I kind of like Dr. Peteron's view on these kind of questions, try flipping them around. Don't ask "Why do women earn less?" Try framing it as "What are the reasons men earn more?" Another one, "Why is it that there are so few women in high level management positions?" frame it as "Why are there so much men willing to put up with the stress and pressure of high level management positions?"
There are a lot of reasons for the inequality between men and women. I'm not saying they are "justified" or "fair" but there are some obvious (painful, even) but true reasons why men and women don't earn the same. Of course, these reasons do not specify the whole margin but they explain quite some of the variation.
> "Why is it that there are so few women in high level management positions?" frame it as "Why are there so much men willing to put up with the stress and pressure of high level management positions?"
What does it change if the answer is "It is easier for men because they have to put up with less harassment, less pressure and are more encouraged"?
>"Why is it that there are so few women in high level management positions?" frame it as "Why are there so much men willing to put up with the stress and pressure of high level management positions?"
Except this "framing" implicitly introduces the assumption that gendered differences in stress and pressure tolerance is the cause.
But you are describing "sexist outcomes" which isn't the same sense of the word. It alludes to a sexist mechanism only - whereas the board quotas are the sexist mechanism.
"Income inequality" Has been discussed plenty of time, so I'm not going to reproduce it here. In any case, there is plenty of dispute on whether it is the result of "sexism".
"domestic workload" is something society does criticise, but in any case it is a social convention only - not enforced by law.
Income inequality?
Does risk of dying on the job count as something worth higher pay?
If so, then I think you should reconsider the mantra of "wage gap".
Note: this is just the first hit on google, I'm a bit reluctant to write down an entire arguement here because you have very like already made up your mind...
Depends on where you are. Not all of these apply everywhere, but:
- lack of maternity leave
- being judged on personal appearance even in office settings because your appearance is more tied to your worth than it is for men
- when you are harsh as a boss, labelled "bossy" as a negative. I don't hear many men labelled "bossy".
- be chided about "being on your period" in case you say something people don't like
- people confusing you for secretary / non-technical role because you are not man
- people talking about things which may be sensitive to women in the workplace moreso than men and make them uncomfortable / unable to participate (for example, porn, I have seen this in my office)
- after-hours fraternizing at the bar or on the golf course (or other largely men's activity, it's never going to the salon, for example).
- harrassment / dating propositions (imo, it's not okay either way but obviously more likely for men to do to women in office than the other way around)
- late-night meetings, frequent expectation for workers to come in late and stay late (if women mostly take responsibilities of children at home, this affects them more).
- less pay because rather than keeping pays equal, companies only offer raises to those who ask
Surely there are others. Perhaps some of these seem innocuous to you, but altogether they are potent.
Tangential: I heard a wild, but interesting argument the other day about how allowing different maternity leave between men and women, ceteris paribus, would lead to gender discrimination when hiring. The reasoning was: regardless of the reason being "fair", companies would see women as having a higher chance of taking more leave than men, and thus have less value, overall.
It was an interesting argument for prohibiting differences between paternity and maternity leave, i.o.w.: you must give new fathers as much time off as you give new mothers, no more, no less.
It sounded nice so I never researched whether it was experimentally confirmed / disproven :)
I disagree. In Sweden, at least, it is my opinion that there are more things in society that are disadvantages to men rather to women. Still however, people who vouch for sexist laws as this one always seem to see women as victims.
I personally believe that this is just a part of their ideology. The idea of a patriarchy is a fixed idea which will never change no matter how much legislation that gets pushed.
I will never support such an ideology and I will probably not really respect quota hires since they are just that. They are not hired because they seemed best for the position, just to appease to some social justice laws or beliefs.
It's sexist both ways too. Even if you are a woman that really deserved to lead some company, people will think that you just got there because of the quota. Every error you do would count tenfolds against you... That can't be good.
And those negative views don't entirely come from sexism. I assume similar things would happen if there was a quota for e.g. short people. People are just jealous and claim that others don't deserve things.
Edit: If you feel the urge to dislike could you at least state what you didn't like? Or are discussions frowned upon nowadays?
It's not even about vocalizing it. You yourself could also feel that way... Always questioning if you really earned this. Leading to imposter syndrome, insecurity and so on which might really turn you into a bad leader.
Imposter syndrome is real. But if you are literally on the board of a company, I doubt it matters as much. Also, lots of people inherited rather than earned their wealth. Should we outlaw that to save them from imposter syndrome?
>That kid when he grows up might indeed feel weird about all the undeserved money...
