From the article;
"Miss Harman said: 'If you have got two equally qualified candidates, you might actually want to have the woman because she is a woman"
Fair enough, but equally....
If there are two equally qualified candidates, you might actually want to have the man because he is a man.
Why is this so wrong?
It should be entirely up to the employer, when faced with two equally qualified people, to choose who the hell they like (and let's face, in reality, this is what will still happen).
I have never understood how two equally qualified and capable people can be paid different salaries just because one happens to have an 'inny' and the other has an 'outy' - this is what needs to be tackled, not the half-arsed gimmicky idiocy Harman is proposing.
Frankly, I'm surprised Harman, who is becoming increasingly more absurd with each passing day, hasn't tried to make it law that you must choose the woman over the man regardless of qualification.