Kingsmill has managed to be successful without donning the masculine trappings that so many women in British professional life seem to have adopted. A civil servant bitchily confided in a tabloid last year that Kingsmill was too tall, lacking gravitas because, in her years as a leading lawyer, she wore high heels in court.
In truth, Kingsmill is fun but also forceful, challenging as well as charming. She is a consummate achiever. In her career as a lawyer, she specialised in high-profile redundancies and pay-offs, famously securing 24 million for Peter Wood in his dismissal settlement with Direct Line. She is currently a non-executive director of Telewest and Manpower. And now, as deputy chairman of the Competition Commission since 1997, she has scared the living daylights out of the automotive industry with her investigation of new car prices, and led the panel that rejected the Abbey National/Lloyds merger.
But despite her success, Kingsmill believes her example is as irrelevant as her sex to this report. Its wrong to look at one-off role models, she says. What you need is large numbers [of successful women]. Id like my daughters generation to find it easier.
This comment is the only indication Kingsmill gives that life as a woman has been anything other than easy. She grew up on a sheep farm in New Zealand, before moving to Wales as a teenager. Even in the swinging 1960s, when she went to Cambridge, she describes the all-female surroundings of Girton College as giving her the comfort, courage and confidence to succeed in other male-dominated worlds where I have spent my career.
Of course, as a solicitor, the irony is that Kingsmill comes from one of the few well-paid professions in which women now dominate. She came to the law late, after starting her career in fashion marketing, and went on to become a partner. But only 17% of female solicitors become partners, she says pointedly.
Kingsmill has encountered discrimination on many occasions in her career. In her first experience as a non-executive director (at MFI) she recalls how change was needed and there was a boardroom row and she ended up as deputy chairman.
I know my presence on that board was a shock, she wrote of the experience in The Guardian. I am still convinced that I was asked to join that board as a figurehead... and that I would not want to change the status quo. But the management, which is now turning the company around, recognised that I was there to get things done on their behalf. They are now building on that change.
With this background, Kingsmill makes a forceful advocate for the greater involvement of women in senior management. Corporate Britain needs to rid itself of the clones that dominate the top of the corporate ladder, she says. Women can make a difference.
But as she makes clear in her newly-published report, the undervaluation of women is felt at all levels of British business, not just at board level. Commissioned by the Government to examine the 18% pay gap between men and women, and to address the disparities between the skills and attainment of women and the positions they occupy, The Kingsmill Review of Womens Pay and Employment was published in December last year, and it is a lucid and intelligently argued document for change. It is also a document with great relevance to HR directors.
Kingsmill sees the pay gap as a failure of what she calls human capital management(HCM), a failure that she believes is neither good for the economy nor in the interests of employers or employees. It is not just a matter of creating a society in which men and women have equal opportunities and are equally valued for the contributions they make... It is also a matter of ensuring the best use of human capital to promote economic growth.
Women consistently outperform men academically, but somewhere along the line, there is a failure to train and develop and promote them to their potential, says Kingsmill. Britain is losing skilled and talented people. Its also, she adds, a waste of the benefits obtained from equal investment in womens education.
While many companies regularly pay lip service to the notion that people are among their most important assets, the evidence suggests serious shortcomings in how effectively that resource is utilised, she argues.
Kingsmill puts the blame for this failure fairly and squarely at the door of management. Human capital management is one of the biggest weaknesses in UK management. But she has some sympathy with HR directors. The people responsible for HCM are sometimes not given the scope to manage. HR tends not to have sufficient status. Very few companies put HR on the board. Those that do are consistently the most advanced in HCM.
Kingsmill believes that a major opportunity now presents itself for HR people to show their worth to their organisation. The HR function ought to be on the board, and this is the right time. It may be wishful thinking, but I think there is increasing understanding of HR as a strategic function rather than an administrative one. But I believe human resources is not the right expression, its old hat. If board members are to take their mission seriously, she adds, it needs to be put fairly and squarely in the domain of human capital management.
The Kingsmill report makes a number of recommendations and offers a fair few suggestions besides. Perhaps the most important recommendation (at least as far as HR people are concerned) is a proposal to bring about a widespread adoption of systematic employment and pay reviews as a core management practice.
She explains: Too often, policies to reduce pay inequalities and improve conditions for women... are not clearly linked to the organisations strategic objectives, and very few have in place the systems necessary to consider these issues systematically. Most organisations simply lack the quantified data necessary to make comparisons and track trends in the ways in which they recruit, train and develop staff.
This information needs to cover not just pay but the ways in which men and women are used within the organisation: information on recruitment, career development paths, retention rates and reasons for leaving. Only then is it possible to compare the position of women and men in ways that will reveal discrepancies and barriers, and enable the impact of initiatives set up to overcome these to be properly monitored and evaluated.
