Anyone But Him Paperback

The paperback edition of Anyone But Him will be in the shops from 28th March. I do hope that those of you who haven’t yet read it enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

It’ll be in the new cover design so let me know what you think of that too. The site will soon be relaunched to show all the new covers.

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Sheila

Posted by Sheila on 03/24 at 03:00 PM - (1) ADD / VIEW COMMENTS

Women’s Day 1

When he was the US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence H Summers only had to worry about things like the value of the dollar, tax vetos and smaller current accounts deficits than his successors.

When he was the US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence H Summers only had to worry about things like the value of the dollar, tax vetos and smaller current accounts deficits than his successors. Most of us would find the workload heavy and the issues thorny, but Summers generally received decent press coverage and was seen to be reasonably good at his job. Put it this way, the markets listened to him when he spoke, and having market participants on-side is always a good result.

However things haven’t gone quite so smoothly for him since he became president of Harvard University. Just a few months into his tenure he fell out with Cornel West, a leading professor in Afro-American studies. The result was that West returned to Princeton University and Summers had to apologise for his apparent implied affront to everyone in that department. More recently, his talk at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he made some highly inflammatory remarks about the shortage of women within science and engineering, has caused him to put on his apology hat again.

The key paragraph in his remarks tries to explain the problem as: ‘the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity; that in the special case of science and engineering there are issues of intrinsic aptitude and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialisation and continuing discrimination’.

In a nutshell, Summers is saying that women don’t have as much an aptitude for these disciplines than men and they are more likely to put family concerns ahead of their working lives which is why they’re under-represented in science and engineering. He uses the family concerns argument as a reason why they don’t make it to the top in other professions too.
Cue mass hysteria from the press and from women’s groups regarding the President’s outdated views. Nobody could actually read the transcript until last Friday when it was released and there has been frantic spinning in all directions from his detractors and his supporters to present their view of the man. The question is whether or not the former Treasury Secretary should be pitied for pitching it wrong, or pilloried for suggesting that women are somehow genetically less able to pursue science and engineering.

He did preface his remarks by saying that he was speaking unofficially (though that’s a ridiculous notion for a public figure) and that he wanted to make ‘attempts at provocation.’ He also continually stressed that his theories might be completely wrong. And then he proceeded to dump women into the dustbin of mediocrity.

I do have some sympathy for him. Rather like Kevin Myers in this newspaper who wrote a provocative piece using inflammatory language which in itself became the debate neatly eclipsing the actual topic, Summers had some interesting things to say. Leaving aside the ‘natural aptitude’ theory he also spoke about the ‘high-powered job hypothesis’ which, he said, meant that employers ‘expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job even when the job is not taking place’. And that historically married men were the ones most likely to give that commitment.

The debate here is surely about employers’ expectations with regard to their employees. Initially, people work to earn money. Some people will only ever work to get paid. But others want to progress within a firm, not just because of the greater financial rewards, but also for the satisfaction that doing a good job brings. I don’t, for a moment, believe that fewer women than men want job satisfaction at the highest level. I do, however, believe that a system which makes people feel that they must be continually at the company’s beck and call while passing over those who actually have a life, is intrinsically wrong. But according to Summers more men than women will answer the company call.

He also gave a certain level of thought to the area of socialisation citing the old reliable of girls being caring and boys being destructive. (Not always. I cared enough for the dol I got for Christmas one year to take her apart to find out how the talk mechanism worked.)

Not content with enraging many of the women at the talk, Summers - in trying to be provocative - also managed to annoy Catholics, Jews and white male Americans by highlighting their under-representation in various fields of endeavour. Back when he was the Treasury Secretary, and not allowed to provoke, he addressed the Women 2000 Forum. Then, he commented that if the Sub-Saharan African continent had seen the East Asian rate of improvement in the gender gap in education since 1970, GDP and living standards would be 15-25% higher than they were in 2000. And if the ratio of female-to-male years of schooling were the same, Africa’s rate of infant mortality would be 25% lower.

At that conference, Summers said that ‘education always pays off’. And he also said that by educating girls in Africa you are empowering the member of the household with the greatest capacity to alter the life prospects of generations to come. The cost of keeping girls in school for an additional year, according to Summers, would may than pay for itself in the form of higher income and lower infant mortality.

With comments like that, Summers clearly isn’t the oppressor he’s painted as being. But neither has he grasped the fact that women shouldn’t change to bring their talents to the workforce, industry itself should be changing and adapting to accommodate those talents and reap the benefits.

There are issues about women in business, regardless of whether we’re talking about management or sciences. But they are not issues of aptitude. Nevertheless, not everyone ends up in the arena that they’re most suited for. As Summers might be finding out for himself.

