Is EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding a liar, incompetent… or both? The question occurred to me today as I read the transcript of a speech she gave just two weeks ago to the Harvard Club (Belgium) in Brussels. A link to the transcript:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-12-702_en.htm

In Mrs Reding’s speech we find gems such as the following:

First of all, there is a clear business case. Numerous studies – by Crédit Suisse, McKinsey, Deutsche Bank, Ernst and Young and others – show that companies with more women in top management enjoy better governance and financial performance. The McKinsey study has, for instance, shown that companies with women on their boards outperform their men only rivals with a 42% higher return in sales, 66% higher return on invested capital and 53% higher return on equity. Or take the Crédit Suisse study which shows that, over the past six years, companies with at least one female board member significantly outperformed those with no women on the board in terms of share price performance.

How could she have insulted her audience – presumably including senior business people – with this utter nonsense? As we’ve reported on this website, the Crédit Suisse report makes no claims of the causal link Mrs Reding clearly implies. Indeed that report states (p.17):

There is a significant body of research that supports the idea that there is no causation between greater gender diversity and improved profitability and stock price performance. Instead the link may be the positive signal that is sent to the market by the appointment of more women: first because it may signal greater focus on corporate governance and second because it is a sign that the company is already doing well.

Adams and Ferreira (2009) looked at the impact of greater gender diversity on 1,939 US stocks between 1996 and 2003. On the face of it, their data showed positive gender diversity effects. However, using two different techniques to handle reverse causation, they found statistically significant negative effects on profits and stock value following the appointment of women to the board.

Farrell and Hersch looked at 300 Fortune 500 companies between 1990 and 1999 and showed that firms with strong profits (ROA) are more likely to appoint female directors but that female directors do not affect subsequent performance.

Mrs Reding is also misleading about McKinsey reports. Not a single McKinsey report, to the best of our knowledge, claims a causal link. Most of their reports concede that an explanation for any apparent correlation might be that stronger-performing companies can better afford to indulge in initiatives such as ‘improving’ gender balance in their boardrooms.

Let’s finish with Mrs Reding’s breathtaking claim, ‘…companies with women on their boards outperform their men only rivals with a 42% higher return in sales, 66% higher return on invested capital and 53% higher return on equity.’ Again, this is correlation being cynically misrepresented as causation. Catalyst, the American feminist campaigning organisation which made such claims in its ‘Bottom Line’ report series, stopped making claims of positive causal links in September 2011. Why is Mrs Reding continuing to use Catalyst data in such a misleading way, and continuing to misrepresent studies? We ask again: is she a liar, incompetent… or both? We should be told, given that as EU taxpayers we’re collectively financing her very substantial salary and perks, and we have no means of voting her out of office.

Charlotte Vere, one of the few winners of a coveted ‘Maggie’ award, is one of the country’s most prominent and erudite non-feminists. I don’t agree with her position on all matters concerning the genders in the workplace (and elsewhere) but her arguments are always worthy of attention. So I was grateful to be alerted by Persephone to an interesting interview in the Evening Standard:

http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/charlotte-vere-there-can-be-no-excuse-for-promoting-anybody-other-than-100-per-cent-on-merit-8225888.html

We wish Charlotte every success in her new position as head of the Girls Schools’ Association.

We’ve published the minutes of previous meetings of this inquiry, and pointed out that every ‘witness’ questioned by the committee has been in favour of more women on boards, whether through quotas or otherwise. All have been ideologically committed to the initiative, and most have been professionally engaged in it, most of them at the taxpayer’s expense. The peers themselves appear to have taken it as a given that having more women on boards is a ‘good thing’ in itself.

The latest and final taxpayer-funded advocate ‘witness’ was the Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson, who merited a whole session to herself at the start of last week. Be warned, the minutes make depressing reading, particularly around the area of correlation/causation between more women on boards, and enhanced corporate performance. To their credit, some of the peers were more challenging on this issue than on previous occasions, but faced with an avalanche of well-rehearsed gobbledegook from Jo Swinson, what hope did they have? Any reasonable person would surely have lost the will to live, listening to her nonsense.

