Yesterday I debated the topic of ‘women in the boardroom’ on the Daily Politics show. In the studio debating with me was Heather Rabbatts. The piece starts with three pieces ‘to camera’ from three women. The first two are the usual self-serving guff, but the third is insightful, as we’d expect from the journalist and broadcaster Cristina Odone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcwfWEPg3t4&feature=youtu.be
I’ll be debating issues surrounding quotas for women in boardrooms with Heather Rabbatts (link below) on the BBC2 show Daily Politics next Monday (28 January), possibly sometime between 12.00 and 12.30.
http://londonspeakerbureau.co.uk/speakers/heather__rabbatts
[Following material added 25.1.13]
Last November I gave evidence to the House of Commons inquiry into ‘Women in the Workplace’. In December Ms Rabbatts gave evidence to the same inquiry. The minutes of that session are on pp 29-46 of the following PDF:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmbis/uc754-iii/uc754.pdf
Now while much of Ms Rabbatts’s testimony was interesting, I particularly enjoyed that of Margaret Mountford. Anya Hindmarch also made some very good points. A couple of extracts from the minutes, featuring the redoubtable Margaret Mountford:
Q236 Julie Elliott: Thank you. Do you think it is important that women such as you are seen as trailblazers or role models, or do you think that gender is irrelevant?
Dr Mountford: I think gender is irrelevant. I think women do not do themselves any favours by having women’s groups—and women’s this, that and the other. If you look at a job, you look at who the best person for it is. I never perceived things in gender terms. I can remember interviewing a prospective trainee and being asked how many women partners we had in my City law firm. I said, “I do not have a clue. I have never counted them.” That is not relevant; it should not be relevant. I find it rather alarming that we are still sitting here discussing these things when we have heard the same old stuff year after year after year.
Q237 Julie Elliott: If it is not relevant and we assume the population is equally talented among the genders, then why are there so few women on boards?
Dr Mountford: They do not stay the course to get there—that is my feeling. There are issues as to why they do not stay the course. The point is not sticking token non-executives on boards; the point is having women at senior executive levels coming through. Nobody wants anybody as a non-executive on their board who does not have relevant experience. Nobody wants to be the token woman on the board. We have to stop women leaving the professions and business at these intermediate levels. It is not a board issue at all. They leave for a variety of reasons. More of them leave now because perhaps there are more choices—certainly at the more senior level.
(And later in the session, the following gem.)
Q265 Caroline Dinenage: I think I know the answer to this question.
Dr Mountford: Ask a different one, then.
Priceless.
We’ve demonstrated that the ‘glass ceiling’ is a myth, and that men in positions of authority, far from stopping women rising to senior positions, are actively facilitating them doing so, regardless of the relative numbers of qualified men and women available for those positions. Obvious examples of this phenomenon include:
– the sustained efforts of David Cameron, Vince Cable et al to increase female representation in corporate boardrooms, regardless of the evidence this will harm corporate financial performance
– the sustained efforts of many FTSE100 chairmen, members of the ‘30% club’, to do likewise
While men don’t display ‘in-group preferencing’ – to use the term used by academics – women very clearly do. An example of the academic evidence:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15491274
Sometimes you come across breathtaking examples of women’s in-group preferencing. Heather McGregor was on the same panel as myself giving testimony to a House of Commons select committee about two months ago. She made a misleading statement in her testimony, in our view knowingly. We publicly invited her to retract the statement (link below), but have had no response.
https://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/an-invitation-to-heather-mcgregor/
The (uncorrected) minutes of the hearing:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmbis/uc754-i/uc75401.htm
From Heather McGreegor’s response to Q84:
We need more role models. I think that women who have succeeded have a responsibility to turn around and help the people behind them. As Madeleine Albright said, there is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.
Could we possibly ask for clearer evidence of in-group preferencing? The woman is positively revelling in it. From her response to Q81:
I am an employer myself. I employ 22 people; only two of them are men.
