Women on Boards; an update

Diversity – not just for Halloween

When I was in Norway last year, I took the opportunity to research the experience there of women on Boards – had the sky fallen in after all companies had to appoint at least 40% female Boards? (the quick answer is that nearly everyone in Norway thinks it was a non-event). There has been a flurry of research and articles recently, as other European countries consider following in Norway’s footsteps (so far Australia’s response has been restricted to requiring better reporting).

The most reported research has been this study (pdf) by Cranfield University on Gender Diversity on Boards: the Appointment Process and the role of Executive Search firms. The study was in two parts; a general review of the process of Board appointments, and then a specific set of interviews with headhunters to understand the appointment process from the key intermediaries in the process.

One of the first observations was that change in the pool of Directors appointed will come from changing the criteria – the brief given to the Executive Search firms. If you focus on experience, rather than skill set, you are going to appoint the same set of people who are already on boards:

So our next step is to say, what you’ve got to look at it’s not experience,  i.e. I want somebody who’s either been on the Board, or been on the executive committee of a large company, is I need someone who can make a contribution around the Board table. Using our competencies, it is about strategic input, about focus on results, around influencing style and skill, and integrity and independence. Those are sort of the four major areas we look at. And what we say is you can get those skills from people who haven’t been on the Board yet.

But there is also quite a lot in the study about the later parts of the process, including the interview process:

As you know, many interviews are ‘Oh, you worked at JP Morgan, do you know X? Oh, a lovely chap, he knows all these people I know’. So… but is he any good at the job? ‘Oh, we never got there. We never actually got to the meat of it’. […] Now, what you want people to do, when they go through a series of interviews, is to be asked the same questions, or at least cover the same issues. And that’s one of the weaknesses of a lot of interview processes, is that many people don’t know how to interview, and don’t know what to interview for. So our interviews are structured interviews based on behaviours, based on competencies. But if Board members don’t know how to do that, then they may come up with the wrong answer. So, actually, a lot of it is about training directors to look for the right things.

And right at the end of the process, when a fabulous woman has been found, the executive search firm also has to gee up the Chairman to appoint a woman:

The critical moment is often towards the end where there are two candidates, and the female candidate is maybe the less experienced one.  And it’s preventing the Chairman from losing his nerve when somebody else around the boardroom table may say, well I like them both, and Jim looks like a terrific chap, but look at his record, but she’s never sat on a FTSE Board before, she’s been on the Board of her own business. So there’s a danger of constant voices of conservatism, and actually part of the value that we add is just helping the Chairman say ‘No, remember what we’re after.’

This opinion piece from Allison Pearson in the Financial Times breaks down the research for those who don’t feel like reading an 80 page report:

A report this week by Cranfield School of Management bears out my theory. It says the appointment of women to FTSE 350-listed non-executive director roles is being held back by selection processes which “ultimately favour candidates with similar characteristics to existing board members”. Or penises, as they are more widely known. Chaps are more comfortable with other chaps. Only when a woman has been foisted on them and does a terrific job without crying or talking about Tampax do they start to see that we can be quite useful.

McKinsey has done the most definitive research on why this matters – performance of companies generally improves with greater gender diversity at senior levels. But the final word should go to this post from a Silicon Valley venture capitalist :

This is why I personally care about diversity: it’s the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy. When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process, that it’s not actually as meritocratic as it could be. And I believe that is exactly what is happening in Silicon Valley.

There’s plenty of good research on the subject of team performance that shows that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many different kinds of tasks. The problem is that this research doesn’t argue for demographic diversity, but rather for a diversity of perspectives. So, again, racial or gender diversity is not an end in itself. But we have to ask ourselves: if teams are consistently being put together with homogeneous demographics, what are the odds that they also will contain a diversity of perspectives? Shouldn’t we be worried that the same selection process that produces homogenous results in one area might be accidentally doing the same in the area that we care about (but that is harder to measure)?

Cross posted at Actuarial eye

Leaving the office at 5.30 to have dinner with your kids

Sheryl Sandberg tells Barack Obama how to create jobs (source Reuters)

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, always leaves the office at 5.30 so that she can have dinner with her kids at 6 (via Laura at 11d). I’m pretty sure that her commute is not like the average commute of the working mother of young children (bluemilk nails it as usual), and she probably has someone at home preparing the dinner, too, so she doesn’t have to spend the first half hour with tired, hungry, fractious kids while she scrambles some food together for everyone. She almost certainly spends lots of time later in the evening working in some way, and when she is in Washington talking to the President, she might have to be a virtual presence at dinner.

