Corbynomics: A Dystopia

seven-day-weekend

davomcdave wrote: »

I looked up the Labour leader elections over the last 30 years. In all that time no woman has come ahead of a man. The only time a woman hasn't come last is because there is more than one woman standing.

The Labour candidates for the big mayoralities were all men and outside London any women that stood came last in the selection process. It seems that any time a person needs to be popular rather than competent in the Labour Party a man is chosen. There are lots of women in the Shadow Cabinet and, now the first choice men have resigned, there are even some women in senior jobs. The Party has spoken very loudly over the years though: women are not welcome.

Maybe there is another side to this; that they only get incompetent women because of the ubiquitous and patronising women-only shortlists that no genuinely capable woman would dream of being chosen from, and therefore none of these second-raters are suitable for high office.

May, Thatcher, Sturgeon and indeed Merkel and Clinton got where they did without resorting to these awful lists.

davomcdave

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

Maybe there is another side to this; that they only get incompetent women because of the ubiquitous and patronising women-only shortlists that no genuinely capable woman would dream of being chosen from, and therefore none of these second-raters are suitable for high office.

May, Thatcher, Sturgeon and indeed Merkel and Clinton got where they did without resorting to these awful lists.

I think the women-only shortlists are symptomatic of a greater problem within Labour which is that the only way women can advance is by being pushed from the top.

The biggest problem for me is that if you have women only shortlists that the advantage isn't to be gained by being competent let alone amazing it's by being able to game the lists. It strikes me that is probably a great way to find candidates that are good at gaming lists but aren't so good at politics on a wider basis.

westernpromise

It's all about maintaining a pretence of equality (for the votes) while stitching everything up behind the scenes in the usual way.

If you are talented you don't need all-xyz shortlists. The problem for Labour is that mediocrity for all is one of its core values; rather than bring all schools up to the standard of the best, for example, they regard good schools as "a great danger" and think everyone should be forced to go to bad ones.

As a result most Labour leaders have been unfit for the job. All they are good at is backroom stitchups.

chris_m

davomcdave wrote: »

I think the women-only shortlists are symptomatic of a greater problem within Labour which is that the only way women can advance is by being pushed from the top.
The biggest problem for me is that if you have women only shortlists that the advantage isn't to be gained by being competent let alone amazing it's by being able to game the lists.

There was something about this sort of thing that I saw in one of my local papers' websites recently but not anywhere else. However, I've now managed to find it on the parliament.uk website;

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/women-and-equalities-committee/news-parliament-2015/women-in-house-of-commons-report-published-16-17/

The Government should set a domestic target of 45 per cent for representation of women in Parliament and local government by 2030 in response to the UN indicators for Sustainable Development Goal 5.5. The Government should set out how it plans to achieve this target, working with political parties.
The Government should seek to introduce in legislation in this Parliament a statutory minimum proportion of female parliamentary candidates in general elections for each political party.
.
.
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Parties that fail to comply with this target need to face sanctions for the quota to be effective.

IMO, this is complete and utter bill hooks.

As in any role I believe that it should be the best person selected for the job, irrespective of gender.

Setting statutory targets for proportions is completely wrong and could well lead to people being selected, not because they are the best person but because they happen to be female and are needed to "make up the numbers" - which would, IMO, be a greater insult to those selected than having not been selected at all.

davomcdave

chris_m wrote: »

There was something about this sort of thing that I saw in one of my local papers' websites recently but not anywhere else. However, I've now managed to find it on the parliament.uk website;

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/women-and-equalities-committee/news-parliament-2015/women-in-house-of-commons-report-published-16-17/

IMO, this is complete and utter bill hooks.

As in any role I believe that it should be the best person selected for the job, irrespective of gender.

Setting statutory targets for proportions is completely wrong and could well lead to people being selected, not because they are the best person but because they happen to be female and are needed to "make up the numbers" - which would, IMO, be a greater insult to those selected than having not been selected at all.

I take your point however if you look at CEOs, MPs or company management then women always come second to men. That makes me think that either:

1. Men are superior to women
2. We are missing out on a huge amount of talent due to our reluctance to promote women and to pay them the same as men for the jobs that they do

I don't believe quotas get us anywhere either but there is definitely a wider problem to be resolved.

