Moral Maze radio four tonight: Equality and merit

[TheFeministParent]

Examining new proposals for positive discrimination. 8pm, I think.

[sethstarkaddersmum]

suspect it will have that woman from the Institute of Ideas on it and result in feminist enragement....

[EatingAngelPie]

interesting nws on the narrowing of the pay gap though. i wonder what the main driver of that is...

[claig]

Excellent thanks for that. I must admit that I do often find myself in agreement with Claire Fox, even though she used to be a Marxist and may still be one, I'm not sure.
Should be interesting.

[claig]

oh God, Matthew Taylor, rarely agree with him

[HerBeatitude]

On now

[claig]

Taylor is wrong. Employer can choose, but shouldn't be forced to choose.

[claig]

Taylor and Portillo have changed the argument. Everybody agrees that there should be no discrimination. The argument is about positive discrimination.

[claig]

Agree with Melanie. They scrapped grammars and destroyed the chances of the poor. They dumbed down education.

[claig]

Claire Fox for Prime Minister. She is formidable.

[TheFeministParent]

Bugger, after my initial excitement bedtime went wrong and found myself pacifying a small child with nightmares.....will listen again!!

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

How thick am I that I have never heard of the RSA?

It's only been on 2 minutes and I am already pissed off by Claire Fox. These proposals are about using positive discrimination only if two candidates are equally good, qualified etc - now she's going on as if the idea is to promote women even if they've spent their whole lives living in a bin and reading the Dandy.

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

Claire Fox really is a - and I use this word advisedly - knob.

"Women choose to have families" ALL BY THEMSELVES, APPARENTLY.

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

oops - that might have been Melanie thing actually.

[TheFeministParent]

Eh?

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

Just that old cliche about women choosing to be underpaid when they choose to have families.

Whereas of course, men don't have families.

OMG at Michael Portillo defending positive discrimination. :)

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

(sorry TFP - she didn't say "men don't have families", but it's always the implication that only women can have them. )

[TheFeministParent]

I quite like Michael....lately!

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

That "excessive legislation" guy is doing a pisspoor job IMO, with - is it Matthew Tayloe - taking him to pieces.

and LOL

LOL

fucking

LOL

at the idea that it's equality campaigners who are the ones who make an issue of race/gender!

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

None of the "anti" side are able to bring themselves to say it's wrong to employ a male teacher over a female one, I notice.

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

Notice they've taken on the usual "rape trial" tactic of using women to defend male privilege.

[claig]

The lawyer at the beginning wasn't any good. Claire ran rings around him. Then Linda Bellos didn't stand up for any positive discrimination stuff at all, but agreed With Claire on mist everything. Bellos's case seemed to rest on flipping a coin, and that some executives are not hired because they are not good golf players and that a surgeon preferred to hire people who shared his taste in classical music. But in the real world of business, this is not the norm. Her examples are such outliers as to be practically irrelevant.

[TheFeministParent]

It's like Helena Kennedy says about pinning the badge on someone just like you.....he (white middle class suit) reminds me of myself and so he'll be great!

[claig]

Agree that people do tend to hire people like themselves and who they get on with. But she said that working class men don't get on the board because they may not be good golfers. Modern corporations don't work like that. It is a competitive world and companies compete internationally. It's not about golf in most corporations.

But I was very surprised that Bellos was not in favour of positive discrimination. She even said that if two candidates were equal, thne she would flip a coin.

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

Rubbish - people hire people on pretty slim basis. Excuse me if I've been in the Crazy Fairyland of Business (rather than the real world of it) but I'm pretty sure that on at least one occasion I was hired because I had been to the same university as the boss's wife FGS.

the coin-flipping was nothing to do with positive discrimination, IIRC it was what do you do if there are two equally qualified candidates and nothing whatsoever to choose between them (including other factors, gender, race etc).