Regular followers of this blog will know of the excellent blog of Herbert Purdy. He’s an occasional commenter on our blog pieces, and he posted a lengthy and powerful response to a very silly comment left by ‘professor’ Kirstein Rummery, a co-director of the Feminist and Gender Studies Centre at Stirling University.

On Friday we issued a public challenge to Emma Ritch, the Executive Director of Engender, a Scottish feminist campaigning organisation. She claimed that ‘much evidence’ supported the notion that increasing female representation on corporate boards is a driver of improved corporate performance, and we’ve given her until 5pm next Friday, 29 May, to provide that evidence, or become our next ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ award winner.

In our blog piece we pointed out that reports and studies by McKinsey, Credit Suisse, Reuters Thomson, Catalyst (a radical feminist campaigning organisation, based in New York) and others were not claiming the existence of a causal link between more women on boards and enhanced financial performance, contrary to what is so often claimed by feminists.

Our challenge came to the attention of ‘professor’ Rummery, who is on the board of Engender. She posted the following comment:

Not that great at your research, are you? Read this.

The EU briefing paper, a masterpiece of the dark art of spinning, cited the very studies which in our blog piece were revealed as NOT demonstrating a causal link. ‘Professor’ Rummery had unwittingly nominated herself for our next ‘Gormless Feminist of the Month’ award. Herbert Purdy’s response to her is a gem, and takes up the remainder of this blog piece:

“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 …’ here. 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’ – here. 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!”

Another insightful piece by Belinda Brown, published earlier today on The Conservative Woman website. We welcome the growing willingness of female commentators to publicly challenge individual feminists – in this case Dr Victoria Bateman, recently the subject of an interesting oil painting – as distinct from challenging feminism as an ideology. It’s also good to see Belinda’s link (the second in her piece) to William Collins’s excellent website.

Four months ago a new YouTube channel was established, under the name Captain Nemo. He’s one of a growing number of video aggregators who feature our interviews, and get high viewer numbers, leading to more support for J4MB.

His link to my interview by a feminist presenter on Notts TV (not the BBC) is here. It’s attracted 22,756 views and 358 comments in less than four weeks. His link to my ITV ‘This Morning’ discussion with Caroline Criado-Perez – in which she laughed and admitted she’d lied on BBC Radio, thereby earning her first ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ award – has attracted 18,500+ views – here. His link to one of my London Live TV interviews, in which (as usual with London Live TV) I was challenged by the feminist presenter and two feminist guests, is here. It’s attracted 7,823 views and 203 comments in less than three weeks. A depressing number of the comments concern my stammer, a longstanding problem I hope to address now there’s less pressure on my time, post-election.

I should like to thank Captain Nemo – and others like him – for supporting our work.

We’ve been presenting these awards since April 2014. The first was presented not to a single feminist, but to a whole coven of them – those working at the Fawcett Society. The full list of award winners is here.

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.

A few months ago, on a bitterly cold day outside the University of Nottingham, I and others linked to J4MB were interviewed by Lucy Holmes, founder of the ‘No More Page 3’ campaign, for a forthcoming documentary. A small extract has just been published. Enjoy. The odious Canadian radical feminist behind the ‘Mancheeze’ blog – a worthy winner of one of our ‘Gormless Feminists of the Month’ awards – has already left some gormless comments.

Unlike our critics, we’re happy to correct anything we’ve said or written which turns out to be untrue or misleading. David Cameron has handed a third of new ministerial positions to women, although fewer than one in three Conservative MPs are women. In two or three posts we’ve used the figure of one in seven Conservative MPs being women, but that has turned out to be incorrect.

68 of the Conservatives’ current 331 MPs are women, about one in five – 20.5%. Female Conservative MPs are only 62% more likely than their male colleagues to be given ministerial positions.

The large increase in the proportion of Conservative MPs who are women stems in part, we believe, from the party’s apparent policy of fielding female candidates against incumbent female MPs at general elections. This, allied with Labour’s continued use of all-women shortlists and expanded number of female Labour MPs, has ironically contributed to the increased number of female Conservative MPs.

We’ll now amend blog pieces citing the ‘one in seven Conservative MPs are women’ claim.

Some months ago we broke into mainstream media coverage following a Buzzfeed News piece which attracted over 160,000 ‘hits’ in its first day. Yesterday I was interviewed by Buzzfeed’s Emily Ashton – here. I’ve written to Emily with a number of corrections and clarifications, and I hope the article is modified accordingly. They are:

1. We haven’t finally decided to stand against the Conservatives in 2020 – we’ll probably decide the target party much nearer the election – but David Cameron’s appointment of a disproportionate number of women to his cabinet (compared with how many Tory MPs are women) and his re-appointment of Nicky Morgan as Minister for Women & Equalities inclines us to challenge the Conservatives.

2. Women are over-represented as MPs when compared with the proportion of prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) who are women. Caroline Spelman was the chairman of the Conservatives in 2008 and recently revealed that at that time, men outnumbered women as PPCs in the ratio 10:1.

3. Four times as many British men as woman are work-centred, Dr Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory (2000) – here.

4. Artificially increasing the proportion of women on corporate boards leads to corporate financial decline – here.

5. The end of the paragraph ‘He said…’ should end with ‘advantage women and girls’, not ‘advantage girls’.

My thanks to R for pointing me towards a Sargon of Akkad video (28:37) concerning Bahar Mustafa (27), Goldsmith’s College’s ‘Diversity Officer’, who excluded white men from a meeting, then maintained she was being neither racist nor sexist in doing so. The video has attracted over 82,000 viewers in just five days. We take our hats off to SoA for all his excellent work.

I invite you to join me in signing an online petition to have Ms Mustafa sacked.

We are relieved to learn that Dan Perrins has ended his hunger strike. His statement is here. We thank him for taking the action he did, and hope he hasn’t done any lasting damage to his health.