A hatchet-faced feminist trout we hope never to see again.
Our thanks to Mike P for this.
Month: April 2018
Ryanair pays male employees on average three times more than its female employees. Michael O’Leary, CEO, in line for a Churchill award.
A piece by Rosamund Urwin in yesterday’s Sunday Times:
Ryanair pays its male staff in the UK more than three times as much as their female colleagues, the no-frills airline has revealed.
Women’s hourly pay at Ryanair is on average 67% lower than men’s. Only 3% of staff in its highest-earning quartile are women, the carrier has revealed. [J4MB: Hmm. Might the two things be connected?}
“Like all airlines, our gender pay in the UK is materially affected by the relatively low numbers of female pilots in the aviation industry,” it said. “In recent years, the number of female pilots applying to Ryanair has increased.”
Only eight — or 1.4% — of the budget airline’s 554 pilots in the UK are women, compared with 5.7% at arch rival easyJet. [J4MB: Hmm. Might pilots be paid more than cabin crew? If so, it’s not fair.]
The carrier used to publish a “Girls of Ryanair” charity calendar featuring cabin crew in bikinis. However, chief executive Michael O’Leary scrapped it four years ago, saying it did not chime with the family-friendly image he wanted to cultivate.
Last June, Ryanair’s chairman, David Bonderman, resigned from the board of car-hailing app Uber after being accused of sexism. He had interrupted fellow director Arianna Huffington to say that adding women to the board would just mean more talking. [J4MB: A good point, well made, David. It’s always good to interrupt Arianna Bloody-Huffington.]
Under new legislation, companies and charities must publish their gender pay gap data by Wednesday.
You can subscribe to The Times here.
William Collins’s important blog piece on the gender pay gap is here. Spoiler alert:
The median gender pay gap is in favour of women for part-time employees, and has been for 20 years. Post-tax, for full-time employees, the gap has been in favour of women for a number of years.
Speakers Corner: A discussion about MGM with a Muslim gentleman
We had a good time at Speakers’ Corner yesterday, along with quite a few members of The London Group, some of whom spoke effectively to the crowds. We had a good level of engagement on MGM, large numbers of people seeing our placards, many taking pictures on their smartphones of the web addresses of the Muslim and Jewish cases against MGM – one side of the placard gives the website address of the Muslim case, the other side the Jewish address. When Muslims and Jews come up to us to complain that their religion is named on the placard, but not the other religion, we turn the placards round. We also handed out a considerable number of anti-MGM leaflets. All in all, a very successful day.
We’ve just posted this (video 15:09) onto our YouTube channel, a discussion with a Muslim gentleman about MGM. Our playlist of around 55 MGM-related audio and video pieces is here.
You can fix hexagonal wheels on a car if you want to, but…
Earlier today we posted a piece titled BBC pledges to have 50:50 gender split of expert voices by April next year. Our thanks to Sundancekid for posting these comments:
You can fit hexagonal wheels on a car if you want to.. if you feel sorry for hexagons.
Don’t expect a smoother ride though.
And don’t expect to get there any quicker.
That’s my expert opinion.
(I’d tell the BBC, but I’m not confident enough… ).
Metropolitan Police ditches practice of believing all victims
Our thanks to David for this piece in today’s Times, emphasis ours:
Britain’s biggest police force has abandoned its policy of automatically believing victims after a series of flawed inquiries into alleged sex crimes, The Times can reveal.
Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said she had told officers they must have an open mind when an allegation is made and that their role was to investigate, not blindly believe.
“You start with a completely open mind, absolutely,” she said. “It is very important to victims to feel that they are going to be believed. Our default position is we are, of course, likely to believe you but we are investigators and we have to investigate.”
The issue has become one of the most fraught for the police service since a national policy instructed officers to believe alleged victims automatically. It was aimed at encouraging people to come forward with the confidence that they would be taken seriously, particularly in sexual abuse cases.
