A piece in yesterday’s Evening Standard. Following the recent cabinet reshuffle, Home Secretary Amber Rudd has also taken on the mantle of the most absurd job title in government, Minister for Women and Equalities. And she’s lost no time in confirming that in common with the holders of all such titles, starting with Harriet Harman, she’s a liar. The start of the article:

Companies were today told to increase their profitability by appointing more women to top jobs as Home Secretary Amber Rudd warned that it made “no sense” to fill boardrooms with men.

In her first public appearance since taking charge of the Government’s equalities policy, Ms Rudd said firms were more likely to outperform their rivals if they had greater diversity in their senior ranks. [J4MB emphasis] 

She also called on businesses to close the gender pay gap by promoting more women from junior ranks, changing recruitment practices and allowing flexible work patterns.

The claim of a causal link between more women on boards and improved corporate performance has been known to be a lie since at least 2012. Evidence from longitudinal studies very clearly shows a link between more women on boards, and corporate financial decline – here.

A piece in yesterday’s Times. The 200+ comments thread is very interesting.

I am planning a life of crime, but not of punishment. This week I will steal two magnums of Dom Pérignon, glug both, smash one bottle over the head of a passer-by, get in my car well over the limit and drive into a tree. If you see me on my rampage it may be best to steer clear because I’ll be packing a fork to stab those who interfere. Come my day in court I have an inkling it will be OK, though, because I am a woman, youngish, with a degree: things that seem to act as a forcefield against punishment in our criminal justice system.

Last week we learnt that a junior doctor who had twice been caught drink-driving was to be spared prison. Lauren Fowler, 25, crashed her car and was found slurring and swearing by the police. Less than two months later, while on bail, she was caught three times over the limit after half a bottle of vodka. Recklessly endangering life not once but twice. She called it a “wake-up call”, but must have pressed the snooze button the first time. Yet, after much was made in court of Fowler’s profession and the stress it entails, she received a suspended sentence.

I’ve subscribed to The Spectator for some time, and am regularly troubled by the amount of feminist-friendly content (and the virtual absence of anti-feminist content, though the columnists Rod Liddle and James Delingpole are occasionally critical of feminists). Feminists including Julie Bindel and Julie Burchill write pieces for the publication.

I’ve just learned that Mary Wakefield is the commissioning editor, which may help explain things. In the current edition there’s a piece by her, titled, “When therapy does more harm than good” in the print edition, and, “For some girls, therapy does more harm than good” in the online version. It’s mainly about PTSD, and the male-specific content consists of the words, “We associate PTSD with soldiers back from grisly frontline…” before focusing on women and girls. My blood ran cold at the text I’ve emphasised in this extract:

Women can be shell-shocked by life. It’s surprising — and it’s not… All sorts of recent studies show that giving birth, even to a healthy baby, can be traumatising. Most new mothers wobble like light aircraft in turbulence, then stabilise and carry on. A number nosedive. More than 8 per cent of mothers in America and in Canada develop PTSD after childbirth. Then on top of the ordinary grind there’s life’s sucker punches: losing a child; losing a spouse; miscarriage; abortion (much though we celebrate it); serious accidents; sexual abuse.

Since the passing of the Abortion Act (1967), there have been around 10 million events to ‘celebrate’ in the UK. With every passing year there are about 200,000 more.

A piece by Rod Liddle in the current Spectator.

A piece by Nicholas Hellen in yesterday’s Sunday Times. Emphases are ours:

A mother with a fear of men has described her terror when she was locked in an NHS women’s psychiatric ward with a burly transgender patient who was about 6ft tall and “extremely male-bodied”.

Philippa Molloy, 42, said this weekend that she was “genuinely, absolutely terrified” because she had suffered a relapse in her bipolar disorder that made her irrationally convinced that men were conspiring to kill her.

When she raised her concerns with hospital staff, however, she said she was not taken seriously and her medical notes implied that she was a “transphobic bigot”.

She said the NHS had failed to think through the implications of allowing patients to self-identify their gender.

“The rights of that trans person to feel safe were put above the rights of me to feel safe as a natal woman,” Molloy said.

“Hang on a moment: the rights of someone born male being in front of someone born female — where have you heard that one before?” [J4MB: Nowhere, to be honest.]

It is the latest in a series of disagreements about transgender people sharing female-only facilities.

A controversial ruling has allowed men transitioning to be women to swim at the ladies’ pond on Hampstead Heath, north London, and The Sunday Times has revealed how a male-bodied NHS nurse was set to perform a cervical smear test on a woman who had requested a female nurse.

The resignation last week of Justine Greening, the equalities minister, has created uncertainty about plans to make it easier for people to change gender without a doctor’s diagnosis.

Molloy, who is married and has two children, was admitted to a women’s secure psychiatric ward on the night of February 15, 2016 in Burnley, 45 miles from her home in Lancaster.

“Part of my psychosis was that I was convinced I was being followed by men’s rights activists. It sounds ridiculous, but that was it. They wanted to kill me, they were going to come after me. And my husband was involved in everything. Because of that I was taken and placed in a female-only unit,” she said.

She describes herself as a feminist [J4MB: Now there’s a surprise] who had previously campaigned against the closure of a women-only ward.

“If you erroneously believe that there are men wanting to infiltrate your life in order to kill you and that is on your notes and that is why you are in a female unit [and you] suddenly discover a male- bodied person in your six-bed bay . . . I was terrified. Genuinely. Absolutely.”

She said the patient, who had arrived four days into her stay, was “presenting as female but they were very clearly physically male, very broad shoulders and about 6ft. They used to wander around in their dressing gown, not a particularly long dressing gown, [J4MB: What has the length of the dressing gown got to do with anything? Ah. Yes.] all the time.

“You are on a locked ward and you have nowhere to go. In Burnley there are no private rooms and you are just separated by curtains.”

She said other women on the ward were also at risk, one being a victim of male violence and another woman experiencing hypersexuality as a symptom of bipolar mania.

Two days after the arrival of the trans patient, Molloy was moved to a hospital in Lancaster where she stayed until April. She said she was taken aback when a nurse handling her case told her she was “really surprised to read your opinions about trans people” in the case notes.

Molloy was shocked by the implication that she was a “transphobic bigot” and by the failure to recognise that her response in the secure ward was “because I was psychotic. I don’t think trans people are a threat at all. At the time I believed that men were a threat.”

She said the incident had deterred her from going to hospital last October when she had a relapse with similar symptoms.

Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust said: “We would welcome the opportunity to discuss this directly with the person further to the written response they have previously received.

“The Equality Act offers guidance about the admission of transgender people to NHS wards and this is something we have also taken legal advice on. This directs that transgender people should be able to self-identify and receive treatment on the ward that is appropriate and in line with that self-identification.”

You can subscribe to The Times here.

A piece by Tom Whipple in today’s Times:

Mothers of children under the age of three are less happy if they stay in full-time employment, a study has found.

The study is the latest to investigate the consequences of recent social revolutions in women’s employment. “More than 50 years ago, Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique challenged the image of harmonious middle-class domesticity and advanced the idea that homemaking makes women unhappy,” [J4MB: Well, that would be the authoritative work on women’s happiness in relation to family life and paid employment] writes Dana Hamplová, from the Czech Academy of Sciences, in the Journal of Happiness Studies. “Yet, even after decades of discussions, the question of whether working mothers enjoy better subjective quality of life than stay-at-home mothers is still unresolved.” 

The survey of almost 5,000 mothers from 30 European countries looked at responses to the questions “How happy would you say you are?” and “How satisfied are you with your life?” The study found a small but significant increase in happiness among mothers who were not working, compared with full-time workers. In a comparison with part-timers the difference was not significant.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Several tips of the hat to the estimable Elizabeth Hobson for her excellent new website on The Representation of the People Act (1918). We’ve just added it to our lengthy list of recommended websites.

Our thanks to Mike P for this. The start and end of the piece:

A woman police officer subjected her ex to a menacing six-month stalking campaign after he dumped her and took up with a new lover.

Detective Constable Kirsty Anderson – who worked in a domestic violence unit – used her own police force’s computer to threaten Michael Hall, 36, and his new partner, telling them: ‘Life will be hell.’

The jealous detective, 39, even told Mr Hall to watch his two sons who ‘could disappear’.

She also threatened to spread untrue rumours Mr Hall’s new girlfriend Sarah Stroud, 37, was HIV positive and said she would petrol bomb Miss Stroud’s home while her daughter, aged five, slept. [J4MB emphases]

Now the West Yorkshire police officer is facing jail after pleading guilty at Bradford Crown Court to harassing Mr Hall, leaving him in fear of violence.

She also admitted using police computers to access data which she was not authorised to view.

Anderson – who had dated Mr Hall for eight weeks [J4MB emphasis] after meeting via Tinder – began her campaign when he dumped her, sending him a series of emails warning ‘Ur life will be hell’ and ‘U will live a nightmare’…

The court heard Anderson – who has resigned from the force – had a ‘raft of mental health problems’. [J4MB: Clearly well suited to working in a domestic violence unit, then.]

She is due to be sentenced on January 26. [J4MB: A woman with a ‘raft of mental health problems’. Is there the remotest chance of a suspended sentence?]

