When we were children, we wanted heroes and heroines. Someone to look up to. Someone to show us how to move through the world and save the day. But, you know, time passed. Life happens. We found our own heroines in our everyday lives. Our sisters. Our friends. Our colleagues.
And then every so often, a little spark lights up somewhere in the world. A distant shooting star. It may not spend weeks on the front page of the newspapers, but it's enough to remind us to believe. Recently, we felt a warm glow when we saw that Claudia Goldin, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, had won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Not just because she's only the third woman to ever win the award, in a field that has traditionally been male-dominated. I mean, it's hugely significant, of course, but that wasn't the only striking thing about the news. Goldin has won as a result of her research into women's economic progress in the workplace - and specifically, the gender pay gap. Her research, and the subject, have been recognised as being important and valuable. It's enough to give us all hope for progress towards real gender equality.
As you probably know, 22 November 2023 is Equal Pay Day. It's the day from which women are effectively working for free in the UK, due to the gender pay gap - which in 2023 sits at 10.7%. It's also the case that, in general, the gender pay gap widens as you get more senior; higher earners experience a greater discrepancy between male and female hourly earnings. There is some light at the end of the tunnel - the gender pay gap has been reduced by approximately one quarter among full time employees over the last decade - but overall, it still makes for pretty depressing reading.
Claudia Goldin's research examined the reasons for the gender pay gap. Whilst sex bias played a part, she also found that parenthood had a particularly significant effect on women's long term earnings - sometimes, of course, women may work fewer hours after having children but many also experience a career interruption, and leave the workplace altogether for a period. This probably isn't going to be a shock to our 9-2-3 community - many of us have wrestled with this exact question within our families and in our professional lives.
But what if flexible working could act as a protective factor, and help to keep parents of both sexes in the workplace for as long as they wanted to be there? Flexible work encompasses a whole range of solutions to help working parents remain in employment. Flexible start and finish times, or remote or hybrid working, for example, can enable parents to drop children at nursery and do the school run before starting work. Annualised hours can help them to put in longer days at work during term time, and spend more time with their children during the school holidays, when childcare can sometimes be hard to come by. Compressed hours can make it economically viable for parents to remain in employment, by saving on childcare. Flexitime may make it possible to attend those class assemblies which seem to us to pop up with ever-decreasing amounts of warning and ever-increasing regularity, but which are really, really important when you're five and you've been practising your single line for three weeks.
We could talk all day about the possibilities - all it takes is a little imagination, and a commitment from companies and team members to making it work. At 9-2-3, we talk every November about gender pay gap day. Wouldn't it be wonderful if one year, there wasn't anything noteworthy for us to write about? Until 2009, no woman had ever won the Nobel Prize for Economics. We have to believe that change is perfectly possible. We can't promise that we can all save the day, superhero-style, by this time next week. Change isn't like that, unfortunately. It's a series of everyday victories, until one day we look back and realise how far we've climbed. We look forward to working with you, every day, to take one step at a time along that path.