The software I use for this blog is from WordPress, and one interesting feature is seeing from which countries blog ‘hits’ originate. Most of them are from Anglophone countries, of course, but one non-Anglophone country now accounts for more hits than all the other non-Anglophone countries combined – Germany.

I attribute the interest in Germany largely to Michael Klein, who runs the excellent and popular German-language blog http://sciencefiles.org. He’s mentioned this campaign in a number of his blog posts, and contributed a number of pieces to this blog, all of which have been well received. He’s just put up a new post in which he kindly includes a link to the Amazon page for The Glass Ceiling Delusion. Sales of the book have been increasing markedly, as this campaign attracts more publicity with each passing month.

For people who can read German, here’s Michael’s post:

http://sciencefiles.org/2012/09/15/ende-einer-genderphantasie-die-glaserne-decke-in-scherben/

For the 99.9% of you who can’t read German, here’s a Google auto-translation:

120915 Google translation of a post by Michael Klein

I think it’s fair to say German-to-English translators need have no fear of being replaced by auto-translation software any time soon. Michael also sent me the following:

Feminists keep telling us that – as EC Commissioner Viviane Reding puts it – ‘a group of middle-aged, business suit wearing men’ is discriminating against women. The result is a ‘glass ceiling’ in companies that prevents women from rising to the top. However, a new German study published in the mainstream journal Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie shows that there is no such thing as a glass ceiling. Fabian Ochsenfeld, author of the study, used panel data collected in the HIS-Absolventepanel and followed graduates from German universities over 10 years. Ten years on from their graduation, he found that among 1,780 male and 2,466 female graduates, the male graduates had a 19% higher chance of holding a top management position. However, the difference isn’t caused by discrimination within companies, the so-called ‘glass ceiling’, but is a result of life choices made by female graduates.

Firstly, data shows that female students differ from male students in their choices of disciplines. Female students more often study social sciences and humanities than male students, while male students choose engineering and economics more often than female students. However, it takes economics and engineering to head straight for a top job in management. Deciding to become a mother positively quashes chances to get to top management positions. It’s clear that the smaller number of women in top management positions or company boards isn’t the result of discrimination against women, but rather the result of women’s own life choices – the choice of motherhood in particular.

If feminism is to respect individuals’ choices, it’s reached a dead end. However, experience shows that individual life choices don’t count in the ideology of feminism, the main objective of which is to sponge off society.

I recently posted a piece about ‘improving’ gender balance in the boardroom being socialism’s Trojan Horse:

https://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/socialisms-trojan-horse/

I’m grateful to Georgina for pointing me towards a piece on Guido Fawkes’s blog about PES Women, the women’s section of the Party of European Socialists, which has called for companies that don’t have more than 40% female board members to be dissolved. PES Woman president Zita Gurmai extolled:

‘Aspirations are not enough. We need concrete targets to be met (40% of women on boards) and concrete consequences if those targets are missed. The crisis must not be an excuse for not including more women in decision-making positions.’

The link to the piece on Guido Fawkes’s blog:

http://order-order.com/2012/09/13/eu-labour-dissolve-companies-that-dont-meet-gender-quotas/

None of the Norwegian companies which delisted following the introduction of quotas for women on boards have relisted. Are we heading towards a future in which companies that follow socialist thinking (by ‘improving’ gender diversity in their senior reaches) gradually fail, and companies which don’t follow socialist thinking delist and succeed?

Any fair-minded person who watched the two episodes of ‘Women at the Top’ on BBC2 – the second was shown last night – will surely have been appalled at how the estimable Hilary Devey – an entrepreneur (the founder of Pall-Ex) and a ‘dragon’ on Dragon’s Den – seemed to have been exposed only to propagandists for ‘improving’ gender diversity in the workplace generally, and in boardrooms in particular. But what else might we have expected from the institutionally left-wing BBC?

