How much longer must women wait for true equality?

How much longer must women wait for true equality?

Across government, business and financial institutions, incompetent men continue to thwart the progress of talented women

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Helen Goodman has suggested that women are appointed to positions beyond their competence.



How will we know when true gender equality is achieved in the British workplace? Perhaps there is an index running, even now, which measures gender equality with a range of key indicators. Equal pay at all levels of service delivery in the public sector would surely be one, as would equal numbers of women achieving promotions at work or being employed in positions appropriate to their qualifications, skills and training. Parity of representation in company boardrooms and among the nation’s chief executive officers would surely be another important indicator that, 40 years after the Sex Discrimination Act, this country is serious about treating women fairly and equally in the workplace.

Last week, in a perverse way, the Labour MP Helen Goodman provided another measure of the progress that has been made by working women in the UK. Goodman, the MP for Bishop Auckland in north-east England, suggested that women are now routinely promoted to top jobs in Whitehall that were beyond their competence and level of experience. Goodman said: “Someone very senior in the Foreign Office was saying that they were under pressure to appoint women as ambassadors. You can find that people are perfectly capable but sometimes they lack the experience or skills that you need to have. And you are not doing the organisation or [the women] themselves any favours by appointing them.”

If this is true, then it would be a landmark day in the quest for women to be treated equally in the workplace. That there may be some women operating at the highest level of the UK government who are not up to the job and have only been appointed because of their gender ought to be a cause for some celebration. For hundreds of years, the governments of this country and the biggest boardrooms have been awarding the best and most financially lucrative jobs to incompetent men.


All over the UK today, there are tens of thousands of male executives and senior civil servants who were only appointed to their jobs because of one or a combination of the following three attributes: they are members of the right golf club; they are freemasons; they attended the right sort of school. The cost to British industry going back generations because of this army of chinless wonders is probably beyond calculation. In the banking sector, an army of men brought this country to the brink of economic collapse because of a combination of greed, arrogance and rank incompetence. As well as the toxic bundles of mortgages that these men were trading in, how many were handing out billions in loans to decent chaps who had given them hand relief in England’s green and pleasant boarding schools? And when the roof fell in on their scams and stratagems, another army of incompetents was there to bail them out with billions of our money.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/26/how-long-for-true-equality-for-women