We have very robust evidence showing that artificially increasing the number of women on boards leads to a decline in corporate performance. It’s unfortunate we weren’t called as witnesses to present this evidence to the House of Lords inquiry, to be questioned on it.

The minutes:

121015 House of Lords inquiry ‘Women on Boards’ minutes

Since the financial crisis, 84% of the stock of Royal Bank of Scotland has been owned by the British government. British taxpayers have underwritten the sum of £45 billion spent buying up RBS stock. Could there be anything more extraordinary than RBS – whilst owned by a Conservative-led government – spending money on a left-wing social engineering initiative? From the last issue of Mail on Sunday, 21 October:

Royal Bank of Scotland will tomorrow launch a £1.5 million fund to boost the number of women starting a business. Over the next three years RBS will issue ten grants of up to £50,000 a year each to organisations with ‘dedicated enterprise programmes’ working to boost female start-ups.

The Inspiring Women in Enterprise scheme is part of a wider RBS Group initiative called Inspiring Enterprise, which looks to grow entrepreneurship and boost the number of social enterprises. The bank will publish a report tomorrow that shows the rate of self-employment among women has consistently remained half that of men. In 2011, just over 10% of men were in the early stages of setting up a business compared with just 5% of women.

Chris Sullivan, chief operating officer of RBS corporate banking, said: ‘We want to unlock the huge economic potential of women and remove the barriers that stand in their way when it comes to setting up a business.’

Give me strength. What ‘barriers’ stand in the way of potential female entrepreneurs, but not in the way of male entrepreneurs? This is pathetic stuff, and RBS might as well set fire to the £1.5 million. But we shouldn’t be too surprised by any of this. RBS’s chairman Sir Philip Hampton has long been an enthusiastic supporter of ‘improved’ gender diversity on boards and elsewhere, and… need it be said?… he’s a member of the 30% club.

Some good news, and my thanks to Steve, Tony and Ulrika for being the first of many to bring it to our attention. Presumably it will be in all the papers tomorrow, but the following is a link to the story on Daily Mail Online:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2221905/EU-drops-plan-force-companies-allot-40-cent-board-seats-women-lawyers-argue-strict-quotas-illegal.html#ixzz2A8oW2YfG

From the article:

It would appear that EU plans to legislate minimum 40% quotas for women on major corporate boards have been scrapped due to a legal technicality. The EU’s legal service said countries cannot be obliged to reach the 40 per cent female quota, but can ensure that more is done to address gender bias on boards.

‘Countries… can ensure that more is done to address gender bias on boards.’ Note the supposition of ‘gender bias’, or in common parlance, that baseless conspiracy theory, the ‘glass ceiling’. Let’s not fool ourselves that the battle is over. It will never be over, because we’re fighting an ideology, not a rationally-argued position. Ideologies can’t be defeated, but with effort and commitment their manifestations can be thwarted, time after time.

This begs the question of whether the British government could act upon its threats to impose legislated quotas on FTSE100 company boards if they didn’t reach 25% female representation by 2015. Sadly that increasingly looks like an irrelevant question, given those companies are collectively heading for an average of 30% female representation by 2015. Many of them have chairmen who are members of the 30% club. The day is coming when these men will be publicly and collectively vilified for their indifference to the interests of their companies, their companies’ shareholders, and the British business sector more widely… all in the name of a social engineering exercise.

Covert discrimination against men in recruitment and promotion terms has been rife for years – particularly in the public sector, increasingly in the private sector too – but a story pointed out to me by Tony today really takes the biscuit. Discrimination against men is increasingly overt as well, and it’s becoming ever more hard-wired in organisations. You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that at a time when the EU is in its biggest-ever financial crisis, appointments to the six-person executive board of the European Central Bank would be made solely on the grounds of merit. Well, you’d be wrong. From a BBC website:

EU commissioners are due to debate proposals that would force quotas for women on corporate boards. EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is in favour of the proposals to make it mandatory for companies to reserve 40% of seats for women. But several countries, including the UK, are opposed to it.

The debate comes after the European Parliament criticised the lack of female candidates for the European Central Bank (ECB). A parliamentary committee – in a resolution passed by 21 votes to 12, with 13 abstentions – called on the European Council to withdraw the candidacy of Luxembourg’s Yves Mersch for the ECB executive board, saying his appointment would mean that the board would be all male up until 2018.

