[Updated 28 February 2013]
We’ve established a new political party, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). It has its own blog http://j4mb.wordpress.com. More on this later in this post.
Campaign for Merit in Business, which was launched early in 2012, has made a remarkable impact in a relatively short time. We’ve proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the ‘glass ceiling’ is a baseless conspiracy theory. Through exposing as fantasies, lies, delusions and myths, the arguments which said that increasing gender diversity in the boardroom (‘GDITB’) will improve corporate financial performance, we’ve destroyed the long-vaunted ‘business case’ for GDITB. We continue to relentlessly give publicity to five longitudinal studies, all of which show that GDITB leads to declines in corporate financial performance. What else would we expect when businesses aren’t free to select the best people for their boards, regardless of gender? Proponents are left with little other than misrepresenting correlation as causation in pursuit of their social engineering programmes.
The Conservative-led coalition no longer challenges our assertion that the impact of GDITB on UK plc will inevitably be a negative one. And yet it continues to actively pursue GDITB. DBIS continues to refuse to have a minister meet with us. What might explain this extraordinary state of affairs? We believe there are a number of strands in the answer:
1. David Cameron has an exaggerated fear of the ’women’s vote’. He showed his feminist-friendly credentials soon after coming to power in 2010 by appointing the Labour peer Lord Davies of Abersoch to report not on whether to give effect to GDITB, but on how to do so. Indeed he showed those credentials in the autumn of 2009, when he announced he was setting up some all-women prospective parliamentary candidate (‘PPC’) shortlists. I’d once worked for the party at their London HQ (2006-8) but resigned my party membership in the autumn of 2009 when David Cameron announced his willingness to introduce all-women PPC shortlists for the forthcoming general election. I was later informed, by a senior officer in the party, that I was far from alone in having done so.
2. The leading minister at DBIS, the Lib Dem MP Vince Cable, holds extreme left-wing views, and is on record as saying that if he were Prime Minister, 50% of his cabinet would be women. He has publicly used - in his speeches and writings – utterly discredited research ‘evidence’ in support of GDITB.
3. The CBI, which should be defending its members’ rights to appoint directors as they see fit, is a part of the problem. For some years it’s actively promoted GDITB. Its current President, Sit Roger Carr (chairman of Centrica) is on record as stating that while he doesn’t personally believe GDITB improves corporate financial performance, he thinks it improves meeting ‘atmospherics’.
4. GDITB is being pursued vigorously because FTSE100 companies are under threat of legislated quotas (Davies Report – 2011) if they don’t ‘voluntarily’ achieve 25% female representation on their boards by 2015. This has resulted in a more than fourfold increase in FTSE100 female director appointments, from 12% of new appointments before the quotas threat (2010) to 55% (2012). Virtually all of the new female appointments have been as NEDs, an indicator of how shallow the available pool of qualified women is compared with the available pool of qualified men.
5. For some years government inquiries into such matters, while seeming to be open, have been deeply flawed. The most obvious recent example was the 2012 House of Lords inquiry into ‘Women on Boards’ which heard only from witnesses in support of GDITB. Many were professionally involved in the initiative. The level of witness challenging by the peers, including the Conservatives, was embarrassing to watch. In our written evidence to the inquiry we included details of four longitudinal studies which show that GDITB harms corporate performance. The final inquiry report explicitly rejected the idea that GDITB can lead to declines in corporate performance, without explaining why. We wrote to the inquiry’s chairwoman, Conservative peer Baroness O’Cathain, asking for an explanation, and didn’t receive one.
6. The House of Commons inquiry into ‘Women in the Workplace’, to which we gave oral evidence, is still ongoing, and we’re hopeful of more attention being given to our evidence than was the case with the House of Lords inquiry. But virtually all the witnesses before this inquiry, as with the House of Lords inquiry, have been pro-GDITB. We’ve made formal complaints about the misleading testimonies of a number of ’witnesses’, one of whom amended her evidence as a result.
