Our thanks to Mike for this. From the article, a reference to correlation, leaving the reader to erroneously imply causation, although it’s been known for years that the only causal link between higher female representation on corporate boards and financial performance is a negative one:
Lord Davies rejected suggestions that companies were ‘padding’ boards with female non-executives for public relations purposes, insisting the women appointees were qualified for their posts.
‘It’s about business results,’ he said. ‘The more diverse the group is at the top of the company, the better the results.’
Were I to be visited this evening by the hob-nailed boots of the Schadenfreude-Fairy and offered my customary wish, it would be this. I would like Lord Davies to be wheeled into an operating theatre in need of life-saving brain surgery – while a little feminist voice whispered in his ear that his surgical team had been picked not on merit and experience, but on a quota system the better to reflect the diversity of the species. After all, the more diverse the group then somehow, magically, the better the results eh, Lord Davies?
Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
‘‘I think also at the top of the company you should represent your workforce and your consumers. People forget that 51 per cent of the working population in the UK is female.
With stupidity of that sort, the last tattered remnants of successful ‘British’ industry should be history by 2030. A couple of points occur to me:
1) The function of a board of directors is to ensure the success of a commercial enterprise by using the best talent available to it and giving it a profitable sense of purpose and direction. No successful business has any future if it discriminates against that talent merely on the grounds of a characteristic and genuinely capable women have no trouble progressing up the ladder in a commercially successful business. These days it is actually easier for them than for their male colleagues, owing largely, it is claimed, to fear of legal action for sexual discrimination.
2) the 51% of the working population that is female works overwhelmingly in the public sector and has no conception of commercial constraints. To such people any crazy idea is possible, regardless of cost, because they are protected from criticism, are highly unlikely to suffer the consequences of failure and, in any case, someone else always pays. Most of the rest are not work centred and therefore have no right to consideration for a position that often requires long experience and single-minded dedication to reach.
3) All this is really about is giving self-obsessed and self-important women positions of status, unearned income, and a free lunch with a reserved parking space, without any real responsibility.
Lord Davies of Abersoch should put a sock in it (the wool in his mouth would then match the wool in his brain).
I call for boards to have 30% Martians by 2020.
In the name of diversity it’s only fair and right, since not to do so is alienist.
Figures shew that 0% of workers are presently small, green and from Mars.
This can only be due to shameful discrimination which must be addressed immediately, by quota if necessary.