But that doesn’t invalidate the value of someone that senior speaking out about the value of family time. Too often the speech is from a man like Michael Hawker talking about how he spends 80 hours a week at work because he loves what he does. And so the model of a senior person is of someone who necessarily spends all their life at work. It becomes the only model of success.

I have found that when I am open about the fact that I leave the office early (I say 5, but it is more often 5.30 when I actually get out the door), a surprising number of senior people will admit to doing the same. But nearly all of those early leavers sneak out. They tend not to admit to wanting to have dinner with their kids, or any other reason for spending time with people not from work, in case some unspecified person thinks they aren’t serious enough.

We need to have more senior people, male and female, talking openly about the ways in which they carve out time in their lives for their families. And, of course, we need more senior people actually doing it.

Cross posted at actuarialeye

Missing girls

Crossing the Nile to go to school - But how many girls live to go to school in Africa?

Last year I read a fascinating book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl. She talks about the issue of missing women, how demographically, there should be more women than there are in many different countries of the world. The issue was the subject of an Economist cover nearly two years ago.

Tyler Cowen has alerted me to a fascinating paper on the subject, soberly entitled, Missing women: age and disease, by Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray.

The authors, instead of doing a fairly high level comparison of ratios between men and women at birth, and men and women in the population as a whole, look at projections of the relative proportions of men and women given the same relative birth and death ratios between genders that happen in the first world. They readily point out that there are many different ways to work out what the “appropriate” relative birth and death rates are, but nevertheless they come up with some fascinating conclusions.

Our study of excess female deaths by age yields two key findings. First, once we control for natural variations in the sex ratio at birth, sub-Saharan Africa has as many missing women as India and China: significantly more as a percentage of the female population. Second, the majority of missing women are of adult age. Sub-Saharan Africa has no missing females at birth, while the corresponding proportion for India is under 11%. China’s missing females, in contrast, are largely prenatal. About 37–45% of them may be classified as missing at birth. But all these regions display missing women at a variety of ages. For instance, excess female mortality up to age 15 does not account for more than a third of the total in India or sub-Saharan Africa.

So the fascinating thing about this study for me is the complexity it adds to the story. While the standard story of why there are “missing women” is sex specific abortion and female infanticide, that is only really the explanation in China. In other countries, the story is much more complex, with relative female death rates much higher than males at a variety of ages, and in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly because of maternal death rates and deaths from HIV-AIDS.

Ultimately, the conclusion of the paper is not that different from the Economist’s attention grabbing “100 million missing women”. But the reasons are far more interesting.

We find approximately 20 million missing women in India, 58 million missing women in China, and 8 million missing women in sub-Saharan Africa. Look at the enormous difference between China and the other two regions (in flows all three regions were about the same). This comes from the fact that excess female deaths in China are clustered at age 0. We reiterate, though, that these estimates must be treated with a great deal of caution.

The missing women in India and sub-Saharan Africa are largely because a variety of causes (injury, suicide, various diseases) disproportionately kill the women there.  That’s a reason to worry, and potentially an easier issue to fix, if the will and the resources are available.

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Cross posted at my new blog actuarial eye.

The cost of living longer

This article, from the US smart money magazine, is a fascinating look at the latest thinking on how long we are likely to live. You really should read it in full.

It looks at the latest thinking on longevity, and what that means for retirement planning. Some US life insurers are providing insurance older and older, even for people who have had brushes with cancer and other nasty diseases, on the basis that modern medicine really is getting much better. Some of the underwriters interviewed for the article suggest that you really should plan on living to age 95.

Many Australian financial plans tend to look at the average life expectancy and save on that basis. On average, a 65 year old Australian man should expect to live to 83, and a 65 year old woman should expect to live to 86. So if you are likely to live to 86 (based on your current age) you should make sure you have enough capital and income to last that long. If you die sooner, at least you can pass on the left over money to your heirs.

But what if you live longer? Most Australians would assume they will live off the aged pension in that case. And it is generally enough so that you won’t starve (although if you don’t own your own house you’ll find it tougher). But the aged pension is not a huge amount of money. The maximum rate for a single pensioner is $748.80 per fortnight, and $564.50 per person for one half of a couple. That’s $19,536 for a year for the single pensioner.

