Why is is that David Cameron binet cannot even meet the gender diversity targets for his Cabinet that Lord Davies recommended for company boards?
Well, for a start, there is a lower percentage of women as MPs than there are women in most companies.
Although female MPs, as a percentage of the whole, have been steadily rising, they're still only at 22%. This is not very good. It's not the worst in the data set I was looking at (that's Georgia: 6.5%), but it's not the best (Sweden: 46%). In fact, it's squarely in the middle of the table.
In some ways, it should come as no surprise that there aren't many female MPs and Ministers.
For many years MPs have fought to improve conditions at Westminster. Debates regularly extend into the wee, small hours of the morning. Childcare provision is awful, and most MPs wouldn't even have their children in London with them anyway. Who wants to commute to London every week for a job that doesn't even pay paritcularly well when you compare it to an equivalent role in private sector, or even in the civil service?
Mind you, perhaps the issue is even more fundamental than that, striking right to the core of our society:
Eton, Westminster and St. Pauls aren't co-educational, and given David Cameron's propensity to select his Ministers from these Alma Maters, then women really have no chance, do they?
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I agree with the vast majority of what you say but isn't it true in any job that it's down to your network. As we progress through any organisation it's about having an ear to the ground and knowing what's what?
ReplyDeleteLouise Mensch ended up having to choose her husband and life in NYC although I understand that she was an MP and not on the cabinet, perhaps that came from frustration at never getting the cabinet post? I'm going off topic here... LOL.
Anyway, I suppose we have the shadow of Maggie looming large. Or maybe that's just me.
That's my unstructured thoughts for the day.