Philobiblon

It’s the end of day three at Green Party Conference in Hove, and this is my first blog post – disgraceful, although in my own defence, I have been running around madly chairing, proposing motions, speaking at sessions, doing hustings, and being intercepted on my way to the loo by people wanting to talk about the management of email lists… (and I have been tweeting).

But there was one session in particular that I am determined to record, which was yesterday’s “The man-made economic crisis: time to give women a go?” That attempt at provocation didn’t really work – I think it would be fair to say all of the 20-odd attendees broadly agreed with the premise, but nonetheless we had an excellent discussion.

I was in the chair, so I didn’t have time to make detailed notes, but there was one observation from our excellent speaker — Rowena Lewis, acting director of the Fawcett Societ — that really struck out.

She pointed us to the Society’s report from last year calling for boardroom quotas to improve the representation of women (which is also Green Party policy).

When the report came out last year, she said, it was greeted with scorn, with the pounding of fists on tables accompanied by words such as “never”, “impossible”. But in the past few months, she said, there had been a shift in the reaction. Not quite acceptance, but acknowledgements that this might just be a possibility, might even be a good idea, and certainly the only way to beat the 220 years that at current rates it will take to achieve boardroom gender equality. (And that’s if the trend of the last year, which has seen women’s representation reduced, isn’t continued.) “The government is now toying with the idea of ‘aspirational targets’, whatever that might mean,” she said.

She also shared the memorable phrase from Norway, which I hadn’t previously heard. It forced firms to have 40% women on their boards, and the hierarchy were surprised to find that contrary to claims of a shortage of suitable candidates, “the waters were well stocked with women”. And in the UK, organisations by the score were collecting long lists of eminently suitable women, Rowena said.

We admired her work, and I think it would be fair to say she was impressed by the Green Party. “I am really pleased to see one of the major parties taking such a progressive stand on women in the boardroom,” she said.