Women get paid less than men. There are a myriad of reasons why that is so, some of which are outwith your control as an individual. Focus on changing that which is within your control.

There are gender differences in pay levels. Fact. You are not being a hysterical woman if you point that out.

You are not being rude by asking what the salary levels are in your organisation and how they are determined (although a reluctance to tell you is giving you a lot of information!)

Being the longest serving post holder does not automatically deserve more pay. Career breaks need not necessarily mean less pay. Be clear about what you have gained during that break, what you bring back into the organisation. Don’t assume that you deserve lower pay.

Not knowing your worth may mean you get paid less. If an employer can get you on the cheap they will. And if an employer gets you on the cheap they will, albeit subtly, value you less.

If you are giving of yourself cheaply, you may value yourself less.

If you value yourself less you won’t ask for more pay.

Know your worth.

Know the worth of the job you do.

Know the industry norm for the job you do.

Know what your organisation pays others.

Know you have the right to ask for your worth!

You owe it to yourself (and all the women coming after you) to be paid equally with men. Go for it!

P.S. Speak Up! is a brand new course devised by me and launching in November. If this post has been useful to you, take a look at the course – you’ll love it!

Research in Happiness at Work

Stephen Wood and L.M. De Menezes of the Cass Business School in London, published some research earlier this year* which supports what I have been saying for some time. When you can’t actually switch jobs, working on making your existing job better, improving your working life, will increase your sense of well being and happiness at work.

They advise trying to make your job as enriching as possible and taking opportunities to be more autonomous and grasp opportunities which may enhance your CV. So no falling into the “I won’t help ‘them’” trap as actually being more co-operative can actually help you!

They also found that knowing what was going on, being kept in the loop, helped employees feel more content with their lot. This is no surprise as in any times of stress and change we need to feel we have a say in what is happening, that we can exert some control somewhere in the process. And one way of doing that is to increase communication with your manager or your HR department. Find out what’s happening in your business, whether it’s your immediate company or your industry as a whole.

Plan Ahead for Next Job

Don’t see this time as ‘dead’ time. Yes, you need to hang in there for a while but there are still opportunities to plan ahead. Don’t wish your life away but a bit of judicious planning for the next step, when it becomes available, is good career planning. Maybe get yourself on a course within work, or invest in one yourself outside of work; (a lot of participants on my Renewyou course are doing exactly this).

If you don’t know what that next step is, but you do know that you don’t like what you’ve got, listen to my free visualisation and see what it comes to mind!

You spend a lot of your life working, so it needs to work for you as well as your employer! Make a start now on enriching your working life!

Photo Credit: Gokan Kohur
* High Involvement management, High Performance Work Systems…Journal of Human Resource Management 2011

If you’ve enjoyed this article, check out these 3 Essential Questions for Women

Women

Leaving aside how much actual genuine choice is involved, and  why occupations which are traditionally female dominated should be valued less, I went to look at the figures again. And this is what I found on the UK Government equalities site, hardly a bastion of feminsim extremism I’m sure you’ll agree! They say:

Gender Pay Gap

The Office for National Statistics collects data on earnings through the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings which it uses to calculate gender pay differences. There are a number of different ways of calculating the gender pay gap, one of which compares the pay of all men and women in work (full- and part-time) and looks at the median. By this measure, the gender pay gap is 22.0 per cent.

GEO has undertaken research into the causes . This found the key factors explaining the pay gap were as follows:

• 10 per cent of the overall pay gap can be attributed to occupational sex segregation. Having 10 percentage point greater share of men in an occupation is associated with 2 per cent higher average hourly wages;
• 12 per cent of the gap is due to the industries in which women work;
• 21 per cent of the gap is due to differences in years of full-time work;
• 16 per cent of the gap is due to the negative effect on wages of having previously worked part-time or of having taken time out of the labour market to look after family; and
• 5 per cent of the gap is due to formal education levels

But a significant proportion (36 per cent) of the pay gap could not be explained by any of these factors, suggesting discrimination may be an important factor.

