An excellent piece for The Conservative Woman website by Professor Philip Booth, Editorial and Programme Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).
I confess to having a soft spot for the IEA, and not only because it was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite economic think tank before, and during, her three terms as prime minister.
In the summer of 2012, some months before J4MB was launched, I was leading Campaign for Merit in Business, the only organization in the world at the time (as now) campaigning against a government’s initiative to force major companies – through gender quotas, or the threat of them, as in the UK – to increase the proportion of women on their boards.
In the summer of 2012 I gave a well-received lecture at the IEA on why companies shouldn’t actively seek to increase female representation on their boards. For one thing, it’s anti-meritocratic, and for another, evidence was already accumulating – from numerous longitudinal studies – of a causal link between increasing female representation on boards, and corporate financial decline. The short C4MB briefing paper on the matter is here.
If feminists want to lend credence to any such campaign for quotas in the nice, safe. warm, well-paid careers then the process is simple – they must also advocate for quotas in all of the dirty, nasty, dangerous and lower-paid jobs. While they’re at it, let’s have quotas for brain surgeons and see how happy patients are that their surgeon was employed soley on the basis of genitalia rather than on training and experience – what works for the highly vocal geese in the mahogany-panelled boardrooms must, one assumes, also be regarded as legitimate for the goose under the knife?
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