I was listening to Jim Mora’s program on National Radio on Friday afternoon, where he featured guest speakers Michelle Boag, Lianne Dalziel and a third woman whose name I don’t recollect.

Dalziel was rather warm about news that had come to her attention recently: apparently women appointed to run large companies statistically show poorer performance in terms of delivering value to shareholders. A more recent ‘study’ (I immediately switch to high-alert mode when I hear this term) suggested the reason for this was due to the fact that companies in peril were more likely to hire a woman to head the company than a man, ie women CEOs were getting served hospital passes.

Rather than consider such an assertion with the scepticism that it merits, Dalziel leapt on it with the enthusiasm of the desperate. She seriously suggested that directors imperil their companies so that when collapse occurs, they can resort to the defense “Well what do you expect? It was run by a woman.” The 3rd woman on the show was even more vehement in faulting men’s complicity in women’s failure in business. She went further to say that it was always businessmen, not businesswomen, who responded to business collapse by withholding payment to creditors while hiding their own considerable assets, thereby demonstrating their inability to understand the suffering they inflict on others (shades of the fabled wealthy deadbeat dad here?).

The ease with which these women accepted this nonsense surprised me .Not because open misandry is unusual, but because a woman of such high office would resort to it on such a public forum with no real thought of the consequences. I would suggest that she’s used to the company of people who talk in this way, without challenging each other and safe in the knowledge that there will be no real public response. Did it not occur to them that no-one is ever forced to accept a position as CEO? That perhaps women eagerly compete for the leadership role of a company in trouble because for the last 30 years they have been told girls can do anything and men are incompetent? That the consequences of failure are not visited upon women with the same harshness as it is with men? That a man would never expect a panel of other men to explain away his failure on National Radio – one of whom is a cabinet minister?

Don’t these women realise that in rushing to the aid of others simply because they are women, and readily accepting anything that makes them feel better about themselves, it is they, not we men, who reinforce the image of women not being equally capable?

And to answer the ridiculous assertion that it is only men who suffer from a lack of ethics in business, I read today of the prohibition order against Robyn Case (no connection). I leave you to decide if we men have no female company in the realm of deceit, chicanery, denial and unrepentance.