I immediately thought of Judy Dench's performance of "M" in James Bond. Turns out, the code name for the real position is "C" (which is in the article).
As the article says, the new "C" has been promoted from being "Q", her former position in the Service, while in 2021 she was "K", an even lower position.
Generally, it’s news because it helps to confirm that gender or sex-based discrimination hasn’t interfered with the career success of a female individual.
Specifically, it’s another milestone for the British intelligence and security community - one that Stella Rimington made in 1996 at MI5 and Anne Keast-Butler made in 2023 at GCHQ.
Also, this sort of thing goes “Notable for its absence, notable for the first, no longer really notable at all”. It’s hard to have the last one without the middle.
Disclaimer: Take this as a criticism of news articles like these, rather than as a commentary on gender politics.
It think that articles like these are celebrating the institution itself, rather than the individual's achievement. In particular, this paragraph stands out:
> Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer called the appointment "historic" at a time "when the work of our intelligence services has never been more vital".
When an institution faces challenges, you need a competent and bold individual at the helm. Not someone from a specific demographic group. I'm certain that Ms. Metreweli fits the bill, since this hers one of the rare jobs where the professional skills align with the personal skills required to climb up the organization hierarchy. But the statement itself seems to emphasize that the MI6 achieved something. A declaration of "we are progressive too".
The article itself says more about MI6 and C's duties, rather than about Ms. Blaise Metreweli. Granted that this is one job where the personal achievements cannot be divulged beyond a limit. But then, the article could be equally brief. This is a common pattern. Such stories use the achievements of these remarkable individuals to advertise the job instead.
In the defense such article, there is one meaningful purpose that they serve. It may attract the attention of girls and women who are a good match for the job, but may not have considered it otherwise. It also gives them the reassurance that their career growth won't be limited by their gender. That's not a bad deal in my opinion.
It shows that the glass ceiling for this role no longer exists.
Keep in mind that many women and girls have been socially conditioned to believe this type of job is not for them. Headlines like this can be inspirational in pushing back against this conditioning.
..but you don't find it strange that merit somehow only ended up in one gender over the last several hundreds of years? Especially given that there seem to have existed competent women in this time, but for some reason men chose to elect only men into high positions, to the point of preventing women from applying or getting such jobs. Then suddenly we all collectively decided that from now on, only merit is measured, but we pipe up when a woman gets elected to say that "did these people really check merit?"
It feels a bit too close to "lets only choose people like we did the last hundreds of years" when noone batted an eye if some man got chosen. If you didn't comment "but did they really check this mans credentials and merits" every time MI6 gets a new boss, then it feels a bit odd to do it only now, don't you think?
"So the scientists compared the ratings of the top hundred male and top hundred female players from Germany. And they found that the men indeed outperformed the women. However that difference can be almost entirely explained by statistics. Because the larger the population, the wider the range of measured scores—the bell curve has a longer tail. And because many more men play than women, the best male players are extreme outliers on that bell curve. As more women play, a few should also reach those extremes, right out there with the men. To which one might be tempted to say: Checkmate."
MI6 is quite a nasty secret agency. Behind all the nice hollywood-clichés, they are a very nasty organization that has a list of horrors on its name:
- albanians uprisings of the 50s
- OUN/UPA funding of the 50s
- iranian coup of 53
- guiana coup of 64
- working with the cia to arm mujahideen in the 80s
- lybian terror operations of the 00s to get back oil
- disinformation operations for iraq wars(operation mass appeal) in the 00s, and many others
- assassinations(for example in kenya even recently)
- work with nazi collaborators in many eastern countries in the past 30 years to destabilize governments
- trapping julian assange
- implication in bombing operations all across the world(for example operation goldfish)
Remember they are allowed to operate in a completly unrestricted way even against british citizens. They are as bad people as Mossad and CIA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(James_Bond)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_of_the_Secret_Intelligen...