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Time flies when you are enjoying ourselves and for todays special celebration we have one taboo topic and one private topic so ideally suited to a solo act.  For the main course we get a peep into my upcoming book on the Fintech Board – or more broadly the development of a SmallCo Board as it matures. A topic I have been researching for many months with over three dozen folks who are experts on this topic including over two dozen leading UK Fintech CEOs.

For the starter course we have a dive into a February attempt by a UK politician – largely successful to bully some UK Fintechs into having gender quotas for their boards.  Without a law, a regulation, just pure PR pressure and bullying.  A shocking incident that – unsurprisingly virtually every one of the dozen or so (pretty random) London Fintechs kept its head well below the parapet on and just went along with.

Short notes and especially links: 

• “British Government refuses to say whether proclaiming divinity of Christ is a hate crime” – Catholic Herald
• “Fintech firms among those pressed on gender equality charter” – AltFi article
• “Banks [MB & Fintechs] given until Friday to detail commitments to Women in Finance Charter” Daily Mail Article
• some highlights from the last four years
• Stephen Pinker’s new book: “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
• Christian Faes’ Tweet on Nicky Morgan’s PR pushing of a Gender Charter in FS/Fintech
• My comment on the altFi article link:
  • 1) Putting aside the PR stunt angle of “catching firms out” what is this constitutionally? It is not a law debated and passed by parliament. It is not a regulation. But woe betide you if you dont conform. This is plain statist/political bullying.
  • 2) Interestingly there are no equivalent “initiatives” in sectors dominated by women [primary school teaching, therapy et al] asking them to have targets for men. How is this “gender balanced”?
  • 3) All this gender-ism we are seeing totally ignores peoples’ free will and preferences when choosing career (hence uneven outcomes as above). In the UK in A level computer science 90% of sitters were boys, 10% girls.
  • 4) Pressuring Fintechs to enforce social engineering (without a debate in parliament) can only deteriorate the meritocracy that is entirely the case in every Fintech I have ever met – they need to succeed so much they hire whatever person is best for the job – regardless of gender/ethnicity/whatever – if penguins were the best coders there would seriously be a rush on London zoo to get that competitive edge.
  • 5) this has become such a hot potato (hysteria started post last US election) that folks refuse to even mention it on the podcast – even in passing. What kind of a world do we live in when folks don’t feel free to have and to share their opinion?
  • 6) as has been shown by research (which, being a father of daughters, I keep an eye on) being constantly exposed to the narrative that the world is against you and that you need affirmative action to survive in it is deleterious to girls’/young womens’ mental health which is already arguably worse than it ever has been across all of history (suicides in young people having tripled in 30yrs). Identity politics is absolutely not cost-free, consequence-free.
• animus and anima possession
• Jordan Peterson’s viral interview with Cathy Newman on YouTube
• Police force kicks out all-male choir after it refuses to accept female singers
• Christina Hoff Summers “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men”, “Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women”  [&not mentioned in the podcast but a relevant article from 2014] “Wage Gap Myth Exposed – By Feminists”
• Warren Farrell “The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It”
• Jonathan Pie YouTube The Wage Gap
• [not mentioned in the podcast but a relevant article] “Wage Gap Myth Exposed – By Feminists”
• Niall Ferguson “White Men Are Bad?”
• Microsoft To Ban ‘Offensive Language’ And Monitor Your Private Account
• several chapters from my upcoming book on Fintech Boards – you’ll have to listen or buy the book later in the year 🙂

And much much more 🙂

Share and enjoy!