Mike Hosking: It's time for the equality warriors to get real

Opinion

OPINION

It's been a big, busy week for equality warriors.

Firstly, you had your group of three researchers calling for urgent action around women and their places in the boards and bosses' offices of this country. They want quotas.

Then we had the "Champions of Change" group, with what is a very large survey into the workplaces of this country, and further confirmation that when it comes to various forms of executive level existence, women are not well represented.

The workplace itself is about 50/50. By the time you get to the pointy end of the operation, it's 65/35.

But this now sadly has become like so many of these similar sorts of debates. Find an issue, bang on about the issue, do surveys on the issue, keep doing surveys on the issue, keep banging on about the issue, with the grand hope that you wear people down enough to acquiesce, and enact a bit of law, tariff, subsidy, or tax.

Or in this case, a quota.

It is a sign of our times. Issues are everything, "virtue signalling" is the phrase of the age. Putting things right is what we live for. Except, with so many of these issues we also have a reality clash; a logic clash.

What they want is laudable. How they want to get it, though, makes no sense.

In a country full of women at the highest levels of anything, and anywhere you want to look, the evidence suggests the exact opposite of what they're trying to argue.

Women can do anything. And they do.

So we are left, as far as I can work out, with two inescapable conclusions.

Either women at executive and board level are not represented in vast numbers because they are being deliberately and overtly held back by a sexist misogynist regime of presumably men who are determined to block their progress. Or, they're not actually wanting to do that sort of work at all.

If it's the latter, I have sympathy. I don't want to do that sort of work. Not everyone wants to be the boss.

The researchers and activists have decided that success is measured in terms of work place elevation, and that's a mistake. Because, for many, it isn't. Being on a board isn't an automatic thrill. Not everyone wants to be a CEO and, because they don't, they don't apply.

Some people are mixing up the mathematical assumption that, just because you work, you must then want to go on and be the boss.

If you can get your head around the fact that's not true, that explains your 65/35 split.

It's not sexism, it's choice. If only a handful apply, only a handful get picked, thus meaning the quota some so desperately want goes against every rule of common sense and basic business: virtue beats talent, artificiality beats skill.

Women are way too smart to fall for that nonsense.