We’ve still a way to go!

Picture Credit: Valinza

How to Improve Your Working Life

Here’s three tips to help you cope with the bad times and get ready for the upturn (trust me, this will pass).

1Don’t Take it Personally, Think Global

We women have an uncanny ability to personalise things. Thoughts like ‘Why me?‘, ‘I’m no good’, ‘I’m so unlucky’ start to morph into ‘I’ll never get a good job again‘, ‘no one will employ me’. It’s a downward spiral and doing you no good at all. I’m all for being realistic about situations and the reality of this situation is that there is a global economic downturn and ‘times is ‘ard’ for almost everyone. It is not personal.

2 Upgrade Your Spam Filter

Now about those little messages dropping unwanted into your brain as you sigh over yet another unrewarding piece of work you have to do. Believe me, they are making you feel worse. So if we want to feel better we need to deal with them. If you’re a regular reader you’ll know I’m very into evidence based research and using techniques that work. Well, positive thinking is not something off the wall; it’s a technique that works and is used in treatment models for all kinds of conditions.

First you have to identify your negative messages to self (write them down as the thoughts go in; I bet you’re really unkind to yourself sometimes). Then you have to harness that negative impact for a good and positive one. So turn your spam into something helpful, like ‘ I am good at what I do’, ‘this will pass’, and so on. I can’t write them for you as they have to be something that sounds like you talking and doesn’t make you squirm with embarrassment!

3 Find Something Fulfilling Outside of Work

When you’re not getting what you want from work try and get it from somewhere else! Work out what you’re missing: challenge, stimulation, new learning, team work, responsibility, money maybe, and see if there is a way of finding that outside your current role. You could offer yourself and your skills to a charity, maybe do an additional part time job (that’s harder but not impossible), start an online course, read a self help book and try out what it advises, sign up for an evening class…. Give yourself ten minutes to jot down all the possibilities, don’t censor anything. Or better still do it with a friend and make it fun.

I’d love to hear how you cope or have coped if you’ve ever been stuck in a job rut. And don’t forget my book ‘When Work Isn’t Working’ covers all of this and more.

Photo Credit: Kostas Kitsos

This group is for professional women who want to get ahead in their careers,  to network, share advice, share stories, etc, but who don’t want to have to behave like men to do so.

I invited lots of my connections to join me and most have but I have had one or two comments back saying the fact that the f word is in the title is putting them off. One woman said:

“I know it’s sad but I don’t want potential employers to see ‘so and so has joined a Feminist group’ on Linkedin.”

I suppose I shouldn’t be, but I am genuinely shocked. I quite understand women not wanting to join a group as they don’t feel it applies to them, but actually wanting to join but thinking having a ‘feminist’ label will disadvantage them! That’s a whole different matter.

Do you have experience of this? What do you think? Are you embarrassed to be called a feminist? Would it harm your career or business prospects? You may comment anonymously!

Photo Credit: Unknown, ad from 1970s

Jane: Sarah, you are well known for your work with financial information for women, and I’m sure many of our readers will have seen you on BBC’s Saturday Breakfast or heard you on Radio 4.

So my first question is -Why a specialist site for women? Are our financial issues very different?
SARAH: Yes, I think they are – in two significant ways. Firstly, women often have to make different decisions about money because of different working patterns and priorities and secondly, women often approach issues around finance, such as risk and debt, differently.

For example, many women will want to know how much they could lose before they’ll invest whereas men tend to focus more on the maths of how an investment stacks up. Women also typically owe less than men but have debt that charges a higher interest rate (such as credit cards) and also worry about it more.

How did you first get into the world of finance? Was it something you had planned to do from school days? Were you always good at managing your pocket money? (I wasn’t…!)
I can safely say that my burning ambition when I was at school wasn’t to work in personal finance. I wasn’t very good at managing my pocket money (unlike my sister) and would often run out of money halfway through the week.

