Our thanks to Jeff for this. It’s about time women started to admit publicly what we all see with our own eyes, in our work and home lives, decade after decade. Woman are typically more prone to anxiety than men, and they don’t cope as well with healthy competition, so they suffer more stress when put under pressure, such as in the workplace – the subject of the newspaper article.
36 years ago Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, yet year after year we hear calls for female role models, leaving aside the tricky question of who’ll be the role models’ role models. There’s a seemingly never-ending need to ‘celebrate’ and ‘inspire’ women, endless propaganda on the BBC and the media generally about ‘strong’ high-achieving women, taxpayer-funded initiatives to ‘encourage’ women into fields they don’t want to enter (engineering, £30 million), lowering of standards to enable more women to meet entry and/or ongoing employment requirements (women-only MP shortlists, police, fire service…), preferencing of women over men in the public sector (Equality Act 2010), the decline of state education partly resulting from the feminisation of the teaching profession (masked only by grade inflation, decade after decade), and so much more.
For three years Campaign for Merit in Business has been informing the government and businesses of the evidence that driving up female representation on corporate boards leads to corporate financial decline – its short briefing paper is here. On the basis of merit we’d expect women to occupy fewer than 5% of the board places in major companies – for the simple calculations leading to that conclusion, see reference #2 on p.68 of our election manifesto – yet due to government threats of legislated gender quotas, the proportion of women on FTSE100 boards has risen from 12.5% to 25% in the space of five years. Almost all the new female directors were appointed as non-executive directors – what does that tell you about the competence gender gap at the top of major businesses? The government has a longer-term goal of gender parity on FTSE350 boards, which will require a more than tenfold preferencing of women over men, and a large number of male executives being denied board places they would deserve on the grounds of merit.
What are the consequences of this ideologically-driven insanity? A small number of women are advanced far beyond their natural abilities, and the rest of us – men, the vast majority of women, and children – pay the price, in so many ways.
