Companies need to moderate office chat to stop men talking about sports because such conservations exclude women and are a “gateway” to “laddish behaviour”, the head of a professional institution said on the BBC.
Chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute Ann Francke told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday that bosses should curtail conversations about sports in the office, a staple of British workplace conversation.
“I have nothing against sports enthusiasts or cricket fans — that’s great. But the issue is many people aren’t cricket fans,” Ms Francke said, adding that it was the responsibility of team leaders to stop this “kind of banter” in order to be more inclusive.
She continued: “A lot of women, in particular, feel left out. They don’t follow those sports and they don’t like either being forced to talk about them or not being included in the conversation.”
Claiming that talking about sports was a “gateway” to more offensive behaviour, the CMI chief said: “It’s a gateway to more laddish behaviour and — if it just goes unchecked — it’s a signal of a more laddish culture.
“It’s very easy for it to escalate from VAR talk and chat to slapping each other on the back and talking about their conquests at the weekend.”
Saying that it was employers’ responsibility to “make sure everybody feels comfortable”, Ms Francke claimed that if you were to ask people in the workplace “subjected” to sports chat, they will in the majority say they feel “uncomfortable”. She added that these kinds of “behaviours” can “hold women back at work”.
While the BBC included remarks from sports journalist Jacqui Oatley, who disagreed with Francke’s assessment that men should be discouraged from talking about what interests them, this is the latest instance of the taxpayer-funded broadcaster platforming woke viewpoints.
A guest editor for the Today programme’s Christmas broadcasts criticised the editors of the BBC’s flagship current affairs show for platforming climate change extremist and anti-Brexit voices while minimising or excluding opposing viewpoints. Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore had called the broadcaster a “secular church” which “preaches and tells us what we ought to think about things. So it tells us we shouldn’t support Brexit and we should accept climate change alarmism and we have to all kowtow to the doctrines of diversity.”
A recent poll has revealed that most Britons do not trust BBC journalists to tell the truth, while another showed that half of Britons want the TV tax scrapped and for the broadcaster to earn its money.