The area of GDITB is but one of many areas in which governments actively discriminate for women and against men, because they’re fearful of the potential impact of ‘women’s votes’, while being contemptuous of ‘men’s votes’. Let’s consider just one example of that discrimination. Almost two-thirds of public sector workers are women, yet the Equality Act (2010) permits public sector bodies to discriminate in favour of women in their recruitment processes. Positive discrimination on gender grounds is illegal, so the government terms the phenomenon ’positive action’. It amounts to exactly the same thing in practice.
Men have signally failed to co-operate effectively to defend ‘men’s human rights’ over many years, but this is changing. Politicians of all parties have left us with no choice. We’ve taken the only logical step, and got political. We’ve formed a political party to challenge the government in numerous policy areas – including GDITB - where there’s relentless special treatment for women at the expense of men. I shall lead the party.
On 30 December the leading broadcaster and Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts exclusively revealed our intention to launch the party:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2254307/Pro-men-party-Harriet-sights.html
The response we got was considerable, and international. The proposed name of the party, and our thinking behind forming it, were exclusively revealed in an article published by a leading American men’s human rights website on 3 February 2013:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/government-tyranny/fighting-feminism-lets-get-political/
If you believe in this cause, then please support us by making a donation, or possibly by making a contribution in other ways. We already have an accountant in place to take care of finances both before and after the party’s establishment. 100% of donations will be used to finance our campaigning work. Thank you for your interest in our work.
Mike Buchanan
We’ve given the influential American MHR website ‘A Voice for Men’ an exclusive on the first prospective parliamentary candidate J4MB has selected for 2015, someone who contested the same parliamentary seat in 2010 for his own political party:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/justice-for-men-and-boys-party-arrives/
We wish him well. On 9 May I’ll be revealing – again through ‘A Voice for Men’ – the seat I’ll personally be contesting in 2015.
We need a lot more donations if we’re to hit our financial target for contesting 30 marginal seats in 2015. I ask you to donate whatever you can afford towards that goal (link below), and I remind you that nobody connected with the party draws any income from donations.
http://j4mb.wordpress.com/donate/
Thank you for your support of our efforts to make the future brighter for men and boys (and the women who love them).
Mike Buchanan
I’m on a roll social media-wise. Having established a Twitter account a few days ago, I’ve just set up a Facebook page with considerable support from a London-based MHRA, Richard Ford, who rejoices in the nickname ‘Black Fedora’. His two blogs are here:
http://sixmillionpounds.blogspot.co.uk
http://the-black-fedora.blogspot.co.uk
My Facebook page is here:
http://www.facebook.com/mike.buchanan.9066
I invite the subscribers to this blog (and other visitors) to invite me to become their ‘friends’.
People keep telling me I have to be on Twitter. I’ve finally succumbed to the pressure and set up an account, so if enough people ‘follow’ me – @MikeBuchanan11 – I’ll start tweeting and see if it’s a good investment of time.
Our political party Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them) plans to contest the top 30 Conservative marginal seats at the next general election, scheduled to take place in May 2015. We’ve contacted local papers in all 30 constituencies, seeking prospective parliamentary candidates, and we’ve already heard from a number of individuals, so we’ve started to draw up lists.
The seats are detailed at the end of this note. We’re also hoping to contest Witney (David Cameron), Camberwell & Peckham (Harriet Harman) and Twickenham (Vince Cable). All the main parties are equally and institutionally anti-male, so we plan to challenge incumbent governments’ MPs at general elections. Our objective is to make a sufficiently good showing – voting for J4MB will result in the party/parties in power losing seats – that we will minimise the likelihood of the same party being elected for more than one term. This will put 30+ years of the state’s relentless assaults on men’s and boys’ human rights firmly onto the political ‘radar’ in the UK for the first time. If you’re interested in standing as a candidate for J4MB in 2015, for any of these 30 seats – or possibly another – please email me at mb1957@hotmail.co.uk.
Finally, political campaigning costs money, so I am making a request for donations. Nobody connected with J4MB earns any income from it. You can donate through the link below.
http://j4mb.wordpress.com/donate/
Let me know if you’d like to set up a Direct Debit instead. Even a modest amount every month will generate a good sum in the two years we have before the 2015 general election. Thank you.
