Paul Apreda of Families need Fathers Both Parents Matter Cymru gave a well-received presentation at the recent conference, here. He recently sent a FOI request to the Welsh government, and has just published this press release.

Our thanks to William for this. All six ‘officers’ are women. William remarks:

Yay, diversity!!!

On Friday evening, a few hours after the piece on Philip Davies’s conference speech in The Guardian which led to a great deal of mainstream coverage, Tom Swarbrick of LBC Radio devoted the final hour of his show to the matter. Firstly he interviewed Philip at length, then a particularly gormless feminist for thankfully only a short time, then myself (9:07), then there was a 30-minute phone-in.

You need to be a subscriber to LBC to access historical content. I asked LBC for copyright clearance to publish the full hour, but so far I’ve only been given clearance to publish my own contribution – here. It was heartening to be interviewed by someone not pandering to feminist sensibilities, for once.

Our thanks to Leigh for this. Barely any recognition of fathers denied access to their children, and no mention of the complicity of the state and the legal profession.

Next Sunday, 21 August, I’ll be joining some of the fine men from The London Group at Speakers’ Corner, from 10:30 onwards. I invite you to join us. A few of us will be protesting against MGM, a crime in the UK, at the same time.

Our thanks to John for this. An extract:

Mr Recorder Ben Nolan QC today sentenced Stanbridge to eight months imprisonment, suspended for two years, with rehabilitation requirements. The judge said: “She received a community order last year for an offence of sexual assault on a child.

“She has, within a matter of weeks of the sentence, committed a further offence of sexual activity with a child, the same child.”

The judge said a psychologist’s report into Stanbridge’s background, problems and learning difficulties meant the prison sentence could be suspended. But he warned her: “Should you commit any further offence, you are at risk of having to serve this sentence in addition to any other sentence imposed upon you.”

Hmm, I can’t recall any case of a man receiving a suspended sentence after sexually assaulting children, following a psychologist’s report. It’s almost as if Philip Davies MP was right, and women are treated more leniently in sentencing terms than men…

A new petition has just come to our attention. It was launched by Douglas of the Anti Misandry website. Please sign, to show your support for Philip Davies. Thank you.

Ella Whelan is an assistant editor at spiked, and the authoress of numerous pieces to which we’ve linked. Yesterday spiked published this, at times an insightful piece, but not immune to the anti-MRA and anti-J4MB rhetoric more commonly employed by her male colleagues. The second paragraph starts:

Davies chose to vent his anti-feminist spleen at a meeting organised by Justice for Men and Boys, a typically sad group of men’s rights activists.

The hyperlink will take you not to the conference website but to a silly piece by the Independent, itself drawn largely from a Guardian piece. Reliable sources, then…

A ridiculous statement later in Ms Whelan’s piece:

Yet is Davies really deserving of this scorn? For a start, as most women will no doubt be aware, men’s rights activists meetings are pretty lame affairs.

Most women, in common with most men, have never attended a men’s rights activists meeting, so how could they be ‘aware’ of any such thing? In my experience, they are anything but ‘pretty lame’.

The sneering final paragraph:

All free-thinking women must stand up for freedom of speech. We must defend the right of men who rant about misandry and other mad theories [our emphasis] to say their piece, not because we agree, but because to censor speech is to admit that we are not able to win the argument. The danger to freedom doesn’t lie in isolated gatherings of small-minded men; [our emphasis] rather, it lies in the paternalism of those who think we need to protect women by censoring opinion.

Ella Whelan can do much better than this, and generally does. The comments stream is more interesting and insightful than the article.

Our thanks to Martin for this. From the email associated with the embarrassing 13-page document:

About the author

Greg Young, CEO of LeaderShape Global, has been a thought leader in the field of leadership development for over 10 years following a senior career in the Lifesciences and Telecommunications Sectors – see http://www.leadershape.biz/greg-young. He is a contributor to “The Invisible Elephant & the Pyramid Treasure: Tomorrow’s Leadership – the Transpersonal Journey” (2011) and “Leadership Assessment for Talent Development” (2013). Greg diversity (sic) has a passion for diversity in leadership and most recently was on the Judging panel of Women in Construction and Engineering Awards (WICE) 2016.

An extract from the document (p2):

Routledge and LeaderShape Global in partnership are pleased to announce a series of quarterly White Papers around the subject of Transpersonal Leadership, culminating in the publication of a book entitled “Becoming a Transpersonal Leader” in January 2018. So what is Transpersonal Leadership? The concept was first published in a report on tomorrow’s leadership, based on a leadership development journey developed by LeaderShape (Knights, 2011). The word “transpersonal” was inspired by the use of the word in “transpersonal psychology” (Bynum, 2010). “Transpersonal” is defined as “extending or going beyond the personal or individual, beyond the usual limits of ego and personality”.

A Transpersonal Leader is defined as: They operate beyond the ego while continuing personal development and learning. They are radical, ethical, and authentic while emotionally intelligent and caring. They are able to:

• embed authentic, ethical and emotionally intelligent behaviours into the DNA of the organisation

• build strong, collaborative relationships, and

• create a Performance Enhancing Culture that is Ethical, Caring and Sustainable.

From p.10:

Ensuring women reach the top

There are many strong and valid societal and organisational reasons why fewer women reach senior positions and the very top of organisations than would be expected and justified by demographics. What this research study identifies is that women are actually better than men as leaders in many of the EI capabilities that make up the leadership styles that leaders need in the 21st century. However, the study also shows that there are a few areas, especially around emotional self-control and self-confidence where women could and should focus to make themselves as good as they can be as leaders in this fast changing world.

Strategies for building a strong pipeline of women leaders

This study shows that woman have natural attributes that when realised make them ideal leaders for organisations in the 21st century. The challenge however, is to get more women into leadership positions where they can deliver maximum advantage. These strategies fall into broad categories of: 1. Setting targets based upon sound data 2. Creating the right HR policies that enable the talent to be present in the work environment 3. Developing Organisation Development (OD) policies that recognise the difference in requirements between genders. 4. Building a culture that recognises and encourages leverage of the difference that woman can make to strategic thinking and performance.

My brain hurts. I think we can safely assume no mention is made in the document of the long-established fact that four times as many men as women have a strong work ethic, and that’s the prime reason men outnumber women at senior levels in the private sector.

Suicide is a deeply gendered issue in the UK, as it is globally. In the past 30 years the male:female suicide rate differential has more than doubled, from 1.7:1 to 3.5:1. Last year International Business Times published my article on the matter – here.

The Health Select Committee recently announced the launch of a suicide prevention inquiry – here. Eight of the committee’s 11 members are female, including the Chair, Dr Sarah Wollaston (C). We shall be sending a written submission (3,000 words maximum) by the deadline of 9 September, and seeking to give oral evidence to the committee. The last time I gave evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee was in 2012 – here (video, 56:50).