Nearly seven out of 10 of the 'most powerful jobs in UK business' are still going to men and there remains 'much more to do' to boost female representation in Britain’s boardrooms, the former boss of the FTSE Women Leaders Review has warned
A heated debate broke out on GB News today after Youtuber Pearl Davis argued that women "just need to work harder".
This comes after the former boss of the FTSE Women Leaders Review has warned that nearly seven out of 10 of the "most powerful jobs in UK business" are still going to men and there remains "much more to do" to boost female representation in Britain’s boardrooms.
Speaking on GB News, Davis said: "Women aren't breaking that glass ceiling, because really, we're not doing equal work. Women don't build any of these companies.
"When we look at top female billionaires, we see Kim Kardashian, where men have Elon Musk. If women aren't willing to build these companies themselves, why do we go to the men and say give me the best jobs in these companies?
"If we look at society at large, women don't do the hardest jobs. Men create 75 per cent of our food, 80 per cent of our stuff. And in 150 years of Nobel Peace Prize for the hardest things like physics or chemistry zero women have won.
"We're not picking career fields or even going to college for the highest paying stuff. We are not working as hard as men and therefore we're not getting the results that men are getting."
Feminist Jean Hatchet was left fuming with the comments and responded: "I mean this is an absolute basic level of inequality on a board. Because what Pearl is saying is that women don't have merit because they don't do the work, but you've already got those boards stocked with men who decided the merit of those [other] men.
"So we're working within an already established patriarchal society which has already laid the groundwork for those men to lead those companies and do all this work that Pearl assumes they are more capable of than women. For those board positions, 65 per cent of those positions are nominations. Those men nominate other men.
"That's the patriarchal society we've lived in and been aware of for centuries. And Pearl can pretend she's not aware of it but that's how you build a career as a YouTuber."
