It started in 1911 with the campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, hold public office and end discrimination but since then, great improvements have been made within our culture. The campaign responded and the tone and intention of IWD has, for the past few years, moved from being a reminder about the negatives to a celebration of the positives. But the debate is certainly changing back to a negative one, with the EU planning to use quotas to force increases in the number of women on boards across the continent.

The assumption behind the quotas is obviously that gender discrimination exists and allocating boardroom seats to women is the only way to end this. This makes me worry about the future of women in society. On the one hand women want to be treated equally in the workplace, but through this campaign, the same women want special treatment to climb the ladder, and reach identical positions to men. There is clearly a contradiction and it not only undermines the idea that promotions be based on merit, but entails the use of punishments to enforce a certain kind of gender representation in the boardroom – which by the way does not prove any direct correlation with better performance. Surely it should all be about ensuring women have the right to work and the rest is based on merit. One might argue that the quotas aim to tackle politics in the workplace working against women but then politics in the workplace could be a result of numerous factors, ranging from cultural differences to favouritism based on something as arbitrary as liking McLaren F1 VS Arsenal FC! From what I can observe, it’s never entirely clear whether appointments are made fairly or not and the case for blaming gender discrimination does not seem to be proven.

We all possess certain individual characteristics and I believe that our characteristics and attributes should be the criteria to determine the roles we get. At some level I also feel that men and women are different, more so biologically than psychologically, and sometimes, these underlying differences impact our performance and the direction of our career too. I struggle to understand why this has to be taken negatively. Instead of celebrating the contributions made by women, the quotas are highlighting the inability of women to achieve success unless helped out. As a woman, this is upsetting and worrying to the extent that quotas may ultimately lead to a loss of respect for women in business as the roles they acquire will not be entirely based on their skillset and knowledge but the fact that they are female.

I feel this is unfair on men but an approach that will probably benefit everyone who want to compete on merit in the long term, as the argument for quotas will be quickly exposed in the competitive boardroom environment. In the interim, there is the International Men’s day celebrated every year on the 19th of November to fight for gender equality for men in the 21st century. Worth a go guys?