Ann: Annual General Meeting - Notice of Meeting, page-52

Is it the case then that "business competence" is unequally weighted in men (and men of a certain societal background in particular) and this explains their historical dominance of leadership positions?

If competence isn't equally distributed in a population, that either implies perhaps a genetic exceptionalism in a sub-set of it or far more opportunity to develop that competence, perceived or otherwise.

I do think if you took 100,000 people split equally between the sexes, you'd expect a reasonable correlation of naturally 'competent' and 'incompetent' in both populations.

And the higher the sample, the more the number will trend towards an equal distribution, absent an explanation for the exceptionalism of one specific group.

With over 4 billion of each sex, I find it difficult to believe men (and again, typically men of a certain class... if you truly want to succed in life, hard to argue being born rich isn't an enormous head start) continue to dominate purely because of some inate competence over and above others and not to some extent also centuries of essentially "jobs for the boys" being entrenched in our norms and expectations.

And hell, the ASX alone has more examples than you could possibly need to point to massive salaries and opportunities going to people who don't merit it.

To argue our current system is and always has been a pure meritocracy is fantasy.

Capitalism hardly has clean hands, by the way.