It won’t surprise you that of the 10 Commissioners at the Equality & Human Rights Commission, eight are women. Gender equality is a fine thing:

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/about-us/the-commissioners/about-our-commissioners/#kl

The EHRC is going to look at the ‘under-representation’ of women on corporate boards later this year:

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/news/2014/january/commission-to-undertake-new-project-on-women-on-boards/

Commissioner Laura Carstensen is credited as the author of the following gem:

Research shows that diverse boards produce better performance and many companies recognise this. However, there is still much more to be done to improve the representation of women at board level. The aim of this project is to help companies do more to open up the field of board appointments which will help them achieve better results for their company by widening the talent pool. We look forward to working with BIS to shape the project to ensure it’s effective in tackling this issue.

We’re about to email a link to this piece to the EHRC, with the following public challenge to Ms Carstensen:

Your comments (above) clearly imply there’s a causal link between increasing the proportion of women on company boards, and enhanced financial performance. In the course of the past two years Campaign for Merit in Business http://c4mb.wordpress.com has challenged dozens of organisations (including DBIS) and hundreds of individual proponents of ‘more women on boards’ to provide evidence for such a causal link, and no evidence has ever been forthcoming. This is a FOI request asking you to provide evidence of the causal link you’ve implied. Please don’t waste our time pointing us to reports and studies (e.g. McKinsey, Credit Suisse, Catalyst, Thomson Reuters) which show correlations but then make it clear those correlations aren’t evidence of causation and nor do they imply it. Thank you. You might like to read our briefing paper which has the Abstracts of five longitudinal studies showing that increasing female representation on boards leads to financial performance decline:

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

Oops. I’ve been judged ‘wrong’ after having outlined in a recent piece for The Backbencher how the state assaults men on many fronts. My judge is Sarah Osborn, a politics student and Secretary of that collective of cheerful young ladies, the Durham Union Feminism Society (DUFS).

After the recent debate in Durham University, a lady student informed me – whilst she was struggling not to laugh, not altogether successfully – that members of DUFS are known collectively as ‘duffers’. Not to their faces, obviously, she said, pointing out there was no point risking life and limb over a play on words.

I was reliably informed that DUFS had planned a picket of the venue where the debate took place, but these strong independently-minded women – all modern-day reincarnations of ‘Rosie the Riveter’ no doubt – called off their protest, because… er… it was raining slightly. Maybe they’ll invest in a few DUFUS umbrellas for my next visit. Ms Osborn’s piece:

http://thebackbencher.co.uk/mike-buchanan-is-wrong-the-state-is-not-assaulting-men/

I invite you to respond to the utter garbage she’s written. I posted a short comment myself, then realised I was largely repeating some of the material in my original piece, with which she’d signally failed to engage. There’s only so much time you can commit to trying to engage with the crazies.

More political correctness from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26107011

The reason that shows such as Mock The Week and Have I Got News For You? often have male-dominated panels is perfectly simple. Men cope better with the competitive nature of these programmes – indeed, they often enjoy it – and the result is often comedy gold, appreciated by license fee payers. By contrast, many female contestants on the programmes have been strikingly unfunny – not all of them, to be fair.

From the article:

Panel shows such as QI and Mock the Week will no longer have all-male line-ups, the BBC’s director of TV has said. ‘We’re not going to have panel shows on any more with no women on them,’ Danny Cohen told the Observer. ‘You can’t do that. It’s not acceptable.’

I don’t write to ITV whining that Loose Women has all-female panels wittering on at mind-numbing length about utter trivia, do I? No. Why is there a problem with all-male panels, but not all-female panels? Because feminists whine and politically correct men such as Danny Cohen put up the white flag. It’s the same response as husbands have to a nagging wife, ‘Anything for an easy life’. So the feminists get what they want, and BBC shows decline in quality.

Is it ‘acceptable’ to Danny Cohen that there’ll be no female players in England’s soccer team in the forthcoming World Cup? And if it is acceptable, why?

Earlier today we posted a piece relating to the latest post by a feminist blogger, Sarah Ditum:

http://sarahditum.com/2014/02/06/we-need-to-talk-about-gender/

In her latest post Sarah Ditum refers to Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender. It’s the feminists’ book of choice whenever anyone puts forward the theory that sex differences in behaviour might be partly biological in origin, relating to differences between the brains of human males and females at birth – a theory which is supported by a large and growing body of evidence, yet assaults a cornerstone of gender feminism.

A number of books by world-renowned psychologists and brain scientists arrive at different conclusions to those drawn by Ms Fine, one particularly good one being Professor Simon Baron-Cohen’s book The Essential Difference (2003). The book’s basic thesis is that the male brain is hard-wired for systemising (so men are drawn to fields such as engineering) while the female brain is hard-wired for empathising (so women are drawn to the caring professions). Reasonable people (by definition, feminists are excluded) would surely expect gendered brain differences to have resulted from the different evolutionary niches occupied by men and women over millennia.

So I was intrigued to read an exchange in the comment stream following Sarah Ditum’s new piece, which mentions one of Simon Baron-Cohen’s studies. In case the exchange is ‘pulled’, here it is:

CharlieOneFour:

It seems you have chosen only the statistics where women are victims and then smeared all men because ‘masculine contempt for women and desire to control women’ is the cause of domestic violence.

You scoff, ‘as if a preference for pictures of princesses or cars were a secondary sexual characteristic’, however, it may well be true. It is measurable on the first day of life that boys prefer mechanical things and women prefer faces, and all the way to adulthood that men prefer systematising, women prefer empathising. If this is the case, surely boys do prefer cars and girls do prefer the idea of romance?

Sarah Ditum:

You need to read Cordelia Fine and meet some babies. It is measurable on day one that babies can’t play with anything because they have no fine motor control. Idiot.

CharlieOneFour:

Please, if you read what I actually said, which is that it is ‘measurable on the first day of life that boys prefer mechanical things and women prefer faces’. Of course I’m referring to Simon Baron Cohen’s study, Sex differences in human neonatal social perception, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300000321

You, Sarah, are clearly the idiot.

Sarah Ditum:

Like I said: read Fine.

‘Like I said: read Fine’. What an utterly pathetic, lazy, and yes… IDIOTIC response.

The full Abstract of the Simon Baron-Cohen study (first published in 2000) to which CharlieOneFour refers (the term ‘neonate’ means ‘newly born child’):

Sexual dimorphism in sociability has been documented in humans. The present study aimed to ascertain whether the sexual dimorphism is a result of biological or socio-cultural differences between the two sexes. 102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin. (my emphasis)

We look forward to seeing if this exchange continues.

Across the world the male suicide rate is markedly higher than the female suicide rate. You have to wonder how many men’s deaths are recorded as suicide, when the truth is they were murdered by their partners. A story from New Zealand:

http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/victim-s-family-never-forgive-evil-helen-milner-5827143

At last!!! A female Conservative MP has challenged the utter nonsense spoken about women in politics, emanating from politicians and others – most recently, the harridans at The Fawcett Society (see earlier post). Tracey Crouch MP writes in the Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2554975/Dont-patronise-women-like-cheap-stunts-Ed-Its-men-like-I-feel-sorry-MP-slams-Milibands-jibes-number-Tory-female-benchers.html

Now there are some things we wouldn’t agree with in the piece, but overall it’s so good that we’re going to offer Tracey Crouch a ‘Maggie’ award. Only one politician has won the award to date – Marina Yannakoudakis MEP – and there have been few winners overall. One was the journalist and broadcaster Angela Epstein. Her award:

121015 Maggie award for Angela Epstein

Sarah Ditum is a blogger whose analysis of gender issues is so manifestly stupid, you have to wonder if she manages to put on matching shoes every morning. She posted a piece recently which plumbed new depths of idiocy:

http://sarahditum.com/2014/02/06/we-need-to-talk-about-gender

I posted a comment last night, but it hasn’t been published. Ms Ditum declines to post my comments these days, maybe my comments in the past have upset the fragile sensibilities of both she and her blog followers, by presenting them with inflammatory material – facts, statistics, arguments based on evidence, those kinds of things. Anyway, I’ve just post some further comments, and on the assumption she won’t publish them, here they are:

“Sarah, do you seriously believe the nonsense you write? Be sure to send the Waterstone’s colouring book story to The Everyday Whining Project. You should have the courage of your convictions, get together with your feminist friends and invest in a new bookstore with non-gendered colouring books – come to that, non-gendered books in general, so don’t stock any ‘chick lit’ or romantic fiction – then watch your money disappear, as surely as night follows day.

Most of your analysis is demonstrably wrong, but I have better things to do with the next two hours than prove it. Gender feminism is immune to rational challenging, because it’s a faith position. You’re as brainwashed as the most delusional religious fundamentalist. Gender feminism is based upon nothing more than conspiracy theories, paranoid delusions, fantasies, lies, delusions and myths.

