Mandatory quotas for women on the boards of companies would be a dreadful idea. So says Maria Miller, the minister for women, who wants promotion to be based on removing barriers rather than political correctness.
Britain, she notes in a speech on Wednesday, doesn't need a meddling Brussels to tell us how to run our businesses because the fact that 44% of all board appointments in the past six months have been women shows that the voluntary approach is working.
That's one view. Another way of slicing and dicing the figures shows that not one woman executive director has been appointed in the past six months, with the real power wielded by men, as it always has been.
But it is not the selective interpretation of the statistics that is the strongest counter to Miller's argument. Nor is it that the same voluntarist line is trotted out to no effect when it comes to executive pay. It is not even that Miller is missing the point when she describes quotas as patronising, when the real issue is women being passed over in favour of less talented men.
No, the real problem with the voluntarist approach is that it will perpetuate mediocrity. Male boards will beget male boards, with the odd female director of human resources for those companies that like to consider themselves go-ahead. There would be a case for the status quo if the country was booming as a result of macho UK plc. But it isn't.
