Our thanks to Chloe for this. Just the latest in a long line of silly uncritical articles penned by (mainly) female journalists about women and the world of work.
In August, Ann Francke, CEO of the Chartered Management Institute, won a Lying Feminist of the Month award for comments she made about the gender pay gap – the story is here. An extract from the Daily Mail article:
CMI chief executive Ann Francke said the notion the pay gap would ‘resolve itself over time’ without Government intervention was ‘flawed’, and that the problems facing both working mothers and non-mothers needed to be addressed.
‘In 2005 the pay gap for senior women was less than it is today, which may be very surprising to hear,’ she said. ‘The reasons for that are cultural. There are far too few women in senior positions. We talk a lot about the motherhood penalty, but I think we need to look broader than that … it affects non-mothers as well as mothers. [Would this be the non-motherhood penalty?]
‘It’s about the culture of success, about how we define who is successful, it’s about this long hours, presenteeism, not fitting work around the modern lifestyle.’
She added that women ‘did not aspire’ to succeed within a culture where deals were ‘nailed on the golf course’, [Another feminist conspiracy theory] and called for the Government to compel larger companies to publish their gender diversity statistics. [The government has already done this, at the insistence of feminists.]
There we have it. Work shouldn’t involve long hours, it should ‘work around the modern lifestyle’. She’s basically confirming the substance of Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory, which explains why only a minority of senior staff are women… while at the same time, calling for more women in senior positions. She’s just nominated herself for another award, Gormless Feminist of the Month.
