Dry clean your power suits, ladies, it’s women on boards season again!

If a million spin doctors worked for a million years, they couldn’t come up with a better way for corporate Australia to publicly rend its garments over gender injustice while doing almost nothing to improve women’s lives. It’s aspirational, inconsequential, uncontroversial. Talking about putting more women on boards allows people with no interest in feminist issues to sound like they’re committed to making a real difference. Best of all, it sucks up precious airtime and column inches from far more important problems in which large companies play a significant role.

Last week it was the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors pushing for more gender equality in the tiny group of people who run Australia’s biggest companies.

Acsi’s Gordon Hagart, who wasn’t born yesterday, acknowledges that women’s under-representation is a function of systemic economic issues:

The economy has been set up in a way that is not favourable to women ... So I think it’s about a transition in the whole economy that’s necessary, it’s about having a strong pipeline of great female executives coming up through the ranks.

Curiously, Asci’s proposed 30% quota does precisely squat to address these issues. Hagart doesn’t seem too concerned to discuss what structural sexism actually is, how it’s mediated by capitalism, or how it affects women already suffering from other forms of oppression like racism or poverty.

Even if we take Hagart strictly at his word, it’s not clear that quotas have many positive impacts beyond strict representational equality. For a glimpse into outcomes of the brute force, add-women-and-stir approach we can look to the Australian Labor Party, which has had quotas for decades, and has increased female representation as a result. But Annabel Crabb points to the challenges facing those women:

There are, of course, women in politics who buck the trend and have babies in office, and they are amazing. If juggling were an Olympic sport, these ladies would never be off the podium. [...] What’s the easiest way to have a fulfilling life in politics? Have a stay-at-home spouse, or don’t have children at all.

So what’s the issue? Oh, that old canard: unpaid, undervalued reproductive and caring work, and other nominally private-sphere issues that compete with the economic demand that women engage in paid labour. The symptoms of this problem look very different depending on where you are on the socioeconomic ladder, and get worse the further down you go. We could begin to address issues such as poorly compensated pink-collar jobs, the pay gap, widespread discrimination against pregnant workers – nah, let’s just get more women on boards.

Even when quotas are implemented they serve the interests of companies, not women as a class or even the women they purport to assist. They’re a textbook bandaid solution that appropriates dissatisfaction with the status quo, harnessing it to wring more work out of wealthy women while stonewalling conversations about how socioeconomic relations impede healthy functioning for workers with families.

Our family lives, our relationships and our children, are why most of us drag ourselves out of bed every day to go to work. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a high-flying businesswoman, a single mother, or a father whose job limits the amount of time he can spend with his partner and kids: this is the stuff that actually matters. Even the phrase “work-life balance” obscures the idea that the economy should be considered an instrumental force, rather than its own source of value. The ball on which we should all be keeping our eye is promoting human flourishing.

Once we place this at the centre of our discourse it becomes clear that the women on boards narrative is a distraction, and a dangerous one at that. If professional women were to start demanding reforms like public childcare, or work arrangements that facilitate people of all genders being treated as though their non-work life commitments actually matter, there would be space for broad solidarity across lines of class and sex. The private sector clearly has a stake in preventing this sort of coalition from emerging, because organising work around family rather than profit conflicts with the fundamental operating principles of capitalism.

The best way to dampen a truly progressive program is to offer non-solutions that might mollify those with the most power to affect change: people who are already relatively privileged. Thus, business must be seen to care about the needs of high-status women, and weak incremental measures that boost their participation in prestigious occupations have the appealing virtue of perhaps boosting the bottom line. Whichever way you slice it, quotas for boards is capital looking out for itself.

Professional women, and workers more generally, have to recognise that their human priorities are in a state of conflict with business interests. When companies offer crumbs of concessions to gender equality, we can’t afford to take their word for it: we must trace the flow of benefit, and see where it accumulates.

Material improvements in women’s lives, and family life generally, are goals worth pursuing for their own sake, but they will require action both more radical and more collective than what business itself proposes. Sisters are going to have to do it for themselves, and that means identifying areas of common ground from which to proceed. We all deserve better than this, and hollow sweet talk from the top end of town is not going to cut it.