Are you serious? How is taking money from one person who never worked for it and giving it to another person who never worked for it going to make one feel self-conscious and sympathetic to the other?
There are people who refused lottery winnings... Minds are different and weird.
Edit: To directly answer your question, It's not about being sympathetic to the other. They just didn't deserve the money. You "feel" they envy of other people and ask yourself why you and not somebody else. At least if you were the legitimate heir you knew that your family earned it somehow...
Yeah... I guess it's needed once to kinda break the resistance / bias against women. But in the long term it should definitely not exists.
I would propose slowly ramping it up to 50% over a range of maybe 20 years? Then hold it for 10, and drop it.
From there on it should be fair game. If the imbalance should happen again, then I guess it's just how it is...
(The slow ramp-up is so you don't fill up with the first best women available, which maybe might not necessarily be the best candidates... Which would lead to more bias if they fail the job, instead of the opposite.)
I think the article is saying that the results are inconclusive. They have had little effect in either direction, so now that they are the status quo, there's no reason not to keep them. Arguments of excessive regulatory overhead may or may not be compelling, but they have an uphill battle to fight.
keeping stuff that doesn't show results but feels good seems an awfully dumb thing to do. instead they need to determine why it does not do what they expected. The reason I take this view is that too many will accept a state "we feel good about it" and never work to solve the actual problem.
But according to HN people everyone is censoring them and they can't even go to work and write weird pseudoscientific rationales for why they hate diversity programs and expect their employer, who is promoting heavily and publicly lots of diversity programs, to not like this and fire them and it's all FEMINISM GONE TOO FAR!
Yeah, I also distinctly remember HN's overwhelming disgust with the practice of exposing people for marching with Swastikas ("an ancient Indian symbol!") and calling for the extermination of jews. That was right around the time that woman got "accidentally" killed by a one of the free-speech advocates driving his car into the "marketplace of ideas".
Equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity... Many things have been said by other, better informed and more eloquent people than me. I noticed this however:
“At least ten more years”
And that makes me wonder if and when this will turn into something akin the "Communism / Captialism / Whatever concept has never been tried/implemented _properly_"
Personally, I don't think striving for equality of outcome will do society any good.
A few million people died in Iraq as well under the super-egalitarian, meritocratic, no equality of outcomes democracy of the USofA, so why does choice matter so much?
That biases about race might be changing form doesn't "rule out" the idea of racism. You might as well say the increased inclusion of Irish people in the last few decades rules out racism in that period.
The idea of diversity on corporate boards isn't to mandate equal outcomes, it's that a more diverse board may be more inclined to provide equality of opportunity to the next generation.
That's why it's not a requirement for diversity in CXO positions. The board is a rather hands-off institution in most companies. They hire the CEO, on mostly just hold them accountable afterwards.
> And that makes me wonder if and when this will turn into something akin the "Communism / Captialism / Whatever concept has never been tried/implemented _properly_"
I see this as the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy of ideologies
> The essayist Spengler compared distinguishing between "mature" democracies, which never start wars, and "emerging democracies", which may start them, with the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. Spengler alleges that "political scientists" have attempted to save the "US academic dogma" that democracies never start wars from counterexamples by declaring any democracy which does indeed start a war to be flawed, thus maintaining that no true democracy starts a war. [0]
This is what bothers me the most. The thinking seems to be that by deliberately employing "positive" discrimination, someday we'll detect that bias has been eliminated, and then the government will instruct all institutions throughout the country to dismantle their discriminatory policies. Having deliberately practiced discrimination for 10, or 20, or 30, or however many years, someday we'll see it isn't needed anymore, and stop. To me, that's absurd.
For one, I doubt we'll ever detect that bias has been eliminated. Secondly, even if we did, we'll never dismantle the institutional policies of discrimination, because at that point, far too many people would be benefiting from them. We seem to be deliberately implementing institutional discrimination on the assumption that differences of outcome necessarily represent oppression.
Exactly. While there absolutely is discrimination due to systemic and personal bias, reaching for equality of outcome is much to heavy handed. The result is many innocent people being hurt at best, at worst istitutional tyranny.
If unions are anything to go by, in those 10/20/30 years powerful institutions will arise ensuring bias will always be detected, either by technical/political interference with the means of measurement, or altering the scope of what constitutes "bias".
> Xavier Fontanet, former chief executive of Essilor, a French eyewear company, quoted Charles de Gaulle as saying “one may not command without having obeyed”—his point being that women often lack the management experience that makes a good board director.
who would have thought that we'd hear this argument in 2017!!
