Our public challenge of Emma Ritch, Executive Director, Engender

/ Mike Buchanan

I confess I’d never heard of Engender before this afternoon, when I was doing some research on Nicola Sturgeon’s plans to have Scottish companies ‘voluntarily’ introduce gender-balanced boards. On the website’s home page we find:

Engender is Scotland’s feminist organisation.

A recent article in Holyrood, a current affairs magazine, included this:

Emma Ritch, executive director of Scottish feminist campaigning organisation Engender, said: “It’s perhaps an indicator of how far we have to go to achieve women’s equality that attaining 25 per cent board representation by women appears to have provoked such excitement.

“There is so much evidence that gender balance on boards drives better corporate performance (my emphasis) that companies who fail to appoint women are acting against their own best interests, and the interests of all of those who want to see better corporate citizens. It’s not quite time to cross quotas off the list of possible solutions.”

The Scottish Government has said it will launch a Partnership for Change pledge in 2015 to challenge all organisations to set a voluntary target for 50:50 gender balanced boards by 2020.

Ms Ritch really couldn’t be clearer. Not only is she claiming a causal link exists between increased female representation on boards and improved corporate performance – anyone in the business world, in which I worked for 30 years, would take that as meaning improved financial performance – but she claims there is ‘so much evidence’ for the link.

Campaign for Merit in Business provided evidence to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries in 2012 of a causal link between artificially increasing female representation on boards and corporate financial decline. In late 2012 we published a short briefing paper with the full Abstracts of five longitudinal studies, all demonstrating the link.

We know of no evidence to support Ms Ritch’s claim, and we assume she’s employing the long-discredited feminist tactic in this area, misrepresenting correlation as causation. All the oft-cited reports and studies of which we’re aware (McKinsey, Credit Suisse, Reuters Thomson, Catalyst…) make it perfectly clear that the correlations in their reports aren’t evidence of causal links, and can’t even be taken to imply it.

Our public challenge of Ms Ritch is as follows, I’ll email her a link to this piece in a moment.

Ms Ritch, good evening. You claim to have ‘so much evidence’ of the existence of a causal link between higher female representation on boards, and improved corporate financial performance. We are unaware of any such evidence, despite having researched the subject over the past four years.

The leading academic proponent in the world for more women on boards is Professor Susan Vinnicombe of the Cranfield International Centre for Women Leaders. Nearly three years ago she admitted to a House of Lords inquiry that she knew of no such evidence – here.

I invite you to email me links to your evidence by 5pm next Friday, 29 May. Should you fail to do so, you will become our next ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ award winner. Caroline Criado-Perez has won the award three times, the first time for making the same claim that you have. She admitted on the ITV programme ‘This Morning’, when I was seated on the same couch, that she’d lied – here. We invite you to admit likewise.

10 thoughts on “Our public challenge of Emma Ritch, Executive Director, Engender”

    • Kirstein, I’m embarrassed on your behalf. Those are the very studies I referred to in my blog post, all of which make it clear that correlation isn’t evidence of causation, and can’t be taken to even IMPLY it.

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      • The biter bit.

        You can be sure that Kirsten isn’t at all embarrassed, merely more convinced that all men are bastards.

        Just as an aside, and only slightly tongue in cheek, isn’t time we stopped chivalrously being embarrassed on behalf of women? It’s time for them to woman up and be embarrassed for themselves.

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    • And you are not that good at doing what you are meant to be doing, madam!

      That is, seeking always to test the evidence and disprove the null hypothesis – and particularly avoiding at all costs that most basic of academic errors – mistaking correlation for causation.

      Have you never heard of ‘Cum hoc ergo propter hoc’ (with this; therefore, because of this). The familiar fallacy of thinking that because two things happen simultaneously, one must be a cause of the other? You know, the things professors are meant to watch out for in their students?

      Would you conclude that someone who pulled the toilet chain at the same time an earthquake hit and the house fell down around him actually caused his own misfortune?
      Did it never cross your mind when you clicked the button on this sarcastic comment, that the respondent firms in the paper you cite might have achieved the same levels of performance despite the degree of diversity in their senior management teams?

      Apparently not. Instead, you offer a bullet point list: a descriptive narrative that only just stops short of saying more women = better performance, but leaves some pretty obvious hints (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) for the unwary. Are you seriously prepared to offer such a work as counter evidence to a series of robust longitudinal studies over several years that point in the opposite direction? It is possible that those studies might be flawed in their conclusions – of course they might – but at least their methodology is robust and far sounder that the evidence you cite.

      When you first read your cited work, did it not cause you immediately to question its obvious bias and screamingly obvious correlation/causation error? If one of my students had come up with a comment like yours, I would have been having a very serious word with her, suggesting firmly that she revisit some of the principles of the philosophy of research. Your thinking is puerile. It would never pass even at undergraduate level, let alone doctoral/professorial level, and it ill-befits the title of professor.

      You are a typical example of the low-grade people who are now gaining academic chairs in what we used to call universities – centres of the pursuit of learning and truth – but are now little more than madrassas of the now threadbare, wholly discredited Marxist ideology of feminism. Your are a promoter of feminism.

      And lest anyone be in any doubt about this allegation of mine against you, your own words betray you: ‘My final area of research concerns gender …’ (http://rms.stir.ac.uk/converis-stirling/person/11240) Ah, gender. That political term, not a biological descriptor, that comes from feminist thinking. That attempt to place a social construct on maleness and femaleness, and to highlight the differences between men and women in terms of sex-based social structures and sex-based social rôles.

      Not only is your academic ability worth squat, you are a charlatan: a blatant ideological feminist, using your rôle as a professor to promulgate its precepts, and prepared to cite any old form of political propaganda in support to spread your hollow cause, creating traps for the unwary.

      People like you are overseeing the decline in standards of our universities, because you are prepared to accept and even promulgate political documents based on little more than advocacy research. People like you: blind, bigoted people with political agenda that come before the pursuit of truth, are part of the malign campus culture we see today.

      Friedrich Hayek said of people like you: you are ‘the second hand purveyors of ideas’. https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Intellectuals%20and%20Socialism_4.pdf You are part of that left-wing intellectual class he so eruditely exposed more than 50 years ago, which has colonised our campuses, and you surely are not worthy of the position you hold.

      You utter, utter fool!

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  4. ‘There is so much evidence that gender balance on boards drives better corporate performance (my emphasis) that companies who fail to appoint women are acting against their own best interests … ‘

    Trust an ideologue to think she knows better than those actually running profitable businesses what is best for their businesses. The clue, of course, is in ‘ … and the interests of all of those who want to see better corporate citizens‘, although the term ‘corporate citizen’ should be examined, assuming that it isn’t just another example of the sloppy writing so typical of latter day graduates rather than the argot of the post glasnost Communist Party that is Julia Middleton’s Common Purpose.

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  5. A phrase I can only barely recall, because I have not heard it used for so long, is, I think, ‘bearding the lion in his den. As lion tamers go Mike, you have balls the size of an Elephant, and the stamina to match. Nicely done.

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