A Letter that I sent to the anchor-person of the CBC's programme SPARK.

Hello Norah,

I have never heard Spark before, but I have just caught part of your show.

Where did you find the wonderful Penelope? What a joy to hear a female talking common sense about females. At last we have someone on the radio who isn’t sniveling and whining about the fact that there aren’t exactly the same number of females as males in every occupation on God’s earth. At last we have someone who can actually recognize the differences between males and females. Personally I love to see, chat with, socialize with and any other ‘with’ a glorious female who wants to be feminine and be recognized as a beautiful woman.

Why can women not accept the fact that they are female, glory in the idea, enjoy doing whatever it is that they want to do and just get on with life? What is the point of so many of you wanting to give the impression of having a massive inferiority complex?

During my many years as a management consultant, I’ve met many highly competent women in management and I have also met many highly competent women who couldn’t care less about being in management.

Of course there aren’t the same number of women in Venture capital companies as men for all the reasons that Penelope gave you. I am also darn glad that there aren’t the same number of men in nursing as there are women; having been in hospital a number of times, I cannot tell you what a joy it is to wake up after an operation to see a pretty young face smiling down at you and to hear a charming, gentle, female voice instead of several days’ growth of beard and a gruff word or two.

As for your next guest, the Indian professor, as with most research scientists, he relies heavily on statistics. Let me remind you of two things about statistics:

First. We are all humans but of two very different genders, with different ideas and different ideals. You simply cannot group individuals by ‘type’.

Second. When the breathalyser first came out in the late 60’s in England, the first statistical report on its usage said that 10% of all fatal accidents were caused by drunk drivers and this was an unacceptably high percentage. So a friend of mine and I wrote to the Times of London, pointing out the fact that these statistics showed clearly that 90% of all fatal accidents were caused by sober people; so who should be taken off the roads?

Thank goodness for people like Penelope, talking about real people in real situations on the ground and actually experiencing the facts of the case.

Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, you producers and anchor-people at the CBC. Some of us are getting very bored with all these so called ‘experts’ with their theories (no matter how many professorships they hold) and ‘world renowned’ interviewees. Let’s have more interviewees like Penelope, and those like her but with the opposite view, but let them be real people who are involved in the topic of the show. Talk to the people on the ground, and take the ones who produce statistics from within the protection of their ivory towers with a truck load of salt.

Believe me when I say, Norah, that no statistics, no matter from where you get them, are going to enable you to prove this crazy notion that every board room in the world should be populated by 50% women and 50% men. Oh, and don’t forget parliament and local government and all other institutions! Some of them will be, and some already are, populated by more women than men.

All the best,

Jeremy Moray