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Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
composer, poet, critic, essayist

Monday 19 March 2012

Owl

‘Too much, too much’
Cries the owl behind my head.
Stopping and starting, a
Whole gathering of owls,
Hooting and squeaking as I play
Spot the branch,
Swiveling my head into the
Dark aroma of night.

I sit back down and that
One, insistent voice
Starts up again behind me.

It seems I
Haven’t yet got the message.

Form

Rivulets of sound become matter.
A repeat signals something new -
Time relived as the
Day drains into evening.

Fluid, precise
Exuberant, poised.
All tactics in a
Game of waiting.

A change of key heralds development -
Time spun forwards backwards to a
Recapitulation which will
Come and then go.

Saturday 17 March 2012

Beyond Lehman Sisters: New Feminism and Economic Collapse


It is hardly news that only a tiny handful of the world’s economic and business leaders are women and that the glass ceiling remains a real obstacle to their promotion. Many women therefore welcomed Christine Lagarde’s quip when, as French Finance Minister, a year after the global banking collapse of 2008, she suggested that the crisis would have looked very different if Lehman Brothers investment bank had been run by Lehman Sisters. Her remark triggered renewed debate about gender inequality in the financial sector and struck a chord in all areas of the workplace at a time of intense criticism of reckless corporate behaviour. Since then, in an ironic aside to Lagarde’s subsequent appointment as Head of the International Monetary Fund, yet darker aspects of the male-dominance culture within the corridors of fiscal power have been highlighted by the scandals attending the downfall of previous Head Dominic Strauss-Kahn (not to mention the serious allegations of sex crime). The need for reform is both clear and urgent. So how far has the ongoing debate got to the root of gender inequality in business and, beyond, to the root of global economic crisis? The answer is not very far. But the reasons for that lie as much within the terms of the debate itself as within the huge complexities of the issue and the difficulties of enacting reform.

Much of the response to Lagarde’s suggestion has been to take it at face value and pursue those questions directly pertaining to the comment itself; the most obvious being whether she is right. Would it really make a difference to corporate behaviour if more women were at the helm? If so, why? What forms might this difference take? Can we be certain any difference would be positive? Positive for whom exactly? Are we talking in purely economic terms of business performance or, more widely, about the role of business and employment in society? Whatever the starting point, the issues very quickly become multiple, complex and far-reaching. Even so, things would appear simple at base for the statistics documenting the lack of women in business are dire; a mere 15% of directors in FTSE100 companies are women despite growing evidence of improved market success for those companies with a greater female presence in the boardroom. To take just one study, a four-year, 2009 US analysis of Fortune 500 companies found that returns were much higher on equity (53%), sales (42%) and invested capital (66%) for those with most women in top management teams compared to those dominated by men. Echoing other surveys, the results were strongest in those companies with at least three women on the board of directors. So it seems clear that encouraging women up the corporate ladder is vital to improving society’s fiscal health - if not to saving its very economic core from potential meltdown.

But there is a growing and uncomfortable sense of deja-vu about the debate, not least because it is failing to address deeper systemic issues. As opinions polarise around Lagarde’s remark and how to tackle the often misogynist cronyism of the old boys’ network, a crass kind of dualistic thinking has re-emerged around gender issues on all sides of the debate in which women are seen only in comparison to men. Indeed, Lagarde’s very comment is predicated upon such binary thinking for, however challenging it may be to the financial establishment to raise issues of gender from within its very heart, and, however controversial her grounds may be for a favourable comparison of female behaviour to male within that predominantly male environment, she is nonetheless advocating nothing more radical than a call for more women to hold positions of corporate power. In a way reminiscent of the identity politics of the ‘80s and ‘90s, she has invited discussion of the role of women in business in terms of how far women are included and represented and in terms of the particular skills they might bring to the table. But, in mainstream circles at least, that discussion does not extend to a feminist critique of Western capitalism itself, despite the system being one in which women, usually participating as unpaid, cheap or cheaper labour, are very much poorer, second class citizens. (Even those women lucky enough to be in full-time employment can expect to earn 16.4% less than their male counterparts, while all women aged 40 earn 27% less than men of the same age according to a 2010 study by the Equality and Human Rights Commission; a statistic sadly demonstrating a very unfavourable comparison of women’s position to that of men’s).

