Why is it always a ‘problem’ when men dominate a profession, but never a problem when women do? For many years over 90% of psychology graduates have been women, and nobody bats an eyelid.

Four out of seven unemployed people in the UK are men, yet the state does everything it can to drive up female employment, and as a consequence male unemployment. In the public sector two-thirds of employees are women, yet the Equality Act (2010) allows public sector bodies to favour women over men when recruiting – the invidious ‘positive action’ provision, which is positive discrimination for women in all but name.

Decade after decade of taxpayer-funded social engineering initiatives have led to the feminisation of a number of professions which were historically male-dominated, medicine being an obvious example. 70% of newly-qualified doctors today are women. The NHS is in crisis as a result, as we’ve reported on a number of occasions, while 72% of the income taxes which pay for this insane ‘direction of travel’ are paid by men, just 28% by women.

Clearly it would make no sense to increase the employment of women in male-dominated professions which are not currently in crisis. Yet that’s precisely what government, businesses, and professional bodies have long been working together to deliver.

What about the professions which women have long been less inclined than men to pursue? This brings us to engineering, a traditionally male-dominated field, and Nick Baveystock nick.baveystock@ice.org.uk. He’s the director general of the Institution of Civil Engineers and is on the board of an organisation called WISE http://wisecampaign.org.uk. From their website:

At WISE, our mission is to increase the gender balance in the UK’s STEM workforce, pushing the presence of female employees from 13% as it stands now, to 30% by 2020.

Our services are designed to build and sustain the pipeline of female talent in STEM from classroom to boardroom, boosting the talent pool to drive economic growth.

WISE, which has nearly 30 years experience of inspiring girls to pursue STEM subjects, now incorporates the UKRC, which had a contract from the Government from 2004-12 to increase opportunities for women in science, engineering and technology through support services to business, education and women returners. The UKRC is now an independent Community Interest Company trading as WISE (company number 07533934).

Let’s do some basic maths. By 2020 – just seven years away – this organisation’s ’mission’ is to more than double the proportion of women in these fields, from 13% to 30%. Put another way, they want the proportion of men in these fields to fall from 87% to 70%. All else being equal, we estimate this would require the number of men working in these fields to fall by 24.2% by 2020.

We’re today making the following public challenge to Nick Baveystock:

Are you aware that by virtue of being on the board of WISE, you’re supporting an initiative with the objective of reducing the number of men working in engineering by 24.2% by 2020? I should like to offer a presentation at ICE to outline why this ‘direction of travel’ will inevitably be highly damaging to the engineering profession, and those who rely upon it.

Good afternoon. We hope you’ve had a restful summer break.

We should like to thank our supporters warmly, and our donors in particular. In July we launched our first ‘crowdfunding campaign’, aiming to raise £1,000 to fund the third of the 30 candidates we plan to field at the 2015 general election. The campaign was scheduled to last 60 days, yet the full sum was raised in just 22 days. Today we’re launching a new campaign, more on this shortly.

Recently we’ve been working even longer hours than usual, helping a television documentary maker understand the assaults on men’s and boys’ interests in the modern era, and the malign influence exerted by militant feminists and their collaborators. Along with a small number of others with an interest in these matters, I expect to be filmed shortly for that documentary, possibly in the context of a ’round table’ discussion. The programme will be broadcast on national television in the New Year, and to the best of my knowledge it will be the first time feminism has been critiqued on a mainstream British television channel in the modern era.

The public appetite to challenge feminism is growing across the world. A number of prominent Canadian ‘honey badgers’ – anti-feminist women – have been interviewed on television. In the United States Paul Elam, founder and publisher of ‘A Voice for Men’ http://avoiceformen.com, arguably the most influential men’s human rights website in the world, was interviewed last week for the ABC television programme 20/20. The show regularly attracts 50+ million viewers.

