Here’s a deal – we’ll stop the fuss about gender if the other half will just occasionally shut up
Here’s Charlotte Valeur, chair of the Institute of Directors, telling us that big companies don’t have more women on their boards because the companies lie.
by Christina Patterson for The Guardian
photo: ‘It’s a cliche that women aren’t brave enough. It’s also a lie.’ Photograph: Eddie Keogh/Reuters
Wasn’t it great? All those lunches! All those parties! All those speeches, saying how great we are and how far we’ve come! Where are the women in the boardroom?
Perhaps it was for you. I spent International Women’s Day in the way I spend most days: sitting at home, in front of my computer, looking forward to the odd trip to the kettle. I saw the tweets, and read the articles, but it all felt a bit like bring-your-daughter-to-work day. It felt like dress-up-as-Hermione for World Book Day. It felt like Crufts.
It’s always a bit odd when a day set up to celebrate half the world’s population makes you feel as if you’re watching Greenpeace try to save a whale. Here, as always, were some prime specimens, making pronouncements about the dangers we face. Here’s Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, reminding us that the gender pay gap even among the rich country members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – a thinktank for developed nations – is 16%. Here’s Charlotte Valeur, chair of the Institute of Directors, telling us that big companies don’t have more women on their boards because the companies lie.
And here’s Caroline Criado Perez saying – well, where do you start to get more women in the boardroom? It isn’t just, according to her new book, Invisible Women, that we’re less likely to make it on to bank notes or plinths. If we’re in a car crash, we’re less likely to make it, full stop. Women, she says, are 47% more likely to die in a car crashthan men. This, she explains, is because cars are designed for men. Oh, and so is the rest of the world.
Pass the hemlock, with those canapes. “The male experience, the male perspective,” she says, “has come to be seen as universal.” This has been true throughout history, and it’s true now. Quite a mountain to climb, then. The whole of world culture to change. Childbirth to be eliminated or reformed.
It’s all so big. It’s all so exhausting. Yes, of course we should have more women in power. Of course we should have more women on boards. Business leaders say we should be braver. They are, they claim, crying out for good women. They are scraping barrels for good women! All those brilliant white men on boards are sending out search parties for good women, but unfortunately the ones they find just aren’t good enough.