Do gender quotas really add up?
THERE is much to admire in Minister for Sport Patrick O’Donovan’s gender quota proposals issued this week, whereby sports bodies will have to have a minimum number of women on their management board or risk losing State funding, but, as always, the devil is in the detail.
The motivation for introducing the quota - to get more women involved at the administration level of sport - is meritorious but there is always a danger with imposing rules and guidelines in these matters rather than trying to solve the problem in a more organic way.
On a very basic level there will be women who will baulk at the idea of being put into position of authority just to fill a quota based on their gender, and being appointed under such parameters will almost always leave the incumbent female in an invidious position. Can that ever be right or proper? We suggest not.
A logical follow on from that is the ‘best person for the job’ argument. It’s fair to assume that most ambitious women support this premise, given that all those highly successful females already operating in the business world and, indeed, in sporting organisations have got to where they are without the leg up of a gender quota.
As far as we know not one of Geraldine Casey, People and IT Director, Tesco; Johanna O’Driscoll, Head of Group Financial
Evaluation and Advisory Services, CRH plc; Marguerite Sayers, MD of ESB Networks Limited; Niamh Townsend, General Manager, Dell; Helen Tynan, Director of People Operations for Google in Ireland; Una Fox, VP, The Walt Disney Company; or Louise Phelan, VP of Global Operations EMEA, PayPal, got to where they are today on the back of a gender quota.
Nor did any Irish female politician (before this year’s gender quota for the General Election) or indeed Róisín Jordan, chairperson of Tyrone GAA, of Cork GAA’s vice-chairperson Tracey Kennedy ( pictured).
Of course there is a huge imbalance in the numbers of male and females in position at all levels of sports administration, but would any or all of the aforementioned women feel compromised in their job if they felt they were there just to make up the numbers, as it were?
Minister O’Donovan’s suggestion / threat that State funding could be withdrawn if organisations don’t meet the quota is very much the stick option of the carrot or stick choice. Turning it on its head and incentivising sports bodies for promoting more female participation at board level might be a better option, although, in truth, that would still amount to the same thing: playing the numbers game for financial reward instead of leaving women get on with getting ahead, which, we suspect, is what all women want.
Of course, there’s no denying that sport at almost all levels remains a male dominated environment and is not necessarily the better for that.
An analysis by The Irish Times earlier this year found that of the 50 places filled by the executive committees/boards of the FAI, IRFU and GAA there was just a single female representative. That’s hardly the healthiest state of affairs, no matter how qualified and capable those 49 men are, but perhaps the question Minister O’Donovan needs to be asking - and getting proper answers to - is whether women are being actively prevented from filling more of these positions or if they simply are not looking to fill them at all.
If there is a barrier being put in front of women impeding their way to the top positions then the Minister and sport and everybody needs to ask why this is so, and real and immediate steps need to be taken to eradicate prejudicial appointments on the basis of gender.
Or maybe the reality is that the lack of participation by women is merely down to their disinterest in holding positions on committees and boards and executives when it comes to sports administration. I don’t know if that’s the case, but maybe more women than men simply don’t care enough to sit in meetings that take three times longer than necessary to get through their business, and all too often procrastinate and obfuscate on decisions and amble along happy enough to maintain the status quo.
Maybe the minister isn’t giving women enough credit here, and his good intentions are actually misguided.
It’s always a delicate matter raising issues like gender quotas because while they are certainly almost always done with the best of intentions there’s always a ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ aspect to it. For every woman who might benefit from getting a little help through the trap door in the glass ceiling there will be another who will feel insulted by the gesture and possibly compromised if she finds herself in a position of authority having got there because of a quota, or at least under the presumption that that’s the reason she got there.
There’s no doubt but too many of this country’s sporting organisations are too male dominated at administrative level, but do we really want to go down the road of forcing women into something? Or patronising them? Not for me.