Tag Archives: gender pay gap

GENDER STEREOTYPING MASTERCLASS

‘Our emails display our brand just like a letterhead or a business card,’ noted a news item on 14 February, launching Lancaster’s new email signature template files:
Four templates are provided at:
There’s plenty of advice and guidance: email signatures need to be useful, lawful and, of course, accessible to screen readers. Moreover, ‘Lancaster University is an inclusive place to work and learn and therefore, we would encourage people to include their gender pronouns on their email signature.’
Righty-ho. Let’s look at this template text, then:
Jo Bloggs | Postgraduate Programmes Officer
Linguistics and English Language | Lancaster University
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Working hours: Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays 9am to 4pm
Personal Assistant: Ms Jane Bloggs: j.bloggs@lancaster.ac.uk
Excellent, so we have Mr Jo Bloggs the officer and his loyal personal assistant, Ms Jane Bloggs. That Athena SWAN renewal’s going to be a doddle, eh?
And yes, we know that equality is about a lot more than email templates. We’re sure that the imminent equal pay audit will show how much the Gender Pay Gap at Lancaster is closing, given the institution’s work to actively improve it.

WITHERING HEIGHTS

People in the Management School have been confused in recent weeks by signs visible around the fire doors outside Lecture Theatre 4 stating ‘CAUTION: Men Working Overhead’ – many staff on the top floor of LUMS are actually female! On closer inspection, it appears that the signs were put up by Bagnalls Painting & Decorating, who seem to operate a strict men-only policy for work that’s too high for the ladies to reach, even in heels. The subtext collective are left wondering whether University procurement regulations require external contractors to demonstrate equal opportunities practices, and whether we can invite external contractors to Gender Pay Gap meetings.

DOCTORIN’ THE PAY GAP

Following the recent rescue of her three new friends from the deadly vacuum of space, and her recollection of who she is, the Doctor is looking forward to new faces, new worlds and new times. Her trusty ship, the TARDIS, whirls through time and space, swerving exploding supernovae and sliding between parallel universes. However, she hasn’t yet remembered how to steer the TARDIS, and so it plummets through a wormhole to arrive in Alexandra Square at Lancaster University on 26th July 2018.

Surveying the external scene on the scanner, the Doctor wonders what they are doing in this 1960s brick-and-concrete landscape, then gasps in horror. There is a Gender Pay Gap! The group of companions demand an explanation – will their teeth be extracted and stuck on anyone’s face? No, this is not as glamorous or exciting as a blue-faced alien tooth-pulling hunter of humans, but a monster that slowly strangles women by denying them equal pay for the same work as men. The Doctor points to the screen – apparently, this place has a Task Group that’s fighting it – let’s go and help them.

Yasmin, Ryan and the Doctor burst out of the TARDIS, and start making their way towards Lecture Theatre 4 in the Management School, whilst Graham lags behind bemoaning the lack of alien excitement and wondering why this place they’ve arrived in is a building site. It takes them 20 minutes to make a 5 minute journey, including following Design the Spine diversion signs in a circle round Edward Roberts Court until they achieve escape velocity near the Deli. They finally arrive just as the presentation is beginning, and slide in at the back and make themselves inconspicuous.

As the presentation winds up the Doctor presses a button on her makeshift sonic screwdriver and freezes the other people in the room in a bubble of spacetime as she and her companions huddle round for a discussion. I can’t believe that out of 32 Band 3 Professors at the University only one is a woman, says Yasmin. What’s wrong with that, asks Graham, and gets a icy stare from the Doctor. And there’s more male senior professional services staff than female, points out Ryan. So what, asks Graham, who shuts up and wanders off to stare out of the window when the other three glare at him at once.

They all agree that the Task Group analysis that ‘where the money and status is at LU, women aren’t’ is largely correct, and yes, the overall problem identified, that female staff are clustered in lower grades, male staff in high grades, is also true. It’s been a while since I was last a woman, says the Doctor, but this is getting worse over time. Listen, I think I remember that I used to work at a university, leave this to me.

With a sound like foghorns squabbling underwater, the bubble of frozen spacetime begins to disintegrate, and the audience is asked for questions. Dr Jane Smith of the Foundation for Advanced Temporal Calibration And Transportation Studies steps forward to take the microphone. It’s a crying shame about the professors and senior professional services staff and all that, but according to my sums that’s a lot fewer people than the 936 women in Grades 6 and below. Wouldn’t the most sensible, equitable and immediate way to reduce the gap be to raise the wages of the lower paid staff? And then work on smashing the patriarchy?

