Quite frankly, no, it's not. The article touches on this, and I'd easily bet my house that, if it gets that far, that courts will eventually invalidate this law.
That said, there is hardly any company that would want to be the plaintiff in this case: "So, you're the company that led the lawsuit trying to keep corporate boards all white and male" is what the headlines will say, and no corporation would want to be branded as such.
As much as I support equality and diversity, I'm even more strongly opposed government over-reach. The state shouldn't have a say in who gets a job at a private (non owned by state) company.
As the article state, I hope this will get over-turned by the courts.
This would set a bad precedent. If the state can dictate the kind of person gets a highly coveted job, what else can state dictate?
Literally impossible to provide equitable outcomes to all possible segmentations of humans since those segments can be gerrymandered as easily as our geographic definitions used in the past. For instance, the most hyper-modern views of gender vs sex.
Yes it is. And that's what we've done as a society for hundreds of years in the US. That we are now attempting to fix that will obviously be seen as an attack, because losing privilege is never easy.
Will you expand on how you see this distinction and how the distinction matters here?
I understand the difference between equity and equality, but I don’t know what exactly you mean to imply here, and don’t want to draw any hasty conclusions about this comment.
Equity by its normal dictionary definition is great.
But as the critical race theory worldview defines it, "equity" involves unequal treatment of people and discrimination (decisions made about how to treat people) on the basis of race.
The idea is to retroactively create equal outcomes, not equal opportunities in the present.
The problem is: a society can't create either equal outcomes or equal opportunities by intentionally discriminating one way or another, since doing so (1) fails to solve problems at their source and (2) creates new problems.
> The problem is: a society can't create equal outcomes or equal opportunities by...
Society can't create equal outcomes, period. People don't want the same things in life. Some want to be of service to other people, some want to be rich so they can buy a yacht. You can't just give yachts to everyone and call that equality.
We do need safety net and equal opportunities
Personally I think the whole idea of equality is stupid because it just makes people compare their life to others instead of thinking about what they want in life. But again if we have to have equality then it's equal opportunities and more importantly, safety net.
Federal government already says you can't discriminate.
They aren't saying, "you have to hire this person". They're saying you can't hire exclusively this type of person that currently dominates the top of society.
Given that these boardrooms don't diversify themselves, what is the actual problem with it?
It doesn't mean that at all. You can hire a black person and not fire anyone. They may choose to fire someone, but given these are board positions, and it literally takes just one person -- they can easily accommodate simply hiring someone.
If that was the literal rule (you had to fire a white male) then yes, I would be against it. The intent isn't to be spiteful against white males. It's to give space at the table for other groups that are intentionally excluded due to their race.
These are board members. They are not hired in the first place, and generally need to be re-appointed every few years. This law has been slowly ratcheting up, so either people have simply been not re-appointed to the board, or they have increased the size of the board to include new members who were chosen from more diverse backgrounds.
This is starting to sound similar to equity laws established in South Africa, which have not had good outcomes. Preferential treatment like this, not based on merit, is unfair and could breed a lot of resentment.
At a practical level, it means you end up with particular slots reserved for particular demographics. What happens when the person from $demographic_one retires from the board? Do you use an impartial search process? Or are you legally obligated to reject certain applicants based on their demographics?
I understand the appeals to equity vs equality. I'm saying this is a subtle distinction hinging on who is making choices and how. I don't want the government deciding who is diverse enough or historically oppressed enough or underrepresented enough. It will get it wrong far too often.
It's going to be one diverse person at a lot of those boards and they will get the stigma of being the person that was put there because the actual good candidates had the wrong skin color. No matter how qualified they might actually be, they can't escape the looks.
Plus, by making this a factor, you're just kindling actual racism by pitting white males against everyone else. The resentment created by rejecting someone for their gender or color of skin does not subside just because the attributes happen to be white and male.
I get the intention, but fighting racism with racism just doesn't work.
Do white males feel like they are all unfairly on the board because they passed over all the black candidates? No. They think they're there on merit, because well --- of course, they're white.
So that's your counter? Nothing against the actual merit of the statement? White people don't naturally assume they have their positions on merit? How many whites actually think, "Maybe I shouldn't have this position because of the advantage I've been given being white"? Seriously. How often do white males seriously ponder this?
> No. They think they're there on merit, because well --- of course, they're white.
You leave no room for the possibility that people in such positions are self aware, or even capable of understanding the broader context. I suspect this is what folks are reacting to.
