An interesting piece by John Lloyd for Quillette. I’ve posted these comments:
One aspect of “woke capitalism” that has never been exposed in the mainstream media is the “women on boards” scam, namely the claim that appointing more women to corporate boards would result in enhanced financial performance. The result of this scam has been a huge increase in the number of women on major corporate boards, the overwhelming majority as non-executive directors.
In 2012 I presented evidence to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries of the already well-established causal link between increasing gender diversity on boards and corporate financial DECLINE. The evidence is here:
I have often challenged high-profile proponents of “more women on boards” to provide evidence of a causal link with improved financial performance, and they’ve never come up with anything. The most recent challenges, last December, included challenges of Baroness Helena Morrissey, founder of The 30% Club in 2010, Tony Danker, the Director General of the CBI, and Professor Susan Vinnicombe:
https://c4mb.uk/2022/12/14/women-on-boards-our-public-challenge-of-four-leading-proponents-2/
Mike Buchanan
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS
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I am not disputing that putting people who don’t know much about the company on the Board is likely to turn out a costly fiasco, but I quite like the story about Branson’s trains. For months the toilets on the trains locked themselves and wouldn’t allow passengers to use them. It was not unusual to find, even on a long journey on Branson’s Breakdowns, that all the toilets on the trains had closed themselves and there were no usable toilets on the train at all.
It turned out that there had been no (0) women involved in the design process at any stage, with obvious consequences. Nobody realised that women dispose of paper pads and similar stuff by putting them down the toilet. Sensors in the toilet detected that an object had been put into the toilet and closed the toilet down.
The pump that had been used to remove waste from the toilet could not cope with the paper pads. It reported a fault and the toilet shut itself down.