A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

Our thanks to Mike P for this.

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A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

Our thanks to Robert for this, from Best of Feminist Memes:

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A piece published by Elizabeth Hobson on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

A (vintage but interesting) 2014 study, looking to explain the feminist paradox (wherein the majority of women in the modern Western world support gender equality but only a small minority identify with the feminist movement, which purports to pursue gender equality) showed that feminist activists “exhibit both physiological and psychological characteristics associated with heightened masculinization, which may predispose women for heightened competitiveness, sex-atypical behaviors, and belief in the interchangeability of sex roles.”

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A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

The madness continues. Since when have skirts been “gender neutral”? The start of the piece:

A school has said boys who find trousers too hot in the summer months should instead wear a skirt as part of a ‘gender-neutral’ uniform policy.

Chiltern Edge Secondary School in Oxfordshire has banned boys from wearing shorts and insists those who don’t want to wear trousers must don a skirt.

Leaders at the school in Sonning Common introduced a ‘more formal’ uniform policy at the beginning of the academic year that stipulated that the only leg wear permitted was trousers or skirts.

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A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

Four days ago we published a piece about Rachel Reeves MP (Labour, Leeds West) being “truly staggered” by the decision of the Bank of England to appoint a man to the Monetary Policy Committee. Maybe she was staggered that the outrageously anti-male recruitment process – explored in our piece – had failed to lead to the appointment of the best woman for the job, rather than the best person for the job. Only one man was on the five-person shortlist.

Our thanks to Jack for this piece about PWC. Over the six years I’ve been campaigning through Campaign for Merit in Business against government and corporate initiatives to increase gender diversity on corporate boards – because greater gender diversity leads to financial decline – I’ve had plenty of time to consider why professional service firms (notably accountancy firms and management consultancies) are such arch-supporters of more gender diversity in the upper echelons of businesses. They know the negative impact, and must themselves be seeing it in impaired efficiency, effectiveness, and therefore reduced profitability. The only explanation I’ve ever found credible is that in persuading clients to adopt the policy of increasing gender diversity at senior levels, the clients are weakened and then have to rely more on external support, i.e. professional service firms.

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A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

Our thanks to Bryn for this. It’s been known for decades that teachers award girls higher marks than boys for the same quality of work, indeed that knowledge was the driver of the replacement of O Levels by GCSEs in 1987/8, because then teachers’ pro-girl bias could be reflected in higher marks for girls. The significant education gender gap started that year – the gap had been miniscule previously – and has been with us ever since. It’s an issue well explored by William Collins here.

Extracts from the BBC piece:

Teachers are more lenient in their marking of girls’ schoolwork, according to an international study.

An OECD report on gender in education, across more than 60 countries, found that girls receive higher marks compared with boys of the same ability.

Researchers suggest girls are better behaved in class and this influences how teachers perceive their work.

Differences in school results can sometimes “have little to do with ability”, says the study.

The OECD study, examining gender inequality in education, says that girls can be put off careers in science because of a lack of self-confidence and negative stereotypes. [J4MB: How often do we have to read of the female self-confidence issue, and stereotypes? Surely a more plausible explanation is that girls are disinclined to study challenging subjects e.g. STEM – where answers are right, or wrong, so teacher bias plays less of a part? And do girls’ (and women’s) problems with “stereotypes” arise from their anxiety and herd instincts, which aren’t going to change any time soon?]

But it also reveals that teachers can be biased towards giving girls higher results than boys, even when they have produced the same quality of work…

It also raised questions about whether this really benefited girls.

“Is it a good thing? Maybe in the short run, you get a better school certificate,” said the OECD’s education director, Andreas Schleicher. [J4MB: “You” being female, of course. Complete blindness to the other side of the coin, that boys get worse school certificates as a result of this female privileging.]

“In the long run, the world is going to penalise you because the labour market doesn’t pay you for your school marks, it pays you for what you can do.”

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A piece published by Elizabeth Hobson on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

“We are no longer a pageant. We are a competition.” according to Gretchen Carlson, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Miss America Organisation and former winner of Miss America, on Good Morning America.

Participants will no longer take part in swimsuit or evening gown parades – but rather an interactive session with the judges where they will have the opportunity to display their intellectual and personal prowess and one in which they’ll don an outfit that expresses their personal sense of style.

The move is intended to empower the participants. Personally, I don’t make a value judgement on the worth of women extracting their sense of empowerment from a) their appearances or b) their intellect – it’s horses for courses, in my opinion. And it seems a shame that increasingly women who do find empowerment in looking great are having their spaces taken away from them – Miss America, darts walk-on girls, grid girls…

Impact on ratings is yet to be seen.

Read more at The Independent or CNN.

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A piece published by Elizabeth Hobson on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

Authoritarians know that language is a critical weapon in the battle for souls. Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four was less about the invention of new words than the destruction of the old, “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words with which to express it.”

Read more at The Economist.

Please support Mike Buchanan’s work on Patreon. Thank you.

A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

Appalling. These retailer will, of course, never sell a card that says “Happy Mother’s Day, Dad”. Good to see some comments from Swayne O’Pie.

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A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in June 2018:

Appalling. The start of the piece:

The head of the UK’s largest teaching union has warned that plans to move towards a ‘knowledge-based’ curriculum risks “hurtling” England into the past.

Dismissing plans for a traditional, academic curriculum as outdated, National Education Union (NEU) joint general secretary Mary Bousted argued the importance of including “identity”-focused figures to inspire people from minority groups.

Delivering a speech at Bryanston Education Summit, she said: “As an English teacher, I have no problem with Shakespeare, with Pope, with Dryden, with Shelley.

“But I knew in a school where there are 38 first languages taught other than English that I had to have Afro-Caribbean writers in that curriculum, I had to have Indian writers, I had to have Chinese writers to enable pupils to foreshadow their lives in the curriculum.”

According to Bousted, whose union represents more than 500,000 education workers, teachers should be focused on developing skills like “resilience” in pupils rather than engaging them with great works of literature, because the literary canon is conservative and too white.

“If a powerful knowledge curriculum means recreating the best that has been thought by dead, white men — then I’m not very interested in it,” the Times Educational Supplementreported her saying.

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