Low on the Hogg

REUTERS chairman Sir Christopher Hogg has finally accepted that he has become a liability rather than an asset. Senior sources close to the struggling media and financial information group tell me he has decided to go after 18 years at the helm, though the exact date of his departure is still up in the air.

While the group's preferred successor, Unilever boss Niall FitzGerald, is already on the Reuters board, it is not yet clear whether he will agree to take over and, if so, whether that will be in time for Hogg to step down at the annual meeting later this month.

What is clear, however, is that the longer Hogg lingers, the more damage he is doing to chief executive Tom Glocer.

Reuters' fortunes have gone dramatically backwards since Glocer - an American and the first non-journalist to run the operation - took only a year. The shares have crashed by 90%.

Yet Glocer has his supporters, inside the company and in the wider market. Many investors accept he is dealing with a legacy of complacency - one that took Reuters' supremacy for granted and failed to notice that upstart Bloomberg was pinching much of its business.

Glocer is credited with taking what, for Reuters at least, are dramatic actions. But his very rich pay package - he picked up a bonus of £612,000 last year when Reuters reported record losses of £493m - has come in for substantial criticism.

Hogg - implicated in the group's wayward past - has been incapable of deflecting the anger. He has argued that Glocer is doing a good job and that he will eventually pull the ailing business round. But no one has ears to listen to Hogg any longer, particularly following his unsavoury attempts to persuade shareholders to swallow a multi-million pound pay rise for Jean-Pierre Garnier, the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, where he is also chairman.

As Jonathan Bloomer discovered last year at Prudential before the departure of his boss Sir Roger Hurn, scarred by his role as head of the Marconi board, a lame-duck chairman can damage a business every bit as much as a poor chief executive.

Hard lesson
When Louise Barton, a former top analyst, won a victory last week for equal pay in the City in a case against her former employer, Investec Henderson Crosthwaite, she urged more young women to try for well-paid jobs in the Square Mile.

But this week, Arnaud Chevalier of University College, Dublin, will tell the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society that women persistently study for and choose less well-rewarded careers. His research shows that in 1998 women graduates with three years' experience earned £18,500 while men earned £21,200.

Chevalier believes 84% of this gap can be explained not by workplace discrimination but by differences in women's motivation, expectations and choices. More females, for example, study arts subjects while men specialise in engineering, maths and computing.

Women are more likely to work in smaller companies or public service and rate doing socially useful jobs more highly than men. Female employees also tend to limit their horizons because they expect to take career breaks to have children.

Barton may not relish the legal clash over sex discrimination with her old employer, but at least she had the ambition to get herself a job she found stimulating and well paid.

There is, lamentably, still considerable evidence that women's pay falls some way short of men doing the same job. It would be encouraging, however, if fewer of them ruled themselves out of the race before it had even started.

A message for fat cats
OUR report last week contrasting the largesse to some top insurance executives with the pain they are inflicting on customers has drawn a fierce response from readers.

That anger is likely to intensify following the revelation that Royal & SunAlliance fired its former chief executive Bob Mendelsohn with a £2.44m pay-off.

To quote just one Financial Mail reader: 'I am incensed. I am going to stop lining their pockets with money for a non-performing pension fund. All other business I have, such as car and household insurance (as it comes up for renewal), will be removed to a company with a more responsible board of directors. If enough dissatisfied customers did this small thing, the fat cats might eventually get the message.'