Well, glad that's settled.

Simon Murray, chairman, commodities giant Glencore, in the U.K. Sunday Telegraph:

Women are quite as intelligent as men. They have a tendency not to be so involved quite often and they're not so ambitious in business as men because they've got better things to do. Quite often they like bringing up their children and all sorts of other things.

All these things have unintended consequences. Pregnant ladies have nine months off. Do you think that means when I rush out, what I'm absolutely desperate to have is young women who are about to get married in my company, and that I really need them on board because I know they're going to get pregnant and they're going to go off for nine months?

Worth noting that Murray (pictured) offers this pensee as Glencore, world's largest commodities firm, is in the midst of a mammoth, $60-billion IPO, with Murray and his worldview spotlighted as never before. (Had you heard of him previously?)

Before its IPO, Glencore was long a shadowy outfit with vague ties to Marc Rich (the tax cheat notoriously pardoned by Bill Clinton) and with Xtrata, the Zug, Switzerland-based mining company flipper that a few years ago picked up Falconbridge during Harper's yard sale of Canadian industrial icons. Falconbridge earlier absorbed the legendary Noranda and its stable of some of the greatest names in North American mining. So that's the crowd in whose hands the fate of thousands of Canadian workers are in. All to say, you'd think Glencore would want to be on its best behavior in making its debut as a publicly traded enterprise.

And the thing is, it likely imagines it is.

But, there you go, 52% of the population isn't to be taken seriously in the workplace. Are "ladies" not to be entrusted with responsibilities of the highest significance.

So believes the head of a multibillion-dollar multinational, and I kinda doubt he'll pay any kind of price for it. I suppose we should be grateful that Murray is publicly candid about the unease that the still overwhelmingly male decision-makers about hiring and promotion of women feel, but don't dare express. Just so we understand why women are still so rare in the highest reaches of decision-making, especially in the private sector.

A side-note. If this neanderthal comment had passed the lips of an elected official or bureaucrat, particularly in N.A., he'd promptly lose his job, as Larry Summers was very publicly stripped of the presidency of Harvard for merely musing along these lines. (1) That's a distinction between the public and private sectors that goes unnoticed while we indulge in our government-bashing.

I guess it was about 32 years ago that my future wife was taken aback by a low-level recruiter at a magazine publishing firm in Toronto who wanted to know, in considering her for hire as an advertising coordinator, if she planned to be "in the family way" in the next few years. Even then she thought the question deeply insulting, at the very least an invasion of her privacy. But she took the job.

Good to see how far we've come in three decades.

Oh, you were asking. The answer is 16%, the female membership of the U.S. Senate. I believe that's a record. Women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies? I think that's six or seven, I haven't checked for a few months.

It's like Margaret Thatcher never existed, and Angela Merkel doesn't. Or, for that matter, the extraordinarily competent women who run Xerox, Kraft and Anglo American, owner of the De Beers cartel. And it sure makes the threat of government quotas to ensure we finally tap the skills of the other half of population that much tougher to argue against. 

Note: Yes, Harvard College (official name) is indeed a private corporation. But like its Ivy League peers, Harvard is heavily reliant on federal, state and municipal grants and subsidies. Which makes it a far more public instititution than it cares to acknowledge - though the truth does come out in "Summers moments." 

 

 

Comments

[Boff]

Ahhhh I'm sure Murray's comments are being lauded in many quarters as "common sense". After all, it is true that childbearing absents women from the workplace, and that women disproportionately make sacrifices in time and job quality for the good of their families. In an intensely competitive work environment, how is this to be dealt with?

I have no idea.

(I come at this from the academe, where women's representation in faculty is abysmal compared to the proportion of Ph.D.'s they receive...but academics particularly punishes women as CV gaps are a bad thing, and many academic families have to undertake several moves during the development of their careers. Patriarch still rules even amongst young professors...comparatively few men are willing to make any sort of career sacrifice).

[dolive]

Hi Boff: Everything you say accords with my experience. And academe is especially punishing, but in fairness, to both genders. Politics on campus is the worst - and I don't mean the students. (Kids' play, at least they, or we as I recall as a Ryerson student, stab each other in the front for, say, the editorship of the student newspaper.)
Yes, Murray's odious comment will be taken as affirmation in many quarters.
And yes, you're right that procreation and career are each so demanding that one or the other has usually to win out to the exclusion of the other. Which is not to say moms don't work outside the home - mine did, ditto most moms in my suburban Scarborough neighbourhood in the 1960s. But it was, and continues to be, a struggle. I find it bizarre, even immoral perhaps, that the gender solely capable of sustaining humanity is punished for it. (Sperm is easy enough to find, fertility clinics abound. Wombs, sorry, the nurturing of a fetus is still the exclusive province of women.)
"I have no idea." Me neither. But we have to work on it. If women choose to make raising children their full-time vocation, all my respect and support is with those making that decision. For me at least, there's no greater accomplishment in life than bringing new life into the world and nurturing it, which my mom is still doing for me at age 86!
If you want a life outside the home, a career for instance, and also be a fine parent, we must as a society make this possible without undue sacrifice in career. Women in my experience will almost always sacrifice career ahead of their children.
We have to fix this because society is not fully exploiting the skills of 52% of the workforce. Common sense tells you - and this is a profoundly optimistic reality - that if we have more women running things, if we have a wider pool of potential leaders to choose from in running the local symphony, the school board, the country, the multibillion-dollar corporations - then our level of accomplishment and civility and ingenuity as a society will rise dramatically.
I'm confident that day is coming, but I'd like to see it happen in my lifetime. Time and again, we'd abandoned our exclusion of groups - of Catholics in Ontario in the days of Orange Ontario that lasted until the mid-1960s; of waves of New Canadians, from Europe first, then Asia and the Caribbean, most recently South Asia and now Africa - and our society has only become more civil, smarter, richer as each bigoted exclusionary tradition has been discarded. This will be the one last big self-defeating bias to overcome, and the blessings will be manifold.
I see Norway now has paid paternal leave. And the workplace peer pressure is such that if new dads persist in showing up for work outside the home, their co-workers cold-shoulder them until they go home to be with their partner and kids, which the state is paying them to do for, I think, a year.
So that's one idea. We're an inventive species. We can solve this. It's not a problem. It's an untapped bounty.