We’ve publicly challenged most of the people Hilary Devey met to provide evidence of a causal link between ‘improved’ gender diversity on boards and enhanced corporate performance. Collectively they’ve supplied us with nothing. The following appeared on the programme:

Sir Roger Carr (Chairman, Centrica)

Lord Davies, author of the infamous Davies report (2011)

‘Comrade’ Vince Cable, surely the most left-wing business minister on the planet

Helena Morrissey (30% club)

Erin Hurvenes, Jane Scott  (Professional Boards Forum)

Ceri Goddard (chief executive of the Fawcett Society, a militant feminist campaigning organisation)

Catalyst (an American campaigning organisation – some of their now-discredited claims of enhanced performance resulting from more women on boards were shown in the programme)

As well as the ‘usual suspects’ we were treated to some new propagandists. They included two women who I emailed earlier today to request their evidence of the missing link:

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, who is French, Swiss and Canadian. Details here:

http://www.avivahwittenbergcox.com

To contact Ms WC:

Queries@avivahwittenbergcox.com

Kristin Skogen Lund, a businesswoman who manages to get by with just the one nationality, is Norwegian. She is President of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise and can be contacted here:

firmapost@nho.no

Needless to say, there was no mention of the University of Michigan study which detailed the damage done by quotas for women on Norwegian boards. No mention either of the fact that many publicly-listed Norwegian companies delisted as a result of the quota legislation, and not one has since relisted.

As always with these public challenges, we will of course publish any evidence they have of the (causal) missing link. As always, don’t hold your breath…

Michael Klein, the gentleman who runs http://sciencefiles.org, today publicly initiated a very interesting challenge of José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission. His introduction to the matter should be self-explanatory:

STOP REDING

In a concerted action crossing borders, British and German organisations and scientists dedicated to equity and scientific rigour have joined forces to urge José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, to stop Viviane Reding from making the European Commission the laughing stock of Europe. In a letter signed by scientists and representatives of these British and German organisations, Reding is shown to bend and misrepresent evidence, to seek to manipulate public opinion, and to be unfamiliar with principles like equity and justice, although she’s a Commissioner of Justice.

Michael’s website covers the text of the challenge in both German and English:

http://sciencefiles.org/2012/09/11/schluss-mit-der-manipulation-der-offentlichkeit-durch-viviane-reding-ein-brief-an-jose-manuel-barroso-den-prasidenten-der-eu-kommission/#comment-2915

The following is a PDF of the English version only:

120911 Letter to Jose Manuel Barroso about Viviane Reding’s drive for ‘improving’ female representation on boards

Michael Klein is to be applauded for this excellent initiative, which we are pleased to support, and we look forward to Mr Barroso’s response.

Regular visitors to this blog will need no reminding that Viviane Reding is the ‘prime mover’ in the EC for more women on corporate boards. Who could be better placed, I reasoned, to supply us with evidence for a causal link between more women on boards, and enhanced corporate performance? I’ve just emailed the following document to her at viviane.reding@ec.europa.eu

120910 letter emailed to Viviane Reding

I’ve just emailed the following to DBIS, via their dedicated FoI request email address foi.requests@bis.gsi.giv.uk. It should be self-explanatory, and I look forward to sharing their response with you in due course.

Good afternoon. In recent months I’ve written twice to Vince Cable in connection with the topic of ‘improving’ gender diversity on boards (letters below).

120529 letter to Rt Hon Vince Cable MP

120721 open letter mailed to Vince Cable

The second letter has been passed onto your Helen Whitehead for a formal response, which I hope to receive shortly (I believe she only returned to work today, after a holiday). To date, not a shred of evidence has been provided to us by politicians or civil servants – or anyone else, for that matter – to substantiate claims that ‘improved’ gender diversity on boards causes (rather than may sometimes possibly correlate with) enhanced corporate financial performance. This lack of evidence isn’t surprising, however, given the evidence that ‘improving’ gender diversity on boards leads to a decline in corporate performance:

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

I was recently interviewed on the matter on BBC Radio 4:

https://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/interview-with-martha-kearney-transcript/

I am writing to request under the Freedom of Information Act, the evidence base supporting the government’s claims of a causal link between increasing the proportion of women on corporate boards, and enhanced corporate financial performance. Thank you.