Our thanks to Mike P for this. Extracts:

Cambridge’s concessions emerged from a two-year review of the traditional exams, which said there was a 50 per cent jump in 2015-16 in undergraduates gaining permission to make ‘alternative arrangements’ because of anxiety or mental health issues such as depression…

One student told The Mail on Sunday that the obligatory quiet periods created a ‘suffocating cloud of stress’, and the ‘nagging feeling that college is forcing you to work can undermine your self-confidence’… [J4MB: Would this be a male or a female student? No prizes for answering that rhetorical question correctly. Will these women, when employed, get the ‘nagging feeling that the employer is forcing them to work’, thereby undermining their self-confidence? Let’s get more of these people onto our top corporate boards as soon as possible. What could possibly go wrong?]

Minutes of meetings by the review group show some members wanted colleges to organise tours of exam halls. There were also suspicions that some students applying late for ‘exam adjustments’ were ‘working the system’. It recommended more coursework to cut down on the pressure of three-hour tests, and that degree classification should not be based only on final-year exams. [J4MB: Looking at the consequence of the replacement of ‘O’ lebels by GCSEs in 1987/8, would such a move preferentially advantage men or women?]

 

Our thanks to Y for this piece in today’s Guardian:

A rape trial has collapsed after the Crown Prosecution Service offered no evidence when it emerged that images from the defendant’s phone of him in bed with his alleged victim had not been disclosed.

The failure of the case at Snaresbrook crown court, east London, is the latest example of crucial digital evidence contained on a mobile either not being found or not being handed over to defence solicitors.

Lawyers for Samson Makele, 28, who had been under investigation for a year and half, said that if they had not recovered the photographs themselves the trial could have resulted in a miscarriage of justice and the accused eventually being deported.

Scotland Yard is already conducting an urgent review of similar problems after another rape case was halted in Croydon in December under similar circumstances when phone messages between the man and woman cast doubt on the prosecution’s version of events.

Another sexual assault case was abandoned later in December after material recovered from the defendant’s phone was only belatedly handed over as the case was about to go to trial.

There has been growing concern over disclosure of material that police obtain during the course of an inquiry that might help the defendant’s case. The volume of evidence involved in sex cases has mushroomed at a time when both police and prosecutors complain about the lack of resources due to funding cuts in the criminal justice system.

At Snaresbrook on Monday, a CPS prosecutor told the court that it was abandoning the case against Makele, who is originally from Eritrea. He was accused of raping a 35-year-old woman whom he had met after the Notting Hill carnival in August 2016.

The pair were said to have taken a taxi back to Makele’s flat in Hackney where they had sex and the woman stayed the night. The next day she went to the police and alleged that Makele had raped her and prevented her from leaving his flat. She said she only managed to escape after he fell asleep.

Makele consistently denied the charge and said sex with the woman had been consensual. The CPS subsequently told Makele’s solicitor, Paris Theodorou, of the London law firm Hodge Jones & Allen, that apart from text messages showing contact between the two after the event there was nothing else of interest on the phone that needed to be disclosed.

When the phone was eventually returned to Makele, Theodorou commissioned an independent download of the phone’s contents and discovered more than a dozen photographs showing the pair apparently cuddling in bed together.

They undermined the prosecution’s version of events, suggesting that the relationship appeared to be consensual. Theodorou then served the CPS with the images that had been missed.

In court a barrister for the CPS said the prosecution was also being dropped because of another issue that had raised doubts about the credibility of the complainant.

Theodorou said it was unbelievable that his client had been subjected to “18 months of hell” with the criminal accusation hanging over him.

After the hearing Makele said the ordeal had left him unable to function properly. “I cannot sleep. I can’t go anywhere, even for a day,” he said.

Abigail Bright, a barrister from Doughty Street Chambers who represented Makele in court, said after the case: “It should be a minimum requirement that [police and prosecution] should look at the downloads from the phones around the period of an alleged offence.

Both prosecution and defence ideally ought to be allowed access to all downloaded evidence through a secure online account, she suggested.

Theodorou had to obtain prior permission from the Legal Aid Agency to spend £1,300 plus VAT commissioning an independent technical expert to download all the information on the mobile phone so that he could examine it. [J4MB: And if that permission had been denied, Makele would presumably have been convicted and imprisoned. But why should a man’s freedom depend on the existence of such evidence?]

At least four images showed Makele and the woman in bed together under the sheets, apparently naked.

The police later admitted that the images had not been found by the initial investigation. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said: “It is the responsibility of the investigating officer to pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry in an investigation.

“This involves making complex decisions based on the evidence available and disclosures made by defendants and complainants during the investigation process.

“In this case it is apparent that the police investigation did not find the images, which were first disclosed by the defendant in early January 2018. After this the case was discontinued.”

I have no idea how to subscribe to The Guardian, nor any idea why anyone of sound mind would wish to.