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.
Internal stress is quite an effective weapon by women who suffer from DSM V dysfunctional psychotic disorder, PD and NPD and hide their hostilities
to disable what psychiatrists and society establish as abuses against others and minors. In one way this is why until we get legal reform in family sharing issues we certainly need Courts whose judges are trained in law and contemporary psychology to make balanced rulings!
Single mothers are like office women: they take on some of the male-suited jobs that create big stress spikes. They may work part or full time, need to manage provisioning and sudden deficits, etc. The female role is one of support, not leadership. So when a woman is forced to lead and on top of it has no support she is almost certainly engaging in behaviours that result in male stress patterns.
And as the kids get older these mothers become even less capable. The older her eldest child, the more disordered and stressed the single mother becomes. There are many social roles that father fulfill for children that have a sudden increase in significance from around the age of six or seven, not least of all temper control and mentoring. But we could write a whole meta-study on the lead-support dynamic between healthy parents, how single mothers actually deprive their children of both male AND female role models, how the education system plays into the feminization and coddling of children… There is a lot on it.
The short form is, as supporters having to lead without any assistance, single mothers are still in a male-role, even if they’re unemployed. And single fathers are not only in a healthier position (leaders can function independent of support and leadership is a natural role for a man), but they are often able to find a supplementary female-role-model. On the other hand, single mothers ostracize healthy male-role-models, further affecting their children’s health, their own life stress and, having badly behaved, mentally unstable children, guaranteeing themselves future stress.
A better male equivalent to a single mother or an office woman is not a single father, but actually a man on the dole. Such is a man who gets about enough to live on welfare and has little to no additional stresses, but who displays all the physical signs of stress. Swollen neck from inflamed thyroid, visceral fat from adrenaline surges, low testosterone inducing balding and moobs, fatigue evident in his face… NOT doing things is more stressful to a man than working 40 hour weeks and raising children as a single father.
That’s an interesting theory. How, if we accept it, do we explain the failure rates of single mothers when compared to the remarkable successes of single fathers? The dismal record of the former suggests that they cannot cope with anything beyond ‘texting’, smoking, eating, chatting and watching television (Multi-tasking explained?) while the success of the latter suggests that men can do both women’s work and our own without trouble.
Women deal better with continual bumps of stress: interrupted or polyphasic sleep, bad nutrition, concern about stability, anxiety over health, etc. Little to medium spikes in stress over the day.
Men deal better with big stress: continual underlying stress and anxiety about life-sustaining labour. Semi-continual concern followed by big spikes of stress a few times a week.
Neither men nor women deal very well with the modern work environment, as it’s entirely unnatural to humans. But it more closely follows the male stress pattern than the female one.
Thus, men are more able to deal with the stress that results from leadership, protection and provision roles. Women are more able to deal with the stress that results from support and nurturing roles.
I believe when female board members were made compulsory in one Scandinavian country, very often someone senior just appointed his mother to the post. No duties, no pay, and she voted along with her son.
In other words, treat a stupid rule with the respect it deserves.
I read, long ago, that stress is actually essential to good health. That aside, those women all look depressingly similar and dull, yet all clearly think they look distinct and alluring. No thanks girls.