After certain publicized remarks he made about women colleagues at a Toronto trade event a few weeks ago, legendary adman Neil French was forced to resign as worldwide creative director for WPP Group PLC, in which lofty role he oversaw industry giants such as Young and Rubicam.
What was so offensive that nothing short of resignation could save his company’s face? Did he say women were dumber than men? That they’re less ethical? That they smell bad? No. The gist of his remarks was that few women reach the summit of the advertising profession because family obligations sap their competitive drive.
Clearly terrified of a feminist backlash, French’s boss explained the man’s instant pariah status as a result of views “not consistent with WPP’s philosophy.” But French remained unapologetic: “You can’t be a great creative director and have a baby and keep spending time off every time your kids are ill … Everyone who doesn’t commit themselves fully to the job is crap at it.”
Was French’s tone crude and insensitive? Yes. Were his comments a firing offense on their merits? No—except to feminists. And feminists rule.
French may have lost his job, but his refusal to recant at least salvaged his self-respect in a battle no (white, straight, capitalist) man can win today. His case stands in ironic contrast to similarly beleaguered Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who last January opined that women’s abilities in math and science did not, on average, match men’s. Summers happened to be correct, but like French’s, his unscripted remarks ignited a firestorm. Unlike French, Summers groveled and apologized in multiple spasms of emotionally correct contrition, because his professional life promised to be hell if he didn’t. By abasing himself publicly, he kept his job.
If French’s opinions were wildly absurd, one could understand women taking offence at them. But anyone in contact with 30-something women lawyers, doctors, and of course advertising executives knows that he was only stating the obvious.
Mothers are torn between demanding careers and home in a way fathers are not, and that’s a fact. With motherhood, the once-consuming fires of career ambitions are banked, at least during early childhood. Priorities shift, because making it to the top of one’s profession exacts an emotional toll that militant pioneering feminists may have been willing to pay, but not most of today’s mainstream educated women, confident both of their rights and their maternal instincts.
In fact, according to a recent front page story in The New York Times, 60% of 138 Yale University women interviewed planned to cut back or stop work when they had children, and similar soundings at other elite schools confirm the trend. In Sweden, the oft-cited Shangri-la of gender egalitarianism, women opt for 81% of the 480 days of parental leave that is made jointly available for every couple to share.
However, the objective truth of French’s remarks is a secondary issue. An October 22 Globe and Mail editorial entitled “Must Work Consume All?” demonstrates the liberal media’s tendency to miss the real significance of such incidents, and instead to shovel fresh grist into the pernicious mill of Political Correctness.
Positioning French as a “sexist dinosaur,” the editorial held him up as the poster boy for a culture that rewards “the model of macho competitiveness.” But the work ethic of the advertising industry isn’t the story here. The story is that in a supposed democracy, French was compelled to resign for expressing an opinion in public—as it happens, a defensible and disinterested opinion, however boorishly expressed—to an audience that, thanks partly to misguided editorials like this, feels entitled to shoot messengers rather than debate the message.
Maybe French is a chauvinist and a social dinosaur, and I hear he even smokes cigars, but so what? He did not utter hate speech. He voiced a sociological observation gleaned from his own experience—the notion that women are different from men—which unfortunately for him happens also to be a zero-tolerance PC Thought Crime.
Our business elites are fearful of the power feminists wield in society today. French’s superiors apparently believed that unless they sacrificed him, masses of women would suddenly stop buying hair-styling mousse marketed through an ad agency WPP oversees, a patently ridiculous outcome. But irrational scapegoating is always present when ideology runs amok.
When Communist Party leaders decided an insufficiently loyal member needed purging, they at least did the dirty work themselves. Nowadays, in the reign of PC’s velvet totalitarianism, suspected heretics don’t wait for the midnight knock at the door: They pre-emptively furnish their own show trial, their own verdict, and their own bullet.
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