In general, people may more likely believe they got where they are based on merit when they're higher up on the totem pole. That makes sense to me. Where you lose me is when you say that someone's skin color makes them have even more of a tendency (and to say that "of course" that's the way it works).
The poster I was responding to was noting that white people would look askance at blacks on the board, but I assume not whites. Both are at a high position, it only one group would be looked down on for any sort of privilege granted them. It is a function of race. Not an inherent function of being white, but rather the culture that allows white people to always believe “I did this myself”.
> Both are at a high position, it only one group would be looked down on for any sort of privilege granted them. It is a function of race. Not an inherent function of being white, but rather the culture that allows white people to always believe “I did this myself”.
How is "looking down on for any sort of privilege" a function of race? I thought it was a function of the asymmetrical nature of the privilege.
It's rather amusing you assign the frequency of certain types of thinking to skin color.
Do you think people who are black think "damn, I love chicken/watermelon/grape drink/stealing things/being violent! Do you think people of Asian descent are all good at math?
Like I don't even understand how you can be so blind to the self-referential inconsistency here.
Also, for the record? If you can talk the talk, and walk the walk, or at least demonstrate some aptitude at getting the job done so the person hiring you can be reasonably comfortable they aren't just bringing on an anchor; that is infinitely more likely to factor into getting you a position than skin color.
I do think certain lines of thinking are tied to skin color, for white and black people. Not because they are inherent in the color of skin, but because society created the norms for this kind of thinking based on skin color.
Are they in that position because they are white, or are they in that position because they were born in privileged families? My country has had predominantly white, male Prime Ministers. What's even more remarkable is that every single one of them over the past 20 years went to highly exclusive private schools. The sort of private school that costs more than a good portion of adults earn, i.e $40k per annum.
When you disparage an entire group based on skin colour and gender, you're being a racist and sexist. You're being highly offensive to the majority of white men who weren't born with silver spoons. If you look at the most successful tech founders you'll see a pattern of them being born into wealthy families with educated parents. 50 years ago, most wealthy and educated families were white, which is why you see so many of these founders today. For example:
Mark Zuckerburg - parents were a psychiatrist and dentist. They literally hired software developers (in the 1990's) to tutor him.
Bill Gates - father was a prominant laywer, mother was on executive boards. Access to computers before they were even a thing.
Sergie Brin - Father was a professor, mother a NASA researcher. Private schools.
Larry Page - Father had a computing professor, mother was a computing instructor. Private schools.
Bezos - wealthy family (Grandfather was regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commision).
I’m not even talking about just the wealthiest. How many white firefighters ever question if they got the job because they were white? White people rarely question the accumulated privilege that got them to where they are.
Yes, there are public montessori schools. larry went to a montessori school when he was younger. They are not prohibitively expensive. Sergey's parents were dissidents.
Any argument made that Larry or Sergey had exceptionally monetarily copious upbringings is merely false; they had fairly middle class upbringings by parents who idolized math and science. They both parleyed that through public colleges to positions at Stanford.
Sure get a black in. Then a brown in. Then a LGBTQ in. Then a woman in. Majority consumers don't give a damn how diversify those companies are. Only the most competitives survive. USA had to ban Huawei to stop the competition. Other companies not going to give a shit for this diversity nonsense. If you passed those white males who are truly more capable, guess what? China will reward them handsomely when they go over bringing tons of companies secret. Save a black killed thousands jobs. Save a penny pound foolish.
A national government requiring that hiring decisions be made on the basis of gender or race, and the response is "what is the actual problem with it?"
> They aren't saying, "you have to hire this person". They're saying you can't hire exclusively this type of person that currently dominates the top of society.
No, that's not what Federal anti-discrimination law says. It only says you can't refuse to hire certain people on the basis of a protected characteristic (of which race is one, but not the only one). It says nothing about refusing to hire certain people for other reasons that don't have to do with a protected characteristic.
(Btw, corporate boards of directors aren't even "hired"; they aren't employees. So it's not even clear what, if any, Federal anti-discrimination laws about hiring and employment would apply to them.)
> Given that these boardrooms don't diversify themselves, what is the actual problem with it?
There are two actual problems. One is that you can't have a government that only exercises its power wisely. For every mandate the government makes that happens to move things in the right direction, there will be many more that move things in the wrong direction. The people who are attracted to government jobs where they get to tell other people what to do aren't benevolent helpers; they're people who like power. All history shows that such people are precisely the people you don't want telling other people what to do.
