Charlotte Proudman is the odious 27-year-old feminist barrister who took to social media in a cynical attempt to publicly humiliate a 57-year-old solicitor she’d approached. He responded with a private message, saying her LinkedIn profile photograph was ‘stunning’. We duly presented her with our inaugural Toxic Feminist of the Month award, her certificate is here.
Lord Sumption is the Supreme Court judge who recently made some perfectly sensible remarks about gender diversity among senior judges – here. The toxic feminist responded with an article in the Guardian, which included this gem:
Recognising and challenging institutional sexism needs to be combined with a genuine commitment to equal representation. Incrementalism has failed. We need the introduction of quotas for QCs and the judiciary.
Tom Utley is a Daily Mail columnist with a talent for getting to the heart of matters. My thanks to M for pointing me to his recent article about Lord Sumption’s remarks, and Ms Proudman’s response to them. He refers to her as ‘Little Miss Anti-Sexism’, pleasingly, and ends the piece with this:
As for the interests of justice, it beats me why anyone should think it important that a criminal or a divorcing couple should have a 50/50 chance of coming up before a woman, rather than a man. All we require of judges, surely, is that they be fair-minded, incorruptible and learned in the law.
Their sex is neither here nor there — and if female lawyers wish to drop out before they reach the top, whether to have babies or because they don’t like the working conditions, then good luck to them. No harm done.
Which brings me to a painful and inconvenient truth, seldom discussed — and guaranteed to bring the wrath of feminists crashing down about the ears of anyone who raises it.
But here goes: while it’s of no great public concern that women lawyers tend to drop out, it matters enormously that so many female doctors do the same.
The figures are frightening. It costs taxpayers at least £500,000 to train a doctor.
Meanwhile, the drop-out rate for women after they’ve qualified, coupled with their greater tendency to work part-time and to retire early, means it’s necessary on average to train two female doctors to do the same amount of work over a lifetime as a man. [my emphasis]
Yet medical schools continue to admit more women than men, while 61 per cent of doctors under the age of 30 are women.
In the week that it emerged that staff shortages mean newly qualified GPs are being paid £90 an hour to work at weekends, isn’t it time we started asking a deeply uncomfortable question? Which is more important: sexual equality or an affordable NHS, open for business round-the-clock?
