Last week I went to a charitable fund-raising dinner. It’s an annual black-tie event held in the ballroom of a prestigious hotel in the West End of London that I’ve been attending for many years. It’s traditionally been a very male-dominated occasion, however over recent years the organisers have made laudable attempts to make it more inclusive. But the unfortunate truth is that if you want to raise a handsome amount of money at an event like this, you need men. Not only do they still comprise more than half of the working population of the City of London and on average earn more than their female counterparts, but they posses all the essential attributes required for public charitable giving: namely competitiveness, ostentatiousness and naked materialism.
Generating money at a charitable auction is a counterintuitive process. Instead of appealing to qualities like benevolence, selflessness and modesty (dare I say it, more female attributes) you have to evoke their diametric opposites. I know there is a wellspring of generosity and kindness in these City bankers, brokers and traders as they outdo each other to bid eye-watering amounts of money for the holidays, artwork and sporting memorabilia on offer in the auction. But I wonder if there isn’t some guilt there too? I suspect that they feel on a subconscious level that they don’t really deserve the huge amounts of money they get paid and that by giving to charity they are undertaking a bit of voluntary wealth redistribution.