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Tired of bashing your head against the glass ceiling and beating the same old diversity drum? Well, spare a thought for a bunch of Italian women who were reportedly bounced out of their jobs recently when their employer, a small engineering company, had to make a third of its 30-strong workforce redundant.

The firm, according to The Guardian, decided to hold on to its 12 male employees, and make the 13 redundancies from among its 18 female employees, on the grounds that the women could spend more time with their families, and weren’t the main bread winners anyway.

That sort of thing couldn’t happen here, you think?

The most recent statistics indicate that sex discrimination still accounts for the highest number of discrimination claims lodged with employment tribunals. Admittedly there is an incentive for employees to go down this route as awards for successful discrimination claims are uncapped, unlike those for unfair dismissal. But maybe there’s still plenty of inequality in the workplace just waiting to be challenged.

A story we ran recently about Wal-Mart successfully blocking an equal pay/sex discrimination claim class action from a million female employees, got a record number of hits on our website. Maybe it was our sub-head that attracted visitors: ‘Decision will prevent similar class actions against large firms’. Sighs of relief spreading from here way across the Atlantic?

Probably not. The HR community knows it cannot afford to be complacent. A few months back, chairman of commodities firm Glencore (stock market flotation value £36bn) Simon Murray was reported as justifying his reluctance for boardroom quotas, or even hiring young women, on the grounds that, “I know they’re going to get pregnant and … go off for nine months.”

He thought this made women “not so ambitious in business as men because … they like bringing up their children and all sorts of other things”. 

Lord Davies, author of the Women on Boards report, called the comments “unforgiveable” and about 30 years out of date. Murray later said he was “100 per cent committed to equal opportunities in the boardroom and across a company’s structure”. Now where have I heard that one before?

There are going to be more equality cases going through the tribunal system for HR people to defend until those holding the corporate purse strings catch up with the direction that the rest of us are heading in.

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HR wants to rebuild its image as the organisational guardian of moral values, says Jill Evans

At this year’s HR Forum aboard the cruise liner Aurora, the wind of change was blowing through the restaurants and seminar rooms. Over lunch, delegates were debating the ethics of super-injunctions, and in seminars, some speakers were giving the profession’s ethical agenda a good dusting off. One senior HR director described what happened when his company finally twigged that a manager was useless and sacked him. The action was apparently greeted with a huge round of applause and questions from the manager’s team on what had taken them so long to do anything about it. Staff had been “in bits dealing with this man,” the HR director said. The function, he thought, “had a responsibility to other people whose jobs and lives are being made a misery. If anybody has a duty of care over this, it’s me.”

A plenary speaker said: “It’s not just power that counts. Consciousness is the most important thing. Inform people and they motivate themselves. Change is our destiny. Routine is a standstill. We need people who are open and alive.”
In another session, an HR director said the profession was in danger of becoming the “next set of Luddites” – always drifting back to well-tried and tested processes, driven by a primeval survival instinct to toe the organisational line. He thought that if HR wanted to make itself “irrisistible” to organisations, it not only had to be technically proficient in a range of fields, it also had to be driven by ethics. The session decided it was HR’s responsibility to see that people were treated fairly, and sometimes that included being an arbitrator between the employee and the organisation. HR’s job was about respect for individuals, about becoming a philosophy rather than just a department and, while it had to be rugged over business decisions, it had to be “the conscience and heart of the organisation” too.

Nobody was suggesting a return to the old “tea and sympathy” days – but they did want to ditch the image of a function that relied solely on rules to dictate the direction of travel, and emphasise HR’s role as the guardian of organisational higher values.

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In Davos they’ll be rolling up the razor wire and storing it away for another year - and 5,000 part-time soldiers (the Swiss have to do three weeks’ military service a year), having been on special anti-terrorism duty during the World Economic Forum (WEF), will be going back to their day jobs as bank managers, accountants and farmers. The super-rich and super-powerful corporate and political leaders that had occupied the town’s best hotels will have dispersed to all parts of the world.

A lot of people work part-time in Switzerland, but often they’re doing more than one job. I was holidaying in Davos the week before the conference, and my ski instructor worked all day for the ski school and all night in the resort’s casino during the winter months. Come spring he’ll return to his young family in Brazil where he’s trying to establish his own business.

A far cry from a recent downbeat Daily Mail story that claimed 97 per cent of the 200,000 jobs created in the UK last year were part-time, leading to a “sluggish recovery with legions of workers having to accept a so-called ‘McJob’ to make ends meet”. The fast food chain would robustly deny that taking a job with them, part-time or otherwise, was settling for second best. But there is no doubt that part-time work is on the increase, and unfortunately it’s not always of the highest calibre or the first choice of those doing it.

A recent European Union study confirms that part-time work has increased worldwide, and especially in Europe, over the past 20 years. In the Netherlands half the workforce is part-time, against a quarter in the UK, Sweden, Germany and Denmark. But four times as many women work part-time than men across Europe. The same study found that part-time work was “marginal in highly qualified positions” making it a potential barrier to women becoming senior managers.

Is this why part-timers earn less and have fewer career progression opportunities than full-timers? And why men still outnumber women at the Davos conference by five to one? The WEF organisers are doing their bit to rectify the imbalance - they set a minimum quota of one woman in every five for participants attending this year’s conference. 

In the UK we are told that the last thing businesses need is more red tape (except when it comes to employment tribunals). But without better regulation of the labour market, coupled with HR pushing for improved equality, what is going to give the UK’s army of part-timers the leg up the career ladder they so richly deserve, and our economy the boost we’re all waiting for?
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Isn’t it incredible? When times are tough, people run right back to their deeply held prejudices.

Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, writing in the Daily Mail, recently suggested that legislation extending maternity and parental rights at work might be “harming women’s chances of employment”. Only with employers struggling to get out of the dark ages.

Companies in the know about the “war for talent” are only too well aware why women need to be given a level playing field at work. Take Cisco, for example. That company is working to remove sexual stereotyping. It sees equality as a “business imperative”, driving innovation and promoting customer understanding. There are numerous other examples of successful companies thinking along exactly the same lines.

It’s true that employers have mixed feelings about the legislative rules mooted by the EU and the government to create a more equal society - wrangling over the forthcoming equality bill is proof of this. But take away the advancement of employment protection and we return to child labour and the exploitation of the weakest.

Legislation can’t achieve equality on its own. Society needs to want to make women the equal of men at work. And we don’t want levelling down – Shulman’s preferred model seems to hark back to the days when men and women had to pretend their jobs took precedence over their families.

There are advantages for all of us in men taking a greater share of the responsibility of child rearing. And this won’t happen until all organisations, and the cultures within which they operate, appreciate that a proportion of the population, both men and women, need understanding – and legal protection – while they care for the young and the old among their family members.

We may feel sorry for Alexandra Shulman as she is faced with her “stream of women into my office to discuss their futures, their maternity leaves, four-day working weeks” and so on – but surely all she needs is the advice and support of a good HR manager?
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