Women are making progress in the corporate boardroom but what about sport?

Perfect timing, in the middle of wall-to-wall sport this summer (with little success from cricket, football and rugby.....) Women on Boards launched its “Gender Balance in Global Sport Report. 

I will not rehearse the common issues surrounding the lack of media coverage given to women’s sport; the difficulty of obtaining sponsorship and support, etc as others deal them with better than I can.

This report addresses the lack of female representation on governing boards be they international or national and the lack of governance. We only have to look at the shenanigans surrounding FIFA to see this in action. 

If we are to motivate our girls and young women to participate in sport at all levels they need to see the leadership coming from the top: there is nothing like a role model to inspire. I have written about gender equality in business before – particularly at a senior level - but this report neatly encapsulates how unbalanced the equation is at the top levels of sports administration.

The London 2012 Olympics had the highest participation by female athletes (44.2 per cent of the athletes who competed) yet there are few National Olympic or Commonwealth organising committees or sports federations where more than 30 per cent of board members are female, and the average is closer to, or below, 20 per cent.

If businesses are boasting about their gender balanced policies and their good governance - perhaps they need to be challenged about enquiring a bit more deeply about how balanced the organisations they sponsor are and look at their governance? My experience in charity/business partnerships is that they look very closely as to how your governance and ethics mesh with theirs.  They need to look beyond the corporate hospitality box in sport.

Have a look at the report – free to download from their website under “Featured Reports”  Women on Boards - report

Complementary therapies – should you tell your doctor?

Billions are spent annually on complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) -  vitamins, herbal remedies, homeopathy etc.  These may be prescribed by a so-called health practitioner (I use this term advisedly as there is no equivalent of the medical register so there is no regulation) or self-medicated. Most of them are harmless (and probably useless) but some can be harmful, especially when combined with other medication.

I attended a presentation at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in the USA a few years back where scientists from Sloane Kettering and the Mayo Clinic presented research on CAM: hard-headed scientific research some of which proved efficacy but most didn’t. They gave a statistic that 70% of patients being treated for cancer were taking some form of CAM – this could be as simple as vitamin C or as complicated as Black Cohosh – the latter could have interactions with common treatments for breast cancer. What was worrying was that the majority of patients did not tell their doctor because they were afraid of being disparaged or being told to stop. The former is real but the latter is irrational – if there is evidence (and I repeat evidence) that this will negatively impact a proven treatment, why wouldn’t you stop?

I was reminded of this by a recent blog by Professor Edzard Ernst. He is never afraid of controversy and has had run-ins with various branches of the CAM industry and people in high places..... read the link above. However, he is always worth reading – his research focuses “on the critical evaluation of all aspects of alternative medicine. Unlike most of my colleagues, I do not aim to promote this or that therapy, my goal is to provide objective evidence and reliable information.”

The article is What consumers should know about potentially dangerous interactions with St Johns Wort .  This is also covered in the Sloane Kettering database. Just because it is “natural” doesn’t mean it can’t harm you. Many of our current drugs originate from plants – digitalis (from foxglove) may be a useful drug but wrongly used it will kill you. *

The problem with researching CAM is that you can’t always account for the placebo effect and some trials use CAM without a control group. Just doing something, no matter what, might impact how you feel and we still don’t know enough about how what goes on in our brain affects the working of our body. 

I can be as irrational as the next person though (surely not?) – if I feel the symptoms of a cold, sore throat etc I immediately start taking Vitamin C, even though there is no evidence to show it is effective. It tastes OK and will be excreted if surplus to requirements and I haven’t had a cold in years – probably more due to the fact that I don’t travel on the Underground in the rush hour on a daily basis any more.....

* you should probably also know that humans should not eat the liver of the polar bear – the concentration of vitamin A is so high that it is dangerous.  The Inuit know that......

My doctor should have known....

There was recent press coverage of a possible plan to name and shame GPs who repeatedly fail to spot the signs of cancer in their patients or patients have to make repeated visits before being referred for tests.  Here is the article that was in the Daily Telegraph

I am very ambivalent about this: I do know (anecdotally) of friends who subsequently were found to have cancer or other serious illnesses, but who had been fobbed off by their doctors. When I was involved in a medical research charity we would hear regular reports.  But no one ever told us about how good their doctor was or how quickly they were referred because that was an expectation and not news.  I am also reminded that my own GP (now retired) told me that in 20 years of practice she had only had two patients come to her with symptoms that proved to be breast cancer – she had many patients with the disease who had been picked up through the screening programme.  Also, what this doesn’t take into account are the people who delay and delay going to the doctor with a worrying symptom.

Many years ago I sat on a disciplinary panel for GP’s who had had a complaint referred.  One was from a woman who complained that when she went to the doctor with a lump in the breast, the doctor told her she couldn’t feel anything but to come back in two weeks.  When she came back the doctor said that she still couldn’t feel anything but referred her immediately. She proved to have breast cancer and the doctor had acted perfectly properly – lumps can come and go and two weeks is not a delay.

The second was from a patient who had visited the doctor with a lump.  The doctor had told her it was not cancer and to leave it. She subsequently had to undergo a medical and cancer was found.  The GP’s rationale was that he had once spent six months in a breast clinic so he “knew” so didn’t need to refer her.

Cancer is not always easy to diagnose and I would rather be safe than sorry so I do feel strongly that doctors need to eliminate the worst case first, especially with symptoms that are troublesome but perhaps not specific. We know that, for example, ovarian or pancreatic cancer can have different symptoms, not always clear cut and I would rather they were eliminated before a series of treatments were prescribed for, say, irritable bowel syndrome or constipation.