The bottom line? Women demand equality of outcomes, and when they’re given senior positions, or they run firms, they preference women at the expense of men. We shouldn’t be surprised that almost two-thirds of employees in the public sector in the UK are women. Or that for every three unemployed women, there are four men. This is a serious and sustained economic assault on men, hidden (as always) behind the facades of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’.
Of course this phenomenon isn’t confined to the UK. Yesterday I encountered an example cited in an article penned by the veteran campaigner Erin Pizzey:
As I travel around different countries looking at the damage that has been wreaked upon the fabric of their societies I am afraid for my grandsons and great grandsons. In Slovenia I was introduced to a very powerful woman who had a staff of 39 women, she told me proudly. She also employed one man. He was the receptionist.
Welcome to the feminists’ vision of the workplaces of the future.
Regular visitors to this site will need no reminding of the five studies we routinely cite, showing that increasing gender diversity in the boardroom (‘GDITB’) leads to declines in corporate financial performance. For new visitors, here’s a link to our latest briefing paper on the matter:
It’s important to emphasise that these five studies are longitudinal – the ‘gold standard’ for such studies in this area. No organisations or individuals have yet refuted or criticised the methodologies or conclusions of any of the studies, nor informed us of even one study backing their confident assertions that GDITB leads to improved corporate financial performance. Their favourite tactic is to misrepresent correlation as causation. Indeed, they’re regularly shameless enough to claim that reports (they usually cite a number from McKinsey, one from Credit Suisse, a number from Catalyst, an American feminist campaigning organisation…) provide ‘evidence’ to show that GDITB leads to enhanced performance. They’re lying.
The reports themselves invariably make it clear that causation can be neither concluded nor even inferred from correlation. How many people (including journalists) or organisations went to the trouble to discover that inconvenient truth, before Campaign for Merit in Business? Not one.
Our earlier post (15 January) referred to the DBIS having recently published a 67-page report titled, ‘DBIS Occasional Paper #4: The Business Case for Equality and Diversity – A review of the academic literature’. Here’s a link to the report:
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, DBIS continue to assert that a strong business case exists for GDITB. In common parlance, they assert that improvements in corporate financial performance can be expected to result from GDITB. They’re lying.
DBIS are very familiar with our arguments, and the ‘five studies’ we cite, so have they managed to mention Campaign for Merit in Business within the 67 pages of the report? No, of course they haven’t. And not one minister has agreed to meet with us, despite a string of requests. Has the report at least cited the five studies? Well, they’ve bowed to the fact that two of the studies (Ahern & Dittmar for the University of Michigan, and Deutsche Bundesbank) have been widely reported in recent times, but they’ve utterly ignored the other three. So much for, ‘A review of the academic literature’. Ha.
Even more dishonestly, DBIS fail to report that the two aforementioned studies are longitudinal studies, and therefore worthy of considerable attention. The studies the DBIS cite as supporting GDITB aren’t longitudinal. They’re worthy of little, if any, attention.
It gets worse. On pages 16/17 of the report we find the following:
One of the few papers testing for a direct link between gender diversity on boards and firm performance is Ahern and Dittmar (2011), who use the Norwegian 2003–2008 policy change as a ‘natural experiment’. The introduction of quotas in this period, which forced firms to have 40 per cent women on their boards, left some pre-quota firms with a longer road to travel than others. In more technical language, the authors use the pre-quota variation in female board membership as an instrument.
The authors found that firms reporting the greatest increase in female board membership reported falling stock-market valuations and deterioration in operating performance. They also identify an increase in younger and less experienced boards. However, this evidence is more a comment on the short-term impacts of a quota policy, than it is on the impacts of increasing gender diversity. Whilst the introduction of quotas presents us with a natural experiment, it also changes the very nature of our question to one of, “what are the impacts of mandated (involuntary), rapid increases in gender diversity?”. Any lack of sufficiently experienced women to fill the top jobs would explain these findings.
