The Traps & Pitfalls of Engineering Gender Balance in the Workplace

Women make up slightly more than 50% of the population, therefore they should make up at least 50% of the seats on Company Boards, seats in the Parliaments & CEO positions in top ASX companies.

That's been the claim. It has some problems. So do some of the proposed solutions.

Firstly, 10% of the world's population is left handed. Therefore the workplace must represent this. Each board & every parliament must be 10% left handed and the rest right handed.

Secondly, 28% of the Australian population was born overseas, so for their unique qualities that they certanly bring, we need boards & parliaments to have 28% overseas born.

Thirdly, Indigenous Australians are roughly 18% of the population so Parliament & boards must have 18% Indigenous Australian. Surely?

Fourth, 63% of Australians are reported to be obese or overweight. We need that reflected in the boards & Parliaments. Health is a social issue so it makes sense to have stakeholders involved in the greatest health threat to the nation as captains of Industry & Legislation.
Fifth - 32% of the population live in rural or regional areas of Australian, therefore only 68% of all boards & parliaments should be city dwellers.

Sixth - I could go on forever with the angle of the silly thickened identity politics style assessment. This is part of the problem and the solution, so we must take the identity politics out of the equation and the answer.

Make it equal opportunity for all Australians, whether they're male, female, left or right handed Indigenous or not, born here or overseas, city or rural based, overweight smoker/non smoker, gay straight, atheist, devout faith follower...quit with the sub culture bracketry. Go with the facts, the requirements of the job and the best suited for the job. Is it so wrong to say "Sorry you weren't the best person for this job" or do you have to find a reason to carry your false offended back side? It is a sorry sad & pathetic clam to say " Its not me and my suitability its racist, ageist, sexist, elitist..."
You are not entitled to the job you have chosen. The job of your choice is not an option. If you fail to secure that job with that firm, guess what? That's life, go for another job and do what you can to make yourself the best person for the job. Compete for the job, not expect it to be allocated to you because of an accident of birth that designated your gender or some other divisive identity flag.

That's the problem part solved. Its not a matter of there's not enough of any particular identity, its a matter does the position have someone who is suitable, productive, effective irrespective of their clothes size, gender, sexual preference, hair colour, ethnic makeup, or any other minor & irrelevant grouping. The job criteria is about the job you have to suit it...not the other way around.

18% of the population is aged Zero to 15. Do we slide some of them onto boards? No we don't. So why use some other minor group splitting like age, gender, ethnicity or anything else over & beyond MERIT???

Here's the problems within some of the solutions.
Quotas.
Big problem. Why?

Quotas are a diabolical form of Social Engineering. Now I know with those that know (or perhaps don't realise) they have strong socialist/Marxist leanings, Social Engineering is terribly appealing because allowing the state to take control & engineer things in every day life seems like a short cut to equity. It just doesn't work well. When the state dictates a little, the state will want to dictate a lot. Quotas wont necessarily lead to a murderous communist regime but it doesn't help anyone and the possibility of it being amongst a suite of social engineering initiatives is pretty worrying. More worry when some genuinely good people with left leaning inclinations follow the harder line leftists and the minor & very wrong becomes law.
There's another issue. The advent of the term "Quota Queens". A derogatory term for those ushered in by "positive bias" because they possess that item of identity that the engineers decide needs favouring over & above others to reach a balanced goal. Now in this case some people were quite accurately quota queens, not really worthy of the role, but a person of a particular gender, race, religion etc was needed for the numbers. Some cop the term unfairly, some were legitimately qualified for the job & hopefully were actually employed solely on that basis and not because of the quota AND their identity group.

I can point to a mining company, a big well known mining company in WA's North West. It has a positive bias employment programme. It installed a number of women in middle management & supervisor roles. One specific one covering contractor project management despite a couple of them never having ever spent a day on the tools. A person I know managed a contract job where a car park was built. 18 months later another was required to be built on an adjacent space. These were not 3 bays, these were LARGE sealed parking lots. All was going swimmingly until the lady employed under their gender quota rolled up. She saw the completed 2nd car park area and said the whole lot would have to be re-sealed. No not one, both. She said the contractor had fouled up as the freshly laid asphalt was not the same colour as the other car park. It was explained to her that the colours would even out over time because ones fresh & one's 18 months old.
She ignored this and the company instead of paying for one new car parking lot actually paid for one & then for 2 new layers on top.

The morale there is improving as the supervisor gains experience and she's had to listen to advice from experienced workers. One of the men told me "She'll be ok in time, but its cost some big bucks in mistakes til she gets time & runs on the board. She'll be fine, but she shoulda have been on the tools for a few years to learn up". He went onto say a bloke would have been sacked or promoted sideways out of the way.
So there's problems ahead for unqualified women who leap frog into positions because they're female and there's problems for properly qualified, experienced women who get the job purely on merit. Both can be fairly or unfairly labelled quota queens and we keep the discrimination alive, well and still festering.