Personally, I don't think things like this can be mandated. Yes, there is a gender gap between men and women and yes that needs to be fixed, but you need to target from the ground level and not from the board level.
What we, as a society need to do is to encourage men to be less sexist, for instance, a manger who can hire a male and a female who are both eligble should not hire a male because he 'doesn't want female', that needs to be fixed.
But I think it is wrong to say "hire 5% female candidates"
Because that is not equality. I have seen the reservation system in India and it is horrible, to be honest, it only helps the top % people but the bottom of the food chain is exactly where they were since the start, the bottom of the food chain.
Interestingly, 'reservation for women' was rejected by the female freedom fighters of India because 'they didn't want the superficial equality rights that women want in a few developed democracies' referring to obviously the suffrage movement.
But that being said, the gap exists and it'd be stupid to say that it does not.
>What we, as a society need to do is to encourage men to be less sexist, for instance, a manger who can hire a male and a female who are both eligble should not hire a male because he 'doesn't want female', that needs to be fixed.
But there are no managers who will say that. They'll rationalize it a different way that people will buy into.
> I have seen the reservation system in India and it is horrible, to be honest, it only helps the top % people but the bottom of the food chain is exactly where they were since the start, the bottom of the food chain.
I have also, and this is the point of the reservation system, to create wealthy powerhouse families in a society which had very few from those castes. For everyone who complains about it, there are many more who appreciate it for the good it does and who understand that reservations are not meant to eliminate poverty (else they'd be based on financial status) but are meant to build power and concentrated wealth in communities which had no opportunities to have such.
In India, before reservations generational wealth had cemented a very strong hierarchy. Overturning that hierarchy cannot be done solely by providing education equally, there has to be a balance shift somewhere. People are not going to voluntarily give away their inherited wealth and status, so similar wealth and status needs to be built in other communities. The best way to do this is educate some select few in that community, then perhaps they gain wealth from it, now their children get the same education they did, they inherit wealth and build some more, repeat repeat and now you have powerful families in underprivileged communities which could rival the ones in the privileged ones.
Do you really think that the reservations based on caste i.e. SC/ST not having a creamy layer is balancing the act?
I had got 150 in IIT JEE, a friend had got 70. I missed the cut off by 30marks, I am from 'open' and he was from SC, he wore woodlands shoes, Rayban glasses and he missed IITB admissions by 5 marks. Can you imagine? We were in the same school etc
Reservations system has run amok, incidentally, even Dr. Ambedkar had said that reservations need to be there only for the first 10yrs otherwise it'd have drastic effects and they are.
I am reading India after Gandhi and I appreciate all that was done by our founding fathers and mothers, I appreciate the fact of reservations, but the madness has to stop.
People ahve started to treat reservation as their 'birthright'
> Do the company now need to fire 30% of this guys and is it a valid reason for firing (company can`t get sued)?
There was a five-year period for the changeover, so under most circumstances, natural fluctuation would have eliminated all need for firing. Some companies could have also had the possibility to increase the board's size.
But yes, ultimately some firings may have been required. But note that a seat on the board isn't much like a typical job. Board members almost always have a real job, are retired, or sit on multiple boards.
Side-note, there are more woman in science in countries that's font enforce equality by law and have less woman-promoting courses at universities/clubs.
This law only affects "allmennaksjeselskap" (ASA), which there was less than 300 of in Norway last time I checked. In short they are listed on Oslo Børs (OSE) and are publicly traded. For smaller companies, also called "aksjeselskap" (AS), there are some regulation there as well, but nothing compared to this. It has more about female representation in the company in general.
Comments in this thread are all discussing the wrong topic. It wouldn't matter if 100% of corporate board members were women and minorities due to how boards are constructed over time through shareholder "elections".
Corporate boards are not a free market of ideas, they do not support or represent shareholders, society, or employees, they are monopolized self-serving power structures representing an extension of incumbent management.
Introducing diversity into a situation with already-disfunctional power dynamics (which drastically favor incumbent management because all votes not cast are cast in favor of incumbents) obviously have no impact. Corporate governance laws and proxy voting processes changing is a prerequisite for marginal board members to ever have any real power.
In principle, a quota rule can be used for power consolidation by (arguably douchebaggy) men that already occupy a relative position of power. I can imagine members of an all-male board using quotas as a means to move competitors or newcomers out of their way to the highest position.
Though it doesn't have to be quota for women, of course.