We believe that in time, as J4MB becomes able to fund more candidates at the 2015 general election, we’ll attract more media attention. In the light of this, we’re today launching our new crowdfunding campaign, to fund our fourth candidate. We’ve set a tighter deadline than last time, 30 days, and the deadlines will have to become yet tighter as we approach the 2015 general election, now just 20 months away. If the £1,000 target isn’t met by 30 September, your donation will be refunded in full. You can donate through the following link by credit card, debit card, or PayPal:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/j4mb-is-seeking-gbp-1-000-to-fund-its-fourth-2015-general-election-candidate

We alerted a few donors to this new campaign a few hours ago, and we’re delighted to see that Doris M, one of J4MB’s most stalwart and generous supporters since it was registered as a political party, has already made a donation (£25.00). Doris, thank you. You’re a star.

If you’d rather make a donation by cheque, please make it out to ‘Justice for men & boys’ and send it to Justice for men & boys, PO Box 2220, Bath BA1 1AA.   Thank you for your support, and for seeking to ensure that men & boys (and the women who love them) enjoy a brighter future.

Best wishes,

Mike Buchanan

E: mike@j4mb.org.uk

T: 07967 026163

Some months ago I gave oral evidence to a House of Commons inquiry, ‘Women in the Workplace’. On the same panel was Heather McGregor, the owner and chief executive of Taylor Bennett, a London-based recruitment agency. She boasted of the gender balance in her company. Of the 22 directors and employees, 20 were women.

We see the same pattern across both the public and private sectors. Men appoint women to senior jobs, and the women use their power ruthlessly to appoint women at the expense of men. My thanks to the MHRA who’s just pointed me towards a piece on the management team of an agency of the Australian government, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. There are no men in the team. Yet another female-driven gravy train financed by taxpayers.

http://www.wgea.gov.au/about-wgea/management-team

On Woman’s Hour yesterday there was a piece about a recent report which showed that in the UK men on average earn twice the amount in bonuses as women.

In the public sector women on average earn more in bonuses than men, so we’re talking about the private sector here. It’s not in the least surprising that men earn higher bonuses. They’re far more likely than women to do the really tough, stressful, results-oriented jobs that lead to substantial bonuses, and if they don’t hit their targets, they’ll probably be fired. As an illustration of the gender divide at work here, virtually all the women being appointed to FTSE100 boards share something in common with virtually all the existing ones – they’re appointed as non-executive directors, a gravy-train for women.

Jenni Murray interviewed two people in the studio, Dr Petra Wilton of the Chartered Management Institute (‘CMI’), and Roger Barker, Director of Corporate Governance at the Institute of Directors. The programme runs from 1:08 – 8:18 on the link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b038c7b5/Womans_Hour_Bonus_Pay_Gap_Samantha_Shannon_Mania_Akbari/

During the course of the discussion Dr Wilton stated the following:

There’s a real business case to get more women onto boards… studies by McKinsey etc. show time and time again that diversity does pay, it’s actually providing better returns for shareholders and investors.

I let out a low groan when I heard these lines. Anyone who follows our associated blog Campaign for Merit in Business  https://c4mb.wordpress.com knows that reports such as McKinsey’s show a correlation between more women on boards and improved financial performance, but correlation isn’t proof of causation, nor does it even imply causation. Every study and report of which we’re aware, including McKinsey reports, make that critical point – yet it’s never mentioned in the relentless narrative of ‘more women on boards leads to improved returns’.

The only evidence of which we’re aware showing anything approaching a causal link, five longitudinal studies, shows that when female representation on boards increases, corporate financial performance declines. Our briefing paper on the matter:

https://c4mb.wordpress.com/improving-gender-diversity-on-boards-leads-to-a-decline-in-corporate-performance-the-evidence/

Today I had an exchange of emails and a 20-minute-long phone discussion with Dr Wilton, and I’ll be emailing her a link to this piece shortly. Our public challenge to her:

Dr Wilton, could you – or any of your colleagues at the CMI – please provide evidence to back the assertion you made on Woman’s Hour yesterday, that (gender) diversity provides better returns for shareholders and investors? Please bear in mind that correlation isn’t evidence of causation. Thank you.

If we receive a response from Dr Wilton we’ll publish it, along with our critique of it.

