The Paula Principle

Tom Schuller: It was several publishers, some of them explicitly saying that they wouldn't publish a book on this by a man; and one particular publisher, a large publisher. The editorial team was very keen. We'd had a couple of meetings, they were talking, "Should we have an autumn or spring publishing date?", and then it all went silent. I contacted them to ask what was happening, and a slightly shame-faced email came back, saying, "Well we took it to our marketing team and they turned it down flat on the basis they couldn't sell a book on this topic by a man."

I honestly find this quite hard to understand, because just as a marketing device you would think, "Oh, here's a book on this topic by a man" would be a way of selling it. Now I can see that some of the audience, particularly the female audience, may say, "Why should we read a book on this topic by a man?" But if you extend that principle, that only people who belong to a category can write about that category, you're cutting out quite a lot of authors in the past and in the future.

Rachel Salaman: Do some women say to you, "What right do you have to talk about this?"

Tom Schuller: I've never had that directly. I mean, I've had some questions, and I've certainly had to make it very clear that, in the book and when I speak about it, I'm not prescribing for women and I'm certainly not speaking for women. And actually, one of the reasons why I had to rewrite the whole thing was to get more women's voices in it, by going and interviewing a range of different women, and so they speak for themselves in the book.

On the whole, I've had very supportive remarks from women, saying, "Well it's very nice, actually, that a man has got onto this." But I did find it difficult to find a voice, as it were, that's suitable, because obviously using "they" or "we" works out rather differently in different contexts in the book, and that was a bit of a challenge.

Rachel Salaman: Now, the Paula Principle, the name, is a kind of continuation or a riff, if you like, on the Peter Principle. How do the Peter and the Paula Principles relate to one another?

Tom Schuller: Yes. They are closely related, and I tend to say the Paula Principle is the mirror image of the Peter Principle because the Peter Principle is about why men, on the whole, work above their level of competence, and the Paula Principle swings that round and says, "Why do most women work below their level of competence?" But the relationship is actually closer, or slightly more nuanced than just the mirror image, in two senses, which point in slightly different directions. I mean, the first is that if we're thinking about matching up competence to job, as it were, the better the fit, I argue, the more women will move up, because their competencies will be more fully recognized.

Now if it's a zero-sum game, then fewer men will be above their level of competence, as it were. So I think in addressing the issues around the Paula Principle you're also addressing the Peter Principle issues. But I don't think, actually – and this is the second point – that it is a completely zero-sum game, because if women's competencies are better used then actually, on the whole, that's good for everyone, I mean both economically and socially. And so it's not a straightforward zero-sum, but they are very closely interrelated.

So I'd expect the more the issues that underpin the Paula Principle are addressed and at least in part solved, the fewer examples of the Peter Principle we'll have.

Rachel Salaman: And how widely does this idea resonate around the world in different cultures?

Tom Schuller: It applies universally in northern countries – developed, industrialized countries – in the sense that in all OECD countries this pattern of women outperforming men is true, and it is a remarkably universal pattern. And yet the careers gap, the gender pay gap, is closing only slowly. It doesn't yet apply globally, because in poorer countries women have not yet caught up, but this is an absolutely in-built trend and they are catching up and they will overtake.

Rachel Salaman: And what about other under-represented groups – does the Paula Principle apply to those?

Tom Schuller: Yes, I'm really nervous of that, because I'm less in any sense an expert about that than I am about gender. I guess when we come on to talk about the factors, some of those factors would apply to some under-represented groups, but I would expect it to be less appropriate for those groups, so it's not a universal.

Rachel Salaman: In the book, you talk about a "gap" and a "lag." What's the difference between those two things?

Tom Schuller: Right. Well a gap is, if we look at the position now, what is the difference between women and men, either generally or in a particular occupation or sector? So maybe there's an eight-point, or a 10-point, or 15-point difference in pay at any given point in time. The lag is how long does it take for things to change between the point at which women overtake men and where we are now?

So most people do know broadly that girls do better than boys at school, or women do, but what surprised me is how long ago the crossover point, what I call the crossover point, happened. So it was 20 years since more women than men started going into university. Now this is a long lag from then, and why it's politically important is, if you come up against the argument, as I have and many, many women have, "Well it's just a question of time, you know, just give it time," you're saying, "Well just how long are we expected to give it, and what's the pace of change?" But you can't expect instantly the Supreme Court to be 60 percent women. It is going to take time.

Rachel Salaman: In the book, you note that the extent of the pay gap depends on who is being compared with whom: women versus men, part-timers versus full-timers, and so on. But, isn't it all irrelevant unless we only ever talk about people who match exactly, the same qualifications, but essentially the same experience, the same number of years or a similar number of years in the job, the same level of job? Otherwise the comparisons don't make any sense.