Top 30 marginal Conservative seats, 2010 general election
|
Seat |
Majority |
Runner-up party (2010) |
| Warwickshire North |
54 |
Labour |
| Camborne & Redruth |
66 |
Lib Dem |
| Thurrock |
92 |
Labour |
| Hendon |
106 |
Labour |
| Oxford West & Abingdon |
176 |
Lib Dem |
| Cardiff North |
194 |
Labour |
| Sherwood |
214 |
Labour |
| Stockton South |
332 |
Labour |
| Lancaster & Fleetwood |
332 |
Labour |
| Broxstowe |
389 |
Labour |
| Truro & Falmouth |
435 |
Lib Dem |
| Newton Abbott |
523 |
Lib Dem |
| Amber Valley |
536 |
Labour |
| Wolverhampton South West |
691 |
Labour |
| Waveney |
769 |
Labour |
| Carlisle |
853 |
Labour |
| Morecambe & Lunesdale |
866 |
Labour |
| Weaver Vale |
991 |
Labour |
| Harrogate & Knaresborough |
1,039 |
Lib Dem |
| Lincoln |
1,058 |
Labour |
| Plymouth Sutton & Devonport |
1,149 |
Labour |
| Montgomeryshire |
1,184 |
Lib Dem |
| Stroud |
1,299 |
Labour |
| Brighton Kemptown |
1,328 |
Labour |
| Bedford |
1,353 |
Labour |
| Watford |
1,425 |
Lib Dem |
| Dewsbury |
1,526 |
Labour |
| Warrington South |
1,553 |
Labour |
| Pudsey |
1,659 |
Labour |
| Enfield North |
1,692 |
Labour |
This morning the government published its second annual review on ‘Women on Boards’:
Soon after the Conservative-led coalition came to power in May 2010, David Cameron appointed the Labour peer Lord Davies of Abersoch to report on how (not whether) to increase female representation on boards. The resulting Davies Report (February 2011) was full of claims that increasing gender diversity in the boardroom (‘GDITB’) would lead to improved corporate financial performance, whilst providing not a shred of evidence for the claims. Campaign for Merit in Business (‘C4MB’) has since gathered overwhelming evidence to show that GDITB leads to declines in corporate financial performance. Our latest briefing paper on the matter:
C4MB has been very active in challenging the government over its GDITB initiative. Can we see any evidence of our impact, when we look at this latest report? In my initial review of the document I cannot see a single claim that GDITB will – or even may – result in improved corporate financial performance. This is a major about-turn, and is effectively an admission that GDITB is nothing more than a social engineering exercise. So has the government taken the logical next step, and withdrawn its threat of legislated gender quotas on boards? Of course not. On page 9 of the new report we find:
Enlightened companies really are grasping this issue and doing their utmost to change the face of British boardrooms. However, they are being let down by others who feel that they can ignore this issue. The time has come for them to realise that they can’t. This is not an issue that is going to go away. Our initial strategy recognised that all companies are different and gave them the freedom to tackle this issue in their own way, making the right decisions for their companies. We still feel that this is the right approach for UK business. However, there is a very real danger that those companies who refuse to act now, by failing to put in place targets and polices, will force the hand of Government into imposing burdensome regulation upon all businesses.
I see that among the signatories of this new report is Professor Susan Vinnicombe, who leads Cranfield International Centre for Women Leaders. She was also a signatory to the original Davies Report. Surely the good professor would claim a causal link between GDITB and improved corporate financial performance? Er, no. I refer you to her admission to a House of Lords inquiry in 2012:
I didn’t catch David Cameron’s speech about our recently deceased former prime minister Margaret Thatcher this afternoon in the House of Common, but a supporter and generous donor, Gladys, emailed me the following:
David Cameron, in a speech in the House of Commons this afternoon, stated that Margaret Thatcher had ‘smashed through the glass ceiling’, or words to that effect. I almost dropped my cup of tea in disbelief at his feminist-friendly statement. Margaret Thatcher would have recoiled at the idea that any such thing as a glass ceiling existed. Nothing has been so damaging to female executives as the myth that a glass ceiling exists, or has ever existed. Talented and hardworking women have aways got to the senior reaches of business, and to the boardroom if good enough. The glass ceiling is a myth spun so as to justify driving poorly qualified women, often unwilling to work hard, into boardrooms. Many female executives today have an unbelievable sense of entitlement. The fact that almost all female FTSE100 directors are non-executives tell us all we need to know about the relative numbers of men and women qualified for FTSE100 boards.