The Institute of Economic Affairs (‘IEA’) is universally regarded as being in the very top rank of British think tanks. We were delighted to see an article by Kristian Niemietz (an IEA economist) a couple of days ago, and we’ve just learned of a new one by Professor Philip Booth, the IEA’s Editorial and Programme Director, and a former adviser on financial stability issues at the Bank of England:

http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/10-female-keynesian-economists-10-male-keynesian-economists-20-keynesian-economists

We thank the IEA for being unique among British think tanks in raising concerns over the possible impacts of longstanding gender-related policy directions on the performance of key institutions such as banks and companies.

An excellent new piece by Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs:

http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/gender-quotas-the-left%E2%80%99s-version-of-trickle-down-economics?

The IEA remains the only think tank in the UK prepared to give any exposure to this issue. We were grateful to have a blog piece on this issue published by them last year (link below) and I later gave a well-received presentation to a capacity audience at the IEA.

http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/the-gender-diversity-delusion

I’ve written at length about the impact of feminising workplaces, as have others. I see that the government has just given £500 million of taxpayers’ money to Accident and Emergency departments to help them deal with their staffing ‘crisis’. But why is there a crisis in the first place? Because for 30+ years the state has been steadily driving up the proportion of medical students who are women. Today 70% of medical students are women.

Two months ago Melanie Phillips wrote of the problems arising from women doctors in the NHS:

http://j4mb.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/melanie-phillips-on-female-doctors/

Female doctors are far more likely than male doctors to quit the profession, work part-time whether or not they have children, and more likely to refuse to work unsocial hours and in the most stressful and demanding departments such as A&E.

It costs £250,000 to train a doctor. So what’s the Conservative-led coalition’s solution to the crisis? To increase the proportion of male medical students? Of course not. The ‘solution’ is to train more doctors, presumably 70% of them still women. Well, it’s only taxpayers’ money being flushed down the drain.

And what of the private sector? The American economist Milton Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom (1962):

Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.

These days major companies are riddled with left-leaning executives and Corporate Social Responsibility (‘CSR’) consultants demanding they honour ever more onerous social responsibilities, regardless of the impact on the bottom line. Perhaps the most egregious practise is the relentless pandering to women in the workplace, whether it’s to increase the proportion of women on corporate boards – despite the compelling evidence that the consequence will be corporate financial decline – or to accommodate women’s needs and wishes to take time out of the workplace for child-related matters. Why should companies be any more accommodating of women in this area, than they would for men who wished to take significant time out of the workplace for other reasons?

And so it is that we have a relentless torrent of nonsensical pieces like this, almost always written by female reporters, male reporters seemingly unable to report on gender-related matters:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23600465

The piece starts with:

“More than a quarter of mothers in the UK feel discriminated against at work, a survey suggests.

A third of 1,975 women questioned for legal firm Slater and Gordon said they found it impossible to climb the career ladder and 54% said their employer could do more to support working mums.

Yet 35% thought they worked harder since having children.

Employers said businesses were better than ever at managing maternity leave and reintegrating mothers.

A total of 35% of the mothers questioned by One Poll in July said their workplace was not supportive of their situation when they were pregnant and 31% felt they were not well treated by their employer while on maternity leave.

Some 27% said they had felt under pressure to return to work earlier than they wanted too.

Once back in the workplace, 29% felt they had been overlooked for a promotion because they had responsibilities as a mother.”

Only from a whining female perspective could these numbers be deemed problematical. Let’s flip the numbers to see why:

“Almost three-quarters of mothers in the UK didn’t feel discriminated against at work, a survey suggests.

Two-thirds of 1,975 women questioned for legal firm Slater and Gordon said they found it possible to climb the career ladder and 46% said their employer could do more to support working mums.

65% didn’t think they worked harder since having children.

Employers said businesses were better than ever at managing maternity leave and reintegrating mothers.

A total of 65% of the mothers questioned by One Poll in July said their workplace was supportive of their situation when they were pregnant and 69% felt they were well treated by their employer while on maternity leave.

Some 73% said they hadn’t felt under pressure to return to work earlier than they wanted too.

