Report says women in North still not achieving equality

WOMEN are still not breaking through the "glass ceiling" to top management and better pay, a new report from the Equal Opportunities Commission for Northern Ireland has indicated. The commission report, Women and Men in Northern Ireland, shows only one in five women are managers in the North compared to one in three in Britain.

It also says women in non-manual jobs get around 73 per cent of men's earning, while in manual jobs the figure is 76 per cent. Northern Ireland has "significantly higher" proportions of low-paid women workers than other countries in the EU,

Fewer girls than boys take computer studies, physics and technology which the report describes as vital subjects in today's employment market. "However, if they do take GCSE or A levels in these subjects, girls do better than boys," the report states.

It adds that men are three times more likely than women to find a place on a British government training scheme and that only 12 per cent of local councillors in the North are women - considerably fewer than in Britain, where more than a quarter of councillors are women.

Ms Joan Smyth, the commission's chairwoman and chief executive, said that at the beginning of its 20th anniversary, the commission wanted to highlight the progress women had made. "But this document shows clearly that they have not reached a position of equality here," she added.

"They are still earning less than men, they are still working in a narrow band of often lower-paid jobs than men, they get less training than men and there are fewer of them in positions of real influence," Ms Smyth said.

She said women were too often invisible or misrepresented in statistics. "An obvious example is unemployment. The lower figures for women's unemployment mask the fact that official statistics just don't record many women who are in fact looking for work and that many others are in very low-paid part-time work," she said.