Longevity is a real risk, but not one that most people are willing to insure against. It feels like a bet that you lose twice. If you die too soon, you’ve missed out of years of life, and an insurance company got to keep your money. I blogged about this years ago. I don’t believe the longevity insurance (generally annuities) will ever be more than a tiny niche product in Australia. But it is still a risk most people should think about.

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Cross posted at my new blog actuarial eye.

Fertility update

Last month, the annual fertility rates were released by the ABS. I last did a post on this two years ago, so it is time for an update.

My broad conclusion was that fertility rates are pretty stable in Australia, with the very important caveat that that stability is in the number of children the average woman has in her lifetime, not necessarily how old she is when she has them.

So first, the headline. In the last two years, the total fertility rate for Australia (which represents the average number of babies that a woman could expect to bear during her reproductive lifetime, assuming current age-specific fertility rates apply) has dropped from 1.97 in 2008 to 1.89 in 2010. That is a reasonably significant drop (nearly 0.1 of a child!).

But the movement in the headline fertility rate is always much more than the movement in the average fertility for a woman over her lifetime. Below, you can see that the lifetime fertility rate for women this century has stayed quite stable.

Source: ABS, my own analysis

Women born in 1933 had the most children, on average – 3.1 in total. But women born in 1966 (the most recent date for whom lifetime projection is reasonable) are expected to have 2.05 babies, on average, over their life.

So why does the headline rate move around so much? It is all to do with when women have their babies. Those women born in 1933 had already had two of their children by the age of 28.  In another three years, on average, they’d had another half a child. In contrast, the woman born in 1966 had had one child by the time she got to 28. And it took her until the age of 33 to have the next half a child (on average). But she was still having children in her late 30s and 40s – she was having 50% more children then than her mother’s generation 30 years earlier.

This graph shows that effect.

Source: ABS and my own analysis

Interestingly, the generation from 1906 shown in this graph is much more similar to that woman born in 1966. While the woman born in 1906 had more children in her twenties than her granddaughter’s generation, she kept having them well into her late 30s and 40s, even more than women who are that age now.

Every year the news of the latest statistics gives rise to articles like this one, pointing out that Australia is in danger of not reproducing its population. But while we do seem to be dropping under replacement rate slightly, the bigger news is the change in the age of most parents – that’s the main message from this year’s statistics.

Cross posted at my new blog actuarial eye.

Travelling Feminist: Jeanne Mance

Statue of Jeanne Mance in front of the Hotel Dieu in Montreal

Jeanne Mance was one of the founders of Montreal. A devout Christian, she moved from looking after the sick in France to founding a hospital in Montreal, as well as raising money from the cream of French society to continue the project of healing the sick and developing the tiny French outpost of Ville Marie into the town (and later the city) of Montreal.

Jeanne Mance was born in 1606 in rural France, the second of 12 children of a haut bourgeois family. After seeing her brothers and sisters into adulthood, she moved smoothly into religious service, nursing the victims of the 30 years war and the plague that killed nearly half the people of her town. Through a cousin, she learned of the New France settlement in what is now Canada, and was inspired. After spending some time in Paris trying to work out a way into the religious groups who were moving to New France, she met Angélique de Bullion, a rich woman who wanted to provide money found a hospital in New France, if Jeanne would found it for her.

So Mance, with her 40,000 livres, joined the founders of Ville Marie (now Montreal) and sailed to Quebec in 1641. They arrived too late in the year to start the settlement, so after wintering in Quebec, they sailed down to Montreal island the following spring. Mance had wanted to go and work directly with the Huron, the local tribe, to convert them to Christianity and heal the sick, but because of her promise to Angélique de Bullion, she stayed in Ville Marie and built a hospital.

This was at the beginning of the Iroquois wars – the Iroquois were an Indian nation east and south of Montreal, who were allied with the British. The Huron, who were north and west of Montreal, were allied with the French. So the new settlers of Ville Marie (which was the border at this stage) were frequent victims of Iriquois attacks, meaning that Mance had plenty to do in her new hospital.

Once she had set things going, she returned to France to look after the funding and political side of things. She did this three times altogether, each time bringing back more money from the various sponsors, and also (on her second trip) bringing back more staff with her. She lent the money to the Ville Marie township at least once, as they needed it to keep the township going, and also dealt with many other issues as part of her role as leader of her hospital.