As the Task Group insist that they will be looking at as many options as they can, but they have limited resources, Graham turns from the window, his face white with fear: Doctor, you’d better have a look out here. A bevy of barnacled compost bins decorated with plungers are floating down from the clouds. The Daleks are here! The Doctor spins her sonic screwdriver around and slips it back into a pocket. This problem will be a lot easier to solve.

You can find links to the presentation and audio of the first open staff meeting to discuss the Gender Pay Gap here [staffwall].

STOP PRESS: A second open-staff meeting has been announced for Thurs 18th Oct, more info here [staffwall].

WATCH THIS SPACE: GENDER PAY GAP

We reported, in issue 176, that according to a league table Lancaster has the third worst gender pay gap amongst UK universities. A flurry of committees, working groups, and consultations have been frantically set up in response, and we will cover the progress of the university’s deliberations when subtext springs back into action.

http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/subtext/2018/04/26/never-mind-the-gap/
http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/subtext/2018/05/10/letters-12/

LETTER (OF THE YEAR)

Dear subtext,

The so-called Gender Pay Gap is, in fact, a Sex Pay Gap and the efforts that the university are suggesting around maternity and childcare are woefully inadequate, the latter mainly consisting of signposting things that are already available (though in the case of preschool childcare, pretty inadequate – it’s impossible, for example, to get additional hours/days at the Preschool Centre if asked to work extra time by one’s department).

The pay gap is in place way before we have children. Women are less mobile due to tending to have professional partners (while men are more likely to have partners in more portable and less professional jobs, since men earn more than their partners across society). Lancaster could make it easier for women to take a job if they have a professional partner, and advertise this. We could make it more flexible to, for example, take a sabbatical or a non-sabbatical career break so partners can move temporarily together. I had a big struggle when I wanted to take two terms’ sabbatical because it was the right time for my husband and me – he’d just been made redundant but apparently ‘we don’t do that in Psychology, we only take a full year’. One male colleague on hearing this said ‘oh I suppose my wife just gave up her job when I went on sabbatical’.
 
Women have more other caring responsibilities, not just children. My husband and I needed to stay locally for a number of years – at a time when other colleagues were getting promoted by moving jobs – because my husband’s mother was elderly and needed care. Few men help with care of their mother in law because that’s not what they’ve been taught since childhood.

Travel for work is often impossible for women with caring responsibilities – I couldn’t really travel for the first couple of years after we had children and the only reason I can now is because my husband’s work has become more flexible, not my job (he’s gone part time through choice but also his employer has pushed and enabled working from home a lot more. There’s been no change at all in the help Lancaster has given and no substantial change in the availability of childcare). Even a full day travel is impossible for me (London and back in a day for example) if I’m relying on outside childcare. This means not only could I not go to conferences at first but I also couldn’t go to e.g. a government meeting or grant meeting.
 
Because of Lancaster’s location, talented postgrads who want to stay in the area have to move into a professional services job – there are few commutable academic jobs if you don’t get one in Lancaster. This is more likely to affect women – men just move for work, while women stay put with, as I’ve said, a professional partner, non-childcare responsibilities or children.
 
Women have always been taught (since birth and, these days, before) that they are supposed to be less assertive. Obviously if you’ve managed to get a job in academia, you must have managed to push yourself forward to some extent. We recently had an excellent small workshop on promotion for women but previously the University has run workshops where at one a female professor just told us ‘it’s easy to be a professor, you just have to publish a lot and get grants’ (I can hear the hollow laughter of men and women echoing round campus!) and at another senior women just said ‘oh I’ve never experienced any discrimination’.
 
From the moment the doctor says ‘It’s a girl!’ or ‘It’s a boy!’ society treats us differently – our sex determines what gender roles society thinks we should take, following a partner as a trailing spouse, not speaking up to creepy supervisors, not putting ourselves forward for keynotes and promotions, taking on caring responsibilities for older and younger people – and that in turn determines how much we are paid.
 
Katie Alcock
Psychology

Issue 177

subtext 180 – ‘better sorry than safe’

Fortnightly during term time.

Letters, contributions, & comments: subtext-editors@lancaster.ac.uk

Back issues & subscription details: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/subtext/about/

In this issue: editorial, welcome week, deanshare, lab location, UA92 galore, FASS typos, house-building, union blues, shart, poem, TV review, letters

*****************************************************

EDITORIAL

Gaps, holes, deficits, cuts, absences. Call them what you will, it would be hard to deny that the academic year has been littered with them, providing the subtext drones with more than enough metaphorical material to stretch to breaking point and enough space to fly the traditional end of year round-up through on a bus.

