The chair of the Institute of Directors, Charlotte Valeur, has used International Women’s Day to criticise FTSE 350 companies for not making enough effort to recruit and promote women and minority-ethnic directors. Scrolling through the list of FTSE 350 companies, one will find brands such as HSBC, which was fined £1.4bn for helping drug cartels launder money in Mexico; Sports Direct, where workers have been exploited to the extent that one woman gave birth in the toilets; and G4S, a company so mired in scandal that it has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated solely to the amount of controversies it has amassed. If a company behaves terribly but its director is a woman, is that still feminism?
The reality of women’s work across the world is not that we’re duking it out to see who can make partner first: it’s exploitation, low pay and precariousness. Sexism is bad everywhere, including in boardrooms, but feminism must exist to improve the lives of the majority of women, or it is worth nothing. Valeur may get her wish for more female directors in the FTSE 350, but it makes little difference to the world unless those women use their new power to fundamentally alter the relations between women and capital.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2TraQUa
via
0 Comments