The weather of Montreal was (and is) harsh – much harsher for a population that were living in log cabins. The Iroquois were always close, and frequently attacked, leading to danger for the hospital, as well as complex injuries to deal with. Her second trip to France was partly a personal one – Mance had broken her arm badly and was unable to use it – she was hoping (unsuccessfully) for some better medical care there. And one of the biggest challenges she had to face was a society that wasn’t especially used to women in leadership roles, even religious ones.

Nevertheless, by the time she died, Mance had seen her hospital, and her town, well established. Today she is well remembered for her impact on the city – the Montreal musuem of archeology and history describes her as Montreal’s cofounder.

Travelling Feminist: Dona Catalina de Erauso

Dona Catalina de Erauso was also known as the Nun Lieutenant. She was born in 16th century Spain, and destined by her family for a nunnery. But she rebelled, and escaped at the age of 15 for a life of adventure. She managed to get to South America, where she became a soldier in the Spanish Military, where she was very successful until, after one too many brawls, she confessed her secret on her (she supposed) deathbed. The catholic church accepted her back into the convent (as she was still technically a virgin, despite many affairs with women), until she got sick of the convent life, and went back to adventuring in Spain.

She was born in San Sebastian, Spain, in 1592. She was part of a big family, and a younger daughter, so at the age of 4 she was sent to a nunnery. But at the age of 15, just as she was about to take her vows, she rebelled and escaped. She cut her hair, donned men’s clothing, and decided to seek her fortune. This was the time when Spain was conquering South America. There were enormous riches to be had there for an adventurer. So she became a cabin boy for a ship bound for the Indes, jumped ship in Panama, and ended up in Peru.

In Peru she found a job as a store manager. In the first of many ambiguous sexual encounters, she duelled with a relative of her employer, and as a solution, her employer suggested she marry his mistress (which would have kept both of them handily available for him). But she escaped to Lima where another encounter with a pretty woman led to trouble that Dona Catalina had to escape from quickly.

Luckily, the indigenous population in Chile was revolting, so the Spaniards needed soldiers. Dona Catalina enlisted, becoming a second Lieutenant and distinguishing herself in battle. She met up with one of her brothers there (who didn’t recognise her) and was generally very successful. Sadly though, after three years, she accidentally killed that brother in a duel. They were both seconds to others, and jumped into the fight on opposite sides when the fight started getting dangerous.

Dona Catalina was so devastated that she had killed her brother that she deserted the Army and wandered through the Andes from town to town, gambling, picking fights, and generally gaining a reputation as a serious outlaw. In Cuzco, getting into yet another brawl, she was seriously injured, and convinced she was dying. After receiving the Last Rites, she confessed her gender, and then astonishingly, recovered.

She fled, pursued both for being an outlaw, and for being a woman, until she surrendered to a local Bishop. He had her examined by midwives, who pronounced her both female, and a virgin, so she was placed back in a convent in Lima. Unfortunately communications were better than you might expect in the 17th century, and word came from Spain that she had never actually taken her vows as a nun, so she was tossed out of the convent.

She decided that Spain might be a better place for her, so set out for Spain, to be astonished by crowds hailing her everywhere she went. After a few false starts, she managed to get to Rome to appeal to the Pope for dispensation to continue dressing as a man, and to appeal to the King of Spain for a pension for her military service. Both appeals were successful, and she lived out her life back in South America (in New Mexico) as a mule driver, dying in 1650 at the age of 58.

Her memoirs were published in 1829 (allegedly written in 1626) and translated into English in 1908, with substantial corroborating documentation proving beyond doubt that she did really exist and that many of the bizarre things she claimed did really happen.

She was clearly a transvestite, and had many affairs with many willing women. But it is easy from this historical distance to interpret her life in ways that reflect your own view of a standard life for a woman back then. The most astonishing thing that Dona Catalina did was to live her own life, without regard for the box that women were put in at the time. She seems to have rebelled at every aspect of that box that was possible – dress, gender appearance, sexual relationships, violence, power, independence, religious freedom…

An amazing person, who took her own course through life, and enjoyed the adventure.

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Note on pronouns: Different sources on Dona Catalina de Erauso use different pronouns. I have chosen to use the feminine: “she/her” despite the fact that she spent most of her life as a man.

Travelling Feminist: Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs was a writer and activist primarily on urban planning, the economics of cities, and decay. She moved to New York from Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, and lived there for more than thirty years before moving to Toronto, Canada. She wanted to be known as an economic theorist on cities, but she is best known for two intertwined pieces of activism and writing; she was the major organiser of a campaign to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway through New York’s downtown in the 1960s, and campaigned against many other urban improvements in the area, and she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a polemic disagreeing with most of the major urban theorists of the time (my review is here).