This is a common tactic of proponents of GDITB, reframing questions to suit their aims. The question they pose states that increases in gender diversity (in Norway) were ‘rapid’ and ‘involuntary’. But the same is effectively happening in the UK. In the deeply flawed and ideologically-motivated Davies Report (2011) – the work of Lord Davies of Abersoch, a Labour peer appointed by David Cameron in 2010 – FTSE100 companies were threatened with gender quotas if their boards didn’t achieve 25% female representation by 2015 ‘voluntarily’.
The result has been predictable – the ‘rapid’ increase in gender diversity we’d expect. In 2010, before the quotas threat, just 12% of newly-appointed FTSE100 board directors were women. In 2012, the figure was 55%. We can expect FTSE100 companies to be damaged by this influx of inexperienced women – being appointed in preference to experienced men – in the same way that Norwegian companies were. How could it possibly be otherwise?
We come on to the DBIS report’s comments about the Deutsche Bundesbank study:
A recent Deutsche Bundesbank Discussion Paper adopts methods that are better able to identify causal impacts of board composition on corporate risk-taking, without completely changing the nature of the question being asked. The authors find that board changes that increase the representation of women are more closely linked to increased levels of risk-taking. These findings may be explained by those of researchers such as Booth and Nolen (2009, 2009a) who suggest that differential attitudes towards risk-taking are moderated, with, “girls found to be as competitive and risk-taking as boys when surrounded by only girls”.
We have the usual Orwellian double-speak here. ‘These findings may be explained…’ means ‘In our trawl of the academic literature, we came across an explanation which suits our policy direction.’ But let’s engage our brains, and challenge the point being made about gender-related competitiveness. The work by Booth and Nolan refers to the competitiveness of girls ‘…when surrounded by only girls’. What relevance does this point have to the behaviour of mixed-gender boards, as with the German banks which were the focus of the Deutsche Bundesbank study? None. Absolutely none.
I imagine the officials at DBIS who prepared this 67-page report are congratulating themselves on it. In our view they should hang their heads in shame for producing such an appalling piece of taxpayer-funded propaganda.
The DBIS’s assault on the British business sector is accelerating. The FTSE250 will be in the firing line after the FTSE100 have surrendered, and we know from Lord Davies that 25% female representation on boards is merely ‘a major milestone on a longer journey’. Let’s not delude ourselves that the final destination on that journey is anything less than 50%, whatever the damage to the British business sector.
Who has cabinet responsibility for DBIS, and in turn this appalling anti-business initiative? The Liberal Democrat MP, Vince Cable, of course. He’s commonly known as the Anti-Business Secretary. Why on earth did a Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, appoint such a left-wing ideologue to this important position in the first place? And, more to the point, why hasn’t he since fired him?
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has just enriched all our lives with the publication of a 67-page report, The business case for equality and diversity: a survey of the academic literature:
The content of the report is so embarrassing that, for once, I’ll refrain from a detailed analysis. Email me at mikebuchanan@hotmail.co.uk if you genuinely want my views on this odious piece of taxpayer-funded propaganda. I suggest you might like to spend your valuable time doing something more useful than reading this truly mind-numbing document. Planting potatoes, vacuuming the house, counting the blades of grass in your local park… so many options occur to me.
[Updated 28 February 2013]
The Electoral Commission has just registered our political party, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). More on this later in this post.
Campaign for Merit in Business, which was launched early in 2012, has made a remarkable impact in a relatively short time. We’ve proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the ‘glass ceiling’ is a baseless conspiracy theory. Through exposing as fantasies, lies, delusions and myths, the arguments which said that increasing gender diversity in the boardroom (‘GDITB’) will improve corporate financial performance, we’ve destroyed the long-vaunted ‘business case’ for GDITB. We continue to publicise five longitudinal studies, all of which show that GDITB leads to declines in corporate financial performance. What else would we expect when businesses aren’t free to select the best people for their boards, regardless of gender? Proponents are left with little other than misrepresenting correlation as causation in pursuit of their social engineering programmes.