Tom Schuller: Well of course you're right, in an ideal sense, and that's what we try and do, but firstly that's not always possible, down to whatever level of detail, but I think the really important point is that the pay gap is generally treated in terms of full-timers, so the sort of headline figure you get might be 10 percent, 11 percent, but actually, since a lot of women work part-time, you need a broader picture, and it is a problem. I mean, you're right, it's a problem identifying a single figure for the pay gap and you want to get into as much detail as you can.

And actually – interestingly, I think – if you just look at part-timers there's a reverse pay gap. And that's because, of the men who work part-time, they tend to be people who don't have careers, or are marginal, and so they actually do worse even than women part-timers. It's a complex picture. I mean, I'd just say, although pay is really important, above that, for me, in the Paula Principle, is the careers, the sense of progression and the sense of development and recognition.

Rachel Salaman: Well we'll talk about that in a bit more detail, but first we should touch on your five-factor approach, which explains the Paula Principle. How did you come up with that?

Tom Schuller: Inductively, I think, i.e. by talking to people, thinking a bit, checking it out with them; and of course, you know, there are people who have gone into it, most of these, in much greater depth than I have, and developed much more sophisticated typologies than mine. But I just thought this seems to be a reasonable classification, a reasonable way of arranging people's views and the sort of things that seem to hold women back. In testing that out it's nearly always prompted a good response, although some people have challenged some of the categories and said, "It's all about discrimination, it's all discrimination really."

Rachel Salaman: Well let's pick up on that point, because that's the first one, isn't it: discrimination and values.

Tom Schuller: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: So why link those two things?

Tom Schuller: Well, discrimination is not a sort of objective thing. We know that, historically, because we can look back on some of the forms of discrimination and think, "How can people have really tolerated that, why were women required to leave, stop being teachers when they got married?" That would be pretty bizarre now. So, the standards change. And incidentally, one interesting thing in that is that Scandinavians still talk a lot, as much about discrimination as other countries where, to any outsider, discrimination is much more blatant, and that's because the bar has gone up for them and they're much more conscious of things that other countries just wouldn't regard as issues.

So the criteria for judging what counts as discrimination is changing, and that's a reflection of the society's values or the organization's values, and I think these two are interlinked. I really wanted to make the point that it's something to reflect on, there isn't a simple answer that everyone sitting round the table would agree on, and that's a function of our values, I think.

Rachel Salaman: There's something else I noticed that wasn't highlighted in your book, which is this idea that if you have a super-competent person in a lower-level job, in a way you could say that helps everyone.

Tom Schuller: Yes, indeed, and I think it does, and probably most of us have seen examples of people who really drive things, drive things along but hold things together, whether it's the departmental administrator or whoever it might be. I think this is an excellent point to make, to say, "Well it's not all terrible if people don't go right up the ladder." But in a way, I come to that with the fifth factor, choice, which we can deal with now.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, shall we jump to that now?

Tom Schuller: Let's jump to that, because, you know, I do actually think it's the most interesting one and it's where I've had the most pushback from women. So the choice thing is positive choice. I have to keep emphasizing it. It's not the kind of choice where a woman says, "Well I could have got that job, but it would have involved traveling at weekends," or something, "and life at home would have been such hell that it wouldn't have been worth my while."

For me it's still a choice, but that's not the kind of choice I'm talking about. I'm talking about where things would have been OK in all the surrounding contexts, but a woman says to herself, "Do I need the money, do I need the status, do I need the hassle? No, no, no. Am I enjoying what I'm doing, am I still growing in what I'm doing? Yes, yes. So why should I go up or change jobs?" And that seems to me intrinsically a really sensible thing to do, that probably more of us, particularly more men, would be a little bit happier if we managed to do it.

But some people do need the money, so they've got to go for the job. So you're right, that from the organization's point of view, workplaces, quite a lot of them, do get a lot out of women who are working below their level. The question for me is, is that woman happy working at that level or is she actually prevented from making the choice to move up?

Rachel Salaman: Related to this actually is the second factor, caring responsibilities, which tend to fall more to women than men, and consequently can hold women back in their careers. Now if you think of a man who might take 10 years out of a banking career to be, let's say, an organic farmer, and then he goes back to banking, he would expect to be 10 years behind his former peers and stay that way for the remainder of his career. So why do we think it should be different for women raising a family, that they should be treated as if they hadn't taken a break?

Tom Schuller: Yes, that's a very unusual man you'd have found there, but to some extent that is a fair point, and there are least two reasons. One is, if we want our societies to continue and we want children to be there as a succeeding generation, it seems to me it's a general question about who has responsibilities and who pays what for rearing the children. I don't just mean obviously in the cash transfer sense, I mean who assumes whatever the costs are of rearing children, and that shouldn't all fall, or very heavily fall, on women alone.