Will red-flagging a practice on a web-site help – I am not sure and the people least likely to be referred are often the ones less likely to do the online research.

Mr Milliband - please do my shopping for me

Dear Mr Milliband

I gather that you spend about £70 a week on your family shopping bill. If you are campaigning on how the average family is still suffering from the “cost of living crisis” you should at least know that the average shopping bill for a family of four is over £100 and been a bit realistic -  you and your wife earn a fair whack so perhaps you could have admitted to spending above the average. 

Now I suppose if you are eating all your meals at that nice subsidized (by me) restaurant at the House of Commons, your wife is eating out too and perhaps the children eating at school then £70 would cover breakfasts, a light supper and the occasional cup of tea but possibly not weekends. I am probably being a bit unfair: you did say that was just for the basic groceries, fruit and vegetables etc. 

I bought some basic groceries yesterday and a few extras like tinfoil and washing up liquid and that came to over £60 which did not include any meat or fish, no nice bottles of wine or mineral water (husband buys the former and I never buy the latter). No snacks (so bad for you and anyway we bought enough chocolate in Berlin to last the year) and no fancy bread, I bake my own (so there).  But then there are only two of us at home and the fruit and vegetables won’t last the whole week.  I really would appreciate it if you could do my shopping for me.

‘Rabenmutter’ – the undermining of women

In the same way that the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi did not herald the equality of women, let alone the rise to the top, in the UK or India the undoubted success of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor and possibly the most successful European politician, is not an indicator of the success of German women in the workplace. I am now wondering if her nickname of “mutti” ie Mummy is affectionate or ever so slightly patronising.

I have just returned from a few days in Berlin. I never need an excuse to visit Berlin but the reason this time was to attend the Cornerstone Conference of the International Women’s Forum – I am on the board of the UK organisation and have been involved in our international collaborations so it was about time I joined in the fray.

The conference was a fascinating mixture of talks, debates and socialising with our German hosts and our international colleagues. A thread running through was how very difficult the position of women with children is in Germany.  It is perhaps notable that Mrs Merkel does not have children – being a rabenmutter is not an insult that can be hurled at her.  A rabenmutter – literally a ‘raven mother’ is the epithet used to denigrate mothers who work. The interpretation is that a raven mother is a loveless, heartless, cruel, unnatural, or uncaring mother; a bad mother who does not take good care of her children – and not because she is hanging around the pub, the tennis club, lunching with friends or shopping - but working.

Germany has a problem: the birth rate is declining rapidly, there is a brain drain of talent out of the country - the brain drain is particularly acute in information and communications technology and the worry is that where the labour goes the companies will follow. And yet, and yet, they are losing women from the workforce once they have children or women who wish to pursue careers are choosing not to have children or to limit the number of children they have to one. Only 14% of women with a child return to full-time work and only 6% with two children. I am connecting the dots, are you? 

We heard from a number of very senior women and with rare exceptions they made their mark in non-German companies first – academic careers at Harvard and MIT, jobs with Shell, BP, in the pharmaceutical industry – and so on. The men we heard from seemed to be more home-grown. The educational system is excellent with a powerful focus on vocational careers and the intake into universities is about 50:50. Educated women are excellent mothers and it is good for child and mother (er, and father?) to spend as much time together in the early years – then what?

There are inequalities in pay in the UK, very few women at senior and board level in major companies (improving slowly) but the situation is much worse in Germany: Germany may no longer be the country of the prewar - Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) but this was disappointing. Berlin on the other hand never disappoints, neither do my women colleagues.

The butterfly effect and trafficking of women....

In chaos theory the butterfly effect is a metaphor that postulates that a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere: the example is that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can contribute to a hurricane in another.

The horrifying kidnap of schoolgirls in Nigeria and the inaction of the Nigerian government for so long, now gradually slipping down the news agenda - and this is just one example of the low status of women in many developing world cultures. I saw an interview with Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe– see Time 100 for her speech about the work she does in Uganda taking care of girls who were kidnapped, forced into slavery and to become child soldiers, shunned by family and their villages and now raising their children born through rape.

Women are objectified in our society – and if they don’t measure up to someone’s physical ideal they can be vilified – reference what happened (mostly on line) to Professor Mary Beard. See her lecture The Public Voice of Women at the British Museum – a brilliant piece by a brilliant woman starting with Odysseus and Penelope and their son Telemachus, throughout history and referencing her own experience, and I quote “

For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it, it’s the fact you’re saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves. They include a fairly predictable menu of rape, bombing, murder and so forth.”

We still don’t have universal equal pay for women in Europe (and other developed countries), there is a lack of representation of women on the boards of most major companies and we have a very poor showing of women in politics – let alone in government. There is a series of trials underway of men who have used positions of authority to abuse women and sexist and misogynistic behavior is still part of our everyday life.  It can be overt, offensive or subtle but pervasive.  We were getting off a tour bus in Amsterdam recently when the guide said, “please remember to take all your possessions, your coat, your cameras your wife” cue laughter..... This is hardly abuse but it jarred – if he had said “husband” instead would I have laughed?  – but he didn’t.

This brings me to the butterfly effect.  Does the effect of naked breasts on page three of The Sun (not breasts feeding a baby, wouldn't that be shocking) contribute to the kidnapping, forced marriage, rape and trafficking of women in Africa?