Irish business is no longer just a boy’s club

“ONLY in the church will they find that God does not want women” - said a disgruntled US nun who has campaigned for years for a more central position for women in the Roman Catholic Church.

Her comments were made in St Peter’s Square after the election of Pope Benedict XVI had been announced.

The good Pope is against the ordination of women.

There is nothing rational about the argument against women priests. Jesus picked no women to be disciples. That’s the Pope’s view and indeed the view of the new Archbishop of Dublin.

It’s quite simplistic given that women would not have been included in such a role 2,000 years ago.

Perhaps even more bizarre is that those who are active disciples of the most patriarchal institution on earth insist on wearing full-length flowing gowns more commonly associated with women.

How could we be anti-women when we go out of our way to look and dress like them? seems to be the subliminal message.

So much for attitudes in the church. To an extent they impact on attitudes in the rest of society.

It’s probably a fair assumption that if the church was more open to women they would have encountered less resistance in the world of business down through the years.

In that sense if the same nun was to come to Ireland, she might notice a distinct lack of women in the upper reaches of Irish business.

And at first glance she might be forgiven for concluding God doesn’t want too many women strutting their stuff in Irish boardrooms.

Is that a fair conclusion? Perhaps not. Last week one of the speakers at the IMI’s annual conference spoke on gender issues.

How and why women think differently to men was part of the talk.

That paper struck me as a token gesture.

The inference was, I presume, if the IMI had such a paper on its schedule then the IMI was fully behind more women in business.

I wonder how many women were short listed for the top job last year before another male got the position as head of the IMI?

It would be interesting to establish also what proportion of men to women attended the two day conference last week.

Certainly on a visual scan one could be easy reach the conclusion that God isn’t too keen on having women in Irish business either.

Some years ago one of the country’s major business magazines changed its award from businessman to businessperson, recognising presumably that Irish business had so many active businesswomen the award could just as easy go to either sex.

That’s probably a bit too optimistic a view, but it was tacit acknowledgement that women’s’ struggle for recognition is no longer as impossible as it once was, whatever about the situation in the church.

In that sense the business woman of the year now looks a bit behind the times.

If we still had businessman of the year awards we would probably face accusations at this stage of being politically incorrect.

Surely we should have a level playing field with no inference of inferiority implied towards women.

At this stage that would be a reasonable line of argument. In the end I suppose it is about trying to strike the right balance and we will not always get it right.

Are the Veuve Cliquot people still right, then, in persisting with their support for a businesswoman of the year award?

It strikes me as an award more appropriate to emerging economies where the hierarchy is still predominantly male and where such countries could do with a healthy dose of female brain power to drive their thinking and their economies forward.

But it does strike me that we have moved forward a bit from those days.

The glass ceiling isn’t just an illusion, but the glass is getting significantly thinner, and women have far greater opportunities than ever before to succeed.

For the thousands of men in mundane jobs its absence or presence makes not a whit of difference to their work situations.

For sure the new Pope is unlikely to have much of an impact on the evolving situation.

It is fair to say the employers’ group IBEC and the rest of the Irish business hierarchy is a bit ahead of the Vatican in their thinking, but not that much.

At least they have given up the long robes.