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The global motor industry is renowned for recognising few barriers, but breaking down many. Race, religion, gender, age, political leanings, cultures and international frontiers generally don't get in the way. Vehicle manufacturers build cars, create local employment and make their products available all over the world. The people working within the industry tend to get on with their colleagues, get on with their professional rivals, get on with countries they may even be technically at war with and get on with building cars that just keep getting better and better.

Auto Express Car Reviews

By Mike Rutherford

17th March 2004

But now Volvo has gone and thrown a nail file in the works by staging a cheap, badly managed and cheesy publicity stunt at the Geneva Motor Show. This, the Ford-owned, Swedish firm did by not only erecting barriers, but doing so proudly, publicly and provocatively. In establishing an 'all-woman' team to develop, over several years, a vehicle called Your Concept Car or YCC, Volvo females blatantly banned Volvo males. Aren't there equality laws to prevent this sort of workplace prejudice and exclusion?

I'm not sure if all this qualifies as sexism, discrimination or just plain man-hating. But I do know that if a bunch of blokes in the Ford empire or indeed at any other corporation were daft enough to get together; plot for several years to develop a boys-only team; effectively ban women from having anything to do with their macho project; then get the official go-ahead by their corporate bosses to establish and publicly boast about their all-man, no woman line-up, equality groups would be up in arms. And rightly so.

Surely cars shouldn't be designed by bloke-only or women-only factions but by teams of people - cross-sectional groups which include, and in no particular order, men and women, blacks and whites, Muslims and Christians, gays and straights, those on the political left and right, the thin and the fat, the beautiful and the ugly, young and old. There's only one qualification these people really need to do the job - talent.

So were the Volvo women absolutely the best and most talented available people to work on the YCC job? Almost certainly not. By implication therefore, more suitable staff were excluded. And that can't be right in today's international business environment. It's so-called positive discrimination that's actually negative - unless you're one of the chosen Volvo women. True, most of the people who work in the motor industry happen to be male. But there are also lots of females working with them - not because they're women, but because they're the best people for the job. Which is the way it should be.

These ladies, and the employers who let them get away with their feminist nonsense in the workplace have set a dangerous precedent. What next? Design teams which include only white protestant males? Outfits whose members must have complexions of a certain shade before they can join? Or projects which you can only join if you've got the right political beliefs, passport or birth certificate? No thanks. If the Swedish firm carries on down this daft, discriminatory road, I'll be selling my Volvo in protest.