My warm thanks to all of you who volunteered to join me in handing out leaflets on 7 March 2012 to people attending the FT seminar ‘Women on Board’.

The grave threat to British business comes not only from within the UK – led by David Cameron and the CBI, to their eternal shame – but, as we might reliably expect, from Europe. There’s a consultation exercise on gender ‘imbalance’ in the boardroom and the woman running it must know that hundreds (maybe even thousands?) of women will contribute to the exercise for every man who does so. You can be sure the Fawcett Society is mobilising its army of feministas. Let’s surprise the woman behind the exercise, then, by contributing our points of view, which may be emailed.

A sample question from the exercise:

In your view, would an increased presence of women on company boards bring economic benefits, and which ones?

It’s apparently not even considered that an increased presence of women might bring economic disbenefits, at least at the current time when there are so few women well qualified for board positions – especially executive director positions, rather than non-executive director positions – as we’d expect from the results of the University of Michigan study on Norwegian boards (see earlier post).

Further details on http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/gender-equality/opinion/120528_en.htm.