The gender agenda

11 August 2009

Recently Harriet Hormone, or is it Harman, I get confused between people’s names and their agenda, called for more women in the boardrooms of the biggest financial institutions, the implication being that they would do a better job than testosterone driven men.

Citing the collapse of Lehman’s which brought the financial house of cards tumbling down, she declared: “Someone said that if it had been Lehman Sisters, instead of Lehman Brothers there might not have been so much difficulty.”

She then coyly emphasised that it wasn’t her who said that – what a tease – and went on to say: “But I do seriously think that half the financial service industry is women now. Women make up half the workforce of insurance companies and banks. Why shouldn't they have a say on the boards as well?”

Well some of them do and they actually make a better job of it than many of Labour’s ladies who make a poor advertisement for Harman’s concept of a testosterone-free United Femdom.

They also pale into total insignificance when compared to the likes of Margaret Thatcher or even former Tory minister Angela Knight who now so ably runs the British Bankers Association.

Take for example the track record of Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary.

She disappeared into political oblivion via a porn movie and sink plug scandal and subsequently confessed to Total Politics magazine that she had been scared by the prospect of becoming home secretary and wished that she had been better trained for the role.

Apparently she had “never run a major organisation” before accepting the job in 2007 so she’d have done a great job as a Lehman sister.

Then there was Ruth Kelly who amazingly fell on her sword over the Home Information Packs fiasco while her subordinate Yvette Cooper went onto bigger things and now has a position in the cabinet alongside her husband Ed Balls but with Ed and David Miliband also on the ministerial team, Gordon Brown obviously likes to keep things in the family.

Most recently, of course, we had the departure of housing minister Caroline Flint who first blotted her political copybook in May last year when she inadvertently allowed press photographers outside 10 Downing Street to snap her Cabinet briefing notes.

These predicted that house prices would fall and that mortgages would become difficult to obtain and this at a time when both Brown and Flint were denying that they expected a property crash.

Flint recently flounced off the political scene and resigned her ministerial position because she felt that under Brown she was no more than "female window dressing”.

Ironically if Harman’s United Femdom became a reality and gender quotas became more important than talent and ability, a lot of women in business as well as politics could find themselves in exactly the same position.