After you, ladies..
Tuesday 19th September 2017
Once again another example of the gender gap. At the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year preliminaries, Shriti Vadera – now Chairman of Santander, with a couple of non-execs at Billiton and Astra Zeneca , and once a Minister under Gordon Brown during the financial crisis and coming from a pretty starry City background – noted that not enough women are in the big jobs.
Sure – they aren’t. I’d add to that they aren’t in the right jobs – survey after survey claims that women are academically brighter than men.
This morning on my JazzFM business show, I had the happy task of interviewing a woman who had not only leapt over the shameful male dominated university career trajectory – but had swapped Arts for a career in coding – engineering software for the future. She loves it. And wants to encourage others to do the same.
And I’ve also spoken to women who have adopted and excelled in the STEM ( science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects. But the fact that’s it’s a story tells you all you want to know. These women are the exceptions.
My interviewee this morning talked about girls being given pink laptops at school..how crass is that.
At the heart of it is a necessary teacher revolution. Until the educational establishment is really ready for some curriculum change – this will all continue. Anyone up for the NUT conference next year?
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