It’s fair to implement gender quotas and get the balance right

I’m in the mood for quotas — the kind that involve one in every two human beings on the planet getting a fair crack of the whip and having their opinions and talents aired, by Alison O’Connor.

My pride has taken a back seat on the issue of gender quotas and if legislation and penalties are what is needed to ensure that women get heard on the airwaves, or have their plays staged in our National Theatre, or indeed their say in the our boardrooms, well then let’s bring them on.

I ditched my pride on the issue some time ago when I realised that at current rates of what we might loosely call progress we would be waiting for hundreds of years for these things to happen.