Women need less empowerment blather and more childcare

Hello and welcome to Working It.

Friend of the Newsletter (FOTN), Kevin Delaney, was in London last week and came to FT HQ to meet our team of Work & Careers and management journalists.

Kevin, who is the NY-based chief executive and editor-in-chief of Charter, has been contributing his insights on the dizzyingly fast changes 💨 in the US workplace since the start of 2025. (See below for his latest instalment.)

We were delighted to meet Kevin IRL, after so much virtual talk. And as the fifth anniversary of the first Covid-19 lockdown approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about what has (and hasn’t) changed since then in the world of work — and why? Here’s my peeve: why is Zoom fatigue still a thing? Why do we keep making ourselves ill with back-to-back virtual meetings? Keen to hear your reflections on this and anything else — isabel.berwick@ft.com.

Read on for a bit of International Women’s Day context around the UK’s dismal performance in gender equality at work rankings, and in Office Therapy, I ask: how should we proceed at work when we are feeling *very* under the weather? Asking for a friend 👀.

Expensive childcare still hampers women’s progress at work 😡

International Women’s Day, on March 8, offers a neat peg for all sorts of vaguely♀related news stories and surveys. My inbox is heaving with press releases that I won’t read (I refer you to last week’s newsletter: how to give yourself some time back).

So let’s focus on hard numbers, which this year come from PwC’s 12th annual Women in Work survey, monitoring progress towards gender parity across 33 OECD countries. How are women doing, really, in workplaces? The headline figures for the UK are not good: we dropped from 17th to 18th in the index — and that’s down from 10th in 2020. This represents “the steepest post-pandemic decline among OECD countries — with Iceland, New Zealand and Luxembourg the best-performing.” 🤦🏼‍♀️

What’s the big picture here? I asked Alia Qamar, senior economist at PwC UK. “This year’s report comes at a particularly significant time globally, with stagnating economic growth, anti-DEI movements, and other geopolitical issues. Similar to previous years, this year’s index update indicates slow, but not insignificant progress towards gender parity on average across OECD countries. Strikingly, however, are the potential economic gains that can be realised by enhancing female participation in the labour market.

“New analysis this year suggests that improvements in female participation, if kept at the same pace as seen between 2011 and 2023, could lead to an aggregate increase in UK GDP of approximately £43.5bn by 2030. This economic expansion is only one of the benefits of greater integration of women in the workforce, alongside reducing income inequality, increasing efficient allocation of the workforce and strengthening the overall skills base.”

Some very good news there — but what’s causing the UK’s lag? Part of the issue, which will come as no surprise to Working It readers, is the high cost of UK childcare relative to many other countries 👶🏽. As PwC explains: “When examining the participation rate gaps between male and female workers, the largest gap is in the career establishment/family formation and childbearing age groups of between 25 and 34 years.”

One thing that struck me in the report was the relatively low percentage of full-time female workers in the UK: significantly below the OECD average, at 68.9 per cent compared to 78.1 per cent. Again, some of this can be explained by the childcare issue, as Alia explains: “The UK has the fourth highest childcare costs among OECD countries — so many women are forced to choose more flexible forms of working, ie part-time. In comparison, Icelandic families spend just 5 per cent of their income on childcare, contributing to a 96 per cent enrolment rate [in childcare] for children aged three to five. The gender pay gap is also higher in the UK than the OECD average — this discourages women from pursuing full-time employment.”

The upside is that Scotland is doing well. Lots of reasons for this (eg high numbers of people in public sector jobs, where the gender pay gap tends to be lower). But the biggest factor is — you guessed it — childcare: “Scotland has offered universal free early learning and childcare for all 3- and 4-year-olds and eligible 2-year-olds since 2021. This potentially also presents a positive outlook for England and Wales, where further childcare support was introduced more recently.”

We’ve been talking about the need for high-quality, affordable childcare for decades. My FT library colleagues dug up a piece I wrote in 2001, when I was paying half my net income in childcare fees. So little has changed 😔.

Office Therapy

The problem: My problem this week: I write this newsletter on my own, which is fine (who doesn’t want autonomy at work? That’s our most basic desire) . . . until it isn’t. I’m writing much of this from bed, after picking up a bug 🐜 because (I am guessing) I was exhausted after a stressful week outside work. Let us never divide the physical from the psychological! How can we manage to disentangle from work at short notice?

The advice: I am crowdsourcing your ideas on this — email me at isabel.berwick@ft.com. We will report back when I am firing on all cylinders again. But first, here’s some advice from someone we should all listen to: Simon Gilbody, professor of psychological medicine and director of the Behavioural Therapeutics Lab [BTxLab] at the University of York.

“First, manage expectations to prevent a deluge when back at your desk. Master the art of the ‘out of office email’. Let others know you’re not going to answer. Say as much as you want about why you’re not working. Indicate when you might be back. Many seemingly urgent things aren’t really.

