Women on top?

As if they don’t have enough problems, including the delightful prospect of the whole corrupt, rackety, incompetent, and anti-democratic  structure of the EU crashing down, they are now getting all worked up about female rights in the workplace and particularly imposing rules across the entire EU for quotas on women on company boards.

 

What is it about politicians that makes them itch to interfere in the smooth running of business? (Obama is a case in point; anyone who can say to a gathering of company big-shots that it wasn’t you who created the business, it was the workers, is an unreconstructed Marxist). There is scarcely a leading politician today who has ever done an honest job.

 

So allow me to expose a few fallacies about equality.

 

First, that women are paid less than men.

 

Does on seriously imagine in this day that firms have discriminatory pay scales for identical work? That the salary of an executive – or anyone else – will be governed by gender?

 

This is a perversion of the truth.

 

It is a fact that women earn less during their working lives. The reason is that their working lives are shorter. And the reason for that can be summed up in one word – children.

 

If only economic criteria were applied, men would have priority in professional training because they work much longer so there is a larger return on the original investment.

 

It is an important and interesting fact that women are now delaying having children until their early thirties, whereas formerly it would have been early twenties. And these days this is exactly the period when executives make the big jump to the most senior positions, including the board. So they tend to miss out (an uplifting exception is Marissa Meyer who is moving from Google to head-up Yahoo where she will have her work cut out trying to turn around what looks like a basket case. She is 8 months pregnant).

 

And the biggest obstacle is children and the demands of family life, as Louise Mensch has discovered. She caused a stir when she exited the Commons inquiry into phone hacking at a crucial point because she was on the school run. Now she has thrown in the towel, causing a by-election that will be a Labour landslide.

 

It is also a fact that in the US more than half of professional new entries are women, only 28% get senior management posts, and only 3% are CEOs.

 

The sad truth is, girls, that no, you can’t have it all.

 

Business life is a mixture of very long working hours and often extensive travel. Many big firms try to accommodate mothers with flexitime, part-time, and working from home. But the bottom-line is profitability, not social engineering.

 

So what to do if you as a boss are forced to have a certain number of women on the board? Well, the same as MPs do. Appoint the wife, squeeze, mistress. Or all three.