In our public consultation document https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/our-public-consultation-exercise-2/ the proposals include the following:

The government should set a date after which state support will not be provided for women having new babies which they are personally (or with the support of a partner and/or others) unable to care for financially.

Single women abuse the system even after they’ve miscarried, as we reported recently https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/why-are-women-above-the-law/

Reporting from the United States, Janet Bloomfield – in her immortal style – has  really nailed the whole issue in a new piece http://judgybitch.com/2013/10/09/seven-ways-american-women-have-made-the-government-their-husbands-sucks-when-he-takes-time-off-doesnt-it-ladies/

My thanks to the gentleman who’s just made me aware of an interesting episode of the BBC Radio 4 show You and Yours, to be broadcast at midday today. From the associated website http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03c3cn0 (the emphasis is mine):

David Cameron’s Conservative party has promoted several female MPs as part of a ministerial reshuffle. We often hear about women in business and politics but we want to hear from people who have experienced either sexism or positive
discrimination in as many workplaces as possible. Maybe you’re a man who feels you’ve missed out on a job because the other candidate was given special
treatment for being a woman. Even if that’s the case, does it matter? And what about pay? More than four decades after the Equal Pay Act promised to pay women the same as men for doing the same job, many are still fighting to get a fair
wage. Are you one of them? We were told the glass ceiling would be shattered but have you found it still exists? 03700 100 444 is the number to call, email youandyours@bbc.co.uk or text us on 84844

Unfortunately I won’t personally be able to call into the programme, but I invite you to do so, if you have a suitable story to relate. If you manage to get onto the programme – call well in advance with your story, then they may call you back during the programme – or you have an email read out, please let me know mike@j4mb.org.uk and we may do a post on the matter. Good luck!

British followers of this blog will need no reminding who the vociferous and odious gender feminist Janet Street-Porter is. This is a woman so full of self-satisfaction that she said on the TV programme Loose Women not long ago:

I’m very intelligent. I’m not boasting, I am very intelligent.

Well, if she’s intelligent, she’s living proof that intelligent people can say (and write) some very stupid things. She excelled herself today in her Daily Mail column, more specifically in the first section http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2447296/JANET-STREET-PORTER-Do-favour–ditch-soundbites-DO-something.html.

The gender pay gap commentary is so uninformed and erroneous that I can’t be bothered even to comment on it, let alone challenge it. Life’s too short. Many people have shown the ‘gap’ to be fully accountable by issues such as professional disciplines, industry sectors, levels of seniority, unsociable working hours and conditions, danger of risk to life and limb (126 of the 128 workplace-related deaths last year were of men) and the like. Yet the myth rolls on, year after year.

Our public challenge relates to something else she wrote in the piece, which is equally uninformed and erroneous. She wrote:

I want both sexes to be treated equally and  given the same chances, because research shows that more women in charge produces better results for business.

The first part of the statement is itself uninformed and erroneous – women are treated equally (often better) and given the same chances – and anyone who doubts this is invited to read Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox or my own The Glass Ceiling Delusion. Our public challenge relates to the second part of her statement:

 … research shows that more women in charge produces better results for business.

Campaign for Merit in Business (‘C4MB’) http://c4mb.org.uk has been in existence since May 2012, and we know of no such ‘research’. Professor Susan Vinnicombe, the head of the Cranfield International Centre for Women Leaders, for many years the most prominent academic proponent in the world of increased female representation on corporate boards, admitted before a House of Lords inquiry in July 2012 that she knew of no such research:

http://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/a-remarkable-statement-by-a-leading-proponent-of-improved-gender-diversity-in-the-boardroom/

She stated to the inquiry:

… there has been quite a push in the past – indeed, we ourselves have engaged in such research – to look at the relationship between having women on corporate boards and financial performance. We do not subscribe to this research. We have shared it with chairmen and they do not think that it makes sense. We agree that it does not make sense. You cannot correlate two or three women on a massive corporate board with a return on investment, return on equity, turnover or profits. We have dropped such research in the past five years and I am pleased to say that Catalyst, which claims to have done a ground-breaking study on this in the US, officially dropped this line of argument last September.

