The Labour Party who brought in the invidious legislation to allow for gender discrimination which it has used time and time again to disenfranchise men from the British political system (through all women-shortlists) has announced this week that it has brought in quotas into the Shadow Cabinet.
This is of course anti-equality and has nothing to do with meritocracy or the best person for the job.
As the Daily Mail reported (and the Guardian of course) Labour Party MP's voted (remember this is not being imposed on high, the male MP's voted for this as well!!) to ensure that the Shadow Cabinet must have a minimum of 31.5% women. Not as many as the 50% that leading anti-male campaigner Harriet Harman wanted.
As Labour MP's vote on who should be in the Shadow Cabinet, it will end up creating a similar situation to the one that the Conservatives used for selecting their European Election candidates. Where there could be (as in five in nine cases in the Conservative case) women being promoted into the Shadow Cabinet even though they received fewer votes than a male.
This of course is sexist, anti-democratic and anti equality.
Where politicians lead of course, others follow.
There continues to be pressure on boardrooms to be more gender equal (always in favour of women), the continue myths and lies spread over pay (the gender pay gap) and of course the Equality Act which will allow employers to discriminate against men when choosing candidates for selection (though I have read that this section of the Act has not been implemented by the Coalition as the Conservatives had opposed it and now in Government have chosen not to implement it - will be checking)
This therefore is just the tip of the iceberg and we can now wait with bated breath for quotas to be brought in across the UK. This will require legislative changes (political parties can discriminate because of the Sex Discrimination Election Act 2002).
The message, throughout all of this, is your skill, talent and expertise does not matter - it is your gender that counts and as long as it is not male.
Posted by Skimmington
Have a look at the Athena Swan awards (athenaswan.org.uk) to see the level of anti-male bias in academia and the level of anti-male bias in the workplace. read through the gold award made to the Chemistry department of York university and, perhaps, like me you will think that males are to be eradicated within the employment field. If athena Swan awards (public funded misandry) were truley interested in equality, then similar processes would be in place for males in under-represented areas.
Posted by: J. mackie | Tuesday, 14 September 2010 at 11:51