59 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 85.8 ms ] threadI am amazed that my home country, Sweden, has not followed since it is basically the feminist capital of the world.
How about:
- Income inequality
- Unequal domestic workload
- Only 22% of elected parliamentarians being female
There are a lot of reasons for the inequality between men and women. I'm not saying they are "justified" or "fair" but there are some obvious (painful, even) but true reasons why men and women don't earn the same. Of course, these reasons do not specify the whole margin but they explain quite some of the variation.
What does it change if the answer is "It is easier for men because they have to put up with less harassment, less pressure and are more encouraged"?
Except this "framing" implicitly introduces the assumption that gendered differences in stress and pressure tolerance is the cause.
"Income inequality" Has been discussed plenty of time, so I'm not going to reproduce it here. In any case, there is plenty of dispute on whether it is the result of "sexism".
"domestic workload" is something society does criticise, but in any case it is a social convention only - not enforced by law.
Have a look at the death gap!
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/how-come-nobod...
Note: this is just the first hit on google, I'm a bit reluctant to write down an entire arguement here because you have very like already made up your mind...
- lack of maternity leave
- being judged on personal appearance even in office settings because your appearance is more tied to your worth than it is for men
- when you are harsh as a boss, labelled "bossy" as a negative. I don't hear many men labelled "bossy".
- be chided about "being on your period" in case you say something people don't like
- people confusing you for secretary / non-technical role because you are not man
- people talking about things which may be sensitive to women in the workplace moreso than men and make them uncomfortable / unable to participate (for example, porn, I have seen this in my office)
- after-hours fraternizing at the bar or on the golf course (or other largely men's activity, it's never going to the salon, for example).
- harrassment / dating propositions (imo, it's not okay either way but obviously more likely for men to do to women in office than the other way around)
- late-night meetings, frequent expectation for workers to come in late and stay late (if women mostly take responsibilities of children at home, this affects them more).
- less pay because rather than keeping pays equal, companies only offer raises to those who ask
Surely there are others. Perhaps some of these seem innocuous to you, but altogether they are potent.
Tangential: I heard a wild, but interesting argument the other day about how allowing different maternity leave between men and women, ceteris paribus, would lead to gender discrimination when hiring. The reasoning was: regardless of the reason being "fair", companies would see women as having a higher chance of taking more leave than men, and thus have less value, overall.
It was an interesting argument for prohibiting differences between paternity and maternity leave, i.o.w.: you must give new fathers as much time off as you give new mothers, no more, no less.
It sounded nice so I never researched whether it was experimentally confirmed / disproven :)
The pressure on men and women to take time off after a baby diminishes the effect you speak of.
Men and women both suffer, yet men suffer in silence...
I personally believe that this is just a part of their ideology. The idea of a patriarchy is a fixed idea which will never change no matter how much legislation that gets pushed.
I will never support such an ideology and I will probably not really respect quota hires since they are just that. They are not hired because they seemed best for the position, just to appease to some social justice laws or beliefs.
And those negative views don't entirely come from sexism. I assume similar things would happen if there was a quota for e.g. short people. People are just jealous and claim that others don't deserve things.
Edit: If you feel the urge to dislike could you at least state what you didn't like? Or are discussions frowned upon nowadays?
That's their problem. They want to vocalize it, well you can fire them!
Technically they are equal, they just happened to be born somewhere different. So it should be fair, right?
That kid when he grows up might indeed feel weird about all the undeserved money...
Are you serious? How is taking money from one person who never worked for it and giving it to another person who never worked for it going to make one feel self-conscious and sympathetic to the other?
Edit: To directly answer your question, It's not about being sympathetic to the other. They just didn't deserve the money. You "feel" they envy of other people and ask yourself why you and not somebody else. At least if you were the legitimate heir you knew that your family earned it somehow...
I would propose slowly ramping it up to 50% over a range of maybe 20 years? Then hold it for 10, and drop it.
From there on it should be fair game. If the imbalance should happen again, then I guess it's just how it is...
(The slow ramp-up is so you don't fill up with the first best women available, which maybe might not necessarily be the best candidates... Which would lead to more bias if they fail the job, instead of the opposite.)
Who would've thunk.
Isn't the article saying that they didn't work?
I don't think corporate board equality was ever though of as a panacea.
Its the #hashtag way of life, the lazy.
Personally, I don't think striving for equality of outcome will do society any good.
I presume many slave owners had the same point of view.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well, isn't it just convenient that if we don't strive for equality of outcome then life will just have to remain tilted in favor of white/asian men
That biases about race might be changing form doesn't "rule out" the idea of racism. You might as well say the increased inclusion of Irish people in the last few decades rules out racism in that period.