In its current form, the Western capitalist system is not just failing financially, but it is also increasingly dysfunctional at a cultural level; for, whilst lip-service is paid to the supposed mobility of the free-market, in reality, the system is designed in such a way that profit inevitably comes at the expense of social equality both here in the UK and abroad through, for example, morally-dubious foreign outsourcing practices. Indeed, the structure and behaviour of corporations and financial markets is increasingly revealed to run counter to democratic ideals and basic principles of socio-economic justice. The very urgency of the renewed gender debate is testimony to the failure of previous feminist campaigns in business and politics that may well have changed some attitudes towards women for the better and opened some doors for them in the process, but which have been unable to effect systemic reform and are now foundering on the rocks of economic globalisation and collapse.


Naomi Klein is one commentator who might urge us not to miss the economic wood for the trees at this time of global financial crisis. Ten years ago, in her hard-hitting de-construction of corporate culture “No Logo”, Klein argued that an obsession with identity politics prevented activists of the late ‘80s and ‘90s from noticing the ingress of a far greater threat to freedom and equality; identity branding. She contested that, as activists indulged in self-referential turf-fights over the representation and visibility of gays, women and ethnic minorities, they lost sight of the bigger economic picture; they simply did not notice when powerful corporations, already switched on to the youth marketing goldmine of ‘cool’, began actively to appropriate notions of diversity as marketing tools (those infamous Benetton ads appearing to challenge racial stereotypes, for example). Indeed, a corporate coup d’etat took place under the activists’ very noses in which companies successfully exploited global markets in new ways by means of cynical appeal to oppressed groups, utilising the very language of social activism (Nike, for example, promoting sports shoes as objects of female and black freedom and status). In Klein’s words: “identity politics weren’t fighting the system, or even subverting it. When it came to the vast new industry of corporate branding, they were feeding it.”

Today - and right on cue it seems, amidst claims of a supposed ‘90s cultural revival - a new wave of identity politics is cresting as brand-worship has become ubiquitous on every social and cultural level despite rising unemployment, the outstripping of wages by inflation and increasing chasms between rich and poor, the West and developing nations. Governments are adopting punitive austerity programmes and slashing public spending in moves that target their most vulnerable citizens but which are so far failing to halt the collapse of the Eurozone and global financial systems following the credit crunch. Against this backdrop, heated debates are taking place in the UK about everything from Scandinavian-style boardroom quotas for women to new trends in oxymoronic Tory feminism as the Conservative party tries to stop the haemorrhage of its hard-hit female support base. But the toxic legacies of Thatcherite financial deregulation and profit-worship with which we are now faced serve as an ironic reminder that greater involvement by women at management level hardly guarantees greater long-term economic stability, nor does it ensure financial justice for those women and men in the West and the developing world who are paying the highest price for an increasingly sociopathic Western capitalism. Seen from this perspective, current speculation about whether women might, for example, be more or less prone than men to indulge in risky business ventures is not only based on banal gender stereotype, but would ultimately appear to be beside the point.

As the reality and consequences of economic collapse hit home, substantive, not just symbolic, reform is now urgent. It is more vital than ever to become aware of the bigger economic picture and to take action in light of its problems. Whilst battles to do away with glass ceilings and bring about changes in the gender balance of financial institutions are undoubtedly crucial, they can equally be used as a convenient red herring to distract from the wider, more fundamental need to effect deep, systemic reform in the way capitalist structures operate; the urgency of which calls for real, feminist vision from women - and men - experts within the business world. Of course, some form of identity politics need not be incompatible with a broader focus on economic reform but that is the point; the debate needs to take conscious account of the failure of concepts such as ‘trickle-down’, with the unwarranted faith in market success eventually to provide social and economic progress for all. If we truly aspire to notions of democracy and freedom, then ways must be found to establish real principles of equal opportunity and equal access at the heart of our socio-economic system, not merely as desperate add-ons in an attempt to find some kind of panacea to financial and social disaster. As a society, that will entail not just a willingness to tackle the behaviour of powerful corporations that are currently failing to run the system even in their own interests, but to take a good, hard look at our monetary values and undertake a cultural reassessment of how we define ourselves as women and men within the financial landscape. We now need to decide what roles we choose to accept as gendered individuals within a financial system that so plainly affects not just our own but the socio-economic well-being of other women, men and children across the globe.

Published on Interactive Ecology 17th March 2012: paper.li/saphyreblue/1306436290



Tuesday 13 March 2012

pulse

left
up down sideways along
breathe
rest head lie back

lift eyes to the grey sky and
marvel at the rain rain rain

everything soaked in tiredness
but the pulse
unrelenting uneven
stubborn angry

alive