The Skills: From First Job to Dream Job - What Every Woman Needs to Know - Mishal Husain

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career change. Every projection about the future of work suggests that mobility will be increasingly important – perhaps the disruption will even bridge some of the workplace gender gaps we see today, if it becomes more common for men and women to shift gear, go part-time or take time out to retrain or for family reasons.

      There is more to do to help people achieve their potential at work. But when I contrast my experience of working life with that of my mother, I feel a deep gratitude. For all the emphasis on education in my family, the idea that it could be used to forge a career and for that career to exist alongside motherhood, is a novel one. My mother gained two degrees in Pakistan and became a producer at Pakistan Television when it was first set up in the 1960s. But all around her, it was accepted that marriage and motherhood were more than likely to bring any nascent careers to an end.

      Her own marriage brought her to the UK in 1972 and I was born in 1973. With my father working long hours in the National Health Service in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire, I was her full-time job. She told me years later that there were times when she would watch the Asian programming coming out of the BBC in Birmingham and long to be a part of it, to use her experience and have an identity in this new country beyond that of wife and mother. It was never going to be possible – she had a baby to look after and any family members who might have helped out were far away. Childcare and travel costs would have been an unjustifiable addition to an already tight household budget.

      It is not in my mother’s nature to be bitter about what might have been, but her experience reminds me not to lose an appreciation of the doors that have been open to me, one generation on. Changed attitudes to women and to ethnic minorities have both played a key role in my life chances – not so long ago it would have been hard to imagine someone with a name like mine fronting a national news programme. That is not to say that I find my own combination of motherhood, marriage and work easy – or even always manageable. But I often think back to what I heard the then head coach of UK Athletics, Charles van Commenee, say just ahead of the London Olympics. Having coached many athletes to medals, he said he always tried to make them appreciate that pressure would be an ongoing part of their lives. ‘I tell them – it’s uncomfortable out there,’ he said. The words resonate with me because alongside the many privileges of my job are the difficult aspects – in particular the scrutiny. I cannot have one without accepting the other, and I have but this one life to make the most of what comes my way.

       Where We Are

      Each generation must create its own reality and find its own identity

      Camille Paglia

      If I feel fortunate to have been born in a time when my opportunities have been so much greater than my mother’s, it is also true that the advancement of women has not reached the point I would have imagined it might when I left university in 1995. By then, both the UK and my parents’ country of origin, Pakistan, had elected female prime ministers and, if asked, I would have said that spoke volumes about change and progress.

      More than twenty years on, I now see that while we owe a great deal to those who smashed glass ceilings and led the way, the follow-up – assuming there is one – is vital. It was Norway’s Erna Solberg, the second woman to be elected prime minister of her country, who brought this home when she told me why she likes the ‘second woman’ role: ‘It means the first was not a one-off.’ Even her country, known for being one of the most gender-equal in the world, has not reached a fifty-fifty split in Parliament – although with 41 per cent women, it is still doing better than most.1 In India, women make up only 12 per cent of the Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament, while in China a woman has never sat on the Communist Party’s most powerful decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee.2

      Interestingly, the picture for Chinese business is considerably better, with women holding 31 per cent of senior leadership roles. It’s a proportion matched in Africa and exceeded in Eastern Europe, but in businesses in the European Union, women hold 27 per cent of senior roles and in North America, just 21 per cent.3 The study, by the accountants Grant Thornton International, noted that those countries with the most policies in place to promote equality – equal pay, parental leave, flexible working – were not necessarily those with the greatest diversity at the top of business. Policy alone was not producing large scale change, they said, while stereotypes about gender roles were still a barrier to progress. That is a conclusion that perhaps makes clearer where the focus for my generation and younger women should lie – we need to think about individuals as well as institutions.

      We can take heart, however, from studies that have compared companies’ records on diversity and their performance – one analysis of more than 20,000 firms in 91 countries found that the presence of women in corporate leadership correlated positively with profitability.4 Another, from consultants at McKinsey, reported that a correlation between gender and ethnic diversity and financial performance generally holds true across geographies. While they couldn’t say that one caused the other, they observed a ‘real relationship between diversity and performance’ and said the reasons for it would include ‘improved access to talent, enhanced decision making and depth of consumer insight and strengthened employee engagement and licence to operate’.5

      A broad perspective on where there’s been progress – and where there are gaps – comes from the World Economic Forum’s annual analysis of gender-based disparities. In 2017, it reported that the 144 countries studied had made great strides in two key areas – health and educational attainment. The major gaps lay in two others – political empowerment and economic participation and opportunity – with particular concern that the average earnings of men were rising faster than those of women.6 It also highlighted how women are likely to be affected by key future trends: automation will significantly affect industries in which many are currently employed, and they are under-represented in high-income and high-growth fields such as technology and science. Even countries where women have made great strides cannot be assured of future progress, explains the organisation’s head of education, gender and work, Saadia Zahidi: ‘A lot of advanced economies have stalled as they were riding the wave of the education boom among women, but if the responsibility of home and childcare is still on those women, there is a limit to how much they can do in the workplace.’7

      In India the growth in girls’ education hasn’t resulted in women entering the workforce in the numbers you might expect or hope for, especially in a growing economy. In fact, according to the Harvard economist Professor Rohini Pande, female participation in the Indian labour market has been falling, down from 37 per cent to 28 per cent between 1990 and 2015. It’s not a lack of political will to get more women into paid employment, she says, or a lack of interest from women themselves. Instead, there is a significant role being played by social norms – among parents, husbands and parents-in-law – about appropriate behaviour for women. Pande’s research also suggests that while low pay is the main reason for Indian men to leave a job or not accept one, women cite family pressures and responsibilities.8

      Those pressures might relate to taking care of the household, but also basic mobility – requiring permission to go out, for example. As Professor Pande says: ‘It’s pretty difficult to look for a job if you can’t leave the house alone.’ Even in India’s urban areas, she and her associate Charity Troyer Moore found female workers struggling to access male-dominated networks. ‘Women often end up in lower-paid and less-responsible positions than their abilities would otherwise allow,’ they say, ‘which, in turn, makes it less likely that they will choose to work at all, especially as household incomes rise and they don’t absolutely have to work to survive.’9

      Nonetheless,

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