I returned back from London late after handing out leaflets to the delegates of the FT seminar ‘Women on Boards’, aimed at Non-Executive Directors. My warm thanks to all those who joined me on a cold, wet and windy afternoon. We’d managed to sit in the FT reception area for almost an hour handing out leaflets before the seminar organisers got wind of us, then the security people asked us politely to move outside the building. We managed to hand out maybe 60 leaflets, and caught most of the delegates, who were almost all women. We even engaged in meaningful discussions with a few of them. More on this in the next day or two.
Among the emails awaiting my return was one from an eminent professor: Dr Glenn Wilson, Visiting Professor of Psychology at Gresham College, London. His Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Wilson_(psychologist)
The good professor’s email contained the following testimonial for The Glass Ceiling Delusion:
Equality of opportunity is a fine thing but equality of outcome is another matter entirely. There is little doubt that men and women have, on average, different talents and interests that make gender quotas in the workplace unfair and impractical. The Glass Ceiling Delusion is a welcome, well-argued addition to the debate about whether women should be pushed up the social ladder just because they are women, and thus at a presumed disadvantage. This is rather an insult to women and Margaret Thatcher, for one, would not have agreed. Individuals should be treated as individuals, not as members of a particular race, class or gender. Whatever the historic injustices, this is the only way that social structures can evolve naturally.
Glenn Wilson, Visiting Professor of Psychology, Gresham College, London.
