Saturday, August 20, 2005

HEY! MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT AFTER ALL!

Who'd have thought it?

It has taken years for them to smash through the glass ceiling. But just as women executives had finally swept away their label as novelties in the boardroom, a report has suggested they are not up to the job. In fact, investing in stock market-listed companies run by women or with female executive directors is a 'surefire recipe for underperformance', according to Shares magazine. It found that among the UK's top 250 listed middlesized companies, the 24 with at least one female executive director increased share values by 'only' 22% over the past 12 months - compared with an average of 27%. If all the companies run by women were excluded, the performance of the remaining 226 improves to 28% - a deficit of 6%. The impact, according to the report, is a 'huge' shortfall of 30% over five years compared to companies run exclusively by men.

Women deemed to have presided over an unsatisfactory performance include WH Smith chief executive Kate Swann - who helped increase the company's value by 22% over the past year - and Rose Bravo, chief executive of Burberry where shares rose 13%. One of the reasons given for women's poor performance is that they 'cannot make tough decisions'. Female finance directors are also described as 'more easily persuaded or bullied into going along with harebrained schemes' by other executives. And families are a distraction as 'most women want a family and it is incredibly hard combining a busy work schedule with a family life'.

The worst performer among the female-friendly firms was Avis Europe, which saw 37% wiped off share values over the past 12 months. Shares in GCap Media, the UK's largest commercial radio company, plummeted 30% in the same period. However, oil and gas speculators Venture Production, which has a female financial director, saw share prices rocket 124%. And several other companies with female executives saw increases of more than 40% - including the London Stock Exchange, headed by chief executive Clara Furse, and Aga Foodservice, which produces cookers and refrigerators.

The magazine's claims angered some of Britain's most powerful female executives and MPs last night. Nicola Horlick, dubbed 'Superwoman' for juggling her job as managing director of Morgan Grenfell Investment Management with bringing up five children, dismissed them as 'complete nonsense'. 'You can't take the share prices of a company and attribute it to one woman executive. It is wholly coincidental,' she said.

Tory family spokesman Theresa May, a former City high-flier, called the findings 'codswallop'. 'Having a man in charge doesn't necessarily lead to success,' she said. 'When given the opportunities, women have proved they can be successful. What they don't need is this kind of ridiculous stereotyping.'

But the magazine's editor, Polly Fergusson, defended the report. 'There are some fantastic senior women executives out there,' she said. 'But our research shows companies with women in high positions do not perform as well on the stock market. Investors can make up their own minds.'

Source



HOLIDAY CORRECTNESS

Tourism is changing, and not for the better. Not so long ago, package tourism was regarded simply as a welcome respite from the rigors and proscriptions of everyday life. Today, the tremendous growth of opportunities to travel and enjoy the environment - the beach, warm climates, snow-covered mountains - is regarded by the critics as a threat to the environment, to indigenous cultures, and to the traveller's own sense of self.

In contrast with mass tourism, the New Moral Tourism is justified less in terms of the desires of the consumer and more from the perspective of its perceived benign influence on the natural world and on the culture of the host. But what is this 'tourism with a mission', and what does it mean for holidaymakers and the countries they visit?

Modern tourism could be said to have emerged with modern industrial society in the nineteenth century. Industrialisation spawned both the means to travel - initially the railways - and created a growing market amongst the new industrial and professional classes, and amongst the working class, the masses, too. Thomas Cook pioneered leisure travel amongst the middle and working classes in this century. He and his son, John Mason Cook (whose initials JMC are now a brand of Thomas Cook tour operations), took an increasingly broad spectrum of the population to ever more distant destinations. Over the past 150 years, the achievement of the industry has been nothing less than the democratisation of leisure travel, from the few deemed worthy, and wealthy enough to partake, to an everyday activity for the majority in developed societies.

The growth of the tourism industry has been driven by economic development. Greater affluence has opened up the possibility to travel for leisure to greater numbers of people. Technical progress - notably the car and air travel - has consistently enabled greater speed, comfort and scope for leisure travellers. Whereas even as recently as forty years ago back-to-back charters were a new innovation, initially confusing to hoteliers and customers, today they are the staple of the big tour operators. The UK's 'big four', Thomas Cook, Airtours, First Choice and Thomsons (now part of TUI, the first European wide package holiday brand, owned by German conglomerate Pressaug) dominate a market that takes annually some thirty five million British tourists abroad for their holidays.

By supplying en masse, such companies have lowered the real cost of holidays, and alongside growing incomes, this has contributed to what Vladimir Raitz, founder of Horizon holidays (the first post-war package holiday company to develop charter flight-based packages) refers to as the package holiday revolution. This growth has been mirrored worldwide, with today some 700 million travelling internationally per year for no other reason than leisure. It is estimated that by 2020, there will be some 1.6 billion international tourists.

Tourism has become big business - by some measures the biggest. It directly employs 74 million people directly, with tourism related activities estimated to provide some 200 million jobs. It provides the largest source of export earnings for countries as diverse as Spain and Barbados. By 2020 it is predicted that tourism expenditure will top US$ 2 trillion, or US$ 5 billion per day. The industry's contribution to global wealth, measured from Gross National Products, is estimated to be four per cent directly and 11 per cent including indirect effects (1). It has also enjoyed consistent growth in recent decades, decades in which some countries have experienced relative decline in some of their traditional industries.

In economic terms, then, Mass Tourism seems self-evidently important. However, it is increasingly discussed less as an economic phenomenon linked to the creation of jobs and investment, or indeed simply as enjoyment, adventure and innocent fun. Rather tourism has increasingly become discussed as a cultural and environmental phenomenon, and more often than not as fraught and destructive.

This is manifested in a constant denigration of mass package tourism and mass package tourists amongst those for whom such things are deemed unethical. For some, post-war tourism is like Frankenstein's (or perhaps Thomas Cook's) monster, having seemingly run out of control, with dire consequences. The association of tourism with innocence, fun and adventure, have been challenged by a mood of pessimism and a sense that moral regulation of pleasure seeking is necessary in order to preserve environmental and cultural diversity.

The moralisation of tourism involves two mutually reinforcing notions. Mass Tourism is deemed to have wrought damage to the environment and to the cultures exposed to it, and hence new types of tourism are proposed that are deemed benign to the environment and benevolent towards other cultures. This ethical tourism is deemed to be better for tourists, too - more enlightening, encouraging respect for other ways of life and a critical reflection on the tourist's own developed society.

There are a plethora of terms that academics and those in the industry have applied to this more moral tourism such as ethical tourism, alternative tourism, ecotourism and responsible tourism. Perhaps the term that covers them all, and helps to identify what is distinctive about them taken together, is that coined by industry specialist Ahluwalia Poon - 'New Tourism'.......

More -- much more -- here

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