The International Petroleum Exchange shares with the Irish Government a curious attitude to promoting women. It's so odd that a researcher actually wrote down five categories into which the main players classify women while they lip-serviced trendy talk about how "fab" women really are.
The categories sprang to mind during all the talk about how alert Bertie Ahern was to gender in deciding the make-up of his Government team. Every news report, every spokesman or woman who spoke about the Cabinet seesaw, said unblinkingly that gender balance mattered to him.
Gender was a misnomer there, since Mr Ahern obviously wasn't trying to balance gay men against straight, transsexuals against transvestites, dykes against queers, unless Fianna Fáil has a bigger closet than anyone suspects. He meant, I think, striking a fair balance between men and women in matters of political power. The result is a single Fianna Fáil woman at the Cabinet table, with one more in attendance as the junior who wields the whip.
Over at the International Petroleum Exchange, the men were more open in talking about how they rated women. Women workers fell into five categories. "Babes" were young, attractive and eager to please, which was exactly why they had no serious professional credibility. "Mums" were unattractive, didn't go down the pub and could be ignored because they worked hard but rarely complained if passed over.
Women with attitude were "lesbians", no matter what their sexual orientation, because attitude meant they were "feminists". They gave as good as they got and talked about rights. Then came "dragons" who were old (over 35) and unattractive. Finally came the only category of women who progressed in the company: these were the women who behaved like men and were considered "one of the boys".
Ahern is the man who brought to the Irish electorate a proposal that ranked women's worth as somewhere more than an egg cell and less than a zygote, so it is to be expected that he prefers to repeat the number of women in the first Dáil cabinet back in 1918, rather than leave his love of dinosaurs behind.
But he's obviously uncomfortable with that reality. He wants, perhaps needs, women to think well of him. Somewhere deep in his psyche, a primal urge for female approval wrestles daily with a fear of female power. Women can mother him, provided they don't nag him when he comes home late.
So scared of women's disapproval that he runs away from any real engagement with them, Ahern nonetheless authorises yarns about how woman-friendly he is. Tall tales about him littered the media during the election campaign, with normally sceptical reporters solemnly repeating the mantra that women love his boyish demeanour and cheeky smile.
Boyish? The man is in his sixth decade, yet he's still more comfortable with that juvenile tag than with spins about his manliness. Ahern's fantasies about his pin-up potential are a matter for himself so long as he keeps them private. But he keeps going public about his commitment to women. He's been talking about making gender balance on State boards a priority since his 1997 election manifesto because it's important, he says. The man has done nothing to change it.
Now he's saying gender matters at the cabinet table. If so, Ahern's preference for men is notable and his preference for blondes ought make every ambitious woman in Fianna Fáil attend her colourist as soon as she possibly can.
But if gender matters at a deeper level, then Mother Ireland is about to take a sublimely oedipal dive. Policies involving both genders will be chiefly set by one woman with children and lots of middle-aged men whose wives generally don't work outside the home.
This counts for more than it seems because of Ahern's trickle-down theories. He believes that if you get it right at the top, the rest of the pyramid falls into line. But if he's got it right, the message he is sending to other chief executives is that gender only matters when it is male. If it mattered when the gender was female, there would be more Fianna Fail women in the Cabinet, after all.
Women keep hoping that work operates just like school, always on the basis of merit. Diligence, efficiency and a pleasant personality will be rewarded with recognition and promotion for those who deserve it. When it's not (and it's not, even for Ahern) they blame their own competence and try even harder to please. What Fianna Fáil woman is going to shout as loudly as Willie O'Dea? Ahern wants women to love him, he even prefers a so-called female management style of consensus and consultation, but he's not in touch with his inner woman, whatever he wants people to think.
He can run to equal opportunities policies to serenade his love of women, but he can't hide. For every €1,000 he earns, he takes €180 from the pay packets of ordinary working women. For every girl he smiles at, he condemns her sisters to earn almost 20 per cent less salary than men.
For every grant his party takes to advance the place of women in politics, dozens of brilliant women get left behind. Because it's not about merit: if it were, then Ahern's clear message is that women aren't worth it.