We’re not aware of a single study or report, from anywhere in the world, which shows a causal link between more women on boards and improved corporate financial performance. All the reports of which we’re aware which show correlations (McKinsey, Credit Suisse, Reuters Thomson, Catalyst…) make it perfectly clear that correlations aren’t proof of causation, they don’t even imply causation. There are far more plausible explanations of those correlations than some ‘gender effect’ fantasy, for example that strongly-performing companies can better afford to engage in this social engineering exercise, which is also good PR in some sectors (e.g. retail, fashion…)..

C4MB, on the other hand, has given a lot of exposure to five longitudinal studies (analysing companies in the United States, Germany and Norway) which clearly show a link between increased female representation on boards, and declines in corporate financial performance. Our short briefing paper on the studies, with their full Abstracts:

http://c4mb.wordpress.com/improving-gender-diversity-on-boards-leads-to-a-decline-in-corporate-performance-the-evidence/

Over the course of 17 months we’ve invited the government, CBI, Chartered Management Institute, and dozens of other organisations (and hundreds of individuals) who support increasing the proportion of women in boardrooms to challenge these five studies, or to provide evidence of a causal link between increased female representation on boards and improved financial performance. Collectively they’ve provided us with nothing.

By her own estimation Janet Street Porter is a very intelligent woman, so I’m sure she’ll be able to provide evidence to back her assertion that ‘… research shows that more women in charge produces better results for business.’ I’m about to email her a link to this public  challenge, and I’ll ask her to respond by 5pm on 14 October 2013. If she fails to do so, I look forward to adding her to our ‘Hall of Shame’ which consists of proponents of increased female representation on boards who’ve failed to respond to similar public challenges in the past. A small selection:

http://c4mb.wordpress.com/our-public-challenges-of-high-profile-proponents-of-improved-gender-diversity-in-boardrooms/

Fifteen-year-old Christian Adamek, an American schoolboy in the educational care of Sparkman High School Principal Mike Campbell, recently committed suicide by hanging himself, a week after streaking through a high school football game. A powerful and moving piece from Paul Elam:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/misandry/asshole-of-the-year-principal-michael-campbell/

As always with AVfM, the comments following the piece are well worth reading.

May Christian rest in peace. How many more tragic deaths of men and boys are required before institutions and citizens in general (and politicians in particular) stop marching to the drums of feminist ideologues?

Earl Silverman was a Canadian who ran the first (and only) men’s domestic abuse shelter in Canada. The shelter never received any state support. After three years Earl had to close the shelter because of a lack of funding. Several days later he was found hanging from the rafters in his garage. A three-minute-long video tribute of Earl is a ‘must see’ piece, in my view:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/a-voice-for-men/rip-earl-silverman-you-wont-be-forgotten/

In our public consultation document we call for measures to be taken with the objective of halving the suicide rate among British men. Even if this target were achieved, the rate would still be 50% above that of British women. What interest does the British government currently have in developing and funding initiatives to reduce the male suicide rate? None. Absolutely none.

Through many of its policy directions (e.g. increasing female employment at the expense of male employment, denying fathers access to their children following relationship breakdowns, providing no support for male victims of DV…) the government is actively contributing to the high male suicide rate.

Earlier this evening I was informed by a self-declared ‘moderate’ feminist on a blog run by Ally Fogg, a Guardian journalist, that radical feminists have virtually no influence in the modern world. I get very tired of such assertions, so I was interested to be informed by a supporter in the North-East of a website which has been operating for over four years. He specifically pointed me to an early post:

http://rageagainstthemanchine.com/2009/07/05/why-i-hate-men-part-1-and-then-it-hit-me/

The post starts with this:

That’s right, I’m admitting it. Tell all your MRA buddies that they’ve been vindicated, call Rush Limbaugh, make sure to let all the other feminists know I’m blowing their cover for them. Men are obnoxious, arrogant, entitled, violent, stinky, crass, loudmouthed, stupid, craven, bragadocious, thoughtless, unreflective, abusive, selfish, lowbrow, willfully ignorant assholes. Well, most of them.

You see, I don’t hate all men, just almost all of them; some of my best friends are men (snarf snarf). There are three or four that I love and consider to be fundamentally decent human beings, there are about seven that are big enough “faggots” that I like hanging out with them, and there are maybe ten that, though I’m sure they have no idea what “male privilege” means, I would equivocate before sending to a re-education camp if given the chance (if the camp conditions were harsh; if it was like summer camp I’d snap up the opportunity to send them for a week or two of re-humanization training and craft lessons).

