Gosh what a surprise – women are still treated like a tiresome worthless nuisance even after we say we would prefer something different.

A bill that set targets for increasing female representation on public boards in Scotland is not working and has delivered little benefit to women, critics have claimed.

The complaints over the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018 come in the wake of statistics revealing that more than a third of listed public authorities had not achieved the key target as of December 31 last year.

The legislation demands that at least 50 per cent of non-executive members on public boards are female. Of the 143 listed public authorities, 88 had achieved the gender representation target, leaving 55 which had not.

[Aside: I do wish that UKnians would not phrase things in a way that requires the subjunctive to make sense while refusing to use the subjunctive. It makes no sense to demand that women are. If they are, there’s no need to demand, is there. It should be “demands that at least 50 percent be female” or else reworded altogether. It should also be “requires” instead of “demands.” Journalists should be required to write better.]

The figures, revealed in the third annual report on the legislation’s operation published this week, also showed the number of authorities meeting the threshold had dipped from two years earlier.

A spokeswoman for For Women Scotland (FWS), the campaign group that successfully challenged the Scottish government at the Supreme Court on the definition of a woman in the act, claimed the legislation had delivered “very little of benefit to women”.

Let me guess. Scotland is too busy forcing women to share all their spaces with men to bother with trivia like public boards forgetting women exist.

A spokeswoman for For Women Scotland (FWS), the campaign group that successfully challenged the Scottish government at the Supreme Court on the definition of a woman in the act, claimed the legislation had delivered “very little of benefit to women”.

“Far from demonstrating that the public boards act is working well, the government’s latest report shows that, seven years after the legislation was introduced, only 61.5 per cent of all public boards have achieved their target of equal representation of women,” the spokeswoman said.

“This is a drop from two years ago when the figure was 64 per cent. It is difficult, however, to have much confidence in any of the data produced when the government’s definition of ‘woman’ has been ever-shifting during this period. No one knows how many men [who have transitioned] have been included in the figures.”

The only worthwhile woman is a male woman.