The biggest gap generator has been the ongoing building work on campus, particularly on the Spine. There have been holes in the ground where the Spine has been dug up, communication gaps where the pink and purple diversion signs have failed to keep up with the actual situation ‘on the ground’, and most worryingly there has been a huge gap in provision for disabled users of the spine, with accessible routes around the pinball game that traversing campus has become having all but disappeared. Add to this the gaps of buildings that failed to appear (squints at the Management School) and the gap we didn’t know we had (cocks an eyebrow at Alexandra Square’s Big Screen), and it’s a wonder we didn’t all get a collective sprained ankle.

There have been financial gaps as well. Students who may have specific learning disabilities have seen a cut of 50% in the funding available from the University to be assessed for them – a massive blow to the life chances of those that need one but can’t afford it. Nationally, the most disruptive gap of the year was the deficit in the UCU pension fund – and understanding thereof – that saw an unprecedented turnout in support of strike action, and UCU members picketing for two weeks in freezing conditions. Whilst the picket lines saw a huge amount of support from students and non-striking staff there was another gap: no clear or coherent response from the VC. The University as a whole continued to fail to cover itself in glory when the Gender Pay Gap report was published in April, revealing LU to be third from the bottom in the country (University of the Year, though!) with a mean pay gap of 27.7% as opposed to the national average of… cough… 17.8%.

There have been notable gaps in democracy, honesty and decency. Maybe it started when Lancaster University Students’ Union refused to take a stance in regard to supporting the UCU strike, and it definitely didn’t end with their ‘creative’ approach to the online AGM ballot. Maybe it started when the University Court was abolished, removing one of the last democratically elected bodies in the institution (and one that oversaw the appointment of various posts). In fact, subtext notes – with some glee – that you can read all about the machinations of Lancaster University’s ‘Strategic Planning & Governance’ division at gap.lancs.ac.uk. Maybe it started when the VC led us to believe that Lancaster was the first port of call for UA92 (it wasn’t) and shrouded the entire business in a cloak of secrecy. Maybe it started with swastikas on Sociology department doors appearing overnight followed by the attempted setting up of a new student society concerned with white supremacy and other alt-right (i.e. fascist) ideas. This is a gap that is going to take more than a bit of polyfilla and a trowel to sort out.

And we’ve been feeling a bit gappy ourselves – retirement and illness have left us short of an editor or two in the subtext warehouse, so we welcome all those readers with a critical eye, a writerly bent and a typing speed of 80wpm to drop us a line at subtext-editors@lancaster.ac.uk to get involved. And so, once more unto the breach, dear readers – starting October. Until then, thanks for reading, and thanks for writing in – do keep doing that. Failing that, hit us with your ‘like’ stick on our Facebook page, at www.facebook.com/lusubtext

LETTERS

Dear subtext,

In 2005/6 when I (as HoD) was trying to support an appeal by a female member of admin who had been downgraded by the job review that was supposed to bring equivalence to roles, I looked  through the internal telephone directory at the names of people who occupied similar grade roles that had not been downgraded. They were almost all male names and employed in University House roles. In departments where the pay was lower, the names were mostly female. The justification was that centralised roles undertook tasks that gained more points, mostly because they undertook centralised tasks!!

My observations were insufficient to challenge the gender neutrality of the job/pay review at that time. I’m pleased to see that gender pay differences is now more valued as an indicator of equality and fairness.

Bob Sapey

(Retired)

***

Dear subtext,

The so-called Gender Pay Gap is, in fact, a Sex Pay Gap and the efforts that the university are suggesting around maternity and childcare are woefully inadequate, the latter mainly consisting of signposting things that are already available (though in the case of preschool childcare, pretty inadequate – it’s impossible, for example, to get additional hours/days at the Preschool Centre if asked to work extra time by one’s department).

The pay gap is in place way before we have children. Women are less mobile due to tending to have professional partners (while men are more likely to have partners in more portable and less professional jobs, since men earn more than their partners across society). Lancaster could make it easier for women to take a job if they have a professional partner, and advertise this. We could make it more flexible to, for example, take a sabbatical or a non-sabbatical career break so partners can move temporarily together. I had a big struggle when I wanted to take two terms’ sabbatical because it was the right time for my husband and me – he’d just been made redundant but apparently ‘we don’t do that in Psychology, we only take a full year’. One male colleague on hearing this said ‘oh I suppose my wife just gave up her job when I went on sabbatical’.

Women have more other caring responsibilities, not just children. My husband and I needed to stay locally for a number of years – at a time when other colleagues were getting promoted by moving jobs – because my husband’s mother was elderly and needed care. Few men help with care of their mother in law because that’s not what they’ve been taught since childhood.

