Tuesday, July 28, 2020



Women board members increase businesses' profits tenfold, report finds

"Pull the other one" was my immediate old-fashioned reaction to seeing this claim. It appears to emanate from this document

The document concerned, however, is primitive from an academic POV. It has lots of pretty grapics but no details of its methodology: no definitions of the terms it uses, no breakdown into categories of economic activity, no breakdown into the recency or otherwise of the company and no breakdown into whether it served a poor, rich or medium clintele. It appears in fact to have no controls at all. I would very much like to see the raw data. I am sure that the influence of feminist management would be much reduced if all other plausibly relevant factors were taken into account.

Just off the top of my head, let me suggest that firms selling cosmetics are exceptionally profitable. The prices charged for some such products would certainly suggest large profit margins. Women as a whole are very gullible about products that allegedly increase their beauty. And beauty-promoting firms would undoubtely have a strong female presence in their management. So such female-led companies were not highly profitable because they were led by women. They were exceptionally profitable because they were operating in an exceptionally profitable business sector

The method of analysis is important too. Are we looking, for example, at extreme quintiles? This is a lamentably common practice elsewhere and normally means that there is no overall relationship in the data as a whole.

So much more information is needed before these findings can be accepted



Companies with greater numbers of female board members bring in 10 times greater profits, a study has revealed.

The research found that executive committees composed of more than a third of women have a net profit margin of 15.2 per cent, while those with none make just 1.5.

The ‘Women Count 2020’ report claims that this performance gap is costing the UK economy a potential £47 billion of pre-tax profit.

Lorna Fitzsimons, co-founder of The Pipeline, which commissioned the report, said the difference is driven by the fact that companies that are more representative have a "better understanding of clients and customer need”.

SOURCE






Samantha Yardley: Fitness writer slammed for refusing to work with fat people

A 34-year-old fitness writer has sparked outrage after claiming she wouldn’t work with anyone overweight as it shows a “troubled mind”.

A UK fitness journalist has sparked outrage for claiming she wouldn’t work with an overweight person because it shows they have a “troubled mind”.

Samantha Yardley has doubled down on claims being overweight shows someone “lacks self-control” — despite outrage over her fatphobic comments.

The 34-year-old said she didn’t believe in fat-shaming but claimed society shouldn’t be “validating” people who are overweight.

“As a businessperson myself and former employer; would I work with (extremely) fat people? No, I wouldn’t. Harsh but true (I’m sorry),” she wrote a blog post earlier this month.

“For me, at best it demonstrates a troubled mind, lacking self-control and at worst it shows a severely disturbed individual who is likely to be lacking energy and suffering poor health.”

Appearing on UK talk show This Morning on Wednesday Ms Yardley continued her comments by claiming obese people should “take responsibility”.

She also argued that plus-sized clothes should be made more difficult to buy to encourage people to lose weight.

“We are all judged on how we look. I wouldn’t judge someone for being a little overweight,” she said.

“But if it was someone who was extremely obese, I would think they are lacking in self-esteem, maybe they have the wrong lifestyle, maybe there’s an underlying problem.”

Ms Yardley then made unsubstantiated claims that people who are obese “take nearly twice as many days off” and are also “more lethargic and more lazy”.

Ms Yardley’s comments have sparked fury, with people tweeting that a person’s size is “none of her business” and weight can be impacted by number of factors, such as illness and medication.

Since her blog post first went viral Ms Yardley has address some of the controversy on Instagram, writing that she was “sorry to have caused offence” but had no regrets about the article.

“Like it or lump it, I got people talking about a pivotal issue,” she wrote.

“A tirade of abuse is all worthwhile if I can help extend just one person’s life. That’s a huge privilege and so many people have reached out asking for help.”

SOURCE







The origins of the ‘white privilege’ myth

An essay which made little sense in the 1980s has defined how we think about race today.

In today’s world, where news is fed to the masses in pre-moulded and bite-sized pieces, important fundamentals are often taken for granted once a narrative has been built.

The recent protests and riots in response to the death of George Floyd are such an example. The idea that the police in the US are systematically racist and licentiously murder black people is accepted as a self-evident truth, despite multiple studies and endless statistics which call this oversimplified narrative into question.

Ironically, the rioting which has been partly inflamed by this narrative, built on quicksand though it is, has resulted in the destruction of black neighbourhoods, countless businesses and the deaths of at least 28 people, including black children.

The narrative of Black Lives Matter and its proxies is this: the current republic of America, conceived as it was by white people, is ineradicably and comprehensively racist. In the maelstrom of outrage, few have paused to examine where this now flourishing narrative came from.

At the bottom of all the presumptions of institutionalised racism is what is known as ‘white privilege’ – the idea that white people axiomatically have easier lives due to unearned privileges granted to them by their skin colour, at the expense of those who are not white. One of the most influential sources of this idea is the 1989 essay, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Knapsack’, by Dr Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh’s essay is well worth a read. As a piece of academic literature, it has been cited over 5,000 times and is only a few pages long.

But McIntosh’s thesis is built entirely on assumptions. McIntosh asserts white privilege as a phenomenon, extrapolating from her assertion of male privilege. She fails to provide any statistics or even anecdotal case studies to back up either of these claims. Nevertheless, she describes white privilege as an ‘invisible package of unearned assets’. Having not really described this invisible phenomenon in any concrete way, she then asks: ‘having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?’

