Fleur Butler OBE is Director of Development for the Conservative Women’s Organisation, has sat on the National Convention.
Whenever International Women’s Day comes around, it produces a familiar script: women as victims, women crushed by capitalism, women oppressed by the patriarchy. There is truth in some of this. But it misses a more important point. More women need to step into positions of power, and more men need to actively seek them out. Not because of quotas, not because of slogans, and not because of fashionable ideology. But because it makes institutions work better, and profits grow and it stabilises the democracies that we live in.
The fact that women make up 51 per cent of the population yet remain under-represented in the rooms where decisions are made is plainly unfair. But the deeper issue is not fairness. It is competence. Complex societies function best when decision-making groups are balanced. Men and women together make better decisions than either sex does alone. If we want stronger capitalism, more effective governance and, frankly, better judgement from men themselves, we need more women in leadership.
The recent spectacle surrounding Prince Andrew, Peter Mandelson and the long shadow cast by the monster Jeffrey Epstein has produced a predictable response. Commentators call for more regulation, more scrutiny, more committees, more lawyers. Every scandal is treated as evidence that we must build another layer of oversight. Yet this instinct, to smother decision-makers in procedure, misunderstands how power actually works.
More rules do not create better judgement and they rarely produce better leaders. And they certainly do not produce the creative, complex problem-solving modern societies require. In practice they often create the opposite: timid institutions paralysed by compliance, where no one takes responsibility and real authority quietly disappears.
After years working in senior leadership, often as the only woman in the room, I have seen how decisions are actually made. I have led all-male teams, worked in all-female environments, mentored both sexes, and raised four sons. One pattern is impossible to ignore: single-sex leadership groups consistently make poorer decisions. This is something journalists often miss because they tend to work alone and are often male. They do not spend their time inside the closed-door negotiations where status, ego and ambition collide in real time.
Aristotle understood something many modern commentators have forgotten: politics is the art of managing competing interests, not eliminating them. Healthy systems depend on counterweights. No amount of process can replace the messy reality of human judgement.
Which brings us to an awkward truth. Men corrupt each other. They groom each other. The lesson of Epstein is not simply that vulnerable young women were exploited by powerful men, though they were. It is that many of the men around him were drawn into behaviour they might otherwise have avoided because they were operating inside male group dynamics that distort judgement.
Male groups have recognisable failure modes. Across psychology and behavioural economics we see the same pattern: groupthink takes hold, status competition escalates, and dissent becomes dangerous. The desire to follow the dominant figure, the alpha, can be remarkably strong. These instincts are not always bad. Male groups can be brilliant at pursuing a goal. They can hunt down an idea with impressive speed and loyalty. But in complex environments, financial markets, politics, corporate leadership, the same instincts can create risk. Surrounded only by other men, groups can drift towards ever more extreme decisions, particularly when status and reputation are on the line.
Women tend to disrupt this dynamic. This is not because women are morally superior. They are not. Anyone who has spent time in politics or business knows that women are perfectly capable of corruption, vanity and poor judgement. But on average, women bring different instincts to group decision-making. They are less inclined towards automatic loyalty and more likely to interrogate assumptions before committing to a course of action.
From an evolutionary perspective that makes sense. For most of human history women needed to assess whether a leader could genuinely protect them and their children. Blind allegiance was dangerous. Even today that instinct remains visible. Women tend to test ideas more rigorously, assess risk more carefully and withhold trust until it has been earned. This is why the lone woman on a board is so often labelled “difficult” or “risk-averse”. In reality she is disrupting the momentum of the pack.
Once women reach around a third of a leadership group, the dynamic changes. Their scepticism becomes normal rather than disruptive. The group slows down just enough to test its assumptions before charging ahead. In other words, balance improves judgement.
This is not a fashionable claim. It is increasingly supported by evidence. Research consistently shows that organisations with more diverse leadership teams make better long-term decisions. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, whose board was entirely male, has often been contrasted with financial firms that weathered the 2008 crisis more successfully with more balanced leadership. The same pattern appears in politics, as Labour women have pointed out around the boys club in No10.
None of this requires ideological crusades or bureaucratic diversity programmes monitored by lawyers and controlled by process. The real solution is simpler. Men in positions of power need to recognise that they benefit from having capable women around them, not as tokens but as genuine partners in decision-making. And women with the ability to lead need to step forward rather than assume the system is closed to them. The point is not symbolic equality. It is institutional strength.
Healthy societies depend on balanced leadership groups capable of challenging each other before mistakes become disasters. Rules and procedures cannot substitute for that.
In the end, the lesson is straightforward. Men do not simply need more regulations. They need more women in the room and it is men who should be asking women today to step forward and become MPs, board members and join their gangs.