“Second, hatch a plan to re-engage and to manage the ‘to-do’ list upon your return. Behavioural activation [the less famous cousin to cognitive behavioural therapy] works well. This means you don’t start any day without a plan. Activity scheduling gets you out of bed and helps with re-engagement. Set small achievable actions. This prevents paralysis and becoming overwhelmed. Prioritise by urgency and importance. Incorporate rewarding and also purposeful activities [these are not always the same]. Follow the plan, not the mood.”

Oh, I like that — follow the plan, not the mood 👏🏼.

Got a problem for Office Therapy? Email me at isabel.berwick@ft.com. We anonymise everything, properly.

US workplace insights from Charter: How to manage a ‘frozen’ job market

This week, I asked Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief of Charter, a US future-of-work media and research firm, to share the latest he’s hearing about the state of hiring. Last week, The Atlantic magazine declared “The Job Market is Frozen” — but what does that mean, exactly?

Kevin told me that, while the unemployment rate remains a low 4 per cent in the US, businesses in most parts of the economy aren’t hiring or firing aggressively — and workers aren’t quitting jobs, either. “The lack of movement is hurting white-collar workers — including those in information technology jobs, where the unemployment rate was higher than the national average at 5.7 per cent in January — and college graduates, who are facing tougher hiring conditions.

“The Big Freeze has also contributed to a decline in the number of workers who are engaged by their work. They’re feeling stuck, with limited internal mobility since virtually everyone is frozen in their ranks, and will happily hop to other companies when conditions improve.”

So what should managers and leaders do? Kevin suggests “one good tactic is to make sure that key team members have access to meaningful skills-building opportunities, especially ones tied to interesting, high-impact projects. Another is for managers to invest their own time. Research consistently shows that weekly one-on-one check-in meetings with a manager are one of the biggest drivers of engagement and performance. A simple shout out or ‘thank you’ to an employee, in public or private contexts, also has similar benefits.”

Ah, the cheap and effective “thank you” — if only more managers would realise that this is the key to happier workplaces 🤷‍♀️.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Can businesses ever run a true meritocracy? Emma Jacobs takes the word/concept of the moment and finds out what exactly means — and whether “merit” based hiring and promotion can ever be free of bias.

2. From Death Star to Raccoon Feet — have quirky meeting room names gone too far? I mean, yes, but don’t let that put you off reading this entertaining article from Clara Murray.

3. Storm Chasers: Behind the scenes at BigJet TV A charming account from RM Clark about a passion project that has become a thriving business and community hub: footage of jets taking off and landing at airports round the world.

4. Students must learn to be more than mindless ‘machine minders’: Sarah O’Connor charts the problems for students using AI on a grand scale: by not learning the foundational skills, and relying on AI, they lose important knowledge.

5. They set out to document a ‘perfect’ marriage. The results were complicated: A new documentary about the photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his wife Maggie Barrett, an artist and writer, has been made by another artist couple — Baya Simons interviews them. I’m intrigued by this exploration of professional and personal tensions.

One more thing . . . 

The WSJ has a great feature called “If These Résumés Could Talk” where recruiters talk about their most memorable candidates and epic interview fails. This instalment, featuring an interviewee in full Shakespearean dress, is my favourite so far.

This week’s book giveaway

Stop Sh*tting Yourself: 15 Life Lessons That Might Help You Calm the F*ck Down by Sam Delaney, opens with the story of how he caused a social media furore after making provocative remarks on a TV breakfast show . . . about pharmacists.

It prompted self-examination and honest change on Sam’s part. Each chapter (Stop Sh*tting Yourself About Work, and so on) has examples from Sam’s life and how he worked to change things for the better. This is aimed (mainly) at men but it’s a very different, far more down-to-earth tone, than self-help books by optimisation-seekers and billionaires. And it’s all the more welcome for it. Enter here by 5pm on Friday for the chance to win one of 10 free copies.

A word from the Working It community

Last week, I showcased a new scheme at Oxford university, preparing students for work in the non-profit and charity sectors. I got some interesting responses including some pushback: “Why not spotlight the organisations connecting non-student young people with charities and social enterprises, where they can build skills and gain experience?”

Very happy to do so — this reader mentions in particular organisations matching young people with charities as trustees, such as the Young Trustees Movement. Happy to hear of other examples.

The FT Money Clinic podcast is back — with a twist 🥳!

Claer Barrett, a dear friend and FT colleague, and the brains behind our Sort Your Financial Life Out newsletter has a new “investment clinic” podcast series, featuring six very different FT readers talking about their real-life experiences of investing. From high-earning 20-somethings with a taste for exotic investments to a woman who is too scared to invest an inheritance, and older professionals planning their retirement, there are lessons here for everyone. Listen to Money Clinic on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.