aforementioned male business traveller or pilot.

We *still* have a way to go before our default assumptions and unconscious biases reset to reflect the realities of our daily working lives. Companies like easyJet are working hard to challenge these assumptions, through their advertising campaigns (the latest of which features a female pilot) and their work in schools helping to build a pipeline of female pilots. Their 45% median hourly pay gap stems from the fact that just 10% of their higher-paid pilots are female whereas 68% of their lower paid cabin crew are female. Kudos to them for reporting their 'snapshot' date pay gap in November 2017, rather than the last month before the April 2018 deadline as per the vast majority of companies. My late grandmother used to say that the best place to hide a book is in a library - and how right she was.

For those expecting to see significant progress in narrowing the gender pay gap in the upcoming GPG reporting season, I would say - don't get your hopes up. That's not because companies aren't working hard to address this, ironically it's because many of them ARE working hard. It's also a matter of timing. With most companies reporting their pay gaps at the last minute in late March or early April 2018, and likely to report at a similar time this year, public perception logically expects a year's worth of progress. But companies who only put in place their initiatives and action plans addressing the gap at the time they reported in March or April 2018, will only have had a few weeks or even day's benefit of these before their next snapshot date for gathering data was upon them, i.e. 5 April 2018. So that's the timing effect.

The other effect, even for companies who had the foresight to put in place actions addressing the pay gap way in advance of the date they reported, is that recruiting higher numbers of female employees into junior, less well-paid roles (building the pipeline with female talent) will in the short to medium term make their pay gap look worse, not better. It will take time for female recruits to progress to higher paid roles and only then will there be a positive effect, a narrowing of the pay gap. Statistics eh?

It's not yet clear how much attention journalists will pay to the next batch of gender pay gap statistics given we in the UK first have the small matter of Brexit to deal with on 29 March.

Regardless, in May ProShare will be releasing it's Annual SAYE & SIP market report with a second year's worth of gender breakdowns on the amounts female and male employees contribute to these employee share schemes, and the relative participation percentages. Whilst I would dearly love to see a vast improvement in these figures (our last survey found that female SAYE participants save at approximately 71% the rate of their male colleagues) I am expecting the figures to follow a similar pattern to that of the Gender Pay Gap Reporting figures for the same period. I'm happy to be proven wrong, of course!

If you'd like a copy of our next SAYE & SIP report when it's released in a few months' time, do let me know. Better still, come along to our 'Celebrating Excellence' share plans masterclass on 19 February to find out how award-winning companies - including easyJet - operate their all-employee share plans in the modern workplace. Get in touch with me or book your place through this link: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/GJBTV5S