McIntosh lists 26 statements that attempt to buttress the ‘white privilege’ she experiences in her own daily life. It starts with the gem: ‘I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.’ It also contains the self-fulfilling prophecy: ‘If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.’

Much has improved for race relations since McIntosh’s essay. But it still came out at a time when Eddie Murphy, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson were among the world’s biggest stars. In 1988, Jesse Jackson won seven million primary votes in his second bid to run for the presidency. In the same year, Lenora Fulani ran as a third-party candidate for president and won the most votes of any woman in a national presidential election until Jill Stein in 2012. And in 1984, Ben Carson became the youngest ever director of paediatric neurosurgery in the US. Yet McIntosh still seemed adamant that black people were unlikely to find success.

McIntosh makes the kind of racial generalisations – and zero-sum arguments – that would not be alien to a Klan member. For example, she states: ‘In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable and alienated.’ It seems impossible for McIntosh to envision a place where both white and black people can be happy simultaneously. The logical conclusion from this casuistry is that for black people to be happy, whites have to be made less happy. And we can see some of this sentiment today, with the increasing demand of BLM for white people to step out of the way.

Even McIntosh’s assertion of ‘male privilege’ – the assumption on which the narrative of white privilege is based – is questionable. Most people who are homeless in the US are males (around 70 per cent), as are the majority (93 per cent) of the prison population. White males alone made up almost 70 per cent of suicides in 2018. Men also consistently make up over 90 per cent of work-related injuries and deaths and are the vast majority of those who have died in wars. Some privilege.

Christopher Hitchens once remarked that the job of a public intellectual for the most part is to say ‘it’s not quite as simple as that’. In comparison, McIntosh’s instinct for generalisation is quite astonishing. In her use of ‘white’, she seems oblivious to the different circumstances and fortunes of different ‘white’ peoples who live in the US.

Among the American ‘whites’ are Jews who fled the Nazis from Poland, Germany, Austria and elsewhere in the 1930s and 1940s; the large Greek immigrant population which escaped economic and political devastation in Greece from the 1950s to the 1970s; and the Bosnian Muslim refugees who escaped attempted genocide in the early 1990s. These are some of the world’s most brutalised and persecuted peoples. But according to McIntosh’s thesis, a Bosnian refugee arriving in the US in the early 1990s with no money, no family and who didn’t speak English has some inherent advantage over Eddie Murphy.

And one wonders what McIntosh would say to the fact that today, the highest earning Americans are ethnically Asians. Indian Americans come out on top (with a median household income of $100,000). Japanese ($74,000) and Chinese Americans ($70,000) also earn more than whites ($67,800).

The number of whites living below the poverty line in 2018 (15.7million) is almost double that of blacks (8.9million). While the proportion of black people in poverty is higher than whites, the sheer volume of destitute white people should at least give pause to the sort of sweeping theory that McIntosh espouses and which has now become one of the most entrenched narratives in American politics.

It’s time to bury the myth of white privilege once and for all.

SOURCE






"A&E" Network Went Woke and Now They're Going Broke

Being ‘woke’ is not good for business—and A&E found that out the hard way. The network has come a long way from its days of dry programming. Shipping Wars, Storage Wars, Longmire, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and other series have boosted ratings for the network. Live PD, created by Dan Abrams, was a better version of COPS that began airing in 2016. It had dozens of crews following police officers from all over the country, allowing them to cut

After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, another wave of political correctness, mob antics, and anti-police fervor took to the streets. Black Lives Matter was back on the scene and the Live PD offered something that could not be allowed to survive because it showed a) that cops are decent human beings; b) at times offered how hard this job can be in certain situations. Remember, there can be no nuance with the far left. The show ran against the narrative that cops were all quasi-Nazis, so the network axed it. As a result, A&E lost nearly half its viewers (via WSJ):

Ratings for A&E Network have plummeted since it canceled the hit police reality show “Live PD” on June 10, a sign of how much the network relies on law-enforcement programming.

Average prime-time viewership for A&E between June 11 and July 19 was 498,000 people, down 49% from the same period last year, according to data from Nielsen. In the key demographics of adults 18-49 and 25-54, the declines are 55% and 53%, respectively.

The show, which follows police on their rounds in multiple cities simultaneously, averaged about 1.9 million viewers for its Friday and Saturday night episodes, repeatedly re-aired on other days. It spawned several successful spinoff shows, also canceled.

[…]

Before A&E pulled the show, its prime-time viewership was up 4% from the same period in 2019, according to Nielsen. The network has other popular shows, including “The First 48”—which follows the first two days of a criminal investigation—and “Court Cam,” about outbursts inside courtrooms, but none as successful as “Live PD.”

A&E’s ratings declines go beyond prime time. Total daily average viewership in the weeks since the show was pulled is down 36% from a year earlier, to 319,000 people. In the 18-49 and 25-54 age groups, the declines are even larger: 42% and 46%, respectively.

While I love the toxicity of Twitter, the merciless fisticuff aspect of the platform, it’s not real life. It’s Thunderdome for us insane people who love hyper-partisanship, who thrive on poking the bear, triggering the Left, and collecting their tears in our MAGA mugs. And yes, there are some lefties on there who can dish it out just as well. But again, it’s not real life. Catering to the ‘woke’ legions on Twitter is a horrible business model and A&E might have discovered that in brutal fashion. Going ‘woke’ seems to be a path to going broke.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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