I gradually moved towards personal finance journalism via a theatre company, an arts centre, catering for rock bands and reporting and producing for local radio. When I moved to London I was offered some freelance work on BBC Radio 4’s Moneybox, filling in for someone who was on holiday. She didn’t come back and I stayed for six years! I loved working on the programme because I felt that – by giving people information – you could make a real difference to the amount of money they had and ultimately to their lives.

It was also a great programme to work on because you had to get all the facts right otherwise you’d be inundated with letters and phone calls (this was before email was popular!).

What was your very first paid job? Do you remember how much you got paid?
My first job, during the school holidays, was working at a fruit machine company filing invoices. I had no idea there was so much money in fruit machines (literally!).  I think I was paid £37 a week, which seemed like a fortune at the time.

You now run your own business. What’s the best thing about being your own boss?
The best thing was being able to set up SavvyWoman in the way I wanted to. I had strong ideas about the content, tone and look of the website – I didn’t want it to be fluffy but was keen to make sure that women felt it was written with them in mind.

It’s really rewarding when you get positive feedback to one of your ideas.  I also have a huge amount of freedom about the topics I can cover on SavvyWoman. Sometimes I’ll write about a topic that’s in the news, but look at it from a female perspective, at other times I’ll pick a completely different subject that I know will be of interest to website users.

What advice would you give to any woman thinking of launching their own business?
‘Go for it’ is the obvious piece of advice. The other one is to say that there are bound to be times when it’s scary so don’t think it’s only you who’s experiencing that. You have to be prepared to work hard and you have to do your research before you start, but it’s a great feeling when you see that your idea has translated into something tangible.

When do you think we’ll have our first female Chancellor of the Exchequer? Do you think the public is less ready for that than they were a female prime minister?
I’d like to think we wouldn’t have to wait too long for our first female Chancellor of the Exchequer but I have a feeling I’d be wrong.  The absence of women in politics – especially at cabinet level – is such a problem and it’s one that parties of various political shades don’t seem that keen to tackle.

Why it should seem acceptable that decisions about the future of this country are led by a cabinet largely representing 50% of the population by gender is a mystery to me.

What was the best piece of advice that you were given when setting up Savvy SavvyWoman?
I don’t think I can pinpoint one piece of advice that stands out. Overall, I was just pleased to get encouragement from so many of my friends. There were times, especially in the early stages when I couldn’t talk about what I was doing because I was waiting to get the trademark on the domain name and when I was trying to choose a web designer when it felt like it was a long way from a business, but in the end it all came together very quickly.

In terms of things I’m glad I did, I was very lucky with the web design team – thebrightplace.com – as they were fantastic communicators as well as having the ability to interpret my non-technical speak into a great website. That took a huge amount of pressure off me.

I was also really pleased to get such a brilliant panel of experts lined up for the website, all of whom give their time free of charge. It felt like a great endorsement of the idea.

In your experience, what is the most common dilemma or issue for women and finance?
I think the biggest issue is retirement. I get more questions about pensions from SavvyWoman users on pensions than any other subject. I know that retirement and, in particular, how to pay for it are big issues for both men and women but all the statistics show that women retire on less than men and in around one in three cases, retire on very little at all.

Not all women have career breaks to look after children but those who do invariably put the pension on hold for quite a few years and never make up that lost time.  Even those who work throughout their lives generally earn less than men (sometimes a lot less) and may be less keen to lock money away.

Of women reaching state pension age last year, fewer than 50% received a full state pension compared to well over 90% of men. Changes were introduced in April that will benefit women, but they’ll take quite some time to filter through the system. A pension may not be the answer, but you cannot rely on the state.

Who most inspires and motivates you currently?
I absolutely love working on the website and I’m genuinely really pleased if I’ve come up with something that women can relate to and that will help them get more from their money. One woman said it was the first finance website that didn’t scare her, which I was really touched by.

