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Six thousand women missing from 
boardrooms, politics and courts
Polly Curtis
Friday January 5, 2007
The glass ceiling is still stopping 6,000 women
from getting any of the top 33,000 jobs in Britain,
says new research from the Equal Opportunities
Commission. A new law to help women, the Sex
Discrimination Act, came in 30 years ago, but
there are still not nearly enough women in the
country’s boardrooms, politics and courts.
Some successful women have a nanny to
help with their children, but they still can’t go
far in their careers because men control the
top professions and they don’t want women to
choose their working hours.
Very few women are getting top jobs, the report
says, and in some areas, numbers are falling.
The EOC’s last ‘Sex and Power’ survey showed
more women in parliament 12 months ago.
Now there are only 19.5% – lower than in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Rwanda.
Although a woman is chief executive of the
London Stock Exchange, and four senior judges
are female, now only 10.4% of the top 100
company directors are female and only 9.8% of
all judges are women.
Jenny Watson, chair of the EOC, said that these
numbers showed just how slowly things were
changing in powerful British institutions. It was
time not just to find more women to fill top jobs, 
but to change the attitudes that stop them. “Thirty
years on from the Sex Discrimination Act, women
rightly expect to share power. But as our survey
shows, that’s not the reality,” she said.
She said life was worse for everyone when
Britain’s top jobs were all male. If women had an
equal voice, our democracy and local communi-
ties would be stronger. And in business, we could
not afford to look at only half the population to fill 
the best jobs.
The commission identified the 33,000 most 
powerful jobs in business, politics, the law and
government in Britain. It said that women should
fill another 6,000 to be really representative. 
At the present rate of improvement, it would take
women 20 years to be equal in the civil service,
40 years in the law, and 60 years in the top 100
companies. But it would take 200 years – an-
other 40 elections – to reach an equal number
of MPs in parliament. By contrast, in the Scottish
assembly, nearly 40% are women and 51.7%
in Wales. The EOC recommended the Welsh
system, where political parties sometimes only
choose from women.
But figures for non-white women are worse. 
There are only two black women MPs, four
non-white top company directors and nine
non-white top civil servants. “If we want our
communities to thrive, this has to change,” says
the report.
It adds that more successful women find it as 
hard to get the jobs they want as women in lower
paid work. As for age, in their 20s men earn
3.7% more, but they earn 10.7% more in their
30s – because after childbirth, women’s earning
power goes down. Men’s doesn’t.
The UK pay gap is one of the biggest in Europe
– 17% for full-time staff and 38% for part-time
– because part-time workers are more often low
paid. Then, when they have children, they lose
opportunities for promotion and earn even less,
the Women and Work Commission found last
year.
If women ask to choose their working hours, they
often lose their jobs, so women with children
often have to find less professional jobs to keep 
working. “Extending the right to ask for flexible 
working to everyone in the workplace would
change that culture and enable more women to
reach the top,” said Ms Watson.