Jane* went to a "very gung-ho" all-girls Sydney high school where she was told "you can do anything" and "one of you will be the first female prime minister of Australia". She spent long hours climbing the corporate ladder while her two kids were in childcare or being looked after by a nanny. She has worked in banking, telecommunications, IT and the public service. But now, nearing 50 and with three degrees – two of them at masters level – she is exasperated at how hard it has been to get ahead as a woman in the workforce.
"I know dozens of women in their mid-40s and above who are completely competent," says Jane, who currently contracts to the public service as an organisational change manager.
![Young businesswoman at her desk in home studio.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170826082357im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/g/h/3/8/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwn3xf.png/1497364406680.jpg)
"They could be running divisions, they could be CEOs, they are completely ethical – they aren't going to be touching up their team member at the photocopier – but they've just given up. They've plateaued with their careers and gone, 'It's not going to happen for me.' "
Jane now avoids applying for senior roles as she doesn't think corporate Australia is ready to offer flexibility in those positions. Yet she wonders if she should make a final play for a higher-level job, or stay contracting on good pay. "There is a great financial benefit to keep working and I don't want to just bail," she says. "I also feel a responsibility that the next generation of women. But for me, I'm at a crossroads."
Jane is so disillusioned with her career trajectory that she is encouraging her daughter to start her own business. Her experiences fit neatly into the The Paula Principle, a new book which argues that most women are working beneath their level of competence. The proposition came to British academic and author Tom Schuller after years of studying adult education patterns and the outcomes of studying. He named it in homage to the Peter Principle, a management theory formulated by Laurence J. Peter in 1969 that argued that the selection of a candidate for a position (and in those days they were mostly men) is based on the candidate's performance in their current role, rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role, and that managers rise to the level of their incompetence.
Schuller found that while women were surging ahead of men at all levels of education, once they start working, their career paths became flatter and more broken, their salaries lower and their retirement incomes smaller.
"How come if women are so completely ahead of men in every respect when it comes to education, that it doesn't seem to be paying off for them, at least in the material sense of pay and careers?" Schuller tells Sunday Life.
Australia is part of a trend across highly developed countries where women outperform men educationally. In 2015, 90 per cent of Australian women aged 20-24 had completed year 12, compared with 83 per cent of men. In the same year, girls in NSW were top of the class in 70 per cent of HSC subjects. Women are also more likely than men these days to earn diplomas, degrees and post-graduate qualifications.
Yet men earn an average $27,000 a year more across all industries and occupations, according to 2016 research from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. And at the top end of town, five out of six CEOs are men. The University of Sydney's Professor Marian Baird, one of Australia's leading researchers into women and work, says it has been known for years that "most women" are working below their skill level. "They top education, but once they hit the labour market women are not getting a return on their investment," she says.
Baird observes that this first became an issue about a decade ago, when increasing numbers of women returning from maternity leave found they weren't getting the same quality of work. "It's fairly well-known that a third of women return to a lower position after maternity leave," says Baird. "They get different clients, they get different projects."
Schuller suggests a number of reasons as to why the Paula Principle is playing out in the workplace – discrimination, women's responsibilities outside of work, a shortage of self-confidence, male networking and through choice – all reflected in the conversations I had with women for this story
Anna*, 42, from Melbourne, believes a lack of self-confidence stopped her from being promoted in the media and advertising worlds. "I used to watch this guy at work," she says. "He wasn't competent but he was the most extraordinary self-promoter I've ever seen. It made me realise how I needed to put myself forward more."
How come if women are so ahead of men in every respect when it comes to education, that doesn't seem to be paying off?
Whereas Anna previously would defer to male managers in meetings so as not to appear to be competing with them, she now uses "I" rather than "we" to highlight her role at work. "Men are very good at providing what is essentially a running commentary on doing their job, whereas women just get on with it," she points out. "Unfortunately, you and your work can easily go unnoticed if you don't talk up what you do and your role in a project's success."
Anna also believes there should be quotas, as her industry is dominated by "traditional" men who tend to promote people like themselves. "I don't think anything is going to change until there is structural change."
Jenny*, a former high-level executive at a computer firm who is now in her 50s, has seen competent women leave jobs because they were overlooked for promotion in favour of male colleagues.
"Men recruit what they know, and support and encourage what they know, and not what is potentially right for the role," she says. "We don't have a vertical network similar to men to help us navigate those senior jobs."
In her senior role, Jenny managed 2500 staff but was working 18 hours a day. She quit to spend more time with her son. "To me, women have a more balanced view on how they progress their lives," she say. "They have to make more trade-offs to get better balance to keep functioning."
The women-at-work issue tends to be dominated by discussions about poor representation on boards, in CEO positions and in management. Schuller's book also explores how the Paula Principle affects women at all levels of the work heirarchy.
"There's been such a lot of talk about the glass ceiling, which is still an important issue, but women at other organisational levels have had much less attention paid to them," says Schuller.
Louise*, a 49-year-old living on Sydney's lower north shore, has an arts degree and a masters in business marketing but has deliberately chosen to work below her level of competency. After a stint in banking and the notfor-profit sector, the only job she could find in her mid-40s that was flexible for school pick-ups was an entry-level role in publishing. "My hourly rate was the same as the 15-year-old neighbour who sets up the goals at soccer on Saturdays," she says. "I was treated like the office junior and it was all to get flexibility. Inside my head I was screaming." Louise resigned and is now freelancing as a copywriter
Schuller suggests we need to rethink what success at work looks like, arguing that it shouldn't just be about having a full-time job and climbing to the top of a corporation. He proposes "mosaic careers", where people chop and change, take breaks, seek other forms of progress and find meaning that doesn't necessarily mean climbing a ladder.
Diana* has pursued a mosaic career, and at 40 is now working as a machine operator in south-west Sydney. But until she was 35, she worked as a chef at restaurants across the city, from fine-dining establishments to the local RSL. "It's a tough occupation, especially for females – quite maledominated, and then you fall pregnant," she says with a laugh. The new mother replaced the demanding shifts of kitchen life with the more regular timetable of factory work, and doesn't mind the change. "It's uncanny how the skills in the kitchen apply in a lot of areas that require a team."
Yet she faces similar discrimination. "I'd say it is about 80 per cent women in the warehouse, yet most males tend to shoot right past you when it comes to promotions. It doesn't matter if they've been there five minutes."
To truly fix the Paula Principle, Schuller argues that we need to dethrone the full-time work model and redefine part-time work as jobs which involve less than eight hours a week. He says women who work three or four days a week are still considered "part time", which has a negative impact on their career as they are seen as being less committed.
"It is very clear that it's not so much having children but moving into parttime work that blights women's careers," he says. "And it's a very arbitrary division. People who work part time are often more committed to their work. It is a mental model in our heads that anyone who shifts out of full time is less committed to their work. This idea needs a real rethink."
Schuller adds that there also needs to be a shift in work patterns. "The situation won't really change for women until many more men are working nonfull-time and in non-traditional patterns of work. So far, the trend has been for women to converge on male patterns – it's all women looking more like men. Now we need to make more men look like women. We need a full spread where both men and women can have a range of different shapes and types of jobs and careers."
* Names have been changed.
The Paula Principle by Tom Schuller is published by Scribe.
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