The Conservative-led coalition no longer challenges our assertion that the impact of GDITB on UK plc will inevitably be a negative one. And yet it continues to actively pursue GDITB. DBIS continues to refuse to have a minister meet with us. What might explain this extraordinary state of affairs? We believe there are a number of strands in the answer:
1. David Cameron has an exaggerated fear of the ‘women’s vote’. He showed his feminist-friendly credentials soon after coming to power in 2010 by appointing the Labour peer Lord Davies of Abersoch to report not on whether to give effect to GDITB, but on how to do so. Indeed he showed those credentials in the autumn of 2009, when he announced he was setting up some all-women prospective parliamentary candidate (‘PPC’) shortlists. I’d once worked for the party at their London HQ (2006-8) but resigned my party membership in the autumn of 2009 when David Cameron announced his willingness to introduce all-women PPC shortlists for the forthcoming general election. I was later informed, by a senior officer in the party, that I was far from alone in having done so.
2. The leading minister at DBIS, the Lib Dem MP Vince Cable, holds extreme left-wing views, and is on record as saying that if he were Prime Minister, 50% of his cabinet would be women. He has publicly used – in his speeches and writings – utterly discredited research ‘evidence’ in support of GDITB.
3. The CBI, which should be defending its members’ rights to appoint directors as they see fit, is a part of the problem. For some years it’s actively promoted GDITB. Its current President, Sir Roger Carr (chairman of Centrica) is on record as stating that while he doesn’t personally believe GDITB improves corporate financial performance, he thinks it improves meeting ‘atmospherics’.
4. GDITB is being pursued vigorously because FTSE100 companies are under threat of legislated quotas (Davies Report – 2011) if they don’t ‘voluntarily’ achieve 25% female representation on their boards by 2015. This has resulted in a more than fourfold increase in FTSE100 female director appointments, from 12% of new appointments before the quotas threat (2010) to 55% (2012). Virtually all of the new female appointments have been as NEDs, an indicator of how shallow the available pool of qualified women is compared with the available pool of qualified men.
5. For some years government inquiries into such matters, while seeming to be open, have been deeply flawed. The most obvious recent example was the 2012 House of Lords inquiry into ‘Women on Boards’ which heard only from witnesses in support of GDITB. Many were professionally involved in the initiative. The level of witness challenging by the peers, including the Conservatives, was embarrassing to watch. In our written evidence to the inquiry we included details of four longitudinal studies which show that GDITB harms corporate performance. The final inquiry report explicitly rejected the idea that GDITB can lead to declines in corporate performance, without explaining why. We wrote to the inquiry’s chairwoman, Conservative peer Baroness O’Cathain, asking for an explanation, and didn’t receive one.
6. The House of Commons inquiry into ‘Women in the Workplace’, to which we gave oral evidence, is still ongoing, and we’re hopeful of more attention being given to our evidence than was the case with the House of Lords inquiry. But virtually all the witnesses before this inquiry, as with the House of Lords inquiry, have been pro-GDITB. We’ve made formal complaints about the misleading testimonies of a number of ‘witnesses’, one of whom amended her evidence as a result.
[New entry, 22 July 2013: The report of a House of Commons inquiry – ‘Women in the Workplace’ – was outrageous in its curt dismissal of our evidence base and arguments, and those of the renowned sociologist Catherine Hakim. The committee blindly accepted feminist arguments in relation to the genders in the workplace, while traditional Conservative perspectives on issues such as meritocracy were nowhere to be seen. Our critique of the report is here.]
The area of GDITB is but one of many areas in which governments actively discriminate for women and against men, because they’re fearful of the potential impact of ‘women’s votes’. Let’s consider just one example of that discrimination. Two-thirds of public sector workers are women, and the Equality Act (2010) effectively enables public sector bodies to discriminate on the grounds of gender in terms of recruitment and promotion, where one gender is ‘under-represented’. In practise only women in the sector are using the legislation, and only to advance women. Positive discrimination on gender grounds is illegal, so the government terms the phenomenon ‘positive action’. It amounts to exactly the same thing in practice.