The post continues in much the same manner, but here’s the interesting thing. It attracted 1,152 comments. I invite you to dip into the comments at random – most support the piece, although many don’t – and tell me that this woman’s line of thinking is marginal. It isn’t. It’s mainstream.

Another intriguing piece from Robert:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/series/unknown-history-of-misandry/misandric-fixation-in-19th-century-europe/

A short but inspiring and moving video consisting of material recorded at the recent groundbreaking rally in Toronto:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/rally-in-toronto-a-short-documentary/

My thanks to Claire for pointing me to an interesting piece published a few hours ago on Mail Online. It’s by the columnist Liz Jones, and mainly concerns Charlotte Raven and the Feminist Times:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-2446296/Feminists-Maybe-Ill-trust-start-growing-beards.html

A particularly insightful comment by Liz Jones:

Feminism, it seems, is these days less Third  Wave, more Third Reich.

 

Some people, especially those with right-of-centre leanings, are puzzled by the fact we’re going to contest Conservative marginal seats in 2015 rather than Labour marginal seats, when feminism is a Leftist ideology. The prime reason for our decision – we may contest another party’s marginal seats in 2020 – is that the Conservatives, under the leadership of David Cameron since 2005, have pursued feminist agendas with even more determination than the preceding Labour administrations (1997-2010). A small example. In the course of 13 years, despite the malevolent presence of Harriet Harman and her ilk, Labour didn’t threaten to legislate for gender quotas on corporate boards. The Conservative-led coalition has enthusiastically pursued many such anti-male policy directions from the outset. This has nothing to do with the Lib Dems. We know, for example, that David Cameron is personally involved with driving the gender balance on corporate boards initiative:

http://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/more-women-in-the-boardroom-david-cameron-is-doing-a-lot-behind-the-scenes/

An excerpt from the Independent piece written by Helena Morrissey, the founder and still the leader of The 30% Club http://www.30percentclub.org.uk/ which campaigns to increase female representation on major corporate boards:

Even if these voluntary steps are starting to work, should the government do more to speed up change? The Prime Minister is already doing a lot behind the scenes [Editor’s note: the highlighting of this astonishing sentence is mine]. As well as high-profile events like the reception he hosted at No.10 last October for women in business, David Cameron and his team have been working on several ideas to support business-led initiatives. For many months, they’ve been working with the 30% Club to broaden mentoring programmes and help create a database of ‘board-ready’ women [Editor’s note: again, the highlighting is mine].

Many FTSE100 chairmen are members of The 30% Club http://www.30percentclub.org.uk/members/. The willingness of such men – in general, upper or lower case ‘C’ Conservatives – to pander to the demands of a small number of strident women, regardless of the damage wrought on men and society in general, is a phenomenon with deep historical roots. Feminism is an extension of female privileging in the private sphere into the public sphere, a point well made by Ernest Belfort Bax in a book published 100 years ago, The Fraud of Feminism. The book is downloadable here, at no cost:

https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/the-fraud-of-feminism-1913/

Honey Badger Radio recently broadcast a two-hour-long programme in which the usual contributors (Karen Straughan, Alison Tieman and Della Burton) explored the links between feminism and traditionalism:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/avoiceformen/2013/10/04/honey-badger-radio-femservatives-oh-my

Nick Reading, the Supreme Wizard of a Canadian party, The Patriarchy Party, joins the discussion over 57:26 – 69:35. Over 81:35 – 84:50 there’s a fascinating account by Karen Straughan (‘GirlWritesWhat’) of her experience at the recent groundbreaking men’s rights rally in Toronto, and her exchanges with a number of men at the rally. The subsequent phone-in is interesting too.

An interesting piece from August, concerning the current difficulties in the United States. It includes a 35-minute video by the always watchable Karen Straughan (GirlWritesWhat), forecasting what would happen when enough men refuse to be slaves to a feminism-driven society. Who’d have thought we’d reach that day so soon?

http://www.avoiceformen.com/misandry/a-small-taste-of-the-fempocalypse/