Jacobs was born in Pennsylvania in 1916 and after finishing school she moved to New York, where she worked as a writer and stenographer, both freelance and for trade journals, often writing stories about various districts of New York and what made them tick. She married in 1944, and had three children. Although she didn’t go to university in a formal sense, she spent two years studying an eclectic mix of courses at Columbia University. She lived in Greenwich Village in New York, and parlayed that experience, plus her wide experience of the districts of New York from her writing career into a wide ranging book about urban planning – the Death and Life of Great American Cities.

This was not only a withering critique of current planning techniques, but proposed radically different ideas for how cities should be rebuilt. She was in favour of diversity, dynamism and mixture – arguing that neighbourhoods worked best when they were a mix of rich and poor, residents and businesses, cultural and economic. Her major ideas were:

Her major theses were that for a city to work:

• A street or district must serve several primary functions.
• Blocks must be short.
• Buildings must vary in age, condition, use and rentals.
• Population must be dense

Urban planning in cities has never been the same.

Reading the book now, fifty years later, many of her ideas seem obvious, especially if you have lived in a city planned by someone who has read her work. But at the time they were incredibly radical, and were harshly criticized, particularly by the university educated men who were responsible for the urban planning of New York at the time. The idea that diversity improves a city and makes it safer was radical then, and still radical now, there are always residents trying to move other users of the city out of their neighbourhoods, particularly as they gentrify.

She wrote several other books about the economy of cities, but her best known book, because it changed the paradigm, was her first. She put all her principles into action by campaigning against many proposed improvements to her own and other parts of New York – in a documentary about New York on PBS, one episode of 14 was devoted to her battles with Robert Moses with Jacobs campaigning for neighborhoods to stay as they were and not to be replaced by expressways and Le Corboisier style apartment blocks.

She moved on to Toronto in the late 70s, when she was worried that her sons would be drafted, and immediately became a major campaigner in city planning there. But her influence in New York, and many other cities lived on, as the power of community became something recognised as a force for change in city planning.

It is rare for a thinker in any field to change it singlehandedly as much as she did.

Travelling Feminist: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist, novelist and lecturer for social reform in the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She is most famous today for her novella The Yellow Wallpaper, a semi-autobiographical work she wrote after a bout of post-partum psychosis.

Gilman was born in 1860, in Connecticut to a family which was impoverished by her father leaving when she was five. She grew up moving around (she attended 7 different schools) and with several aunts (including Harriet Beecher Stowe) at various times, as her mother could not support the family. She spent a lot of time reading in public libraries, so although her formal education was fairly rudimentary, she had read widely and had great general knowledge by the time she reached adulthood.

She became an artist, and supported herself by designing trade cards, and married a fellow artist, Charles Walter Stetson, in 1884, despite not being sure if he was right for her. She had a daughter, Katherine, the year after, and suffered serious post partum psychosis, for which doctor’s treatment was “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time… Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.”. By 1888, she and Charles had both decided that they must separate, for the sake of Charlotte’s mental health, and Charlotte moved to California with her daughter.

In California, she became very active in feminist and reformist organisations, writing and editing for several of them. In 1890, she had a very successful year, writing The Yellow Wallpaper, as well as fifteen other works, a mixture of poetry, prose, fiction and non fiction.

As an example of living by her feminist principles, in 1894 Charlotte sent her (now 9 year old) daughter to live with her father, and his new wife (a good friend of Charlotte’s). She believed that it was important for both father and daughter to know each other.

By this time, Charlotte was becoming an important feminist and reformer. She was a successful speechmaker, who earned her living making speeches, as well as a poet, and novelist. She represented California at the national Suffrage convention, and the International Socialist and Labour congress in Great Britain. She began writing on economics, and women, and her book Women and Economics propelled her into the international spotlight. In it and its successor The Home: its work and Influence, she argued that the domestic environment oppressed women through the patriarchal beliefs upheld by society. Gilman argued that male aggressiveness and maternal roles for women were artificial and no longer necessary for survival in post-prehistoric times. She wrote, “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver”.

She moved back east to New York, in 1893, and in 1900 married her cousin, Houghton Gilman, and their marriage seems to have been a happy one. He died in 1922, suddenly, and she moved back to California to be near her daughter. In 1932, at the age of 72, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and in 1935 she took her own life using an overdose of chloroform, choosing “chloroform over cancer” as she wrote in her suicide note.

