It's All the Fault of Women: Skewed View of the Financial Crisis - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Some of the best satire is well-masked. Ask Jonathan Swift, who was accused of obscene discussion of cannibalism over his satirical solution to 18th century Britain’s troubles with Ireland. But of course, some of what we could only reasonably assume to be satire turns out to be anything but.

• And so we come to Newton Emerson’s column in The Irish Times, “Working women almost certainly caused the credit crunch”.

• You see, Emerson writes, if women weren’t so interested in working but did what many of them really would prefer to do — stay home and be good wives and mothers — then households wouldn’t have had all that money to start overspending and thus create the credit crisis.

• Too late to fix that. But women could redress the results of their self-centredness by leaving their jobs. “The point is that removing women from the workforce would mitigate its effect,” Emerson explains.

• While he then makes some calculations to show that Irish women exiting would leave just enough spots for all the men who have lost jobs in the crisis, he throws another bomb: “It would be ludicrous to suggest that women should be sacked purely to give men their jobs. In many cases, their jobs should be abolished as well.”

• In case you haven’t slapped the screen (or balled up The Irish Times) by now, note that some of his figures come from the Central Gender Mainstreaming Unit at the Department of Justice. WOMEN-omics.com research confirms that of Web sleuths that apparently no such unit exists. And Emerson made his name (discreetly, as long as he could) as editor the Portadown News parody website, which Wikipedia describes as not unlike the US outlet The Onion.

• But maybe he really believes that “women were the driving force behind the greed, consumerism and materialism of the Celtic Tiger years and it was female employment that funded their oestrogen-crazed acquisitiveness”. And while we are at, what was Swift’s favorite meal?

The Irish Times column by Newton Emerson

One argument that it is satire