That's why it's not a requirement for diversity in CXO positions. The board is a rather hands-off institution in most companies. They hire the CEO, on mostly just hold them accountable afterwards.
I see this as the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy of ideologies
> The essayist Spengler compared distinguishing between "mature" democracies, which never start wars, and "emerging democracies", which may start them, with the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. Spengler alleges that "political scientists" have attempted to save the "US academic dogma" that democracies never start wars from counterexamples by declaring any democracy which does indeed start a war to be flawed, thus maintaining that no true democracy starts a war. [0]
0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
For one, I doubt we'll ever detect that bias has been eliminated. Secondly, even if we did, we'll never dismantle the institutional policies of discrimination, because at that point, far too many people would be benefiting from them. We seem to be deliberately implementing institutional discrimination on the assumption that differences of outcome necessarily represent oppression.
who would have thought that we'd hear this argument in 2017!!
Personally, I don't think things like this can be mandated. Yes, there is a gender gap between men and women and yes that needs to be fixed, but you need to target from the ground level and not from the board level.
What we, as a society need to do is to encourage men to be less sexist, for instance, a manger who can hire a male and a female who are both eligble should not hire a male because he 'doesn't want female', that needs to be fixed.
But I think it is wrong to say "hire 5% female candidates"
Because that is not equality. I have seen the reservation system in India and it is horrible, to be honest, it only helps the top % people but the bottom of the food chain is exactly where they were since the start, the bottom of the food chain.
Interestingly, 'reservation for women' was rejected by the female freedom fighters of India because 'they didn't want the superficial equality rights that women want in a few developed democracies' referring to obviously the suffrage movement.
But that being said, the gap exists and it'd be stupid to say that it does not.
But there are no managers who will say that. They'll rationalize it a different way that people will buy into.
> I have seen the reservation system in India and it is horrible, to be honest, it only helps the top % people but the bottom of the food chain is exactly where they were since the start, the bottom of the food chain.
I have also, and this is the point of the reservation system, to create wealthy powerhouse families in a society which had very few from those castes. For everyone who complains about it, there are many more who appreciate it for the good it does and who understand that reservations are not meant to eliminate poverty (else they'd be based on financial status) but are meant to build power and concentrated wealth in communities which had no opportunities to have such.
In India, before reservations generational wealth had cemented a very strong hierarchy. Overturning that hierarchy cannot be done solely by providing education equally, there has to be a balance shift somewhere. People are not going to voluntarily give away their inherited wealth and status, so similar wealth and status needs to be built in other communities. The best way to do this is educate some select few in that community, then perhaps they gain wealth from it, now their children get the same education they did, they inherit wealth and build some more, repeat repeat and now you have powerful families in underprivileged communities which could rival the ones in the privileged ones.
I had got 150 in IIT JEE, a friend had got 70. I missed the cut off by 30marks, I am from 'open' and he was from SC, he wore woodlands shoes, Rayban glasses and he missed IITB admissions by 5 marks. Can you imagine? We were in the same school etc
Reservations system has run amok, incidentally, even Dr. Ambedkar had said that reservations need to be there only for the first 10yrs otherwise it'd have drastic effects and they are.
I am reading India after Gandhi and I appreciate all that was done by our founding fathers and mothers, I appreciate the fact of reservations, but the madness has to stop.
People ahve started to treat reservation as their 'birthright'
1. company have all male board members
2. company is great and successful and not one of the board members want to switch the job
3. deadline for quota is approaching
Do the company now need to fire 30% of this guys and is it a valid reason for firing (company can`t get sued)?
There was a five-year period for the changeover, so under most circumstances, natural fluctuation would have eliminated all need for firing. Some companies could have also had the possibility to increase the board's size.
But yes, ultimately some firings may have been required. But note that a seat on the board isn't much like a typical job. Board members almost always have a real job, are retired, or sit on multiple boards.
http://www.euronews.com/2018/02/11/which-three-eu-countries-...
Corporate boards are not a free market of ideas, they do not support or represent shareholders, society, or employees, they are monopolized self-serving power structures representing an extension of incumbent management.
Introducing diversity into a situation with already-disfunctional power dynamics (which drastically favor incumbent management because all votes not cast are cast in favor of incumbents) obviously have no impact. Corporate governance laws and proxy voting processes changing is a prerequisite for marginal board members to ever have any real power.
Though it doesn't have to be quota for women, of course.