In fact in the last series, three out of the final four Young candidates were girls.

I think you will also find that the females in YA overall have been better than the females in the regular Apprentice.

IMO too many of the females see the show more as a route into z-list celebdom than serious opprtunities in business. Yes there are some guys that do as well but not so much as the women.

The bitchiness seems to increase with every series and the females seem to be more ridicuous with their own self-belief of how good they actually are. A lot of the guys are bad, but many of the women are worse.

It never surprises me when you see the women getting picked off quite easily because most aren't up to the job IMO. I think it was Karen Brady that said about the contestants (both genders) that they are so used to being in charge they aren't used to being part of a team and working as a team.
This seems really true with the women. Every series you get little cliques very quickly and that leads to internal squabling, bitching and general failures.
In the way that some guys try to be the Alpha Male or the Top Dog, the women have a similar thing and they let it mess things up for them.

This is utter crap. Name any woman of the past 3 series who used the show as a route to celebrity? None.

I was wondering the same thing the other day... and I ws also thinking, if a man is chosen a few years in a row, will they force him to hire a woman even if none of the candidates have an interesting business plan?

I remember early on in the show's run, there was a rumour in the press that during the filming of the interviews in Series 1, the producers ordered Sugar to put Saira through to the final irrespective of how well or badly she did in the interviews, as they wanted to avoid an all-male final. Sugar addressed this in the column he had with the Daily Mirror at the time, and insinuated that had any producer told him that, he would have "smacked them on the conk."

So no, I'm guessing he won't invest in a woman purely because the producers order him to do so. Or he'll invest in a woman to keep the producers happy, but slyly invest in another (presumably male) candidate on the side.

I suspect one of the stumbling block is 250k worth of investment. I suspect LA invested less than th 250k in Susan's business.

I don't get the idea that the female candidates are getting generally more bitchy. When I think of the female candidates who I think were the most vicious just for the sake of it, almost all of them come from the first four series.

I think a lot of the women with potential are often overlooked early on in the series. For example, Paloma Vivanco and Bilyana Apostolova.

I think that Series 1 and Series 5 show very clearly that there is neither sexism nor attempts to have equal numbers of men and women on the show. In Series 1, out of the first six people to go, five of them were women. Series 5 had a four woman and one man semi-final - and the one man was the first to go.