Anne Richards: We need a new plan to bring women back into the square mile October 26, 2014 "It is bad, shocking, awful. Since 2008 it has got worse. As an industry we’ve managed to deter a chunk of half of the population. We’ve got to get that sorted.” Aberdeen Asset Management’s chief investment officer Anne Richards does not hold back on the City’s gender imbalance. For her entire professional life, [...]
Asda faces mass legal action over pay inequality: Female shopfloor workers say they receive less than males in warehouses October 26, 2014 Thousands of female shop floor workers are taking legal action against Asda over pay inequality. They claim they are paid less than many male employees working in warehouses, despite doing equally valuable work for the supermarket chain. Law firm Leigh Day told the Guardian that 19,000 Asda employees had approached it since April, [...]
Our obsession with inequality is dangerous – the emerging world knows better October 20, 2014 Forget political polls and voting intentions. The most important survey of recent months came from Pew Research on the attitudes of populations worldwide to capitalism and inequality. As many Western economies labour under the strain of slow growth, an intellectual narrative has taken hold, arguing that free market capitalism causes unacceptable levels of inequality. But [...]
Why aren’t there more female bosses? Maybe it’s because women don’t want them October 17, 2014 For the many women fighting to introduce more women to the top of the work force, there exists a large number who would rather they weren't there at all. The majority of Americans would still rather have a male boss than a female boss, and this preference is particularly prominent among women, according to [...]
Britain climbs to fifth place for women on boards October 8, 2014 The UK is a world leader in female representation on boards, with women making up a quarter of board roles. On a continent-wide basis, Europe comes out on top, with 20 per cent of directors at major European companies being women, a substantial increase from the 15.6 per cent two years ago. European companies now [...]
100 Women in Hedge Funds: MPC new girl Kristin Forbes’s talk goes from Bard to verse October 1, 2014 Kristin Forbes, the American economist who became one of the Bank of England’s newbies this summer, could have been a breath of fresh air. She’s the first woman to serve on the bank’s rate-setting committee for five years – she could have really shaken things up. But alas, she’s toeing the party line… of shoehorning [...]
Chuka Umunna vows to get firms to put more ethnic minorities on boards September 30, 2014 Labour’s shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna yesterday promised to hold UK businesses to account over the number of senior black and ethnic minority staff they employ, most notably at board level. Pledging to introduce a Davies-style commission and report into why people from ethnic minorities make up just one in 15 senior management positions, Umunna [...]
No change in the gender split and none of the most populous six countries gets a vice presidency: Who’s who in Juncker’s commission September 11, 2014 Back in 2012, the European Commission decided it would tackle gender inequality and "break the glass ceiling that continues to bar female talent from top positions in Europe’s biggest companies." The target it set was 40 per cent, despite the fact that at the time the gender split was 19-9 in its own executive – [...]
Forget Piketty: How Sweden combined wealth and equality through capitalism August 27, 2014 SWEDEN continues to be one of the countries others look to for an answer to this fundamental question of our times: how can a country successfully combine increasing prosperity with a relatively egalitarian distribution? The French economist Thomas Piketty provided part of an answer in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in which he [...]
Warsi warns Conservatives won’t win election outright without attracting ethnic minority votes August 10, 2014 Baroness Warsi, the Conservative minister who resigned this week over the government’s position on Gaza, has warned the Conservative party that it will fail to win an outright majority at next year’s general election if it doesn’t do more to attract voters from ethnic minorities. Speaking in interviews with the Independent on Sunday and The [...]