It’s inconceivable to me that if there was a woman of anything even approaching the same experience and expertise as Yves Mersch, she wouldn’t have been given the job on a plate. The bottom line? In 2012, even for the most critical positions in organisations, the most highly qualified man will have less of a chance of landing a senior position than the least qualified woman.

Maybe if Yves had an operation and became Yvette he could re-apply? It seems a high price to pay…

Isn’t it remarkable how often, on the BBC and elsewhere, gender issues in general – and ‘gender balance in the boardroom’ in particular – are subjects handed automatically to female journalists and broadcasters to handle, as if men had no legitimate interest in these subjects? And the people they interview are always (or nearly always) only women. Could the BBC not find even one businessman opposed to ‘improving’ gender balance in boardrooms?

A good example of this bias is evident in this morning’s BBC Radio 4 programme Today, in which Sarah Montague (an excellent presenter, but the sole woman in a team of five presenters) was tasked with hosting a discussion on EU-legislated quotas for women in boardrooms, interviewing Helena Morrissey and the Labour MEP Mary Honeyball. The following link will be functional for 7 days. Scroll down to 07:51 and click on the iPlayer link. The discussion lasts a little under seven minutes. My thanks to Tony and Ray for making me aware of this discussion. I’ve underlined a commendable statement made by Helena Morrissey.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9762000/9762517.stm

Here’s a transcript of the discussion, my thanks to Davina for typing it out.

Sarah M: The European Commissioner for Justice, Viviane Reding, is proposing a new law in Strasbourg today that would force all major European countries to have at least 40% of their boards made up of women. The Commission is deeply divided on the issue. Perhaps surprisingly, the support mainly comes from male Commissioners, while most of the female Commissioners prefer the ides of self-regulation.

Someone who is in favour of quotas is Labour’s spokesperson on gender and equality in the European parliament, the MEP Mary Honeyball. She joins us from Strasbourg now. Here in the studio we’re joined by Helena Morrissey, Chief Executive Officer of Newton Investment Management and founder of the 30% club, which is a group of chairmen and women who’ve voluntarily committed to bringing more women onto their boards. Good morning to you both.

Both: Good morning.

Sarah M: Mary Honeyball, why do you think it’s necessary now to take what on the face of it seems quite a heavy-handed proposal, to have these quotas?

Mary H: I think if you look at the figures it becomes absolutely apparent why we need it now. Just under 14% of board members in the top companies across the EU are women, yet women make up 60% of recent graduates, so we have a huge mismatch here. I believe we need quotas to move this along. If I thought voluntary measures would work, I’d support them. I think they’ll work, but they’ll take too long. I think the situation is so bad now that we do need to move quickly, which is why I very much support Mrs Reding’s proposals, and I hope that they’re agreed by the Commission today.

Sarah M: OK. Helena Morrissey, when you look at the stats, it does look like this needs some big shove to change things…

Helena M: Well, the thing is, here in the UK we have had a big shove in the last couple of years, since the Davies committee reported and put out 10 clear recommendations for voluntary business-led change. Organisations like the 30% club have been trying to implement those recommendations. We’ve seen a really striking change in the pace of progress, for example, since March of this year there have been 62 FTSE non-executive appointments, 30 have gone to women – almost half. That’s a huge leap up from 2010, when it was 13%. So what we’re seeing is not just an acceptance by companies of the need for change, they’re really pressing ahead in a sustainable business-led way.

Sarah M: So that means we have now 17% of… what… executive roles on boards?

Helena M: We’re talking of all roles on boards…

Sarah M: Non-exec or exec? Most of them in the UK are non-exec? Which means they’re not taking the hands-on decisions about their companies. They’re sitting back and making a sort of…

Helena M: Well, I’m not sure these days that non-execs regard themselves as ‘sitting back’. If you look at what happened at Citigroup a couple of weeks ago, when they ousted the CEO, the board was very much in charge of that. So I think that anyone who doubts the importance of non-executive directors has got it wrong. It’s obviously important that we have both and I think that the important things about quotas, or one of the important things, is that they haven’t shown… if you look at Norway, which is often cited as a great example of quotas working, you’ve got 40% non-execs being women in Norway, but 3% of CEOs are women. It hasn’t made a change in the way businesses really operate.