Travel for work is often impossible for women with caring responsibilities – I couldn’t really travel for the first couple of years after we had children and the only reason I can now is because my husband’s work has become more flexible, not my job (he’s gone part time through choice but also his employer has pushed and enabled working from home a lot more. There’s been no change at all in the help Lancaster has given and no substantial change in the availability of childcare). Even a full day travel is impossible for me (London and back in a day for example) if I’m relying on outside childcare. This means not only could I not go to conferences at first but I also couldn’t go to e.g. a government meeting or grant meeting.

Because of Lancaster’s location, talented postgrads who want to stay in the area have to move into a professional services job – there are few commutable academic jobs if you don’t get one in Lancaster. This is more likely to affect women – men just move for work, while women stay put with, as I’ve said, a professional partner, non-childcare responsibilities or children.

Women have always been taught (since birth and, these days, before) that they are supposed to be less assertive. Obviously if you’ve managed to get a job in academia, you must have managed to push yourself forward to some extent. We recently had an excellent small workshop on promotion for women but previously the University has run workshops where at one a female professor just told us ‘it’s easy to be a professor, you just have to publish a lot and get grants’ (I can hear the hollow laughter of men and women echoing round campus!) and at another senior women just said ‘oh I’ve never experienced any discrimination’.

From the moment the doctor says ‘It’s a girl!’ or ‘It’s a boy!’ society treats us differently – our sex determines what gender roles society thinks we should take, following a partner as a trailing spouse, not speaking up to creepy supervisors, not putting ourselves forward for keynotes and promotions, taking on caring responsibilities for older and younger people – and that in turn determines how much we are paid.

Katie Alcock

Psychology

***

Dear subtext,

I concur with your evaluation of the Gender Pay Report.

I have received an ex-gratia payment of £1000, but I was told not to tell anyone that I’d received it. Apparently it might upset those who hadn’t got one. It felt cheapening at the time. No celebration there, then.

I sent my son to the Pre-School centre 25 years ago – it hasn’t been useful to me since. Indeed, its convenience has probably been instrumental in keeping people (possibly men as well as women) working at Lancaster longer than they reasonably should. At any rate, this and other childcare services, despite their longevity, do not seem to have had the impact on the career ladder of women in the past that the report bandies for the future.

Regarding the report itself, the graphs show annoying blue blocks (men) suffocating the beige (?) women at all levels of the organisation. Even in print there’s no level playing field.  The SS 1-5 ladies’ block is so small the corresponding number has to fit outside it, faintly out of step.

I’d sign this letter, but as the informal NDA mentioned above is probably still in force, I am, yours truly, Anon.

Name supplied

***

Dear subtext,

Noise!!! I have quite an interesting and long story to tell, of which I will spare you the details, about men drilling under my window ledge in Bowland North, me contacting Keith Douglas in Facilities as suggested by them, Keith assuring me on the phone that he had asked them to stop and schedule the noisy drilling 8-9 the following days, the men telling me that they could not take orders from him, and so on and so forth…

Drilling that shakes the floor and deafens your ears is great, especially if accompanied by shouting, swearing, bad singing, plus various types of machinery moving around, beeping, etc…

Never mind my work, but what about the students who are trying to do oral examinations, attend seminars, revise, talk to tutors, etc…

I just wonder whether, like last year, there will actually be noise during written examinations just outside the exam rooms…

Thinking of it, I wrote a similar comment in May 2015, and I thought about writing more every year since then…

Michela Masci

Department of Languages and Cultures

***

Dear subtext,

My own recollection of the Jim Bowen performance, which was in approximately 1997 or 1998 and which I witnessed, is not particularly close to the account given in subtext 176. He performed in the Bowland quadrangle, not the bar, on a stage set up for the extrav that evening, for which he provided an opening act. The JCR President was on the stage with him and was the only one present who appeared to find it amusing, although he admitted afterwards that in fact he had not been listening to Bowen’s act! That consisted almost entirely of racist anti-immigrant ‘jokes’. These might have been suitable for a 1960s white audience or a BNP convention, but were totally wrong in the context of a multi-racial audience of intelligent students, as he should have anticipated. It was a crass and stupid choice of content.

He was not booed off the stage (the Bowland students were much too polite for that), but there was no laughter and much audible muttering and cat-calling. Bowen clearly realised his act was going down very badly and cut the performance rather abruptly short and left the stage hurriedly. One of the audience threw a half glassful of beer at him as Bowen passed by, splashing the leather jacket the ‘comedian’ was wearing. He was very annoyed by this and asked me, as the College Principal in attendance, for the cost of having his jacket cleaned. I refused, telling him that his choice of subject matter was so clearly unsuitable and provocative that he should have expected even more of an adverse response and that he was lucky to get away with only that much damage. This was not well received, but we heard no more from him.