Fleur Butler OBE is Director of Development for the Conservative Women’s Organisation, has sat on the National Convention.
Whenever International Women’s Day comes around, it produces a familiar script: women as victims, women crushed by capitalism, women oppressed by the patriarchy. There is truth in some of this. But it misses a more important point. More women need to step into positions of power, and more men need to actively seek them out. Not because of quotas, not because of slogans, and not because of fashionable ideology. But because it makes institutions work better, and profits grow and it stabilises the democracies that we live in.
The fact that women make up 51 per cent of the population yet remain under-represented in the rooms where decisions are made is plainly unfair. But the deeper issue is not fairness. It is competence. Complex societies function best when decision-making groups are balanced. Men and women together make better decisions than either sex does alone. If we want stronger capitalism, more effective governance and, frankly, better judgement from men themselves, we need more women in leadership.
The recent spectacle surrounding Prince Andrew, Peter Mandelson and the long shadow cast by the monster Jeffrey Epstein has produced a predictable response. Commentators call for more regulation, more scrutiny, more committees, more lawyers. Every scandal is treated as evidence that we must build another layer of oversight. Yet this instinct, to smother decision-makers in procedure, misunderstands how power actually works.
More rules do not create better judgement and they rarely produce better leaders. And they certainly do not produce the creative, complex problem-solving modern societies require. In practice they often create the opposite: timid institutions paralysed by compliance, where no one takes responsibility and real authority quietly disappears.
After years working in senior leadership, often as the only woman in the room, I have seen how decisions are actually made. I have led all-male teams, worked in all-female environments, mentored both sexes, and raised four sons. One pattern is impossible to ignore: single-sex leadership groups consistently make poorer decisions. This is something journalists often miss because they tend to work alone and are often male. They do not spend their time inside the closed-door negotiations where status, ego and ambition collide in real time.
Aristotle understood something many modern commentators have forgotten: politics is the art of managing competing interests, not eliminating them. Healthy systems depend on counterweights. No amount of process can replace the messy reality of human judgement.
Which brings us to an awkward truth. Men corrupt each other. They groom each other. The lesson of Epstein is not simply that vulnerable young women were exploited by powerful men, though they were. It is that many of the men around him were drawn into behaviour they might otherwise have avoided because they were operating inside male group dynamics that distort judgement.
Male groups have recognisable failure modes. Across psychology and behavioural economics we see the same pattern: groupthink takes hold, status competition escalates, and dissent becomes dangerous. The desire to follow the dominant figure, the alpha, can be remarkably strong. These instincts are not always bad. Male groups can be brilliant at pursuing a goal. They can hunt down an idea with impressive speed and loyalty. But in complex environments, financial markets, politics, corporate leadership, the same instincts can create risk. Surrounded only by other men, groups can drift towards ever more extreme decisions, particularly when status and reputation are on the line.
Women tend to disrupt this dynamic. This is not because women are morally superior. They are not. Anyone who has spent time in politics or business knows that women are perfectly capable of corruption, vanity and poor judgement. But on average, women bring different instincts to group decision-making. They are less inclined towards automatic loyalty and more likely to interrogate assumptions before committing to a course of action.
From an evolutionary perspective that makes sense. For most of human history women needed to assess whether a leader could genuinely protect them and their children. Blind allegiance was dangerous. Even today that instinct remains visible. Women tend to test ideas more rigorously, assess risk more carefully and withhold trust until it has been earned. This is why the lone woman on a board is so often labelled “difficult” or “risk-averse”. In reality she is disrupting the momentum of the pack.
Once women reach around a third of a leadership group, the dynamic changes. Their scepticism becomes normal rather than disruptive. The group slows down just enough to test its assumptions before charging ahead. In other words, balance improves judgement.
This is not a fashionable claim. It is increasingly supported by evidence. Research consistently shows that organisations with more diverse leadership teams make better long-term decisions. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, whose board was entirely male, has often been contrasted with financial firms that weathered the 2008 crisis more successfully with more balanced leadership. The same pattern appears in politics, as Labour women have pointed out around the boys club in No10.
None of this requires ideological crusades or bureaucratic diversity programmes monitored by lawyers and controlled by process. The real solution is simpler. Men in positions of power need to recognise that they benefit from having capable women around them, not as tokens but as genuine partners in decision-making. And women with the ability to lead need to step forward rather than assume the system is closed to them. The point is not symbolic equality. It is institutional strength.
Healthy societies depend on balanced leadership groups capable of challenging each other before mistakes become disasters. Rules and procedures cannot substitute for that.
In the end, the lesson is straightforward. Men do not simply need more regulations. They need more women in the room and it is men who should be asking women today to step forward and become MPs, board members and join their gangs.