On 29 August – along with Isobel Rimmer of ‘Women on Board’ http://womenonboard.org.uk – I was interviewed by Martha Kearney for her BBC Radio 4 programme The World at One. It’s no longer available to listen to on iPlayer, so my thanks to Lavinia for both saving the file and transcribing it:

Martha: David Cameron wants to see more women on the boards of the UK’s top companies. In fact he wrote to all the FTSE businesses to say so. The European Commission is about to outline proposals for a mandatory minimum 40% quota on the boards of publicly listed companies by 2020. And the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, even suggested that the 2008 financial crisis might not have been so serious if there had been more women in senior banking positions – ‘Lehman Sisters’.

But do women actually improve the performance of businesses? Mike Buchanan doesn’t think so. He runs the Campaign for Merit in Business, and he’s the author of The Glass Ceiling Delusion. Isobel Rimmer is the founder of Women on Board, which campaigns for greater female representation. I asked Mike Buchanan first, why he thinks more women aren’t the answer.

Mike: I don’t think there are any good business reasons for more women on boards. It’s been alleged that corporate performance – financial results in particular – improve with more women on boards. Bur the only two studies which show a causal relationship between increasing women on boards and financial performance, show that financial performance declines when there are more women on boards.

Martha: It actually goes down?

Mike: It does. I’m referring to a University of Michigan study on the impact of quotas on Norwegian companies, and a paper put out earlier this year by Deutsche Bundesbank.

Martha: So, Isobel Rimmer, what do you make of that evidence? The idea that it’s not just that women aren’t an asset, they can actually work against the interests of the company.

Isobel: I think the two reports that Mike’s referring to are perhaps ignoring the fact that in some of these areas, particularly in Norway, there was an imposed quota. The view from me and the groups I work with is that imposing a quota for women at director level isn’t necessarily the answer. But given that we have in this country 61 million people of which slightly over 50 per cent are women, it’s rather concerning that we don’t have the representation that we should have at board level.

Martha: But do you want that representation for reasons of equality, Isobel Rimmer, or do you also think it will help businesses?

Isobel: I think it has to help businesses. We should look at how well it impacts on business, but financial performance isn’t the only measure. And I think when we look at how women bring a different approach, for the FTSE100 still to have only 16.7% female representation really is a bit of a shocker.

Mike: It’s certainly true that the majority of the senior people working in this field – such as Helena Morrissey and Lord Davies – are against the imposition of quotas, but they don’t oppose the threat of quotas. In fact the government to this day threatens legislated quotas if FTSE100 companies don’t have 25% female representation on their boards by 2015. That threat in itself is driving up the number of women on boards.

Isobel: Why would that be a bad thing?

Mike: Why would that be a bad thing? Because it’s clear these women aren’t getting onto boards through merit, and…

Isobel: How do we know? I think what you’re saying, Mike, is that women should be appointed to boards on merit?

Mike: Yes.

Isobel: What Helena Morrissey and the 30% club, and Women on Board – my organisation – are saying is that’s absolutely what we’re pushing for. But it’s about making the process more transparent so that woman can have the opportunities to get board positions and represent, as we say, at least 50% of the population.

Mike: In 2010, about 10% of new director appointments to FTSE100 company boards were women. This year so far it’s running at 44%. Now does anyone seriously think this increase is attributable to a quadrupling of the number of women with sufficient merit? It’s clearly not.

Martha: There was an argument that was voiced at the height of the financial crisis, that had there been more women on the boards of banks – people talked about ‘Lehman Sisters’ – there might have been a very different outcome because there wouldn’t have been the same degree of groupthink. Women might have been more willing to challenge the orthodoxy.

Mike: Again, it’s just a self-serving theory. There have been plenty of examples of female CEOs who’ve been total disasters for their companies. If there were any truth in the groupthink argument, we’d find that corporate performance would improve with more women on boards, but the only independent evidence of which I’m aware is that corporate performance declines. My campaign, the Campaign for Merit in Business, has publicly challenged dozens of organisations and hundreds of individuals to provide evidence that having more women on boards improves corporate performance, and nothing has been forthcoming.