I couldn’t agree more. Gladys’s email reminded me of one of Mrs Thatcher’s quotations:
I don’t want to get to a position where we have women in senior roles because they’re women, we want to have women because they are able and as well-equipped as men and sometimes better.
A remarkable woman, whatever you might think of her politics. Will we ever see her like again?
Good afternoon. I’ve appeared on ten radio programmes in the past four weeks, nine of them BBC radio programmes, the latest being Woman’s Hour. Public consciousness about the discriminations and disadvantages faced by men and boys in modern Britain is rising fast. All the programmes are downloadable here:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKhX1c3ow6BrzdzP3ydpeZQ/videos
We plan to contest the top 30 Conservative marginal seats in May 2015, as I explained in an open letter sent to David Cameron a month ago:
http://j4mb.wordpress.com/our-open-letter-to-david-cameron-march-2013/
I invite you to comment on our public consultation document (link below). If you’d like to do so, please let me know, and I’ll email you the ‘Word’ version.
http://j4mb.wordpress.com/our-public-consultation-exercise-2/
(Our proposals relating to the business sector can be found on pp. 13, 14.)
We’ve seen a steady increase in the number and average size of donations being made to the party, but there’s still a long way to go. Those associated with the party (including myself) draw no income from donations, which are used to cover costs associated with campaigning. We’ll need £15,000 to finance the deposits for 30 seats in the 2015 general election, and a lot more than that to run effective campaigns. I should like to appeal to you for a donation (link below) to help make the future brighter for British men and boys, and the women who love them. Thank you for your support.
http://j4mb.wordpress.com/donate/
Finally, I should like to take this opportunity to wish you and your loved ones a happy Easter.
Mike Buchanan
PARTY LEADER
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS (AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM)
Bitches be mean. Ladies be crying. Let’s give them MORE responsibility! Clearly, they can handle it.
Among the anti-feminist bloggers whose pieces I always take the time to read, must be counted the American lady who writes under the name ‘JudgyBitch’. She’s just published a characteristically insightful, feisty, and funny piece, inspired by the nonsensical article (‘Women make better decisions than men’)published online by a Canadian business school, DeGroote, about which I myself wrote a piece yesterday. Enjoy this taster of JudgyBitch’s output, then subscribe to her blog, and prepare for some treats:
Pandering to women in the business world, regardless of the damage being caused to the only wealth-creating sector, shows no sign of abating. Universities have for many years been riding this anti-meritocratic gravy train, and I thought I’d seen it all in the 14 months since I launched Campaign for Merit in Business http://c4mb.wordpress.com. But an article published by ‘A Voice for Men’ a few days ago really takes the biscuit (link below):
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mcmaster-university-and-men/mcmaster-university-girlz-iz-mo-betta/
The focus of the article is a piece titled, ‘Women make better decisions than men’, posted online by the DeGroote School of Business, at McMaster University (Canada):
http://www.degroote.mcmaster.ca/articles/women-make-better-decisions-than-men/
It surely won’t be too long before the piece is ‘pulled’, before DeGroote suffers too much reputational damage (in case they do so, I’ve put the content at the end of this piece, for posterity). The piece refers to a ‘study’ co-authored by Professor Chris Bart, Professor of Strategic Management at DeGroote. The content of the article is so laughable – it even cites a ‘study’ (Joy et al) published by a militant feminist campaigning organisation, Catalyst – that I simply had to post a couple of comments. Nothing unusual so far. But I was struck by how many other people also made critical comments, many of them very perceptive. Almost all of these people are unknown to me. It’s clear that public consciousness about the sheer idiocy of claims such as, ‘Women make better decisions than men’ is inexorably on the rise.