The second problem is that dictating that people of certain races must belong to corporate boards is just as wrong as dictating that people of certain races can't belong to corporate boards. Both are looking at something that is irrelevant to the actual job, which means they aren't actually improving the corporations; the corporations can still do just as much damage as they did before, just now they'll be doing it with a "diverse" board.
The only real way to fix corporate governance is for people who would do better jobs than the board members of current corporations to form their own corporations and out-compete the current corporations.
> No, that's not what Federal anti-discrimination law says.
I wasn't referring to Fed Discrimination Laws. I was referring to the California law. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
> The people who are attracted to government jobs where they get to tell other people what to do aren't benevolent helpers; they're people who like power. All history shows that such people are precisely the people you don't want telling other people what to do.
Why do you think that's not already the world we live in? Police officers are the epitome of this. I'm just not convinced things get much worse with this.
> The second problem is that dictating that people of certain races must belong to corporate boards is just as wrong as dictating that people of certain races can't belong to corporate boards.
I disagree with this. They are vastly different. One is completely excluding a group from the table. The other is ensuring that a group has a spot at the table. And boards, in particular, are the type of position where there are many qualified people. If we did a controlled study I'd be shocked if there was a negative difference in performance of companies with Black board members.
> The only real way to fix corporate governance is for people who would do better jobs than the board members of current corporations to form their own corporations and out-compete the current corporations.
In order to do that you have to fix a bunch of other stuff in society as well. Companies don't live in a meritocratic bubble.
Honestly there is not right angle to race. Saying "black people cant be at the board of companies" is just as wrong as saying "some black people have to belong to it". That being said, when only white people are at the board of companies without that being a calculated strategy, there is also a problem. If only white people come out on top where - allegedly - the smartest people belong, wouldn’t it be the place of the state to ensure that a fair chance is given to everyone from birth up to professional life, instead of trying to force an artificial standard upon companies?
The problem is that the only real solution is a lot more extreme. I think once women are pregnant they go into managed care and babies are immediately taken at birth into academies (with no knowledge of parents) until adulthood. But that will never happen. Unfortunately short of that we’re likely to never have real equality.
You don't. "Compounding advantage" is a fact of life. Historically, the societies that have dealt with this unpleasant fact of life the best have been those that had some concept of "noblesse oblige"--if you are one of the fortunate ones with "compounding advantage" on your side, you have an obligation to use those gifts to help others less fortunate than you. But trying to erase the advantage doesn't work; every time it has been tried, it has just ended up causing even more misery (and in many cases lots of deaths).
> I think once women are pregnant they go into managed care and babies are immediately taken at birth into academies (with no knowledge of parents) until adulthood.
In other words, you've just reinvented Plato's Republic. Historically, the closest things to this have been societies like the Puritans or Geneva under John Calvin, or in the 20th century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. How well did those experiments in "managed care" work out?
The closest thing to it in today's world is probably China or North Korea. If you think that's a good idea, you're welcome to go live in one of those countries.
> Unfortunately short of that we’re likely to never have real equality.
We won't have "real equality" even with such a draconian plan, because the inconvenient truth is that every human being is a unique individual. There is no such thing as "real equality" because human beings are all different. You can't pigeonhole human beings into boxes. You can't "manage" their care so they fit into whatever preconceived utopian fantasy you happen to have. Human beings are free individuals and we all have to figure out for ourselves how best to use whatever we have been given. And since we all get given different things, we are going to end up wanting different things, needing different things, and making different choices. No central planner can possibly comprehend all that. And every time it has been tried, it has ended up costing a lot of lives and a lot of misery even for those who managed not to be killed outright.
I’m not advocating such a plan. Just pointing out that pretty much anything we do short of that plan created a society that will favor whites people. When laws like those in a California get passed whites get up in arms about fairness. Blacks look around and think ”this is what gets you upset about fairness?”
> I wasn't referring to Fed Discrimination Laws. I was referring to the California law. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
It wasn't since you explicitly said "Federal government" in your previous post. I agree that state laws can say different things.
> Why do you think that's not already the world we live in?
I didn't say it wasn't. If you already agree that what I said is the case, then you should be all the more opposed to more of the same.
> I'm just not convinced things get much worse with this.
Any extension of government power makes things worse. If the increment of "worse" seems small with some particular change, well, the phrase "frog-boiling" wasn't coined for nothing.
> One is completely excluding a group from the table. The other is ensuring that a group has a spot at the table.
