TOTALLY BOARD

The EU proposal that all boards of directors must be composed of at least 40% women comes not a moment too soon.  For far too long, Britain's top companies have relied for their management almost entirely on men.  It is almost 2 years ago now that the UK Government decreed that companies should make more efforts to recruit women into their boardrooms.  Within a year, the percentage of women directors had increased in fact to about 15%; some companies had even achieved 25%.  By now, probably the proportion will be more like 17.5%.

Probably.  But it's still not 40%.  So it does appear that the only way to make sure women achieve their proper position in the workplace is to establish a quota.  A board shouldn't just take on men without looking properly at the balance of talents among its members and its demographic profile.  But do they do that?  Well, some of them clearly do.  But that's all.  Progress towards breaking the stranglehold that men have on boardrooms is lamentable slow.  So legislating that 4 out of 10 board members must be women is the way to overcome their reticence.  It will also put a stop to them complaining that they are far too busy to get involved in the world of big business - they will simply be compelled to play their 2/5ths part.

For as long as I can remember, I have heard nothing but female complaints about the way businesses are run. Well now, with this new EU equality law, they will jolly well have to get up off their bottoms, get out there into our boardrooms and pull their weight.

I can't mow the lawn; I've got all this washing to do or dinner's a bit late because I had to do the ironing today.  How often have we heard these lame excuses for not taking on a real job?  And, despite little tasks being used as a pretext to avoid proper work, there's still a long way to go before they add up to the professional expertise women will now be able to demonstrate in the boardroom.  Where's that blue sock I put out for washing a month ago for example?  And look at my pyjama bottoms, do you call these creases straight?  No.  And don't get me started on the dust on my CD shelves.  So, if managing simple labour-saving devices is not exactly women's expertise, a directorship will certainly allow them to spread their wings.  And about time!

You won't need ever again to moan that the housekeeping never quite seems to stretch to cover all the shopping, while men seem to have plenty of cash even to pop into the pub on the way home.  From now on, the wise men of Brussels have ensured that you will earn your own keep.  And no more putting down your mop and flopping into the settee mid-morning to enjoy a mug of cocoa; you are just going to have to pull up your socks (I see you have both of yours) and buckle down to some 9 to 5 labour.  Thanks to the equality-conscious men at the EU, you girls have no need anymore to complain that you are stuck at home all day while men go out and meet people and have lunch and enjoy dubious business trips with their secretaries - now you'll have to do it too. 

WOMEN'S BUSINESS

I was in Hemingways for coffee earlier and I read an article in today’s Independent about business start-ups (or rather entrepreneurs starting businesses) during the recession.  You do have to admire people who do this, even out of a recession.  The dedication and conviction needed to drive a business idea through to success is extraordinary.  Anyone who manages it at any point on the economic cycle deserves my praise.

Having the idea is easy.  I have several schemes on the drawing board, from recycling Christmas wrapping paper and decorations into garden gnomes to mini-anaerobic digesters for supermarkets, powered by washroom waste and out of date food.  But what I lack is the dedication needed to turn these brilliant schemes into fortune-making businesses.

Even the start-up money seems, recession or no, not too hard to come by.  There are a range of private and government funding organisations (the Dragons Den being the least likely to give you a penny).  And credit for new businesses is still there, even if not loans.

But the work!  One lady described getting up at 5 every morning to boil up stuff on her cooker and pour it into bottles to supply outlets.  ‘When I got my first order for 20,000 bottles, I knew the business was taking off’.  20,000 bottles!  Bloody hell, I thought, how big is her saucepan?

But scale is always the key, isn’t it.  I remember watching a young lady in Osaka setting up a beret outlet.  Berets were incredibly fashionable at one time in Japan.  I was interested because many of the berets were made in England (particularly fashionable then).  But, I confess, I remember thinking, how many berets is she going to have to sell to pay her rent?  Well, you do the maths.  It was a lovely boutique, but I’m sorry to say it didn’t last very long and the failure must have been a great disappointment for its owner.  But an order for 20,000 berets – that would be a different matter altogether.

By coincidence (I wonder if it was), there was an article in the Mail on Sunday about ladies who set up their own businesses during the recession.  Whilst these were also by dint of hard work and dedication and were also successful, I was struck by the types of business they had started up.  Was this the reporter’s or the editor’s choice or do women mostly start up businesses aimed at women?

I accept that women tend to know women better than men, so perhaps it’s best if they, rather than men, open shops for tending eye-brows (calliblepharicure?) or selling yoghurt health drinks, but I can’t help but feel that these businesses are less ‘gaps in the market’ than new ways to prick the vanities or insecurities of women and milk them of their cash.  I don’t know.  I am still amazed at how much ladies pay for things they could do perfectly well for themselves (not to mention the several times more they pay than men do for the same thing) (well, I don’t pay to have my eyebrows pruned) (it’s fairly obvious actually if you look) (even from a distance).  And perhaps women have a lot of disposable income, since they only eat a stick of celery for lunch and an apple for dinner.  So perhaps these really are successful recession start-ups.  But I thought the ladies (in amongst the men) found by the Independent, who had businesses like design consultancies and psychotherapists, were rather more business-like.  They were certainly more hard-nosed.  ‘I had good advice from the bank,’ said one.  ‘I thought I should wait until after Christmas to down-size (not ’throw the people who work for me out of their jobs’ note), but they advised me to take action before end of year bills had accumulated (or ‘so that my employees didn’t spend all their unemployment benefits on having a nice time at Christmas’)'.  Maybe I’m just too soft to run a business.

LIFE IN THE LAY-BY

There has been another exchange in the press recently about baby boomers.  On the one hand, young people wishing to start out in life on their own believe that the older generation had it easy and still have it easy today, luxuriating in their retirement, whilst jobs, homes and benefits are in short supply; on the other hand, older folks think they have only the champagne and foreign travel that they deserve and that youngsters should stop whingeing and get their fingers out.

It is the (relatively) new Government and the severe cuts they are having to make in spending that has prompted this new exchange of recriminations.  But the debate has in fact been going on for years.  To be honest, I, one of those selfish baby boomers, was quite taken aback at the ferocity of one article I read recently by some 20-something.  I have never felt I was luxuriating.  I still have to scrimp to do what I do and I only benefit from anything easy to the extent that I don’t have to leap out of bed in the morning (nor go to bed yet) and can only spend what little I receive from pension and lifelong investment (pretty pathetic income at present) because I have scrimped for a very long time and managed in the process to pay off my mortgage.  As usual in these things, the truth is somewhere in between the two extreme views.

I accept that university degrees are not a guarantee of a job these days and that probably they were in my youth.  But, in my youth, gaining a university place was pretty tough.  One change that happened during my younger years was that the number of universities was near enough doubled.  This meant that many more students had the opportunity of further education.  I didn’t succeed in gaining entry to a university and so the benefit of a degree was irrelevant in my case.  What was important though was that instead I worked all hours under the sun and managed to save some money for my future.

Many more university places means many more graduates, but not necessarily many more jobs.  I accept that there are not so many ‘good’ jobs around at the moment.  But one unfortunate outcome of widely available tertiary education is that expectations are higher.  Britain is still the same as it was 30 years ago in the sense that there are jobs and workers which more or less match up (actually there may be fewer dirty manufacturing jobs and more cleaner desk jobs around now), but having achieved academically, it is an apparent disappointment or lessening of standards to undertake work that involves physical, rather than intellectual, effort.  I really feel for those who might have had higher expectations, but in fact the same competition for much the same jobs exists now as it always did.

The main area which might arguably have been different in my youth is the general entrepreneurial one in the creative industries.  It seemed that there were young people everywhere starting up businesses or performing.  This phenomenon was hardly unexpected, as post-war hardship and gloom gave way to freedom and relative prosperity.  But none of this came on a plate and for every Mary Quant and Beatle there were at least as many failures.  But I can understand how today’s graduates may have come to expect that the job they want should just be there when they want it.

I have resisted talking about my youth in detail before because I know I sound like a grumpy old man, but never the less it genuinely wasn’t easy.  OK, we had new found freedoms, but that mostly manifested itself amongst my friends in partying.  Parties in those days consisted of gathering in each other’s homes, playing a few records which we all brought with us, dancing and, for those that could afford it, beer.  I usually managed to buy myself a couple of bottles of beer on a Saturday night and maybe once during the week met up with friends in a pub for a pint.  It’s not that I object to binge drinking, but it seems to me that the habit comes from lack of direction and responsibility rather than anything else.  Of course it signals that a jolly good time has been had, but it contrasts so markedly with my youth.  My friends couldn’t afford spirits, we didn’t have wine anyway in those days, and a pint down the pub was often mild and bitter, a cheap form of beer I don’t think you can still get today.  I would probably have enjoyed the odd binge too, but my Mum couldn’t really afford to keep me in beer and food.  The loss-leading supermarkets of today didn’t exist and takeaway food for us was a bag of chips on Friday evening.  I think this practice came from a sort of celebration of the man of the house bringing home a pay packet on Friday.  A restaurant meal was a very rare pleasure indeed for us.

And I knew that, saving money by not going out, I was putting something away which would help me in due course set up a home of my own.  When the time came to move away from home, I had saved the equivalent of a half year’s salary.  The only house I could afford then was a sort of shed in the middle of Essex, 4 hours away from my parental home and 2 hours train and underground journey from where I worked in London.  For the next few years I lived on home-made sandwiches and only went home to sleep.  I didn’t much like it, but in that way I got my foot (well, toe anyway) on the property ladder.  I know, I know, you lived in a cardboard box in the middle of the motorway.

But the main difference in modern times is simply the way in which convenience is now built-in.  Supermarkets, prepared foods, takeaway meals, inexpensive fashion, inexpensive booze, affordable technology – none of this, normal today, existed in my youth.  One of my jobs at home used to be to cut buttons off old shirts.  My Mum reused the buttons and the shirts became cleaning cloths.  We don’t do that now of course.  And I still think the ultimate decadence is buying plastic bags each week simply to throw away filled with my rubbish.  And making one’s own sandwiches and a flask of tea to consume at the desk is no doubt seen as laughable these days.

The point is not that I had it tough, but that these modern advances make it very hard for today’s young to economise or to endure inconvenience and very easy for the elderly to luxuriate in having come to the end of their hardship.

It’s not that I feel I have earned the right to be selfish, nor that I think the young should stop moaning.  But I have earned the wherewithal to help my own family get a start in life.  I have also earned the free time to spend most of my daylights hours giving back to the community in a variety of voluntary ways.  And occasionally I can afford to buy a newspaper and sit in a café and drink a cappuccino too.  But I can’t afford that every day even now.  But, equally, I don’t find it easy to hear people say they don’t want certain jobs or can’t live in certain areas.  There may be some good reason why the young person who complained about baby boomers has no help from her family or from the voluntary sector in her community, but I am happy to say that it’s not the case round here and certainly not my fault.

I do sympathise, I really do, with young people who can’t get the job they want or can’t afford the house they want, but I can’t really see the essential difference with what I and my friends had to endure.  I see how hard it is to forego pleasure and leisure, especially when so many footballers and pop and reality TV performers are able to wear the latest fashions and drink in the trendiest clubs and jet off to the most desirable destinations (and maybe also with the sight of their grandparents seemingly sitting in the garden forever).  But these choices are the sorts one has to make in this thing called life.