The majority of people do not believe that gender or race is more important than merit when it comes to getting a top job within the lofty heights of a corporate company. The majority of people* believe that merit is the name of the game. Contrary to what is often casually asserted, the people who don't believe purely in merit are not those people who believe in positive discrimination, but rather, the people who are sexist, racist, homo/transphobic, or ableist. Why? The answer is one that seems blindingly obvious: if pure considerations of merit were behind promotions to top positions, demographic distributions across company boards would be roughly representative. But they aren't, and more, they aren't really getting any better. The 'Women on Boards' review, released today by Lord Davies (link below), found some pretty damning statistics on the question of women's participation on boards in FTSE 100 companies, but stopped short of recommending quotas, suggesting rather that companies take active steps to reach mountainous targets such as 25% female representation on boards by 2015.
In fact, his recommendations seem quite good, but as Julia Finch pointed out in Women directors: why I've changed my mind, these are 'recommendations' to the same companies who are also made 'recommendations' to about acting ethically, regulating trade fairly, not causing financial crises, not fucking people over generally, and so on. That kind of speaks for itself.
On the topic of women on boards, there are several oft cited reasons why we have not yet reached gender-balance. Number one, company boards aren't representative because female candidates are invariably less good than male candidates. If women candidates are chosen who are less good than the male candidates they are up against, it is patronising to women, unfair to men, and bad for business overall. Number two, company boards aren't representative because feminism only started forty or fifty years ago, and it will take a while for women growing up during the golden era of the second wave to filter their way through to the top jobs. Number three, women don't get the top jobs because they don't really want them as much as men do. Women would rather leave to raise families, spending time on greater, purer pursuits than the mindless accumulation of empty, soulless, capitalist money and power. Women just don't like being CEO's! Everyone's a winner!
On this first point, on occasions when I have spoken to professional women about, for example, introducing quotas for women in top positions, the overwhelming response has been that it would not only be wrong but that it would create an unpleasant atmosphere within companies if it were known that a female candidate had been promoted to fulfill a quota, rather than on her own merit. Women I have spoken to, quite fairly, want to feel that they have climbed the corporate ladder by themselves, because of their own achievements, rather than because of some political drive to introduce equalities legislation. I understand this feeling. Nobody wants to get a job they don't deserve. Yet implicit in this argument is the premise that a quota for women would inevitably sometimes result in better men being passed over for inferior women.
Well, yes. Where there are quotas for female promotion and inclusion at higher levels, it is at least feasible that sometimes a more qualified man will lose out to a less qualified woman who has to be promoted because of the quota. But right now more qualified women are losing out to less qualified men, to the point where only 12.5% of FTSE-100 directors are women, where 50% of FTSE companies do not have even one woman on their board , and where there has been little improvement on this for years. We either have to argue that this represents only considerations of merit, and that men are just much, much better than women (sometimes known as misogyny), or we have to admit that the playing field isn't level, that it isn't getting better by itself, and that we are not going to have approximate equality unless some action is taken to get women onto boards. I for one find it highly unlikely that a 30-40% quota for women on company boards will very often lead to anti-male discrimination, simply because I do not believe that male candidates are better than female candidates. To my mind, if such a quota were enforced it would more often than not simply result in promotions for the equally-qualified women candidates who currently don't get promoted. Because currently the system is sexist, you know?
This brings us to the second argument, above. It's often argued that as girls now do better than boys at school, and that as half, if not more, of university graduates are now women, it will just be a matter of time until those proportions even out with a roughly equal spread at the top. Arguably, the forty years or so since the second wave are not long enough for women growing up in the 70s to have reached company boards. Touching as the faith in feminism's power of those who argue this is, it would surely only apply if feminism had already been completely successful. Though equal rights legislation is much improved, it is by no means perfect, and sexism is by no means gone. All people, to some extent, have internalised the norms of a society which has certain preconceptions about roles for men and roles for women. One only needs to watch The Apprentice, source of all my knowledge about business, to see that the qualities which seen to be apt for business are most often masculine ones, and only seen as such in male-bodied people. Confidence, drive and intelligence in men are read as aggressiveness, coldness and over-opinionatedness in women. Whilst much can be done socio-culturally in order to combat such ideas, it seems to me to be rather putting the cart before the horse to say that as feminism progresses and attitudes change women will get through to the top ranks. Rather, women need to be there to effect the change, and positive discrimination, to my mind, is the only way that this will genuinely happen.
On to the third point. Often this argument about most women just not wanting to give up their lives to moneymaking is seen on Comment is free, and other such reputable forums for debate. Of course, any essentialism about women's and men's intrinsic natures is pretty objectionable, and it's all rather convenient that women are supposed to happen not to want to succeed in the same way that men want to, when they currently aren't succeeding in that way. This is the point where the old 'children' chestnut gets brought in - if women will insist on taking time off to have babies and look after them and such like, how is it fair that they can be at the same corporate level as a man who hasn't done so? Any logic behind the notion that extending paternity leave to be equal with maternity leave will hurt the economy is mindbogglingly absent, unless it is assumed that men will always have higher positions than women. Though women, for obvious reasons, have to do the actual birth, there is no reason that childcare should not be shared equally, and indeed, the advantages men will gain from legislation for a fuller fatherhood will only be balanced by the concurrent removal of discrimination against women who want to have children. Sweden has it better than us in legislating for a minimum two months paternity leave (Dads in the UK only have two weeks), and its worth pointing out that their economy has not yet collapsed in any greater way than ours has.
There is still a considerable amount of misogynist prejudice in society, both obvious and latent. Right now, what we have is discrimination overwhelmingly against women, and where there are completely fair examples of areas in which men face discrimination, it is clear that when women make up less than negligible% of top corporate jobs, a very serious prejudice still holds fast. When no progress is being made otherwise, positive discrimination needs to be enacted to right the balance. Not to tip it over to the other side, but just to even the currently uneven grounds. More problematic than the notion that a hostile atmosphere will result from this is the implication that there is not currently a hostile atmosphere where massive injustice is being doled out. Bear in mind that even if a 30-40% quota system were introduced, sometimes stronger women would still be passed over for weaker men (because 60-70% would still be on a non-quota basis, in a still sexist society). But if nothing is done to create change, little will ever change.
Incidentally, I google image searched 'women sitting in boardroom' to find a picture for this article, and it came up with, 'Did you mean 'woman sitting in boardroom'. Telling?
*I know this because I have conducted an extensive survey which involved personally speaking to the majority of people.
More to read:
- Lord Davies' report: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/business-law/docs/w/11-745-women-on-boards.pdf
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