The right solution is simple. Set the job role out regardless of gender, race, religion or any other identity parameter. Allow anyone to apply and judge them solely on their ability, qualifications and suitability for the role. Set up penalties for those who deliberately discriminate. Allow merit, irrespective of identity parameters to rule the waves.

It is interesting, gender balance seems to only be aimed at very high paying white colour jobs. MPs, Senators, Company Directors, CEOs, higher executives, management layers. I haven't seen any initiatives in play to increase the number of women in brick laying, truck driving, shearing, roof tiling, drilling operators, diesel mechanics, plumbers, dozer operators, policing. Do they need to be 50:50 or do they have an exceptional case method?

I notice there's no shaken voice outcries for more men in nursing, child care, health or teaching. I know if I get sick there's not a 10% chance the nurse is left handed, 28% chance they're born overseas, not a 18% chance they're indigenous nor 63% they're overweight nor 50% chance they're male. I don't look at the gender of the doctor, sister, nurse or other health worker. I just look for good people doing their job well.

Did you know?
In 2011 there were 257,200 nurses, 90% of them are women. Is that fair, are we lacking a specific skill set men might bring? Why has the Identity Politics/Social Engineer's barge polling in this field of employment gone missing?

Are women better at it? Now if that question were aimed at a male dominated high paying white collar field there'd be a scary outcry of bigotry & intolerance, boys club, glass ceilings yada yada.

So what do we do with Nursing.
Well we can...

a) Socially engineer nursing so a workplace has to have 50% men.
b) We can force workplaces to reach the 50% target within a few years
c) We can accept that perhaps 90% of the people who apply happen to be women & this is reflected in the actual number employed and just go with that
d) We can ascertain if anyone (of either gender) has been employed unfairly, without proper training, experience or qualifications and either get them up to speed or get them out.
e) Accept that 50:50 is nice but if it means deterring women from applying because there's a quota in place & a large number of men will be accepted, some ahead of good women possibly some of those men not good enough but get the job because of the mere accident of gender at birth...

No. The solution is simple. Merit. Equal opportunity and Merit.
Going straight to equal outcomes (quotas, social engineering) actually reduces fairness, ignores merit and squashes equal opportunity.

Child birth - Oh man does this argument get messy. I point to Julie Bishop, Michaelia Cash, Julia Gillard. They sure did rise to the top, no quotas, just merit. None of them had kids. Its their choice I don't care but fact is child birth is going to set a career back. It does mean time out of the workforce.
Now the debate is whether women are unfairly disadvantaged career wise by having a child or whether men who do not give birth should be on the same footing career wise as a person who takes 12 months off work for child birth once or several times.

Pretty clear in brick laying I'd guess. Time off work due to these things does reduce productivity to the company over time. The debate will rage despite that.

One thing is for sure...

Equal Opportunity for all is the fairest way and it is based on merit, not identity.

Equal Outcomes goes straight to the desired outcome without any fairness, merit or equality & is counter productive.

The Socialists favour the latter and many good, well meaning people who lean to the left will get swept up in that Socialist distortion.

Anti Rural WA Sentiment is Growing

Most people had plans which included the rally at Parliament House yesterday over the Moora Debacle but its finally becoming apparent many had their Plan B ready if the rally produced no fair outcome or indeed did.

Rural people tend to react quickly to issues in the work place, they generally are a committee of one and it then becomes frustrating for them when they join a club or organisation and change isn't swift.

Country people traditionally have been fixers and do so with a good deal of velocity. Probably why many country people get frustrated by politics & political machinations...the wheels of government move slowly. Far too slowly for many of us. In fact even joining a Political Party turns out to be terribly frustrating for many country people. Solutions are obvious but positive change tends to be deathly slow if not totally elusive.

Being a member of a political party isn't altogether different to joining any other community group and people should view it as a Community Group engaging in Community Service. Yes there are ideological differences, there's splits in dearly held world views but that's the case in any rural community.

Point is when the going gets tough the tough get going and the tough now need to consider doing the contrarian move towards positive results.

Joining a WA Political Party.

Progress is slow, sometimes glacier like. There tends to be a lot of people with different jobs & focuses and the actual politicians are flat out trying to attempt triage and find the most important issues to heap change & pressure on whilst keeping pressure on the 2nd tier or peripheral issues.

Its not easy. You can see the solution to a big problem and so may they. Getting change is slow & difficult because the TV Show Hollowmen, Utopia, Yes Minister & Yes Prime Minister soon appear documentaries once you enter the tent door. Sad but true.

Thing is, if you join a party you may not become the rock star face of the party. You may just be (like me) one small tooth in a very large machine. Machines need every tooth. Teeth give feedback, help process, help hold one small part of the organisation and lighten the load.

So Moora Rally was not a failure. It just didn't get an immediate decision reversal.
What's your next move?