Kingsmill has secured the agreement of at least 44 companies to conduct an employment and pay review. Its a sign of how deep-seated the problem is that The Economist a company where the CEO is female and women account for 51% of the workforce is among them. As chief executive Helen Alexander recalls, this led her to believe that, Our treatment of men and women was overall pretty fair. Nevertheless, she discovered that while women were under-represented in the higher salary bands (over 60,000 per annum) they accounted for 64% of the workforce earning less than 30,000. Alexander promised to examine this anomaly.
The overall response to this recommendation has been mixed. One source of controversy has been the suggestion that these reviews become mandatory in the public sector, but only optional in the private sector at least for the time being. But while many union figures have been calling, since publication of the report, for compulsory pay audits across the board, many private companies believe it is too soon or too onerous. Indeed, its interesting to report that The Economist has postponed its review, while it focuses on the current dire economic situation.
Kingsmills view is that pay and employment reviews should be self-funding, and that companies must be given time to figure out for themselves the benefits of such reviews without heavy-handed government legislation. I wouldnt say theres a cost imperative, but any costs that would be incurred by such a review would be more than offset by the benefits, she says.
One of the key challenges to HR departments in establishing proper pay and performance reviews is to create the tools that will measure this. Kingsmill is encouraged, in this regard, by the number of diverse bodies that are working in this area, including the Industrial Society, the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, and the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), as well as consulting firms such as Accenture. Kingsmill also praises the great work of unions, particularly in the public sector, in this area.
Where Kingsmill believes more work is needed is in improving reporting practices in human capital management. Brands are valued, so why not people? she argues. It is becoming commonplace to refer to knowledge, innovation and technical or product development as key elements of competition, and yet the management of human capital, which is the very resource which will deliver these business benefits, is routinely under-reported.
Kingsmill is not alone in this concern. The Company Law Review Steering Group recommends that big companies should produce an Operating and Financial Review (OFR) as part of their annual reports, to include information that the directors judge necessary to an understanding of their business and its future performance. Kingsmill argues that gender analysis should be a central element of this, and believes there is a strong case for including such information in the mandatory requirements in the OFR.
So which is the best company when it comes to womens pay and employment policies? Kingsmill was impressed by P&G, but singles out the BBC as the best individual organisation she has seen. The BBC is brilliant, she says. It has made diversity a corporate objective, and it has implemented it brilliantly. It has a woman MD, women at all management levels, it has measuring systems, and it has job-sharing and other part-time practices in place to deliver it.
However, its not just been an economic argument that has brought about this successful implementation of diversity policies. An identifiable part of senior management remuneration is dependent on diversity targets, she notes, admitting that, Theres nothing like pay for making people sit up and take notice. Kingsmill recommends that board-level public-sector remuneration be linked to diversity targets. But isnt it naive to think that the private sector will adopt such practices without the personal financial incentive?
Kingsmill is pragmatic, steering clear of a legislative burden: Im not looking for a punitive imperative. I want people to understand the management prerogative. There are some legal options, but the most important thing is to win over hearts and minds.
The complexity of this challenge should not be underestimated. Kingsmill acknowledges that the gender pay gap is riddled with complex social, economic and anthropological factors at work, which she describes as both cause and effect. Among them: the fact that women are typically employed in lower-paid vocations such as nursing, social work and education; that women are far more likely than men to take a part-time job (which tend to be lower-paid) for family reasons; and that women tend to read humanities at university, rather than sciences.
Kingsmill makes some interesting recommendations to deal with these important factors. The report proposes training tax credits for employers who give better training to part-time workers, and to employers who recruit and train women in professions in which women are under-represented. Another suggestion is the establishment of a centre of excellence for researching and disseminating information on best practice, and to enable business to re-engineer itself to deal with obstacles and issues.
This latter suggestion has led to a reported spat with the EOC, which argues that more should be done to support its own initiatives aimed at getting women into better-paid professions, and criticises the report for not looking at childcare. It seems a strangely futile row since the Government has rejected the idea of both the centre of excellence, and the training tax credits. It also seems a trifle unfair.
Kingsmill is diplomatically silent about the row. She also reports that she is pleased with the Governments response, despite the rejection of these proposals. They realise its an ongoing process of change [that will bring about the desired results], not a single piece of legislation.
In the meantime, Kingsmill is already on to the next project, a report for the Competition Commission examining prescription-only veterinary medicine. Sounds like the perfect drug.
Further information
- The Kingsmill Review of Womens Pay and Employment
www.kingsmillreview.gov.uk