Once back in the workplace, 71% felt they hadn’t been overlooked for a promotion because they had responsibilities as a mother.”

From time to time we take a little time out from more important work, to publicly challenge feminists to retract misleading statements they’ve made in public. Invariably they don’t respond – feminists are utterly shameless in driving misleading narratives – but we have the occasional pleasing result, such as when the businesswoman Heather McGregor (TV’s ‘Miss Moneypenny’) – a founder member of the odious but influential ‘30% club’ – retracted a misleading statement she’d made to a House of Commons select committee (she and I were on the same ‘witness panel’):

https://c4mb.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/heather-mcgregor-corrects-the-misleading-statement-she-made-to-a-house-of-commons-inquiry/

A challenge we made to Kat Banyard about a misleading statement she’d made on television, concerning the statistics on sexual harassment of schoolgirls, remains unanswered to this day. The same is true of the challenge we made to Caroline Criado-Perez concerning a misleading statement she’d made on BBC Radio, about seven weeks ago:

http://j4mb.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/our-public-challenge-to-caroline-criado-perez/

We invite CC-P once again to correct her misleading statement. Or does she, too, have no shame?

About 18 months ago Campaign for Merit in Business https://c4mb.wordpress.com was launched, with the aim of campaigning against the government’s initiatives to drive up the number of women in senior positions in business and elsewhere, regardless of the number of women with sufficient merit to perform those roles as well as the best available men.

Soon after coming to power in May 2010, David Cameron appointed the Labour peer, Lord Davies of Abersoch, to prepare a report recommending how – not whether – the proportion of women in senior positions in major organisations could be increased. The infamous Davies Report was published in February 2011, and we doubted at the time if Harriet Harman could have objected to a single sentence in it. One of its key recommendations was that if FTSE100 boards didn’t have 25% female representation by 2015, the government should consider introducing gender quotas to force them to do so.

The consequences of this recommendation were predictable. In 2010, the year before the report was published, just 13% of newly-appointed FTSE100 directors were women. In 2012, the year after the report was published, 55% of newly-appointed FTSE100 directors were women. Nearly all these women, in common with nearly all the existing female directors in the FTSE100, were appointed as non-executive directors.

Our concerns over the government’s initiatives – and the capitulation to them by big businesses, the CBI, and other organisations – stemmed nor only from the initiatives being anti-meritocratic, but from the growing evidence base which shows that increasing female representation on boards leads to declined in corporate financial performance. Specifically, we pointed to five longitudinal studies, and here’s our briefing paper on the matter, with links to those five studies:

https://c4mb.wordpress.com/improving-gender-diversity-on-boards-leads-to-a-decline-in-corporate-performance-the-evidence/

Not one longitudinal study, from anywhere in the world, provides evidence to support the formerly commonly stated assertion that there was a business case – a case based upon improved financial results – to increase the proportion of women on corporate boards. Such claims were routinely made at one time by David Cameron, Vince Cable, and others, but since Campaign for Merit in Business engaged with House of Lords and House of Commons inquiries, such silly assertions are no longer being made.

I invite anyone with an interest in the campaign’s work, and wishing to learn more, to email me at mb1957@hotmail.co.uk.

I was very interested to read an article written by Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP, published today on Michael Klein’s website, ‘Science Files’. Of all the British political parties with a high profile, UKIP is by some distance the most committed to meritocracy (e.g. it calls for an expansion of the grammar school sector, and its leader, Nigel Farage, is on record as opposing gender quotas for boardrooms, and elsewhere). Godfrey Bloom’s article is titled, ‘The absurdity of gender quotas for boardrooms’. Enjoy:

http://sciencefiles.org/2013/07/26/godfrey-bloom-the-absurdity-of-gender-quotas-for-boardrooms-a-politicians-view

This article was published online some 17 months ago, but it’s still worth pointing out to anyone whining about an alleged ‘gender pay gap’. The article is of the high quality you’d expect from the estimable Christina Hoff Sommers – author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Betrayed Women and The War Against Boys – and her references to reports and studies by women’s groups make it particularly intriguing. Enjoy:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-gap_b_2073804.html