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Women’s Committee : Published in European Voice April 2006.
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First Published in European Voice April 2006
I think one of the most awkward questions I have been asked since I took my seat as a substitute member of the Women’s Committee is “What is it for?”
I have to respond that I am not really sure. In point of fact I sometimes think it does active harm. I have lived and worked in the United Kingdom for most of my professional life, notwithstanding a short spell in the Far East so any perspective must therefore be derived from experience in the “Anglo-Saxon” economy. I may add after quite carefully going through the members handbook I seem to be one of the very few deputies with serious commercial or military experience.
This is part of the problem. The Commission churn out new directives like chocolates in a sweetie factory and the parliament endorses most of them through commercial ignorance. Especially in the field of small businesses.
My political opponents, often supported by British public service broadcasting try and give the impression that somehow I do not think women should work. Or they should be second class citizens. I believe, and have always believed, as the chairman of an international investment company, albeit a small one, that businesses need more women not fewer and working practices should be flexible. My company has pioneered this approach for many years.
But the law of unintended consequence means the more employment legislation enacted the opposite the effect. Let me list a myriad of examples in the field of current and proposed legislation. The first and most obvious is maternity leave. We have at the moment the absurd situation where a female applicant does not have to say if she is pregnant at an interview, whether she intends to get pregnant or indeed if she becomes pregnant if she intends to return to work. The employment legislation is so heavily stacked against the employer that small companies have simply stopped employing young women. The small employer just claims he wants someone with more experience and employs a woman whose children have grown up. I have been involved with women’s sport at Cambridge University for 10 years. Almost none of these bright young women join small businesses. They all go to big business who can cope better with the legislation.
This is a direct result of having the same rules for Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank as a small music publishing business with twelve people. Last year when a female pilot had been on maternity leave, she had not met the BA flying hours requirement to fly part time. An industrial tribunal overruled BA and she is now flying subject to appeal. The women’s committee cheered. Yet what is the outcome for hundreds of career female commercial pilots? They now have passengers aboard who are thinking “is she competent? Or did she work the system?” This sets back women in the field of commercial flying. Let us look at the lunatic Norwegian system of compulsory women in the boardroom. 40%! If I go to Norway (and I do) to negotiate a shipping contract I now do not know if the female director to whom I am talking is competent or a “token woman”. This is wicked and patronizing and I can assure everyone deeply resented by the business career woman.
Over 50% of all new businesses in the UK last year were started by women. My post bag is one of the biggest in the country on the matter of employment legislation, over half from women. They all agree with me. Yet maybe there is a role for a women’s committee. A radical, revisionist role. They could lobby for the rolling back of stifling over protective legislation in the field of women’s employment. A European campaign to make it easier to employ women. To throw off the shackles. But perhaps part of the problem is that most women’s issue junkies, male and female, deep down think women cannot hack it on their own. They somehow need the protection of jobsworth politicians, journalists and broadcasters (None of whom ever have commercial experience). This indeed is the most intellectually dishonest sort of discrimination and it is rife, not in business, but in the hearts of the chattering classes. Women do not need special help over men, have faith in them, I do.
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