I hate unfairness and injustice and it frustrates me that some financial companies will treat customers as badly as they think they can get away with and will only behave decently once they’re threatened with the prospect of publicity.

I’m not motivated by money and I don’t advocate thinking about it day and night but neither should you dismiss it as boring or complicated because it’s hard to function without it. Sometimes a relatively straightforward piece of information can make all the difference between a good or bad financial decision.

What’s the best piece of advice you have been given?
From a financial point of view, the best advice I was given was never to combine borrowing and investing. This was when endowment mortgages were all the rage and I was working on Moneybox at the time. It was a favourite saying of one of the producers – but she was right.

In terms of general advice I think the one that’s rung true for me over the years is to trust your instincts. I think I generally have quite a strong gut feeling and the times when I’ve not listened to it I’ve normally regretted it.

And what advice would you give to women re their own financial affairs?
I’d say, don’t be scared of money and don’t think you have to be money obsessed to take an interest in it.  Women often make very good financial decisions but can miss out because they’re put off by the jargon that often litters financial articles or brochures (more so than men, it seems).
The last piece of advice would be to think about what you’re going to live on in retirement. It doesn’t have to be a pension, it can be some other form of retirement saving, but make sure you won’t have to rely on the state.

Sarah, thanks you so much for sharing your thoughts with us.

If you’d like some more information about Savvy Woman, or to sign up for a regular newsletter from Sarah, visit her web site by clicking here

“More than two thirds of the billion people surviving on less than a dollar a day are female”

“Research by investment bank, Goldman Sachs found that women tend to invest their income in their children’s health, education and clothing. Men, the bank found, usually preferred to spend it on themselves, buying cigarettes, alcohol or what it delicately terms ‘female companionship’.”

“More female workers could even help head off the pensions crisis and the problems of an ageing population.”

The article is written by journalist Ruth Sunderland, in The Observer newspaper, and you can read it in it s entirety here. It will make you think…

In short, she is a hugely successful and inspirational woman and I am thrilled to be able to bring you this interview with her. We spoke when Avivah was on a brief pit stop at her home in Paris, following trips to her birthplace Canada, Brazil and India!

Jane: Avivah, Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us.

It’s no secret that I loved your first book co authored with Alison Maitland, for the fresh new perspective it brought to the gender debate. And the second, ‘How Women mean Business’ threatens to be just as successful. How did the writing of these books come about?

Avivah: The raw material came through my consultancy work with 20-first, but I had written books before as part of my previous work with The European Professional Women’s Network. Under the name of the network we had published a series of guides for professional women. I had some previous experience of the book world.

There are also two good reasons for writing a book:
1)    It gives you some form of copyright on your ideas. At least if you have it in print you can claim some ownership of your ideas when they are ‘borrowed’.
2)    It’s great to have all your ideas in one place so you don’t have to repeat yourself too often!

Did you have a specific career path? Did you plan your business career?
I grew up in Canada and was part of a very academic family. Business was not on the horizon throughout my education and I took a joint honours degree in Computer Science and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

I didn’t have any goal at all. But I had heard my parents discussing the shortcomings of the academic life enough times to dissuade me from that route, so I went to Paris for a year and got a great job with L’Oreal. It involved lots of travel and eventually led me to attending INSEAD Business School at Fontainebleau. That opened lots of doors to me.

How did you get involved in gender politics? Was there a specific incident that triggered it? Were you subject to discrimination?
No, not myself; I grew up in Canada thinking the whole concept of gender was obsolete!  I have always had an interest in women and my mother was a very strong character. (My father died when I was quite young).

I started a communications company in the 80s and founded the European Professional Women’s Network in the 90s as a side line.It was listening to thousands of women across Europe talk about their careers and aspirations that really awakened to my interest..