Martha: Isobel Rimmer, in the end, aren’t businesses there to make money, to create profits for their shareholders, and to create jobs, not to be vehicles of social engineering?

Isobel: Absolutely right, and I don’t think anyone would want to – I think Mike refers to it as a leftie social engineering campaign – absolutely not, that’s not what we’re saying. But what I do think is that we need to see a more transparent process. And I think people who – people talk about Margaret Thatcher – we haven’t had examples of, perhaps, Freda the Shredder as opposed to Fred the Shred. And I think that when you look at some of the decisions made by companies up to 2008, yes, I think some of those were testosterone-charged, highly risk-taking strategies – particularly in the property sector – but with hindsight, had there been more female representation on boards, things might well have gone the other way.

I haven’t until now posted on this blog an invitation I emailed on 24 July to Viviane Reding viviane.reding@ec.europa.eu . The content of my email is given below. Ms Reding is an EC Commissioner and the ‘prime mover’ behind the EC drive for more women on corporate boards. To my great surprise, she never responded to this invitation.

Ms Reding, good morning. I don’t know if you’re aware of it yet, but the case for ‘improved’ gender diversity in the boardroom is slowly collapsing in the UK, and we’re finding increasing interest in other European countries.

Remarks made by a prominent academic (Professor Susan Vinnicombe) in a House of Lords committee meeting last Monday is attracting interest, and we expect at least one leading newspaper to cover the story in the coming few days. This was our blog post on the matter:

https://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/a-remarkable-statement-by-a-leading-proponent-of-improved-gender-diversity-in-the-boardroom

Helena Morrissey of the 30 per cent club yesterday appeared before the same committee:

https://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/helena-morrissey-appears-before-a-house-of-lords-sub-committee/

Please find below an invitation to an event at the IEA, along with related background. Feel free to extend it to colleagues and acquaintances with an interest in gender balance in the boardroom, and in senior executive positions more generally.

120720 invitation to the Institute of Economic Affairs

The event follows on from a short article published by the IEA:

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

I hope you can make it to the IEA event, and I look forward to hearing from you in due course.

Best wishes,

Mike Buchanan
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS
https://c4mb.wordpress.com

On 24 August I emailed a Labour peer, Baroness Prosser, Deputy Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (‘EHRC’), in connection with a statement she’d made about more gender diverse boards delivering superior performance. I asked her for evidence to substantiate her claim. My request was passed to John Sharman, a Policy Manager, to address, and last Friday I received his response. The content is much as we might expect, and I’ve just sent him back a reply addressing each of his points. The following document contains the full text of his letter, with my comments in red.

120909 response to EHRC letter

I’ve made a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act for the evidence of a link between increased female representation on boards and enhanced corporate performance, the link which underpins government policy on this matter, and is used to justify the government’s continuing threats of legislated quotas. Given that the evidence clearly shows a negative causal link, I look forward to their creative response.

The well-respected London paper, Evening Standard, has a lady editor, and they’ve recently been giving some column inches to the matter of ‘women on boards’. I wasn’t too hopeful of getting exposure for this campaign in the paper – not long ago they published a truly awful full-page article by Comrade Cable – so I was pleased to be contacted by one of their senior journalists on Wednesday evening, with a view to me penning a letter. My final letter has been heavily but expertly edited, and the following letter appeared in yesterday’s edition. The uplift in hits on this blog has been good to see.

Choose boards on merit only

While many proponents of greater female representation on boards such as Helena Morrissey don’t support quotas, they haven’t raised their voices against the threat of quotas if FTSE companies don’t ‘voluntarily’ hit the 25 per cent Government target by 2015. This has already skewed the corporate landscape – 14 per cent of FTSE100 director appointments in 2010 were women compared with 44 per cent in 2012, yet all this year’s new female directors have been non-execs while all the new executive directors have been men.

We have challenged large numbers of organisations and individuals including the Prime Minister for evidence of the benefits of having women on boards. None have provided us with a shred. Only two studies demonstrate a link between women on boards and corporate performance – both showed declines.

Mike Buchanan, Campaign for Merit in Business