Sarah M: Mary Honeyball, if that’s true, about 50% of new appointees being women, that would suggest the voluntary approach here is working?

Mary H: It’s working up to a point. I don’t actually believe that it’s working quickly enough. If you look at what we’re talking about, which is the larger companies, the European Commission’s proposals – if they are agreed – only concern the larger companies. It would take a very long time, it would take about 25 to 30 years to get us up to the 40% mark.

Sarah M: OK, but do you want more than 50% of new people on boards to be women?

Mary H: No, I want to see parity because I believe this is an issue of justice and fairness. I would actually point out that the European parliament – as opposed to the European commission – is completely committed to quotas across party lines. The centre-right European People’s Party is in favour of quotas in the boardroom. So is the Socialist and Democratic Group, to which I belong, also the Liberal Group and the Green Group. There’s very strong cross-party support for this in the European parliament.

Sarah M: Helena Morrissey, there is also, when you look at countries… you mentioned Norway, but it’s not just Norway… there’s a French law in place, Spain has a similar law, Germany is considering it… we’re lining up with Malta and Latvia to block it.

Helena M: Well, and the Netherlands, and other countries like Sweden and Germany that are believed to be adopting our approach as well. Just to correct what Mary said…

Sarah M: We don’t want to have an argument. In Sweden, women hold a quarter of board positions, there might be a more compelling reason why that’s so…

Helena M: We’re on track for that. One of the things I like to quote is it won’t take 25 years to get to 40%, we’re on track now because of the fast acceleration we’ve seen in two years. I’m not disputing it was too slow before, but we’re on track to get to 30% by the end of 2015. But I’d like to point out, I think quotas are discriminatory themselves and it’s a bit ironic… I mean, the last time I checked, Viviane Reding was Justice Commissioner for men as well as for women. It seems odd to introduce another form of discrimination to solve, arguably, an injustice we have already.

Mary H: You see, I don’t think it is discrimination. I think we do need quotas and targets and action to make sure that women aren’t discriminated against. And on the stats, I would point out that Helena’s talking about UK figures and I’m talking about European-wide figures.

Sarah M: We’re trying to cover both, but Mary Honeyball, why do you think it’s happening? Is it just old-fashioned sexism? Men sitting on boards, thinking women just aren’t up to the job?

Mary H: I think that’s quite a large part of it. There certainly are cultural issues here. I think there’s also something about the way women progress through companies… when women have children, it’s very often a huge problem. So I think we need to look at this as a long process, and we need to make sure we bring women on. I think that’s a hugely important part of doing this.

Helena M: Yes, I agree on the need for much more sustainable efforts around this… an executive position – a CEO or a CFO – can’t be created overnight, so no quota could ever get you there. But I think we are on the road in the UK, and that’s maybe the blueprint if you were thinking of rolling out things across Europe, something I’m not necessarily in favour of, either. We’ve achieved a huge amount from a very slow start a couple of years ago.

Sarah M: Helena, can I ask you – I asked Mary Honeybunch – are you aware of sexism in boardrooms?

Helena M: Well, the boards I’ve sat on, I haven’t felt… sometimes I’ve been the chair, so perhaps that’s why… but the chairman supporters of the 30% club… we have 55 chairman supporters, half are from the FTSE that represent 60 of the UK’s largest firms. The great thing is, they haven’t done it through being coerced. They’re actually running the boards. They support it because they’ve seen the improvement that having women has made to the dynamic of their boardroom, and that’s really got to be the best argument for…      

The Anti-Feminism League yesterday presented a ‘Winston’ to a Conservative MP, Philip Davies, in recognition of an outstanding contribution he made last week in a debate in the House of Commons, exposing outrageous anti-male and pro-female discrimination in the sentencing of criminals:

http://fightingfeminism.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/rt-hon-philip-davies-mp-is-awarded-a-winston/

Mr Davies is just the sort of MP that most Conservative voters would like to represent them. He has solidly right-of-centre and meritocratic instincts, and his Wikipedia profile shows him to be fiercely independently-minded:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Davies