Ian Saunders

***

Dear subtext,

Regarding the picture on the university home page (see letter in subtext 176) – it must have been taken some time ago, since that area of the spine has been enclosed within steel barriers for what seems a lifetime but is probably about a year.

Olwen Poulter

Research and Enterprise Services

NEVER MIND THE GAP

Lancaster, the University of the Year 2018, has come near the top of yet another league table: the gender pay gap rankings, that is. According to its own recently published figures (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/edi/GenderPayGapReport.pdf), Lancaster’s gender pay gap of mean 27.7%, median 26.5%, against a sector average of mean 17.8% and median 13.7% puts us in third place nationally. Unfortunately we needn’t specify that the gap is between women earning less and men earning more. Judging by the reactions on social media and by questions to senior managers at numerous meetings, the University community has taken notice.

Where bad news falls, excuses are usually not far behind, and this expansive salary void is no exception: our glorious leaders attribute the gap to various factors, including Lancaster’s proud record of keeping cleaning staff (predominantly female workers) largely in-house, unlike many other HE institutions, and that fact that we have high numbers of lower-paid professional services staff who are mainly female while at the more senior (and higher-paid) professional services grades, the reverse is true. What is noted but not explained, however, is why academic, research and teaching staff are fairly evenly split up to grade 8, after which the proportion of women rapidly drops so that only 25% of professors are female. The official excuse for this is ‘low turnover’, but this seems rather weak. There is no official quota of professors, nor any sort of ‘one out, one in’ system.

The information about bonuses is also rather odd. Publishing this information is a requirement for all employers, and in sectors like banking, bonuses can make a huge difference to overall remuneration. But in Lancaster’s report this category includes only ex-gratia payments and staff awards, each limited to £1,000. Other forms of performance-related pay, are not mentioned, perhaps because they do not meet the definition of bonuses set out by the government. The VC used to get annual performance-related boosts to his emoluments, if he met his targets (which was not always the case – see subtext 156), but these are no longer listed in the University’s accounts. As far as ‘bonuses’ go, then, there seems to be some good news at least: women seem to have done rather well in this regard, with 6.1% receiving bonuses versus only 2.7% of males, and a bonus gap of 21.5% mean and 48.1% median. Trebles all round, Lancaster isn’t quite the den of unreconstructed Sid James-lookalikes it seemed to be…

Or is it? As any insightful analysis is resolutely lacking from the report, it is hard to say what these figures actually mean. For instance, are ex-gratia payments mostly paid to professional services staff in the lower half of the scale (a group that consists overwhelmingly of women)? Are they offered as a sort of consolation prize to people who have reached the top increment for their role, but have not been promoted to a higher-paid role? And are women more likely to be offered one-off ex-gratia payments versus accelerated increments, which would have a much greater effect on their pay longer-term?

Some of the action points listed at the end of the report are indeed laudable and necessary, but overall this feels like a bit of a rush job, ranking only somewhat above the meaningless word clouds and misleading stats of the last staff survey. The University has a legal requirement to publish these figures, but it could have done so much more, especially as everyone knew these figures would have to be published eventually. There is no breakdown by department or even faculty, and wholly insufficient information about linked factors like age, ethnicity, disability, and especially parental status. Once again, subtext readers may wonder why Lancaster doesn’t make more use of its world-leading experts, in this case to investigate, explain and work to mitigate the issues around the gender pay gap.

LU TEXT LOST AND FOUND

LU Text isn’t perfect, and in trying to provide a weekly roundup of Lancaster’s mentions in the press, it is inevitably going to miss the odd story here and there. Hence, we produce LU Text Lost and Found with only the most collegial intentions at heart.

First up, the Sale & Altrincham Messenger reports that the ex-footballer and devoted philanthropist Gary Neville, who readers may know as our business partner in a venture to set up a new university in Manchester, has landed himself in trouble with the Advertising Standards Agency. It turns out that the prospectus for UA92 is wooing potential learners with multiple all weather 3G pitches, even though they have only sought planning permission for one, and the permission hasn’t even been granted yet. Come on Gary, get your head in the game! http://www.messengernewspapers.co.uk/news/16136609.UA92_plan_breaches_advertising_regulations/

Those who enjoyed our analysis of the gender pay gap at Lancaster (the third largest in the UK) might also enjoy the Times Higher’s report on it. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/gender-pay-gap-how-much-less-are-women-paid-your-university#survey-answer