MEN-ONLY BOARDS ARE A NIGHTMARE EVEN IF THEY ARE THERE ON MERIT

Picture the scenario, some young lads from a mixture of ethnic backgrounds and all in single parent households living on a council estate in Camberwell and Peckham in South London. They work hard at school, excel in Maths, go onto university and after graduating get back together and set up a hedge fund or work their way up through an investment bank and eventually all sit to together on the Board.

Picture another scenario, some young girls from well off backgrounds go to the all-girl public school, St Paul's, in Fulham. Again, all do well, go to university, set up their own finance company in The City or work their way up an investment bank and eventually all sit together on the Board.

According to Harriet Harman and her views on men and the City, the former scenario is a "nightmare", yet, the latter is not.

On Tuesday, as part of Parliament's and Equalities Commission's witch-hunt on the City and men in general, Harman declared to the Treasury Select Committee that men-only boards were a nightmare.

This of course is all part of the current Government's anti-male agenda where anything can be said against men and where there are more men in a position than women that this is due to sexism and there is no need to prove this, because if the politically correct say its true, it has to be true. So few of course, stand up to it (of course, if you do, then according to the Coalition on Men & Boys, you are anti-equality and are ignorant).

In addition, she said that the Government would withhold Government contracts for City or financial organisations if they did not have enough women on the Board and she also did rule out quotas (a scenario in Norway where all Boards must have 40% women - so much for meritocracy in Scandinavia)

This witch-hunt is on top of the Equalities Bill which should finish going through Parliament in the next month which is the most anti-male piece of legislation probably ever entered into Statute.

The issue is simply that no longer will be people be judged on their merits or talents but on their gender. The latter is all that counts. It is sexist by its very nature as gender becomes the dominant factor rather than the individual. It is the end of liberalism in the UK.

Furthermore, there will be sexism at the individual level because if one single man who is more talented, adds more value and has more to offer than a woman both in competition for a place on the Board and she is chosen. That man, and his wife/girlfriend/male partner/sister/daughter and mother have been sexually discriminated against.

Harman and her acolytes forget, men and women do not live in isolation. If you discriminate against a man then you discriminate against the female members of his family.

  

Google News Coverage plus excellent Daily Mail article

Comments

[John Kimble]

Sounds exactly like hate speech to me.

Imagine if she'd talked about the nightmare of Muslim only boards, or black only or Jewish only!

[Groan]

Exactly John.It is just female chauvinism somehow let go due to some misplaced chivalry.

I suspect the "City" can look after itself. Rather more concerning is the Equalities Bill and the provisions for positive discrimination. This will probably not have more than cosmetic effects in Boards but will have direct consequences for ordinary workers and lower management.

As so clearly observed the target is to give "legs up" to upper middleclass women in Finance (a recent report for the chief medical officer is about doing the same for women doctors). The EHRC investigation into the construction industry has no such aim of getting more women to be brickies or plasterers. It seems the Ms Harman and her ilk have no interest in anyone outside their own guilded group, certainly not ordinary women or men both trying to make their way without benefit of silver spoons and influential connections. As Margaret Hodge pointed out today the BNP has grown as Labour in particular has ignored ordinary people in favour of fashionable groups of the affluent PC. As demonstrated by the former Home Secretary they are so afraid of ordinary people they feel they need anti stab vests to visit them! The lads from peckham really would be beyond the pale.

[amfortas]

And NONE of all the men sitting in Parliament seem to dare to call her a sexist cow. None of her fellow-travelling skirt-wearing Scottish ones not wig-wearing English ones. Not any of the pantie, suspenders and stockings-wearing members of the male Tory opposition whose friggin' job it is.

Silent as Big Momma rages.

[Groan]

Actually I think its because many of them are sexists themselves, to the extent they completely under estimate Ms Harman and seem to regard her and the "sisterhood" as a joke. Their smug complacency would be amusing, as she trounces them. If it wasn't for the fact that untold damage is being done to men's and women's lives as these men indulge the "babes" in Parliament with their highly experimental social engineering.