Self-identifying as a board member
Today The Times reports on the newest foray into corporate boardrooms under the misleading guise of breaking the gender glass ceiling. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which regulates the financial industry, has drawn up diversity guidelines. These would require every company listed on FTSE indices to declare the percentage of women serving as board members. The new rules, however, do not require that companies declare their board members’ legal or biological sex but their gender identity, regardless of when in their career they adopted it. Using this new definition, the FCA is now recommending that 40 per cent of boards should be women.
But they could all be men. Companies could comply with such recommendations without actually promoting a single woman.
The Equality Law 2010 recognises only legal sex, not gender identity, and there is no right to self-declare your sex under UK law. The FCA guidelines therefore risk setting firms up for a clash with employees with protected characteristics under existing equalities law, who may argue their own rights have been infringed. Using self-identification rather than legal and biological sex as the basis for compiling gender diversity data could, for example, give a misleading picture of a company’s performance under this metric.
Not to mention that it could give companies a veil behind which to continue not promoting women.
The reality is that Stonewall lobbied intensively to change the law but was ultimately halted by an outcry from critics warning of the dangers to women of allowing self-identification to trump biological sex. It is now looking increasingly as if it is getting its way regardless by persuading employers to adopt its agenda.
And who loses? Women. Of course.
I wonder, though, if a company committed to sexism would really be pro-trans? I am betting the typical manly man company would be even less likely to promote such individuals than they would women?
Answer: look at Iran, a sexist, homophobic culture with a top-tier trans “gender affirming” surgery rate.
That’s the beauty of it – they don’t actually have to be pro-trans at all. Anyone dude in a suit could declare himself to be a woman on paper without changing a damned thing in actual fact, the company could declare itself compliant, and the MRAs-oops-I-mean-TRAs would have us all happily play along.
Those who run a “typical manly man company” would hire and promote all kinds of men before they would allow mere real women to have a fair shake. And the men would all know it is a grift and big middle finger to the real women since the men who might “identify” as trans don’t have to do ANYTHING at all except make that declaration on Company Identity Day.
Think about it — what is needed now for a man to say he is a woman? Nothing but his word. No mental health evaluations, no hormones, no surgeries, no change at all in behavior, no cross-dressing, no changing his official ID, no changing his name even, zip zero zilch. He can identify as a woman for the time it takes to fill out a form on Company Identity Day and then go back to being the man he is. Does not even have to tell anybody but Human Resources.
And, presto no change-o, Manly Man Inc. now has the first “all woman” Board of Directors and is the most wokest company EVER!
sw88:
BUT very likely no board photos, except maybe very much out of focus. A man masquerading as a woman has a certain je ne sais pas that is detectable by the discerning onlooker.
Here’s the Nasdaq guidelines mentioned >> https://listingcenter.nasdaq.com/assets/Board%20Diversity%20Disclosure%20Matrix.pdf
So basically these are gender I.D. quotas. Because using the wrong pronouns hurts Pronoun People’s feelings, but more than that, it hurts people’s feelings who think it hurts Pronoun People’s feelings whether it does or not. There are a shitload of these people in the tech industry. Even on a website as seemingly benign as Nextdoor, I saw recently where you can choose the pronouns in your profile; He/Him, She/Her, or They/Them are the choices. Seems kind of narrow given the multidiverse spectrum of pronoun choices these days (according to the trans cult), and there is no fill in or ‘other’ choice. Can’t we just do without this kind of insulting box checking garbage altogether, and let the Pronoun People exclaim their pronoun dipshittery in their profiles (if it’s necessary to their gender identity survival) like the twittertards do?
If I were on the “terrified white homeowner who saw a black person walking down my street” website, I would insist on it as my pronoun
All good points re:gaming the trans identity. I forget how silly it can be.