The guidelines were put in place after revelations in 2011 that police had failed to properly investigate abuse allegations, including by victims of the former BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, who was revealed after his death to have been Britain’s most prolific paedophile. However, the Met was later severely criticised after its detectives placed their faith in a man known only as Nick, declaring that his uncorroborated claims of a Westminster abuse ring were “credible and true”. The Crown Prosecution Service is considering whether Nick will be charged with perverting the course of justice after his claims were shown to be false.
Sir Richard Henriques, a retired judge, identified failings in Operation Midland and said that the instruction to believe a victim’s account should be withdrawn. It undermined the principle of suspects being innocent until proven guilty, he said in 2016.
Ms Dick took the helm at Scotland Yard nearly a year ago, after the collapse of Operation Midland. Asked if she was rethinking the belief policy, she said: “Rethink? I’ve rethought. I arrived saying very clearly to my people that we should have an open mind, of course, when a person walks in. We should treat them with dignity and respect and we should listen to them. We should record what they say. From that moment on we are investigators.”
She said that the police had been criticised for not being open-minded enough. It was important to encourage victims to come forward and she wanted to “go on raising confidence”.
She said: “Our job in respect of investigations is to be fair, to be impartial, and where appropriate to bring things to justice — and of course to support victims, but it isn’t all about victims.”
The Met has also been criticised after a series of rape trials collapsed because evidence was not properly disclosed to the defence. Ms Dick said the issue was being reviewed but added that disclosure legislation was not fit for purpose in the digital age when mobile phones contained “tons and tons” of data.
She said that the MeToo movement had thrown a spotlight on the issue of sexual abuse but cautioned: “Speaking as a cop, opposed to a citizen, I’m interested in crime. If it’s a long time ago, or it’s very trivial, or I’m not likely to get a criminal justice outcome, I’m not going to spend a lot of resources on it.
“And what might be a misunderstanding between two people, clumsy behaviour between somebody who fancies somebody else, is not a matter for the police.”
You can subscribe to The Times here.
June 2016: Our protests against Alison Saunders and MGM
Our thanks to Ewan Jones for filming and editing this (video, 13:58). Our thanks to everyone who turned up to protest outside the head office of the CPS, calling for Alison Saunders to be fired. The video also has some footage of our later protest that day against MGM in Parliament Square.
BBC pledges to have 50:50 gender split of expert voices by April next year
It has long been the case that many of the female “experts” wheeled onto BBC programmes are woefully inexpert. All too often, we see studio discussions of women interviewing 20-something or 30-something women, asking how they feel about things. These women’s level of “expertise” is often embarrassing. Things are going to get worse, as they invariably do at the BBC. Our thanks to Sean for this. Extracts:
The BBC is to insist half of the expert voices heard on news and current affairs programmes are women by next year, it has been announced.
The broadcaster has set a 50:50 gender quota after it came under pressure over its treatment of female staff.
By April 2019, the corporation aims to have an equal number of male and female expert contributors to topical shows, as it increases the number of women on air.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the director-general, said the target would “help transform the range of expert voices across the BBC”.
Director of news Fran Unsworth said change must move “further and faster”, pledging the organisation will produce a report to be accountable on its progress…
More than 100 people have so far taken part in an “expert women” scheme, for free media training sessions to boost confidence and performance.
The quota relates only to contributing “experts”, brought in to give insight and opinion on topical stories…
It also rules out programmes “which already have a focus on gender”, such as Woman’s Hour, which “would not be expected to achieve a 50:50 balance because of the very nature of the programme’s editorial remit”. [J4MB: Conveniently ignoring that “programmes which already have a focus on gender” invariably focus on women, and have feminist narratives.]
Alison Saunders: #BYEBITCH
Alison Saunders fired. About damned time.
The bitch is going. The headline in the Telegraph:
Exclusive: Head of Crown Prosecution Service to stand down after ‘disastrous’ tenure
About damned time. Long overdue.
Justice for Men & Boys 