At last! Someone on the Left has admitted that diversity isn't so great after all

Someone once said that a good crisis should never be wasted. But with less than three months until Brexit, it is an odd time to push for gender quotas.

That, however, is the strategy of Caroline Lucas, Green MP and co-leader, as she became the latest champion of an “emergency cabinet” to stop a no-deal Brexit. Her gimmick? The cabinet would be entirely female.

“I believe women have shown they can bring a different perspective to crises, are able to reach out to those they disagree with and cooperate to find solutions,” she said in a letter to 10 female MPs published in the Guardian. This female cabinet would be tasked with pausing Britain’s departure from the EU and organising another referendum to choose between “the status quo or pressing ahead with the latest government plan”.

The merits of a second referendum or a national unity government will continue to be debated as we close in on our latest exit date, currently scheduled for October 31. But it’s not obvious how either relates to gender equality and diversity.

Even among Lucas’s natural allies in left-wing and Remain circles, her idea was not well received. Ian Dunt, a political journalist who hosts the Remainiacs podcast, said despite his admiration for Lucas “putting a gender restriction on a [government] preventing no deal is profoundly unhelpful”.

Lucas was also criticised for selecting only white women, a consequence of assembling the list from leaders and deputy leaders of Westminster political parties, and was attacked for choosing women who had backed austerity policies. Lucas apologised to “all who’ve been hurt by their exclusion” in a follow-up statement.

The pile up around this story is partly due to boredom from what is proving a particularly long August for British politicos. The obvious ludicrousness of Lucas’s proposal might have sunk it quickly if Parliament was sitting or there was some real movement on Brexit.

In fact the evidence for women being more cooperative than men is mixed, despite the common intuition otherwise. A meta analysis published in November 2011 in Psychological Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal, found “men and women do not differ in their overall amounts of cooperation”, even though in different contexts there were differences.

Amusingly, one of the areas men proved more cooperative in is single sex interactions. On this evidence an all-male cabinet might prove more effective at compromising than the all-female sort.

The details should probably be left to the experts to haggle over. But in conceding that homogeneous teams might have their uses, Lucas has lent implicit support to sceptics of diversity – despite her gushing in favour of it.

The weight of media bias, if perhaps not public opinion, is broadly pro-diversity, Lucas even got slated for choosing only white women. In an expanding number of fields adopting diversity is termed an “essential” ingredient to problem solving and innovation, with both public and private sectors straining to recruit those who are not white, male or straight.

This is sensible enough if only to widen the pool of prospective job candidates. By restricting herself to women MPs, Lucas certainly narrowed the allies she could call on to form her emergency cabinet.

But the idea – Lucas’s idea – that uniformity has advantages is rarely touted, and some deny there is any merit in assembling a team of similar people. This is even the case when diversity’s advocates concede that varied teams can prove tricky to manage.

In calling for her cabinet of pasty, middle-aged, Remainer women, Lucas has conceded that diversity is not all upside. If a Green MP can do it, can’t everyone?