His support for meritocracy extends, we’re pleased to report, to the appointment of directors to major corporate boards. Last Thursday there was a short debate in the House of Commons concerning ‘Public Company Boards’, to which he contributed. Other than Philip, the other speakers in the debate exhibited the gender balance we’ve come to expect in this area:

Anne McIntosh (C)

Jo Swinson (LD)

Valierie Vaz (L)

Andrea Leadsom (C)

Alison Seabeck (L)

The contributions of the Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs were predictably woeful, and may be summarised as, ‘Blah, blah, blah’. I don’t know if Harriet Harman was in the chamber at the time, but if she was, she would have been very happy with what was said:

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2012-10-18a.483.6

I’ll leave you with the final two exchanges of this depressing short debate. Our thanks to Philip for standing up for meritocracy.

Philip Davies (Shipley, Conservative)

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Rather than having politically correct targets, is it not better for companies in the private sector to decide for themselves who are the right people to be on their boards, irrespective of gender, race or religion? Should not all such appointments be made on merit, rather than trying to meet the politically correct targets that the Minister has referred to?

Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire, Liberal Democrat)

It is always a delight to hear from my hon. Friend. He perhaps does not fully recognise the benefits that businesses gain from having more diversity on their boards. The fact that fewer than one in five board members are women shows that there is a wide talent pool out there that is not being drawn upon; businesses could benefit hugely from ensuring that those talents are used in their boardrooms.

Businesses would benefit hugely? Priceless. This is just the sort of claptrap we’ve heard from other Lib Dem MPs, most notably Vince Cable. The overwhelming evidence is that far from benefitting, businesses would experience a decline in their performance.

We were interested to read about a survey conducted by the people behind ‘Netmums’:

http://www.netmums.com/coffeehouse/general-coffeehouse-chat-514/news-current-affairs-topical-discussion-12/836486-rise-modern-femenist-latest-netmums-survey-results.html

Women are clearly becoming increasingly fed up with the impact of feminism on their lives, and with good reason. Few women benefit from the activities of feminists in the modern era and many women – arguably most – suffer because of it. This prompted us to write an open letter to Rebecca Myatt, the producer of that great bastion of militant feminism, the BBC Radio 4 show Woman’s Hour. The letter:

121020 letter to Woman’s Hour

We’ll keep you posted with regard to Ms Myatt’s response (if we get one).

Visitors to this blog may recall a recent post in which we nominated Quentin Letts as our favourite newspaper columnist. He’s also an interesting and entertaining broadcaster.

Some of you may be unaware that between them, Campaign for Merit in Business and the Anti-Feminism League have published online details of numerous awards presented to individuals. Until now there have been three such awards:

‘Toady’ – presented to male collaborators with feminist initiatives, e.g. Lord Davies of Abersoch – author of the odious Davies Report (2011) – FTSE100 chairmen who are members of the 30% club, a number of male MPs… and many others.

‘Maggie’ – presented to women who believe in meritocracy rather than special treatment for women in the workplace and elsewhere, e.g. Angela Epstein, Marina Yannakoudakis MEP… and a few others.

‘Harpy’ – presented to women who campaign for anti-meritocratic initiatives to give special treatment to women regardless of the consequences, e.g. Harriet Harman, Lynne Featherstone… and many others.

For some time we’ve considered introducing a fourth award, the ‘Winston’, to celebrate men who stand up for meritocracy and are willing to expose feminists (and the men who collaborate with them) for what they really are. The trouble is, so few prominent men qualify for the award. But one man clearly does, and that’s Quentin Letts. So we’re delighted to announce that Mr Letts has been offered the inaugural Winston award and has accepted it, saying he’s ‘honoured’. The award:

121020 Winston award for Quentin Letts

We’ll shortly be offering a Winston to a Conservative MP who recently made a remarkable contribution to a debate in the House of Commons. He showed more backbone in this area (detailing outrageous pro-female and anti-male discriminations) than his 300+ colleagues have collectively shown in the past ten years. More details in the next few days, hopefully.

Do let us know if you can think of any other deserving recipients of a Winston.