Fairness is as fairness does

Fairness: a much better word than equality

After prolonged opposition, the government has given in to the Council of Europe’s demand that it names a woman on the list of nominees for the post of judge at the European Court of Human Rights. The Council of Europe’s demand seeks to apply the letter of the law while confounding its spirit. The law is there to ensure fairness. Its application in this case will bring about the opposite effect to that intended.

The government had submitted three names, those of the chief justice and two other judges. All happened to be men. I say ‘happened to be’ because that is precisely it. The salient factor should not be their gender but their qualifications. Isn’t this what the equal rights campaigners have argued for years? The principle applies to men, too.

There is only one woman who is a judge in this country, and her appointment was recent. She has not applied for the post at the European Court of Human Rights, so it follows that no present or former judges who happen to be women have applied, because there are no others. There have been women who applied, yes – but one can make the safe assumption that they are not as qualified as the chief justice and two judges, which is why they were not placed on the nominee list.

The fact that the women who applied for the job may be qualified for the post, as some have argued, is irrelevant. The point is not whether they are qualified for the job, but whether they are more, or less, qualified than the three people who are on the list already.

So why didn’t the government include the lesser-qualified applicants – and these include men, as well as women – in the list and let the Council of Europe make its decision based on merit? The short answer to this sensible question is that the Council of Europe, like many other organisations, has bowed to the yoke of politically correct fascism.

If there is a woman on Malta’s list, the strong likelihood is that the woman will get the job, even if the men are more qualified, so as to redress some imbalance that should be left instead to the progress of time and social development.

It is important to distinguish between ensuring equality for women in general and favouring individual women. Unlike votes for women, equal pay for equal work, equal rights within marriage, and equal access to education, measures such as preferential promotion and quotas do not benefit women in general, but only individuals who happen to be women.

If a woman is appointed judge at the European Court of Human Rights, in preference to a man who is more suitable for the post (by dint of his qualifications and experience, I hasten to add, and not his gender) then it is not ‘women’ who stand to gain, but only one particular woman who either doesn’t deserve it or who deserves it less than those listed originally by the government.

As a mother of three sons, I would object most strenuously if any one of them is shunted aside so that his place may be taken by a less qualified and less able woman, forcing him to pay the price for gender sins he has not committed, while the woman is rewarded for….what, exactly?

I would feel strongly about it precisely because, being 20 years their senior, I had to contend in the early part of my working life with the same problem in reverse – being shunted aside to accommodate somebody far less qualified and able, just because he was a man.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. We’ve had that drummed into us from our early years, yet here we are all the same, trying to set right the wrongs of the past by committing more wrong in the present. What’s done is done. The women who were poorly served by the chauvinistic mentality of past decades cannot be compensated by the promotion in the present and future of other women who mean nothing to them and about whom they couldn’t care less, especially not when individuals who happen to be men are unfairly treated in the process.

Women who have been hard done by in the past because men were favoured over them are not going to crow with delight at a situation in which women are favoured over men, because they know what it’s like and because they understand just how wrong it is. Women who don’t think particularly clearly, or who see the world in terms of gender versus gender, might think all of this is a good idea.

So might those who are twisted by vengeful feelings – but even so, those vengeful feelings are pointless and absurd when directed at an entire gender rather than at the individual who committed the actual wrong.

A recent episode of one of my favourite police dramas on BBC Prime had an officer, who happened to be a black man, promoted over his colleague, who happened to be a white woman. In the toss-up between whether to appoint a black or a woman – such a shame there was no black woman in the running – their superiors decided that there were enough women in senior-level positions to appease the political-correctness people. What they really needed now was a black.

When the selected officer found out, quite by chance, why he had been offered the promotion, he refused it. “All my life I have fought to be treated equally,” he said. “Now I find that I have been given preferential treatment because I am black.”

Equality means exactly what it says on the tin: equality. Just as the favouring of men over women meant an absence of equality, then so does the favouring of women over men. Women who build careers in law, rather than butting out and working part-time or not at all when they marry, have children or both, are a fairly recent phenomenon here.

So it stands to reason that the list of people most qualified for the post of judge at the European Court of Human Rights is more likely to have men on it than women – at least if it is written up according to the dictates of merit rather than of politically correct fascism.

Earlier generations of women used to bemoan the fact that some people were rewarded for having been born with a penis. Now we are getting busy rewarding people for having been born with a vulva. For heaven’s sake, let’s stop all this nonsense and do the decent thing: pick the people best qualified for the job, regardless of gender.

Yes, there will always be women who can’t see the essential humiliation in being known as the one who got the job because of her gender, or who believe that the short-term embarrassment is worth the long-term perks. But that doesn’t mean there should be collusion in accommodating them to the detriment of the more deserving.

If there is a woman more qualified for the job than the chief justice is, and she applies, then certainly, she belongs on that list. But if she isn’t more qualified than the chief justice, then she doesn’t, and that’s all there is to it. I rather suspect that what we are dealing with here is one or two chancers, who happen to be women, who are hoping to work the system in their favour. In this, they are behaving just as some men did in the past.

It is as ugly, unpleasant and unfair now as it was then, and no amount of politically correct dressing is going to obscure that fact.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.