Why is there no mention in your pieces of the fact that 40% of victims of domestic abuse are men, or that in the majority of cases of unreciprocated DA, women are the perpetrators? Or that for every refuge place available for battered men, there are 266 for battered women? Or that one key reason battered men don’t leave their partners – if they have children – is that they’ll probably never see their kids again, thanks to a state which bends over backwards to enable malicious mothers to emotionally abuse ex-partners and their own children. Why no mention of the fact that the highest levels of DA are among lesbian couples? How does the patriarchy force lesbians to abuse one another? Oh, I know. They’ve absorbed the misogynistic beliefs which, according to whiny feminists, are to be found everywhere.

You didn’t publish the comment I sent last night, so I assume you won’t publish this one either. I’ll publish it on my own website.

Have a nice day.

Mike Buchanan

JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS

(and the women who love them)

https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com “

A letter published in the Daily Mail on 30 January, a few days after a piece in the paper reporting an increasing number of men are victims of domestic abuse:

“Having suffered myself, I can identify several reasons why an increasing number of men are victims of domestic abuse. In my experience, the police tend to treat male victims as if they deserve it. The Crown Prosecution Service doesn’t like to prosecute women and the Government and local authorities don’t provide the same amount of help or number of safe houses as they do for women.

I fell ill and ended up in hospital needing an operation, but while my back was turned, my (now former) wife was cheating on me with several men. When I confronted her, she came at me with a metal lamp. I raised my right arm to protect myself, but ended up with a split head and two broken bones. She was arrested while I was in hospital receiving treatment.

On leaving hospital, I attended a police station to give a statement, but a women police officer arrested me and shoved me in a cell for a day. I asked for a solicitor and in my police interview the female officer made it very clear that she took the side of my wife. She claimed my injuries were self-sustained. My solicitor and my father had to show her how those injuries had been sustained.

My former wife hasn’t been charged. I’m told it’s ‘not in the public interest’. The IPCC upheld my complaint against the police, but the officer involved hasn’t been reprimanded. I obtained a non-molestation order against my former wife and the judge said it was a clear case of GBH for which she should go to prison, but the police and CPS refuse to act.”

Why is it more ‘in the public interest’ to prosecute male perpetrators of domestic abuse than female perpetrators? Apart from anything else, we know most perpetrators of unreciprocated domestic abuse are women.

A Voice for Men has just re-published an intriguing piece they first published in 2012, written by a female-to-male transsexual:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/men/mens-issues/from-woman-to-man-to-red-pill-2/

Our thanks to Jenny for sending us a link to a document Fawcett just sent to its long-suffering supporters. It concerns women in politics:

http://fawcett-society.msg2u.net/cgi-bin/v.pl?p=51.36.17.7.2.2014%40a:64.c:47.e:212.r:20545.l:0.ac:VI.s:6902

Jenny writes:

Everything that Fawcett publishes makes me embarrassed to be a woman. Do these women have mental health issues, or are they just plain STUPID? Maybe both? If the former, I wish they’d seek some professional support for their problems, and stop making women look so ridiculous.

The document contains numerous gems along these lines:

In the run up to the next election in 2015, Fawcett will be mounting a  major campaign to ensure more women get into parliament, and that party policies deliver for women everywhere. Dragging Westiminister (sic) out of the middle ages and into the 21st century means making the parties feel voter pressure to stop cutting women out of politics.

Have women been ‘cut out of politics’? As we’d expect from anything issued from Fawcett, the truth is the exact opposite. For decades Parliament has bent over backwards – at taxpayers’ expense, generally – to make itself more female-friendly and family-friendly, with less onerous working hours, the provision of crèches etc. The majority of parliamentarians are men for one simple reason, far more men than women want a career in politics. Evidence of that is emerging from the growing number of female MPs who say they’ll be quitting politics in 2015 after just one term as MPs.

Feminists’ convictions that male politicians further the interests of men over women is nothing more than projection. Parliament always pursues the advantaging of women over men. Many female politicians unashamedly advance the interests of women over men, thereby ignoring the interests of half the electors who gave them their jobs. If there were more female MPs like Harriet Harman and Jo Swinson, the assaults on male voters would surely only intensify.

You sometimes have to remind yourself that Fawcett continues to trot out its idiotic narratives about women in politics 35 years after Margaret Thatcher came to power. So, the $64,000 question:

What’s the POINT of The Fawcett Society?

There’s surely only one point, the same one which applies to all the taxpayer-funded ‘academics’ running Gender Studies courses, the hordes of civil servants working on ‘gender equality’ and ‘diversity’ initiatives, and the like – to fund the livelihoods of whiny professional feminists. And that’s why The Fawcett Society is a contender for our next ‘Whiny Women of the Month’ award.

In March 2013 AVfM published my piece about Fawcett:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/time-to-turn-the-fawcett-off/

It’s about time we challenged Fawcett’s charitable status, given it’s clearly a political campaigning organisation.