Our thanks to Martin for a piece in Newsweek by a female journalist. It starts:

Women who work at Goldman Sachs in the U.K. earn an average of 56 percent less than their male colleagues, a fact the company said is representative of an entrenched imbalance between the number of male and female senior staffers at the financial firm.

That gap widens even more when discretionary bonuses are taken into account, stretching the imbalance to 72 percent. Women account for 62 percent of the lowest-paid workers at the financial institution. The admissions come Friday as part of a U.K. law that requires companies with more than 250 employees to disclose pay disparities. 

Goldman Sachs cushioned the data with an explanation that it hires based on skill, not gender.

“We are a meritocracy, and gender is not a factor in the way that we pay our people,” the company said. “We pay women and men in the same way, using the same compensation criteria, including the nature of their role and their performance.” [J4MB: Companies should limit their comments on their gender pay gaps to statements like this.]

Just as you’re possibly thinking Goldman Sachs might be a vanishingly rare example of sanity on the issue of the gender pay gap, the piece continues:

Goldman Sachs said that it is working to increase representation of women in high-ranking positions, starting with its classes of incoming graduates. The company also won a Gender Equality Award in 2016 for its program that pairs “high-potential” women with mentors in the upper echelons of the company. [J4MB: Do “high-potential” men not need mentors, and if not, why not?]

The company also announced that it signed on to the U.K. Women in Finance Charter, committing itself to having women hold 30 percent of top-brass positions by 2023.

“The fundamental challenge we should all be focused on is increasing the representation of women at senior levels,” Goldman Sachs said. “This is where the real imbalance lies, and requires attention at the earliest stages of recruitment to attract more women to financial services roles.”

The dismal number of women in high-ranking positions is common across the financial sector. A study of 2015 pay data found that women made up only 14 percent of executive-ranking jobs, allowing men to control the boardrooms in most firms. [J4MB: Could you ask for a clearer statement to illustrate this is about women seeking power, regardless of merit?]

Companies across the U.K. will have to turn over internal data on gender equity by April 4. Some large companies have already released reports, with HSBC Holdings, the largest British banking and financial institution, reporting the widest gap, at 59 percent.

 

Our thanks to Mike P for this.

Deepika Bhardwaj is an Indian woman and film maker, her film Martyrs of Marriage was screened at last years’s conference in Australia, and got a very positive response. We’re delighted to report it’s now available to watch at no cost for Netflix subscribers, a link is here. You’ll need to switch on English subtitles, our thanks to William Gruff for this guidance:

Bring up the control bar at the bottom of the screen (the volume slider and play buttons etc.) and click on the subtitles button (square speech bubble with black ‘text’ in it) – then click on ‘English CC’ (under subtitles) so that it’s ticked.

Another day, another woman refusing to take responsibility for the failures of the organization she’s been leading – here. When organizations perform well, women enthusiastically claim a share of the credit. But when organizations fail, women – including the organization’s leader, if a woman – will not share the responsibility. The responsibility always lies with others. This is just one of countless manifestations of a golden rule:

Women want the upside of everything, and the downside of nothing.

Our thanks to Sean for this piece in the Evening Standard. Lauren’s Wiki page is here.

Our thanks to Mike P for this in The Washington Times. An extract:

Again contemplating why she lost the 2016 presidential race, Mrs. Clinton blamed certain women for not thinking for themselves.

“We don’t do well with married, white women,” she said, because of “ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should,” Mrs. Clinton told the audience.

It’s obvious from the last election that the Democrats also didn’t do well with married, white men. Yet, Mrs. Clinton doesn’t argue that it was Republican women bullying and pressuring their husbands into voting a certain way.

In other words, the leading liberal feminist in the country is pushing the ironic narrative that if you’re a woman who does not conform to the liberal narrative, you have no mind of your own and are controlled by the men in your life.

Yet it’s conservatives who are sexist and reliant on perpetuating gender stereotypes. Got it.

Having come from the left, one of the most constant and appalling demonstrations of sexism in the feminist movement was the degrading and dehumanizing of women with whom liberal feminists disagreed.

Times caption: Mariam Moustafa, 18, is thought to have suffered a stroke

and bleeding on the brain in the attack in the centre of Nottingham

A shocking piece posted online by The Times:

An Egyptian engineering student has died three weeks after she was beaten up by a gang of ten women and girls in a city centre while waiting for a bus.

Mariam Moustafa, 18, was punched and dragged 20 metres by a “group of women” outside the Intu Victoria Centre in Nottingham on February 20 at about 8pm.

The student was punched several times in Parliament Street before she got on to the No 27 bus outside the shopping centre. She was followed on to the bus by the gang of women, who were threatening and abusive towards her before they got off. Her mother said that she was previously abused in the street by the same gang but that the police failed to act.

Ms Moustafa, from St Ann’s, had been due to meet her mother and sister later that evening but never turned up. She was taken to Queen’s Medical Centre after the attack and was discharged but she started to deteriorate at home and was rushed back to hospital the same day. She was placed in an induced coma but died yesterday.

Belinda Brown has changed her talk title to:

From the flawed concept of toxic masculinity to responsive masculinity: rethinking how we conceptualise men.

If you haven’t yet ordered your conference ticket(s), you have just 16 days left to do so, before 24:00 GMT on 31 March. You can book your ticket(s) here.

Followers of this website will need no reminding that Campaign for Merit in Business has been explaining since 2012 that strong evidence exists – here – demonstrating a causal link between increasing gender diversity on boards, and corporate financial DECLINE. While proponents of ‘more women on boards’ continue to misrepresent correlation (between increasing gender diversity on boards, and corporate financial improvement) as causation, any 16-year-old studying Mathematics at GCSE level should be aware that correlation isn’t the same as causation, and doesn’t even imply it.

Professor Susan Vinnicombe of Cranfield University has been for many years the world’s leading academic proponent for ‘more women on boards’. In 2012 she admitted to a House of Lords inquiry that she knew of no evidence of a causal link between increasing gender diversity on boards, and improved corporate financial performance – here.

Our thanks to James for alerting us to an article about a Chinese investor based in Beijing, Luo Mingxiong. The start of the piece:

After days in the spotlight for saying female CEOs are bad for business, Luo Mingxiong, a Chinese investor in Beijing, does not regret what he said.

“If I could have had a chance to say it again, I would still list this as my investment principle,” said Luo. He was referring to his statement at a public presentation in Beijing this month that “we usually don’t invest in female chief executive officers”.

Luo, the founder of Beijing venture capital firm Jingbei Investment, sparked a public outcry in China as he listed female CEOs in his 10 no-investment principles, suggesting that in the corporate world, they are as negative an attribute as dishonesty or an inability to learn.

Embedded in the article is a link to an article by a female journalist, Enoch Yiu, and published in 2016 in the South China Morning Post. It’s titled, Female CEOs, board members improve company returns, says Credit Suisse study. She is misrepresenting correlation as causation. The 52-page-long 2016 Credit Suisse study is here. The bottom line? At no point does the report claim a causal link between increased gender diversity on boards, and improved corporate financial performance.

On Sunday evening I was interviewed by Yasmeen Khan of Three Counties Radio about MGM, along with other people. Due to a mix-up I wasn’t introduced at the beginning of the show, unlike Manzoor Moghul, chairman of the Muslim Forum, but spoke to Yasmeen later. The chronology of the individual contributions is in the file description, the audio file is here (30:25). The other key contributors were Patrick Smyth and David Smith (15 Square).