Men are working less since Covid while women put in more hours

A series of exits of highprofile females have fuelled fears over inequality in the City, reports Eir Nolsøe

MEN have been working an hour less each week since lockdown, in a blow to Rishi Sunak’s efforts to boost the economy.

Men worked an average of 35.3 hours per week in 2022, according to new data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) – roughly an hour less than in 2019, and more than three hours less than in 1998.

By contrast, women slightly increased their average weekly hours from 27.4 in 2019 to 27.9 hours in 2022. This was not enough to make up for the reduction in men’s hours, with the overall effect equivalent to losing 310,000 people from the workforce.

The figures are a blow to the Prime Minister’s plans to improve Britain’s economic performance following a decade-long slump in productivity that has depressed real wages and reduced the tax take.

Statisticians also revealed generational differences in trends related to the number of hours worked.

The ONS said Gen Z men and women were on average working fewer hours compared with pre-covid, while Baby Boomers were working longer hours.

The ONS said: “Trends in average weekly hours worked are very different for men and women.

“For men, average weekly hours worked have dropped significantly. In comparison, average weekly hours for women have trended upwards.”

The ONS said that a general shift towards a shorter working week had also been driven by women and older workers making up a larger share of today’s workforce, as these groups worked fewer hours to begin with. However, it added that there had been a “significant fall” in the number of hours worked by full-time men aged between 25 and 49 since 1998.

It said the increase in the number of hours worked by women was “an indication of greater flexibility in working arrangements”, as working from home became more common during the pandemic.

But it added that increases in women’s hours worked had not offset a decline in hours worked by men.

Statisticians said the average working week was now around 20 minutes shorter than in 2019.

The ONS said the overall reduction in hours was equivalent to 310,000 fewer people in work. Statisticians noted that average hours worked by men fell in every age category except those aged over 65 years during the pandemic, in a continuation of the trends seen over the previous quarter of a century.

Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, said the reduction in hours had been driven by men in low-paid jobs. “We know that higher income men are tending to work longer hours and lower-income men are working shorter hours,” she said.

Men still account for 17.15m of Britain’s workforce, compared with 15.7m women in work, according to the ONS.

‘I didn’t feel that when I was chief executive that I was held to a different standard’

‘Women want to achieve more than just financial results’

One must look no further than the FTSE 100’s list of chief executives to see how hard it is for women to reach the top, as an overwhelming 91pc of positions are held by men.

However, even for those who do break through the glass ceiling, research shows that the experience is not all that it seems. The challenges facing women in the most senior City roles were reflected in a new report from recruiter Russell Reynolds, which found that women accounted for a record tenth of all global chief executive departures last year.

According to financier Baroness Morrissey, former chief executive of Newton Investment Management and mother of nine, female chiefs fall victim to “tall poppy syndrome” in the UK.

“Often the women that take on these roles are very high profile and then we have this tendency in this country to cut people down,” Morrissey says.

Growing concern over a lack of equality in the City comes after a year of high-profile female exits.

This includes Dame Sharon White, who announced plans in October to step down as chairman of John Lewis, and Sarah Bentley, who resigned from Thames Water amid fierce scrutiny of the supplier’s performance. Morrissey says there is no doubt that the women in question “all suddenly came under a lot of public pressure”.

Dame Inga Beale, the former chief executive of Lloyd’s of London, says female executives still face huge challenges even once they reach the top. “I didn’t particularly feel that when I was chief executive that I was held to a different standard but sometimes there were criticisms saying that I needed to behave more like a man,” she says.

“When you get to be the chief executive, if you have a different style that is not necessarily well understood or appreciated by others, they may expect you to perhaps behave in what is seen as a more traditional way.”

The media can play a big role in elevating the profiles of female chief executives, says Dame Inga, although she sought to block out any “noise”.

“I tended to ignore the media because I didn’t want to get distracted from my job and it was my coping mechanism,” she says.

Jemima Olchawski, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality, says that even women who are earning 10 or 20 times the average salary still come up against gender barriers. “You might be a hotshot running a FTSE 100 company and getting paid a fortune,” she says.

“But that doesn’t mean people aren’t expecting you to organise play days or care for a sick relative, or suddenly turn up to collect a kid from school if they are feeling unwell.”

Childcare duties and caring for elderly parents are still overwhelmingly seen as a woman’s responsibility, she says. “It’s so embedded that it isn’t about rational choices as to who has the most time or whose time in economic terms is the most expensive,” says Olchawski. “It’s about what the expectation is or who is perceived as appropriate and competent to do it.”

Problems are being compounded by the fact that many employers have not adapted to the kind of flexibility needed to help women succeed, Olchawski adds. “We still have working practices that are stuck in the 1950s,” she says.

The challenges around childcare are echoed by Shevaun Haviland, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). “Clearly, there’s still a huge challenge,” she says. “Research for the BCC in March last year showed two thirds of women felt they had missed out on career progression because of childcare responsibilities.”

Olchawski adds that women are also judged more harshly for their performance regardless of seniority.

“We know that women are appraised more negatively than men for objectively the same performances,” she says. “So that’s rooted in some really powerful ideas about gender norms – about how women should behave.”

Women have on average lasted

5.2 years as chief executives compared with 8.1 years for men since 2018, according to an analysis of 12 stock markets – including the FTSE 100.

Studies looking more widely at women in leadership roles have found similar patterns. For example, female MPS tend to stay in their jobs for shorter periods than their male counterparts.

“A theme that came up was that it’s such a high-pressured environment that perhaps it’s not something that you can maintain for very long, particularly when you are balancing responsibilities,” Olchawski says.

She adds that for those with children, often it is only possible “because they have a partner who is prepared to support them wholeheartedly”.

She says: “And there may be a limit to the amount of time that it’s reasonable to ask their partner to make those kinds of sacrifices.”

Morrissey also highlights that work cannot always come before family. “Women want to achieve more than just financial results,” she says. “When I was chief executive of Newton, I didn’t want to delegate everything to do with my children.

“We had a nanny and my husband was at home since we had the fourth child so I was very lucky compared with most women. But I still didn’t want to just see my children at the weekend. I wanted to be an active parent.”

Dame Inga says such deliberations are common among the women she has met in the City. “When you become a chief executive, your time is rarely your own,” she says. “It’s really tough to get that balance right.” When she decided to step down after five years at the helm of Lloyd’s, Dame Inga had many other things she was looking forward to.

“I felt I needed five years to achieve what I wanted to achieve,” she says. “And then I thought it was time for someone else to take over.”

This perhaps reflects a sense of how women are more likely than men to hand over control when they feel the time is right. “I believe there have been studies into how females think of power and how it means different things to them and it doesn’t always mean just staying in that top job,” says Dame Inga. “I think there is a difference between the genders in that regard.”

There is no silver bullet for solving the problem of female representation in the City, but Morrissey believes that a more flexible approach is key.

“We’ve still got some way to go to modernise working practices,” she says.

“I don’t think a chief executive should be working 80-100 hours a week, because they’re not going to make great judgments. But that’s often still the way it works and that’s not good for anybody, man or woman.”