People have their plan B ready to go and it may not be spectacular sky show, it maybe simple small cog in the machine thing. The more cogs we in Regional & Rural WA the easier fair change will be.

It takes people to know fast change doesn't always happen. Sometimes its slow, glacier like. You have to go in with the long game plan and when things improve really fast you have to extra grateful the gift of velocity arrives unannounced & unexpected. Speedy fixes are the exception to the rule, but if you're not in the game, change against you is far more likely.

My advice is simple. Join a political party. Expect tons of effort with mixed results and those wins & losses will be very slow. But if you're not involved the change will still happen, still be slow but more likely be harshly against what we living in the country need or want.

So consider picking out a political party & joining. Even if you do nothing, your membership fee does help. If you do get further involved know there are different worldviews within a party. There are still wins & losses and sometimes we end up with a position that seems counter productive to some of the members. That's life. After 50 years of watching I joined a political party. I'm a small tooth on a small cog in a machine that's bigger than me. It is a machine and it needs small teeth and small cogs.

If you want change, consider the bold idea of joining a political party and influencing change...even when its glacier slow.

A PerthLabor Minister & her inept Gender Bias View

Yes, I'm a bit stunned...and here's why. Simone McGurk MLA is State Member for Fremantle as well as Minister for Child Protection, the Prevention of Family & Domestic Violence, Women's Interests & Community Services in WA.

Sh also dabbles in the odd paper vote-grab/editorial/opinion piece but rest assured although she represents Fremantle (and you' hope the whole of WA as a minister), although she's responsible for Child Protection, Community Services and a few other things its on female related stuff she'll prattle on about. Yes women certainly need the fair play of equal opportunity and not have any extra hurdles put in their path because they're women. But the equality of outcome is a Socialist Construct that needs tobe feared and Simone McGurk may have to be monitored to she how socialist (i.e. unfair) she is. The Socialist pathway of Equal Outcomes seeks to forget opportunity & removal of unfair hurdles, it wants to go straight to equal results, where the gender balance in a workplace is 50% women & 50% men.

Not 100% equal opportunity to secure the outcome you then have to deserve. Indeed there are not 50% women applicants for all jobs so how can you expect 50% women employed unless that is the percentage of women amongst the best people for the job.

Simone writes an article which employs a number of intellectually corrupt devices to build her premise of pushing more women into particular fields. One of them is using Leukaemia Survivor, 7 year old Madeleine who said women can do anything. Well that's quite wrong. Men can't do anything, nor can women. Some men & women can do things that others can't. Madeleine wants to grow up to be a Scientist. Her only barrier to reaching that career goal will not be her confidence or goal setting, but whether she passes the appropriate exams when she's looking for tertiary admission and to complete university. There's no gender barrier here. Its a heart string attached straw man thing...

Its also quite noticeable Ms McGurk never talks about gender equality in other particularly male dominated fields. Nothing about shoring up gender equality in brick laying, truck driving, plumbing or any other trade based field or labouring. SHE ONLY FOCUSES ON HIGH PAID WHITE COLLAR OCCPATIONS, ABSOLUTELY NO REFERENCE TO MANUAL LABOUR AT ALL.
Yes executive roles, CEOs in ASX firms are cited, numbers in Parliament...but nothing about too many women & not enough men in nursing or on check out tills, or too many men in ditches, in heavy equipment, welding or fitting a roof to house or brick paving...zero.
Why, because not many women apply for these jobs, if they do they'd soon have to be as profitable to keep on as the average labourer. There is no gender refusal scheme happening. There's few women because firstly there's very few applying.

I know lady sparkies, mechanics, shearers, truckies and some labourers out in the sun & the heat on the tools. They didn't get the job because they were female. They didn't get the job because the firm needed females. They got the jobs because despite how few women ever apply, they were qualified and more than able of being good at their job...like any successful male who picked up a job in the same company or the same field. 
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EQUAL OPPORTUNITY.

I'm not sure why the gender bias is heralded as some thing that has to be fixed. Best person for the job irrespective of their gender is what I thought it should be all about. Their merit, not their gender.

Equal Outcomes, the Socialist answer means, just get 50% women in there as quick as possible, whatever it takes. That's quotarising the workplace and merit suffers.

I think we have to push to applicants and employers that it has to be 100% EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, best merit gets the job, not what will lead to a predetermined "balance"

Oddly many Social Justice Warrior type Socialists are hell bent on transgender people being regarded as the gender they choose and we all have to accept it.

Well if we follow that equally stupid premise we just need half the members of parliament to declare they "self-identify" as female (whether they are or not) and we'll have proper gender balance.

Simone has a long way to go before she's a half decent MP...and its not because of her gender. The Perth Socialist Party (WALabor) must have picked her because she was all about spruiking equal outcomes and NOT equal opportunity & merit.

 

Such is the Socialist was.

If all Socialists understood Socialism, there'd be no Socialism nor any bizarre & intellectually bankrupt "equality" screamers.