The second point, I mean, organic farming may have lessons for banking, but bringing up children and running a household, and so on, I mean, I don't want to idealize this, but it's not like women go to sleep while they're bringing up children. They are still doing things, they're learning, they're developing and managing a household, and so on.

Having said that, one of the most interesting areas is what can we do to enable women who are bringing up children, if they are still the primary child rearers, so that it's not a complete 10 years' absence or five years' absence but they stay in touch in some way with employment generally or with their particular job.

Rachel Salaman: Now the third factor in this is self-confidence and identity. Could you talk a little bit about this and why you put those two elements together?

Tom Schuller: Yes. I mean, I think self-confidence, that was just something so many women told me about and I think is demonstrable, that they felt inhibited about going for a job. In the book I talk about the 60/20 rule, where if a man thinks he can do 60 percent of a job he'll say, "Oh I can do that." If a women thinks she can't do 20 percent she'll say, "Oh I can't go for that."

Identity comes really from some work I'd done before. I think we're going on to talk about the fourth factor, social capital, but identity capital is this sense of people having their own occupational identity, if you like, and they're confident in that. And unless you've got that, you can have all the qualifications in the world, but it doesn't do you much good because you don't present yourself, I don't just mean at an interview table but in the workplace, you don't convince people, because you're not convinced yourself, that you've got these talents and skills and competencies.

Rachel Salaman: So that's a little bit about identity capital. You also talk about human capital, and the fourth factor, as you mentioned, is social capital, so can you just unravel those things?

Tom Schuller: Yes. I mean, human capital is slightly economic jargon for, really, skills and competencies, and that's pretty well known in the literature at least. Social capital is more recent, and that's the networks that people have in order to get things done at work or outside work.

The fourth factor is women's absence of vertical social networks, because first of all we tend to associate with people of our own sex, actually. Funnily enough, networks often are women with women and men with men, and because, as things are at the moment, there are more men in higher occupational levels, and I'm not just talking about presidents or vice-presidents or whatever, but just generally speaking. Therefore, logically, men have more links with people above them, who are working at levels above them.

This isn't about nepotism, it's not about necessarily being favored by those men above, it's just picking up the language, learning about job opportunities, generally understanding what it is, the sort of vocabulary and the mores of life above that, whereas women tend to associate with people who are working at their own kinds of levels, and that's an explanatory factor, good or bad.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, and the fifth factor we've talked about, choice – I wanted to ask you a little bit about part-time versus full-time, because it seems to me that there are some jobs, jobs with a lot of responsibility, that are not suited to part-time work. How does that fit in to everything?

Tom Schuller: I agree completely. I mean, you're working on an oil rig, you're not going to be able to do that on a part-time basis. You mean the other jobs where there's responsibilities, you should be on call, and I do, I agree. But I think what's needed is to sit down and say, "Well, how many of these jobs that supposedly have to be full-time and totally on call really do need that?" I think raising the question of what you can do, and what's the cost of redoing the work schedules compared to the cost of losing really good people. So even on commercial grounds it's possible, and there's lots and lots of initiatives now, but still they're small-scale initiatives.

Rachel Salaman: Is there something also about slowing down productivity, because I think if you have decision makers out of the office for one or two days a week, things will slow down. And maybe that's OK?

Tom Schuller: I hadn't thought of that. I mean, I was just going to acknowledge the point that yes, it does make a difference, but maybe it is OK. I think the point is really asking the questions, how often do decisions have to be made absolutely instantly, and the answer is, sometimes, absolutely they do, and have we got the arrangements that will enable that to happen, but how often is it. And maybe a frictionless society or economy, as we're now moving towards, is not necessarily an efficient or ultimately an effective one.

So yes, of course there are circumstances where you need people around the whole time, or at least available the whole time, but then we've got job sharing and we've got modern communications – you know, if it's urgent and it has to be decided, then part of the deal is you're available.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, or someone else with equal responsibility can take that decision. Well, in the book, as well as explaining why the Paula Principle exists, you come up with some solutions, which you call the Paula Agenda. We've touched on some of these already, and the first is to reduce inequalities. So how do you do that on a practical basis?

Tom Schuller: I think issues around putting fairness at the heart of what we do, and fairness includes decent rewards for people who are exceptionally talented or have taken exceptional risks and so on, but actually looking at what deserves a reward and what doesn't.

Gathering pace now are things like looking at the ratios between average pay and top pay – supported, by the way, by some rather surprising institutes, like the Institute of Directors, which thinks that these ratios have got sort of out of kilter. But this is a broader social and economic question.

Rachel Salaman: Your second solution in the book is to prioritize universal and affordable childcare, and meet the elder care challenge. So, to play devil's advocate, why should people who choose not to have children pay for other people's childcare, so that those people can go to work?

