I don’t quite know
what to make of David Cameron’s recent evangelising on the subject of women in
the boardroom. He’s certainly right on
the point of principle; the low level of female directors in our major
companies represents a significant loss of potential talent if one assumes, as
I do, that talent and ability are fairly evenly distributed between the sexes.
I’m not convinced, though,
about his claim that this failure alone accounts for such a significant degree
of economic failure in the UK, nor that putting it right will have the claimed
level of economic impact. The fact that
Norwegian business, with its much higher level of female representation in the board
room, is doing well is not proof that the one is the result of the other. There are a lot of other differences between
the Norwegian and UK
economies.
I wonder whether
his alighting on this particular issue might not have more to do with his poll
ratings amongst female voters than it has to do with economics. I also wonder how his hint that the Government
will legislate if necessary to impose quotas sits with his repeated claims that
businesses are already over-regulated and must be freed from state interference
in the way they operate. It doesn’t look
or sound consistent to me.
I’d actually
support such legislation if it were to be introduced, but I’m not expecting to
see it any time soon. And I can’t escape
the nagging doubt that criticising the lack of women in the board room is a bit
of a diversion from the fact that the government’s economic policies can hardly
be described as successful. It almost
looks like blaming somebody or something else.
Posts
5 comments:
So how will anyone know if their female boss got their job on merit or to meet a quota.
How many female Tory MPs are there?
How many in the cabinet?
John
My issue with blogs is that they stimulate discussion even passion but are ephemeral in extreme
Redistribution and subsidy is a classic example This article should be the basis of a major issue for us in Wales to debate and lo 24hrs later we are back to men and women in the boardroom
Boncath,
But my other reader likes a bit of variety....
John
My other reader?? surely not
Business culture in Scandinavia is very 'people orientated', the role of the board is to give 'nurture' the finances of an organisation to achieve corporate goals. They are also flatter organisations. Business culture in the UK tends to be 'dictatorial' and corporate goals are achieved by feeding instructions down a hierarchical structure, often a hang-over from the English class system. The sickness is that of the culture of business and lack of women at senior levels is just one symptom. Another failure is testosterone driven decision making. Example : Goodwin of RBS decided to do an acquisition of ABN-AMRO when the financial liquidity grounds were dubious, at the bid, he said to the shareholders that her had the 'balls' to do it. I suspect absence of 'balls' would have resulted in better decision making. It should be noted that the Norwegian banking system has not suffered the same fate, as they had done the opposite. They liquidated bad debts early and had realistic valuations on assets. It was Bente Rathe, CEO of Gjensidige, one of the largest banks in Norway at the time, who predicted such poor liquidity would lead to a banking collapse as far back as 2003. Fine woman is Ms Rathe.
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