Posted by Sheila on 02/25 at 03:05 PM - (0) ADD / VIEW COMMENTS

Retail Therapy

VIEW FROM THE GROUND FLOOR

It’s been quite a while since I mentioned Marks & Spencer in this column mainly because there hasn’t been anything very interesting to say. Every since the Stuart Rose vs Philip Green bust up outside the company’s HQ at the time of Green’s failed bid, the retailer has been continuing to post weak trading results and seems to be happy to get through each day without any great master plan to change things. Like for like sales for the final quarter of last year were down 6% which was incredibly poor. The company continues to haemorrhage market share in the clothing department, while the marketing of Tesco’s Finest range is putting the squeeze of the jewel in the M&S crown - their Food Halls.

Although the M&S experience in Ireland has been positive, it’s certainly not enough to drag the company out of the mire. (And the ‘concept’ store in Blanchardstown is a complete mystery to me; when asked what it actually meant one of the sales assistants replied that they ‘wore black uniforms’.) Somewhat surprisingly the share price has continued to make more ground than the profits and is hanging around the 350p level (Green, you remember, was offering 400p); and many investors seem to think that - even if things aren’t getting any better - they won’t get any worse. This is not exactly a very comforting reason for investing in the company of course; given the competitive world of fashion and food retailing, things actually could get worse. Maybe shareholders are comforted by the disposal of M&S Money and the sale of the former HQ at Baker Street last week but my concerns would be for the future growth and strategic direction of the business.

Or maybe they’re hoping that Green will re-enter the fray again in and around the 400p level although whether he could be bothered or not is a reasonable question. After all, BHS, which is owned by Green claims record profits. Why get bogged down in M&S misery when all is well in Arcadia?

Of course if former chairman Luc Vandevelde had delivered on his promises it might be a different story for both investors and board members alike. Vandevelde was at the helm for four years and he promised to turn the fortunes of the retailer around by getting back to core values. (New chairman always say things like this.) He closed down the continental stores and slashed jobs which managed to win him the UK National Business Award in 2003, but his wide variety of outside interests led to a somewhat semi-detached role at the group. At one point he hadn’t turned up at HQ for three weeks and the directors decided that they’d had enough. One of Vandevelde’s outside interests was as a board member of the French retailing giant, Carrefour. His commitment to the supermarket chain has become even stronger now as he has just replaced the previous chairman, Daniel Bernard, who had been at the helm for the past 14 years.

Although in Ireland we have embraced the European ideal with gusto, having gone metric with our weights and measures and welcomed the euro with open arms, we’re less familiar with the continent’s retailing giants. We’re beginning to get to grips with Aldi and Lidl, but their Irish stores are relatively small compared with what we’re used to. Carrefour, on the other hand, is like Tesco - only bigger. When I do my Spanish/Irish comparisons it’s in a Carrefour that I fill the basket (the French company having taken over the Spanish Continiente group a few years ago). The supermarket chain is Europe’s biggest and the world’s second biggest in terms of sales (although Tesco has a greater market value). But the performance of the share price over the past five years has been miserable, plunging from a high of 96 euros to about 40 now. The retail market in France is savage, and competitive pressures are growing all the time. Carrefour needs to be able to maintain its reputation for quality while still being able to compete on price. And it’s losing the battle.

So why have they brought Vandevelde on board? Let’s face it, if he couldn’t do it for M&S what makes anyone think he can do it for Carrefour? He is, of course, close to the Halley family which holds a 13% stake in the company and almost 20% of the voting rights so they are likely to cut him a good deal more slack than if he’d just sent in the CV and hoped for the best. The group has restructured its management roles by setting up a management board for day-to-day activities and a supervisory board as a control body. Vandevelde says that this structure is better for the challenges facing the group. He’s big on changing structures but is he really so big on changing anything else? Perhaps Carrefour is an easier challenge for a man whose experience is more rooted in the food sector than in the clothing sector. Vandevelde spent 24 years at Kraft General Foods and so his knowledge of coffee and dairy spreads is a good deal stronger than his knowledge of hemlines and fabrics. The president of the Carrefour management board, Jose Luis Duran wants to build a stronger group and ‘mobilize the men and women of the company’. He believes that the group needs to have a more aggressive policy for the future and is keen to make changes. Those changes, however, apparently do not include a merger with Tesco, an interesting idea which has been floated in retailing circles recently.

Every summer, when the nearest branch of Carrefour to me is bursting to the seams with the piled-high trollies of overseas home owners and Madrileños who have come to the coast to escape the blistering city heat, I can’t help thinking that it’s an absolute goldmine. But one branch can’t help the bottom line improve.
The question is, can Vandevelde?

Posted by Sheila on 02/14 at 03:07 PM - (0) ADD / VIEW COMMENTS