Isn’t it remarkable how publicly-owned institutions, and left-leaning businesses and publications, are keen to tell the corporate world how to run itself (e.g. by ‘improving’ gender diversity in the boardroom’), whilst being so incapable of managing themselves efficiently? One thinks inevitably of the famously inefficient leftie organisation, the BBC, and The Guardian (loss-making) but what of Royal Mail? A £9 billion+ turnover publicly-owned business which struggles to break even (and in some years doesn’t), despite a monopolistic stranglehold in some areas. For the past two years Royal Mail’s chief executive has been a Canadian woman, Moya Greene, who previously worked for Canada Post (also publicly-owned). It seems Ms Greene is now keen to lead the fight for women to enter the boardroom in greater numbers. If nothing else positive comes of this, that poor Helena Morrissey may now allow herself the odd day off.

The following is from an article in today’s edition of The Guardian. The full article includes comments from Ceri Goddard, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, the same woman who insulted viewers’ intelligence with her comments recently on BBC TV’s feminist masterpiece Women at the Top. I won’t insult your intelligence by giving exposure to her remarks. They’re utterly predictable, anyway.

Royal Mail chief executive Moya Greene has become one of the most senior figures in corporate Britain to publicly back recruitment quotas for women in the workplace – including the boardroom. Greene told an audience at the Communication Workers Union’s women’s section in Peterborough she was prepared to champion quotas, despite many of her peers in business having lobbied furiously to block such a move from Brussels.

‘There is something about the UK – for all its egalitarianism, women are not represented as they should be in society or companies,’ Greene said. Despite modest moves in the right direction, expectations for women in the workplace were changing at a ‘glacial place’. She told the union delegates: ‘If you want quotas, I am open to leading that discussion.’…

Greene told the women delegates that although the recruitment industry is overwhelmingly female, the lists they send for jobs are predominantly male. ‘I’ve sent back the lists and have told others to do the same – it’s almost a campaign.’ She recalled having to do the same thing in her previous job. ‘At Canada Post I had to say we wouldn’t accept white, male lists…’

Let’s do some switching here. What would Ms Greene say of a male chief executive who said he wouldn’t accept ‘black, female’ lists? Presumably that he was being both racist and sexist?