In case DeGroote pulls the piece, here it is, for posterity:
Women make better decisions than men
Julia Thomson | Hamilton, Ontario | Posted: March 25, 2013
Women’s abilities to make fair decisions when competing interests are at stake make them better corporate leaders, researchers have found.
A survey of more than 600 board directors showed that women are more likely to consider the rights of others and to take a cooperative approach to decision-making. This approach translates into better performance for their companies.
The study, which was published this week in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, was conducted by Chris Bart, professor of strategic management at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, and Gregory McQueen, a McMaster graduate and senior executive associate dean at A.T. Still University’s School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona.
“We’ve known for some time that companies that have more women on their boards have better results,” explains Bart. “Our findings show that having women on the board is no longer just the right thing but also the smart thing to do. Companies with few female directors may actually be short-changing their investors.”
Bart and McQueen found that male directors, who made up 75% of the survey sample, prefer to make decisions using rules, regulations and traditional ways of doing business or getting along.
Female directors, in contrast, are less constrained by these parameters and are more prepared to rock the boat than their male counterparts.
In addition, women corporate directors are significantly more inclined to make decisions by taking the interests of multiple stakeholders into account in order to arrive at a fair and moral decision. They will also tend to use cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building more often – and more effectively – in order to make sound decisions.
Women seem to be predisposed to be more inquisitive and to see more possible solutions. At the board level where directors are compelled to act in the best interest of the corporation while taking the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders into account, this quality makes them more effective corporate directors, explains McQueen.
Globally, women make up approximately 9% of corporate board memberships. Arguments for gender equality, quotas and legislation have done little to increase female representation in the boardroom, despite evidence showing that their presence has been linked to better organizational performance, higher rates of return, more effective risk management and even lower rates of bankruptcy. Bart’s and McQueen’s finding that women’s higher quality decision-making ability makes them more effective than their male counterparts gives boards a method to deal with the multifaceted social issues and concerns currently confronting corporations.
The International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics is available online.
How do people make decisions?
- Personal interest reasoning: The decision maker is motivated by ego, selfishness and the desire to avoid trouble. This method is most often exhibited by young children who largely tend to be motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
- Normative reasoning: The decision maker tries to avoid “rocking the boat” by adhering to rules, laws or norms. Stereotypical examples of groups that use this form of reasoning include organizations with strong established cultures like Mary Kay or the US Marines.
- Complex moral reasoning: The decision maker acknowledges and considers the rights of others in the pursuit of fairness by using a social cooperation and consensus building approach that is consistently applied in a non-arbitrary fashion.
Why should boards have more female directors?
- Boards with high female representation experience a 53% higher return on equity, a 66% higher return on invested capital and a 42% higher return on sales (Joy et al., 2007).
- Having just one female director on the board cuts the risk of bankruptcy by 20% (Wilson, 2009).
- When women directors are appointed, boards adopt new governance practices earlier, such as director training, board evaluations, director succession planning structures (Singh and Vinnicombe, 2002)
- Women make other board members more civilized and sensitive to other perspectives (Fondas and Sassalos, 2000) and reduce ‘game playing’ (Singh, 2008)
- Female directors are more likely to ask questions rather than nodding through decisions (Konrad et al., 2008).
Call To Action
Television Editors – Live interviews with Chris Bart can be arranged using the DeGroote School of Business’s broadcast studio. Call Julia Thomson 905-525-9140 ext. 24871 to schedule airtime and book a live feed from campus.
My thanks to the good folk who run a blog site http://ukgeneralelection2015.blogspot.co.uk/ concerned with the run-up to the May 2015 general election. They’ve just sent us the following link to the popularity of the websites of British political parties:
http://ukgeneralelection2015.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/party-political-websites-popularity.html
The website of our political party, Justice for Men & Boys http://j4mb.wordpress.com is receiving twice as many ‘hits’ as the website of the Ulster Unionist Party (‘UUP’) which is very pleasing, given the UUP was launched in 1905 – 108 years ago – and our party was launched less than five weeks ago. The only way is up…