Men have signally failed to co-operate effectively to defend men’s human rights over many years, but this is changing. Politicians of all parties have left us with no choice. We’ve taken the only logical step. We’ve formed a political party to challenge the government in numerous policy areas – including GDITB – where there’s relentless special treatment for women at the expense of men. I shall lead the party.
On 30 December the leading broadcaster and Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts exclusively revealed our intention to launch the party.
The name of the party was revealed in an article published by the world’s most-visited and influential men’s human rights advocacy website, A Voice for Men.
If you believe in this cause, then please support us by making a donation or possibly by making a contribution in other ways. A qualified accountant has taken care of finances both before and since the party’s establishment. 100% of donations will be used to finance our campaigning work. Nobody associated with this campaign or our party derives any personal income from donations. Thank you for your interest in our work.
Mike Buchanan
07967 026163
I’d like to thank this blog’s subscribers, and supporters of Campaign for Merit in Business more generally, for all your support (financial and other) in 2012. The number of subscribers and supporters is growing beyond our most optimistic forecasts. In 2012 we’ve proved the alleged business case for ‘improving’ gender diversity on boards is based upon nothing more than conspiracy theories, fantasies, lies, delusions and myths.
NOBODY in government, the 30% club, the CBI, the business world – or anywhere else, for that matter – is challenging the evidence which shows that ‘improving’ gender diversity on boards leads to declines in corporate performance.
We’ll be stepping up a gear early in 2013, and I look forward to giving you further details about that in due course. In the meantime I wish you all a Merry Xmas, and I hope 2013 is a happy and successful one for you.
Mike Buchanan
The following is a link to the transcript of the session in which I gave evidence (along with Catherine Hakim, Steve Moxon and Heather McGregor):
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmbis/c754-i/c75401.htm
We’ve just received legal advice to the effect that the UK government lacks the legal ‘competence’ to legislate for gender quotas on UK corporate boards, from which it follows that the threat to FTSE100 companies is a hollow one. I’ve just emailed the following ‘open letter’ with a Freedom of Information Act request to Vince Cable, Business Secretary, along with the most senior civil servant concerned with this area, Helen Whitehead:
121203 open letter emailed to Vince Cable
[Update, 19.12.12]
The following letter has just been received:
To my mind the most significant passage in the letter is the following:
We have not received any legal advice concerning the legal competence (or lack of it) of the Government to legislate for gender quotas on UK corporate boards.
It’s clear that the government’s threat to legislate for gender quotas on FTSE100 boards if the companies don’t ‘voluntarily’ achieve 25% female representation by 2015 is a hollow one, and we’ll be informing senior business people of this shortly.
Regular visitors to this site will need no reminding about the central role in the ‘improving’ gender diversity in the boardroom (‘GDITB’) initiative played by Sir Roger Carr, chairman of Centrica, and currently President of the CBI. He doesn’t personally claim that GDITB leads to improved corporate financial performance, but maintains that GDITB leads to improved ‘meeting atmospherics’. Which must be nice for him. We wonder what Centrica’s shareholders think of his social engineering exercise.
Given Sir Roger’s predictable presence at yesterday’s celebrations for the second anniversary of the founding of the 30% club, we thought it was about time we issued him with a public challenge:
Numerous longitudinal studies have shown that ‘improving’ gender diversity on corporate boards leads to DECLINES in corporate financial performance, while no longitudinal studies (to the best of our knowledge) have shown it leads to an improvement:
Do you challenge the rigour or findings of these studies? And if not, do you believe that a decline in corporate financial performance is a price worth paying for ‘improving’ gender diversity in boardrooms? If you do believe this, it would be a position with some integrity:
https://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/arguments-for-improving-gender-diversity-in-the-boardroom/
We look forward to learning of your position on this matter. Thank you.
Campaign for Merit in Business 
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