No golden skirts please

Every now and again, the powers that be in the European Commission come up with something that confirms the perception that the people in Brussels are bonkers.

In this vein we read that the European Commission is now considering compulsory female quotas in the composition of company boards.

Basically this would mean that certain companies would be required to allot a specific minimum percentage of board seats to women, merely because they have an extra Y chromosome. And if it had to come to the crunch – David, who has the same qualifications and experience as his contemporary Mary – would be passed over for a seat on the board, just because he’s not a girl.

I fail to see how this could be seen as a good idea and not political correctness gone mad. How does selecting a board member on the basis of their gender contribute to the company performing better?

And wouldn’t the woman appointed in lieu of a more qualified man be viewed with resentment by him and other colleagues? I’m thinking that this is more of a recipe for disaster than anything else.

The underlying ethos of this kind of positive discrimination is that it helps women overcome those unofficial hurdles that might stop them from making it to the top spots.

However, this kind of artificial reason for promotion is inherently distasteful as it can mean bypassing more suitable candidates who happen to be men to make up the all-important female quota.

It also makes a mockery of meritocracy which should be the only basis for promotion.

Those who support this kind of affirmative action insist that having quotas is a temporary solution which will serve to re-establish some sort of equality between the sexes in terms of employment opportunities. In practice, things don’t really work out that way.

Look at what happened in Norway. In January 2008, the Norwegian government gave public companies a 30-day ultimatum within which to abide by a quota requirement enacted in 2003. Failure to comply could result in penalties, among which were the compulsory dissolution of the company.

The first unintended and negative consequence of the imposition was that a number of companies gave up their public status. But there was also negative fallout on women.

For a variety of reasons, there was a dearth of suitably qualified women to take up top managerial positions. The few who did, in fact, have all the right qualifications and who were willing to take up the posts, got to be appointed to a multitude of boards.

Some of them even managed to gain up to 35 directorships each. These serial directors became disparagingly known as ‘golden skirts’ – a reflection on the fact that their gender was the most important criterion for their appointment and not their qualifications or abilities.

Besides the resentment they attracted, their taking up positions on so many boards effectively blocked the path of other women, disturbing the latter’s career trajectory.

Moral of the story? Artificial promotions on the basis of gender create more problems than they solve.

• There’s something about an uprising in a neighbouring country which seems to bring out the latent foreign policy expert in so many people.

Foreign Affairs Minister Tonio Borg can put his feet up and hand the reins over to the multitude of international relations experts that have cropped up overnight.

They’re everywhere – these home-grown Henry Kissinger wannabes – spouting their uninformed opinion about the Libyan crisis and giving their unsolicited advice about how to bring about world peace overnight. They tell us how they had seen this coming all along (presumably in their crystal ball) and how they were the only ones to spot the spark of madness in Muammar Gaddafi’s eyes (except for President Ronald Reagan who called him the “mad dog of the Middle East”).

Our amateur foreign policy experts are the loudest when it comes to condemning the Libyan leader’s atrocities. They are the shrillest when it comes to declaiming the complicity of the Maltese companies which had business dealings with Libya, or condemning politicians for cosying up to the Libyan regime.

I find this smug, we-told-you-so attitude to be extremely tiresome.

If we had to be honest, we would see that along the years the majority of the Maltese preferred to turn a blind eye to what was going on a few miles from our shores.

Whether this was a result of ignorance, wilful blindness or pragmatism, there were rarely any articles or programmes which were critical of the Gaddafi regime in the local media.

Some of the journalists who are hissing their anti-Gaddafi screeds most loudly now preferred to focus on more lucrative PR work about investments in Libya.

A good many Maltese preferred to think of Gaddafi as the man who could turn off the flow of immigrants from Africa.

The only groups who consistently criticised Gaddafi’s actions were Alternattiva Demo­kratika and Graffitti – and the latter were taken to task by Lou Bondi, for holding a poster of Gaddafi with the Maltese Prime Minister during a protest.

If there’s one thing which irritates me more than the overnight spawning of thousands of foreign policy ‘experts’, it is the inconsistency of certain leading lights of local journalism.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt