Lucy Tobin: Ignore gender - just hire the right person to do the job

It’s time to dump Britain’s obsession with employee differences — gender, race and any other — and the positive-discrimination recruitment schemes that go with them
25 October 2013
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Ping! Evidence of Britain’s obsession with gender differences arrives in the form of an email from one of Britain’s biggest corporate hospitality firms.

It begins: “Responding to the growing presence of women in top jobs …[we are offering] alternative hospitality choices to the traditional male-focused sporting calendar.”

Ready, women? Prowse — official provider of corporate access to events including Wimbledon, Lord’s cricket and the Cheltenham Festival — instead wants to lure you with “culinary experiences with celebrity chefs” and “VIP packages at horticultural shows”.

So that’s cooking and gardening. All of which is evidence of a clearly outmoded assumption. Male colleagues are just as likely to be making dinner of an evening or garden-pottering of a weekend, while millions of women like sport.

But this insight into the perspective of the privileged world of corporate hospitality is symbolic of the way Britain’s offices still view gender: as something all-encompassing that shapes the way people work.

In the vast majority of professions, that’s rubbish. Britain has a predominantly service economy where most jobs involve sitting at a computer or standing in a shop: the physical differences between men and women are irrelevant. Yes, women have babies and may be more likely to request flexible working as a result but innumerable business success stories prove that’s not detrimental to profitability.

Stroll round the Mumsnet office and it’s clear the website’s staff make-up is as female as its users. But its founders tell me flexible working and family-friendly staff policies mean few employees ever want to leave, aiding its success. Likewise, the founders of London recruiter Women Like Us have flourished for eight years thanks to their sexism-circumventing business matching up highly qualified mothers with high-flying part-time jobs, giving companies access to a £50,000-a-year calibre candidate for half that sum.

Yet female stereotyping persists in London’s offices. As a business reporter I’m continuously told small tales of sexist woe. The factory floor jokes, the porn-y office screensavers. An engineer I know has just emigrated to the US, in part to escape workplace jibes from all-male colleagues.

Corporate Britain and the Govern-ment are busy pondering the number of women on boards and female FTSE chief executives. Those too are isolated figures: just three women currently run the 100 biggest listed companies in Britain. But it’s an area of focus because it’s measurable. Easy peasy to count the number of listed companies with women on their boards, and a toddler could be tasked with counting the female CEOs, because it’s so low. Far harder, though, to challenge entrenched, incalculable workplace discrimination lower down the greasy pole.

The number of female bosses is set to rise but we can’t rely on them to transform society’s still-entrenched view on gender in the workplace. It’s time to dump Britain’s obsession with employee differences — gender, race and any other — and the positive-discrimination recruitment schemes that go with them. Far better to forget about biological characteristics that could, or could not, affect people’s work, and instead hire and promote individuals based purely on whether they are good at doing their jobs.

Twitter: @lucytobin

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