Reading the issues that she campaigned about and wrote about – the assigning of gender roles through toys early in a child’s life, the need for reform of the home to enable women to live equal lives with men, and the need for more equal relationships between men and women to make for happy marriages. It seems sad that today she is remembered mostly for The Yellow Wallpaper when she had so much more to say.

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This is part of a serious of notable women from where we are as we travel the world.  Unusually, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was actually a feminist – most of the others have been notable for ways in which they stepped outside their assigned gender roles in times when that was very difficult. I’d love suggestions for future subjects – our itinerary is here.

Travelling Feminist: Gráinne Ní Mháille

Gráinne Ní Mháille, or Grace O’Malley, known in Irish folklore as Granuaile, was chieftain of the  Ó Máille clan of the west of Ireland in the 16th century, and described by some as a pirate queen.  In her long life, she was the effective head of different Irish clans, the O’Flaherty and O’Malley clans, had her own force of mercenaries, and met with Queen Elizabeth of England in an effort to persuade the English to back off on their creeping takeover of Ireland.

Clare Island, and the west coast of Ireland, Granuaile's stronghold

Granuaile was born in 1530, the only child of the head of the O’Malley clan and his wife, from the west of Ireland. The clan was a seafaring one, and controlled land in what is now County Mayo with a string of castles facing the sea.  The family taxed anyone who fished in their waters, and traded by sea around the region (as far away as Spain). When Granuaile begged her father to go on one of his expeditions, he refused her, saying that women didn’t belong on ships as their long hair got in the way. She took him at his word, and cut her hair short, leading to her lifetime nickname of Granuaile – Grace the cropped (or bald).

She married the heir to the O’Flaherty clan, Donal, and had three children with him. His nickname was Donal of the battle, and he spent a lot of their marriage fighting nearby clans, notably the Joyces. After he died in yet another battle, she captured his castle back from the Joyces, and then set up her headquarters on Clare Island, off the west coast of Ireland, with many of the O’Flaherty followers, who were very taken with her leadership. At this time she expanded the family business from taxing fisherman to taxing anyone plying the waters that they regarded as their own. Any ships would be stopped and boarded, and asked for a share of the cargo in return for safe passage to Galway. Resistance was met with violence, as they took their tribute by force, and then vanished into the many sheltered bays in the area.

The line between piracy and toll is a grey one; most histories would say that she passed it. Over time, she gradually expanded her operations up and down the west coast of Ireland, and onto land as well, attacking castles of nearby clans, in order to add to her holdings. Over time, she became very wealthy and powerful, and a focal point for resistance to the gradually increasing attention of the English lords, who were trying to assert their authority.

She then married a second time, 20 years after her first marriage, to Richard Bourke, an important scion of the Bourke clan, who were nominally the overlords of the O’Malleys. The marriage was said to be so that Granuaile could expand her prestige and holdings; with the marriage she gained a castle, Rockfleet castle, as well as more harbours that would be useful to her fleet of ships. By this time, she was already powerful in her own right, and some stories suggest that the marriage only lasted a year; long enough for O’Malley to have another child, and to annex Rockfleet castle for good.

During this time, the English Tudors were gradually strengthening their hold on Ireland. Richard Bingham was the Lord President of Connacht, with the task of increasing control over the local lords that had effectively been self-governing up till now. After much skirmishing (which included Granuiale’s castle being besieged by the English, with Granuiale reportedly throwing boiling oil down at the besiegers), Bingham captured two of Granuiale’s sons, and her half brother. Granuiale sailed to England, and petitioned Queen Elizabeth for their release, as well as the removal of Richard Bingham and a number of other demands. The two Queens met (with Latin their only common language) and Queen Elizabeth liked Granuaile so much that she acceded to most of the requests, despite Richard Bingham declaring that she was “nurse to all rebellions in the province for this forty years”. 

Granuiale is not mentioned in many of the official histories of Ireland (she doesn’t appear in the Richard Bingham biography on wikipedia, for example) which must be partly her piracy, as well as her gender. But she is the stuff of legend, and the subject of many songs and stories, and was a force to be reckoned with for anyone trying to sail the seas of Ireland while she ruled them. Her castle at Rockfleet can be visited (although we didn’t manage it, too far from our very rural abode).

Thanks to John for suggesting Granuiale for this series.