Sunday, April 19, 2009

More on women...

A correspondent, M, criticizes me severely for praising Margaret Thatcher in a recent posting, where I quoted her as saying that she always insisted on running the economy as she would run the household as a housewife (my post of February 22, 2009).

M thinks that she started and promoted the era of corporate greed, not only in Britain but around the world. It is, as we all know, this corporate greed that has brought us to where we are.

M is of course quite right, and I agree with him. I believe that her policies did start the era of corporate greed and turned Britain into a less caring, humane and compassionate society than it used to be.

It also encouraged policy-makers in other countries to pursue these same policies and make the world as a whole a less caring place.

I was really trying to say that men would not think and talk like that. But M is right. After quoting her, I should have added, “However, she did not take her own advice seriously enough to incorporate it into long term economic policies”.

So, my apologies to M.

For me, it still remains that there are far too few women in leading financial and economic positions. It would only be right to have more. I am hopeful that they will follow a more careful economic policy, given their less reckless attitude. This more circumspect attitude may in the end be traceable to a difference in the way the feminine brain functions.

2 comments:

Gdrs said...

On a related note, to support prof. Zeki's note that there are too few women in leadership positions in UK, I was appalled to see some years ago statistics on gender distribution in universities throughout the world. In UK about 5% of all professors were women! For comparison, in muslim Turkey that percentage was 30%. This vividly speaks about the status of women in UK...
While this statistics may be dated (this was probably a decade or so ago), it is unlikely that the disparity disappeared since then...

Giedrius Burachas, San Diego

Lappy said...

"I believe that her policies did start the era of corporate greed and turned Britain into a less caring, humane and compassionate society than it used to be."

"...caring, humane and compassionate..." yes, of course, as any Burmese or Indian or Arab or American or Irishman (or Chinese heroin addict) from the good ol' compassionate days of the British empire will surely attest to.