Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, was appointed governor of the Bank of England in July 2013. His annual salary is said to be around £624,000 ($990,000). His contract term is the customary eight years, but he’s said he’ll serve no more than five. One of his first acts as governor was to capitulate to Caroline Criado-Perez’s silly campaign to retain women on British banknotes, and in 2017 the wildly overrated authoress Jane Austen will appear on £10 notes. Our blog piece on the matter is here. Janet Bloomfield’s piece is here.
Some lines written by, and about, Jane Austen:
I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. (Letter, 11 December 1815. ‘Jane Austen’s Letters’ – 1952)
One of Edward’s Mistresses was Jane Shore, who has had a play written about her, but it is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading. (‘The History of England’ – 1791)
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can. (‘Mansfield Park’ – 1814)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (‘Pride and Prejudice’ – 1813)
How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them! (Letter to Cassandra Austen, 31 May 1811, after the Battle of Albuera, 16 May 1811. ‘Jane Austen’s Letters’ – 1952)
Mark Twain:
Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it. ‘Following the Equator’ (1897)
To me Edgar Allan Poe’s prose is unreadable – like Jane Austen’s. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on a salary, but not Jane’s. ‘Mark Twain’s Letters’
It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death. (Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909.)
The Bank of England has a history of feminist manipulations to advantage women in recruitment and promotion terms. In June 2012, the Campaign for Merit in Business—an organization run by the same people who run J4MB—published a blog post on the matter here. It included the following excerpt from a newspaper profile of Catherine Brown, the £200,000 ($317,000) p.a. executive director of human resources:
According to Catherine Brown, the Bank’s executive director of human resources, there are ‘no fixed hours’ at our premier City regulator. Brown, 46, says: ‘… while the governors and directors are very largely white and male, that is a snapshot in time and in five years it may look very different.’ … this year the intake of women has shot up to 45 per cent.…
‘We are output-focused—there are no set hours,’ she says, adding that this has been crucial to the Bank’s success in recruiting women and to keeping its staff turnover at an astonishingly low four per cent a year.…
Under Mark Carney’s leadership, the Bank of England has discriminated more strongly for women and against men. The intake of female graduates has increased sharply. More women have been promoted into senior positions. In a recent speech to the Trades Union Congress, Carney said this:
Hiring more women in senior roles makes us much, much more effective.
I don’t think any reasonable person could read that statement without interpreting it as a claim of a causal link between appointing more women into senior roles and a strong improvement in organizational performance. Now, the Bank of England isn’t a profit-making organization, so Carney could possibly anecdotally defend his claim—although my 30+ years working as a business executive tells me that his claim is utterly absurd. Former business colleagues—both men and women—to whom I’ve mentioned his claim have laughed out loud. As C4MB has frequently reported, we know from at least five longitudinal studies that there exists a causal link between increasing the proportion of women on corporate boards and financial decline.
We’ve publicly challenged Mark Carney over his remarkable assertion and included with the letter the full abstracts of, and links to, the five longitudinal studies we cite regularly. Our letter is here, and our public challenge of Carney is this:
You claim a causal link between hiring more women in senior roles and strong improvements in performance. We publicly challenge you to provide us details of longitudinal studies which support your claim with respect to major companies’ financial performance, and specifically with respect to their financial returns to their shareholders i.e. their owners. Thank you.
We much admire the British website The Conservative Woman. Co-edited by Kathy Gyngell and Laura Perrins, it’s a site that doesn’t shy away from allocating blame for so many of British society’s ills firmly at the door of radical feminists and their poodles in government and elsewhere. So we were pleased when they ran a piece on Mark Carney pandering to feminists, and linked to our public challenge of him here.