Tom Schuller: Yes, and I think the question of exactly how the costs are distributed is an entirely fair one, but the short answer is, well, if we want a future generation that's brought up satisfactorily, without women having to sacrifice their careers for it, then there is more work to be done here.

So you can look at it just in, if you like, efficiency terms – you know, the next generation, and even people who don't have children have an interest in the next generation doing well. They also have an interest in businesses doing well, or organizations, public and private, doing well, and using the most talent, and it seems to me fair that, whilst the individuals should have their choices to make, we all have trade-offs to make, that there's a public factor here of saying, "We want to make best use of the talent that we've got in our society."

Rachel Salaman: Your third solution is to expand guidance services and mentoring networks. So what was your thinking with that?

Tom Schuller: At all levels, and I think this applies to men by the way as well, mentoring, having someone who will just act as a sounding board is important. But I think the guidance thing, I mean, we tend to think of careers guidance as only happening at the beginning: "So what do you want to do in life?" "I want to be a policeman or an academic," ;or whatever it is, and that's you, but this doesn't look realistic.

So at several points, including if you've had children or if you're coming back, to have the opportunity to say, "What type of career do I want, not just what kind of job, what kind of occupation, but what type of career do I want?" is really important. Everyone benefits from having a service of that kind.

Rachel Salaman: The fourth solution is somewhat related: to enable learning throughout life. Could you expand a bit on that, bearing in mind that you've already said that women continue their lifelong learning more than men already?

Tom Schuller: Yes. Well I think partly – and again, I don't want to stereotype – but if women have career breaks, when they come back, do they want to resume their previous career or do they want to switch, and how do they carry on developing. But I'd also say very emphatically that this is for men to engage in as well, as learners, which they do less well than women do. I mean, I think the evidence on that is absolutely clear.

As people have longer working lives, the opportunities to learn later in life become increasingly important, particularly, if we come back to the part-time issue, if those working lives are not continuous and uninterrupted. So for me the learning goes along with the flexibility and the change, different patterns of working life.

Rachel Salaman: And your fifth solution is to design reward systems to more accurately reflect real value, which is very tricky because determining value is so subjective. So what are some ways forward?

Tom Schuller: Well, I think the first is just to be aware of what it is that we're actually rewarding. Is it banging on the table and saying "I need this bonus" or "I want this promotion, you owe it to me," and this is stereotypical but it is much more male type behavior, and several women recounted to me, sometimes almost with a shrug of the shoulders, that this was behavior they observed in male colleagues that they didn't feel comfortable with themselves.

I think we, in general and in our workplace, have the choice: is that the kind of behavior you want to reward, or are we meritocrats? I mean, do we want to make sure that the people who do good work are the ones that are rewarded. I also use "recognized" as well as "rewarded," because in some sense this is not only about the financial rewards, it is about it being properly acknowledged. I don't just mean, "Oh yes, nice work, but we'll give the money to someone else," but properly recognized and rewarded with progression.

Rachel Salaman: And your last solution is to take a new approach to working times. I think this probably takes us back to the part-time/full-time discussion, but isn't it right that people who spend more of their time contributing to the success of an organization, they should be valued more highly than people of the same ability, doing the same job, who spend less time contributing, be they men or women?

Tom Schuller: Put like that, yes, but looking at it the other way around, people who work part-time, or less than full-time, often give more than their part-time hours actually signal, and what it shouldn't do, you shouldn't get over-rewarded for it, but it shouldn't set the trajectory of your career on a different and permanently lower path.

By the way, just to make sure this is appreciated, I mean, the real gaps that open up, career and pay, are in the later decades of people's working lives, so it's 45 onwards, that's when the trajectories really get wider, and of course that's 25 years' worth of working life, and then you've got pensions and so on beyond that, insofar as they're conditional on the latter years of your working life. So these are big differences later on in life.

Rachel Salaman: Bearing in mind everything we've covered, how optimistic are you about turning around the Paula Principle, and what do you think would make the biggest difference?

Tom Schuller: I do think there is a force there. I mean, I don't think this is something that's going to stop. The question is, first of all, how quickly can it reasonably be done. Secondly, can it be done in a way that sort of brings men and women along with it, as it were, rather than being set up as a sort of contest. I think there have been some terrific changes in attitudes as well as actual practice and behavior.

So I am an optimist, but I just hope it can go faster. I think the single measure would be to somehow abolish this full-time/part-time division, and then perhaps, if I'm allowed my own particular one, is really to enable people to carry on learning throughout their lives – men and women – in ways that help them fulfill themselves at work but also outside work.

Tom Schuller, talking to me in London. The name of Tom's book again is The Paula Principle: How and Why Women Work Below Their Level of Competence. I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.