I had also undertaken some research on dual career couples and knew that two corporate careers was not easy to combine. That research was partly prompted by my own marriage to a high flying executive. It’s an art to be complimentary and not competitive when two careers are involved.

What do you think are the biggest obstacles facing women in the workforce today?
I think the issue of gender being seen as a women’s issue. The corporate culture, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, sees the problems as being a woman’s responsibility; and worse – women often see it as women’s problems too!

A tick box mentality can result in organisations where women organise themselves into women’s groups, men support them but don’t get involved, and everyone feels comfortable. But absolutely nothing changes! I’d say don’t create women’s networks!
There has to be a fundamental rethink at the top executive level.

You mentioned Anglo-Saxon Culture as being particularly entrenched. You now live in Paris; do you find the issues for women there to be significantly different?
Yes, very. French women seem to me to have managed being both feminine and powerful. Anglo Saxon cultures still seem to frame choices between work and family. French women are not so tied to the idea that they should provide all the child care and the idea of having other forms of childcare and help in the home is not so frowned upon. There is no disapproval from others and a lot of public policy to support whatever choices parents make.

And French women are confident of their femininity. They wear make-up, heels, feminine clothes and have never thought they have to dress like men. If women in your organisation are still in grey and black suits the gender issue is still very live!

Mistakes help us grow and learn. What has been your best mistake in terms of the lessons it taught you?
When I created 20-First we started out as a coaching firm for women. And I realised it wasn’t going to achieve my aims, that something else needed to be done rather than just talking to women. My overall goal became to have a gender balance in the powerful positions as the only way to effect real change.

Who has been the most influential person in your life and why?
My mother, a very strong woman as I mentioned before. I have learnt so much from the women I’ve worked with: balance, managing work, child rearing, everything. And there are women I admire greatly, like Christine Lagarde the French finance minister, who is a great supporter of women.

What has been the best piece of advice you have been given?
Be the change you want to see. Be different. Stay authentic, look and feel like a woman. People will listen to you if you have authority, professionalism and something to say! It’s about being comfortable in your skin and true to yourself.

What advice would you give to any aspiring business woman?
You mean apart from reading my books! I would say pay attention to the pacing of your career. Look particularly at your thirties, preferably before you get there. It’s a challenging time so discuss it and plan for it. Use a coach, listen to older women and learn from them So may women drop out in their thirties which is a huge loss to business. Think about it in advance.

And don’t worry about getting older! Getting older is great, possibly the best time of your life as your wisdom and experience grows.

And my final question, Avivah, what does the future hold for you? What are you looking to achieve over the next few years?
Good question! I want to push against the tidal wave, the tsunami of ‘let’s just do it the old way’. I want to change the mindset from a problem of genderto a major opportunity to reshape capitalism, the 20th century and the world, thanks to harnessing the complementary skills, styles and values of both women and men. I want to advance quickly with a handful of truly stellar corporate organisations that grab these ideas and lead the way.

Avivah, this is rousing stuff! Thank you so much. I hope the new book is a great success. I think it should be in every HR department!
If you’d like to find out more about Avivah and her company, click here

Sometimes it really feels like too much of a stretch to get out to events, particularly if you have caring responsibilities.

And having the confidence to network is a common issue when I’m coaching, even with very senior women.

Be selective.

Decide which ones give you most exposure, are likely to connect you with people you find stimulating, will add to your knowledge, or will advance your career. Plan these into your diary.

Although it’s reassuring to attend with a colleague, the temptation to stand comfortably chatting with them may be too much to resist. If you do go with someone else, agree in advance that you will split up and only touch base again at the end. Otherwise you might as well pop into the nearest coffee shop!

But don’t stop going, just be selective. Putting yourself out there is an important part of getting ahead in your field. And you just never know what might happen. I was at a networking event recently thinking I was wasting my time when a director of a film company approached me to discuss a programme idea. That chance meeting has been really helpful to us both!