CLAPTON

davomcdave wrote: »

I take your point however if you look at CEOs, MPs or company management then women always come second to men. That makes me think that either:

1. Men are superior to women
2. We are missing out on a huge amount of talent due to our reluctance to promote women and to pay them the same as men for the jobs that they do

I don't believe quotas get us anywhere either but there is definitely a wider problem to be resolved.

I feel confident that the majority of women could think of more than these two alternative

who exactly did thatcher come second to?

chris_m

davomcdave wrote: »

I take your point however if you look at CEOs, MPs or company management then women always come second to men.

Granted, the numbers are disproportionately low but 195 UK MPs, 21 US Senators, 83 US Congresswomen, 7 CEOs in the FTSE100 and 22 in the S&P500 doesn't equate to "always".

davomcdave

chris_m wrote: »

Granted, the numbers are disproportionately low but 195 UK MPs, 21 US Senators, 83 US Congresswomen, 7 CEOs in the FTSE100 and 22 in the S&P500 doesn't equate to "always".

I phrased myself badly due to editing my post incompletely.

What I was trying to say that if you compare the number of men and women MPs and senior managers in pretty much every country the number of men at the top is greater. Obviously women run stuff. The Chairman of the company I work for is a woman for starters (and is a lot better than her CEO). IIRC Rwanda is the only country which has more women MPs than men.

7 women CEOs and 93 men. I work in governance and we ask the chairmen we meet why they don't have (more) women on their board. When quizzed more closely on why they only had one woman on his board, one chairman said, "Oh xxxxxxxx. She's so good I don't really think of her as a woman any more"!

TrickyTree83

davomcdave wrote: »

I phrased myself badly due to editing my post incompletely.

What I was trying to say that if you compare the number of men and women MPs and senior managers in pretty much every country the number of men at the top is greater. Obviously women run stuff. The Chairman of the company I work for is a woman for starters (and is a lot better than her CEO). IIRC Rwanda is the only country which has more women MPs than men.

7 women CEOs and 93 men. I work in governance and we ask the chairmen we meet why they don't have (more) women on their board. When quizzed more closely on why they only had one woman on his board, one chairman said, "Oh xxxxxxxx. She's so good I don't really think of her as a woman any more"!

How much of that is down to merit?

It's not unreasonable if you assume that advancement on merit will not necessarily lead to a 50/50 split, or even anywhere close to that.

In studies on IQ it's been pointed out that women *on the whole* (before any feminists attack me) inhabit the mid-range of the human IQ spectrum, whereas men predominantly inhabit the bottom and top ranges. If this is true and we accept advancement on merit, then more men in boardrooms is not an issue. If advancement is not based on misogyny then it should be celebrated as a win for meritocracy. Should that mean that the majority of women are not as smart or capable as the top percentiles of men, that's just nature. Forcing equality of outcome will not yield the best results and is a communist ideal.

davomcdave

TrickyTree83 wrote: »

How much of that is down to merit?

It's not unreasonable if you assume that advancement on merit will not necessarily lead to a 50/50 split, or even anywhere close to that.

In studies on IQ it's been pointed out that women *on the whole* (before any feminists attack me) inhabit the mid-range of the human IQ spectrum, whereas men predominantly inhabit the bottom and top ranges. If this is true and we accept advancement on merit, then more men in boardrooms is not an issue. If advancement is not based on misogyny then it should be celebrated as a win for meritocracy. Should that mean that the majority of women are not as smart or capable as the top percentiles of men, that's just nature. Forcing equality of outcome will not yield the best results and is a communist ideal.

I don't believe we should force equality of outcome but we should look at the forces that mean women don't get into the board room and, in my experience, plenty of that is good, old-fashioned sexism.

IME, men dominate boardrooms because they don't want women in mucking up the gig so they simply bring in more men to replace the men that leave.

Bloomberg did a screen where they looked at the performance of the companies whose boards that had most gender diverse make up in the S&P500 and compared it with the performance of those companies in the S&P500 that were least sex diverse. The outperformance over, I think, ten years by the most sex diverse boards was about 90% on total shareholder returns (capital gains plus dividends) but outperformance could also be seen in sales and return on equity.

IQ is pretty much discredited as a measure of intelligence let alone anything as remotely connected with intelligence such as ability to run a business.