You are misunderstanding my point. The current state, where many corporate boards are all of one race and one gender, is not a product of government fiat; it's a product of private decisions. But there have been cases in the past where similar states were products of government fiat. Those past government fiats are now pretty much universally agreed to have been very bad things. My point is simply that this is the same kind of thing, and should be considered bad for the same reasons. The issue is not "spots at the table". The issue is government fiat.
> In order to do that you have to fix a bunch of other stuff in society as well.
Like what? If you mean, like certain corporations having huge advantages because they have privileged access to things like loans with government printed money, lobbyists with the ear of government officials, and so on, yes, I agree all those things need to be fixed--and they're all just more examples of government power being misused. As the saying goes, the root problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell. That is what needs to be fixed.
> Companies don't live in a meritocratic bubble.
In a free market, where the government did not play favorites at all, they would--they would either have to make and sell something people want to buy, or go out of business. That's the only kind of "merit" that matters to us as consumers. But we can't exercise that ultimate control if the government keeps getting in the way.
If you have an open board seat, and your other five positions are currently held by "white males", you are now forced to discriminate based on race/gender. By law you would not be allowed to appoint a qualified potential candidate because they have the "wrong" physical attributes. It's abhorrent.
I walked around my neighborhood today, there are several houses under construction. The framing and roofing crews are staffed entirely by hardy people of only one gender and with little ethnic diversity.
I sometimes watch professional sports, in particular basketball. There is very, very little diversity.
My son is in his first year of teaching elementary school. He tells me he is almost alone in the school, gender-wise.
I think this is a very complex topic, with lots of nuances.
The road to hell is good paved with good intentions, but I don't really see hell over the horizon on this one.
Demographics are funny because they're really easy to satisfy. People come from many backgrounds.
This is just one of many restrictions on individual choice we make for the sake of social cohesion. All of us might choose to work for below minimum wage, but there are real risks there, so we ban it. All of understand how one might end up with a board of all white men, but there are risks there as well, so now it's banned. It does not seem like a meaningful restriction for any serious enterprise.
I'm not sure whether I agree with the CA policy. But this argument against it is extremely unconvincing. It's almost word-for-word what segregationists argued against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
"The two portion so this bill to which I have constantly and consistently voiced objections, and which are of such overriding significance that they are determinative of my vote on the entire measure, are those which would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action in the area of so-called "public accommodations" and in the area of employment--to be precise, Titles II and VII of the bill. I find no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority in either of these areas; and I believe the attempted usurpation of such power to be a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government..."
But this CA law is basically the exact opposite of the 1964 Civil Rights act, which says you can not discriminate based on gender or race in areas like housing and hiring.
This law is saying that you must take into account race and gender in your hiring decisions.
> The state shouldn't have a say in who gets a job at a private (non owned by state) company.
that's exactly what the Civil Rights Act does. The state has been telling you how you are allowed to make hiring decisions for a while now.
edit:
And here's Strom Thurmond on the Civil Rights Act:
"This bill would take away the rights of individuals and give to government the power to decide who is to be hired, fired and promoted in private businesses."
The requirement for corporations to have a board of directors at all is imposed by the state.
You have to argue that the state shouldn't be able to impose requirements on the situations where it relaxes individual liability, not complain about about the natural rights of corporations (they don't have any).
The comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not.
I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and sexism that is easy to observe in hard data, and so this law feels like a single step towards modern equity.
It's not that they're incapable of competing on merit; it's that the established institutions are unwilling to recognize based on merit, and a coercive outside force is required to counterbalance the entrenched racism & sexism until we're at a point where society can function on a truly meritocratic basis on its own.
If a board rejects a (very) competent person based on the person’s gender, race, sexuality, age, then… they lost a very competent person. That person will do great work outside of that board. Can we agree on this? Also, is that some sort of Nash equilibrium?
No, we can't agree on this. If most boards reject this person based on one of these things, they may never actually do this work or achieve anything near their potential.
We've seen already in the US that culture trumps almost everything else. I've had people tell me that they'd rather their daughter marry a poorer white guy than a richer black guy.
That said, all this really ends meaning is that the all-white board hires a couple of tokens they provide no power to and make their lives hell. It's standard process.
I don’t think that this formulation reflects the actual situation. Realistically you have a broad pool of near-identical performers (in a sense that your error in judgement is similar to difference in performance) mixed with some bad performers. The goal of the company is not to hire good, but to avoid the bad. So if someone isn’t bad then it’s fine to give preference based on some diversity metric, because you are just choosing between equivalent candidates (to within your ability to objectively measure).
If you have a fixed headcount, then forgoing one candidate for equivalent another doesn’t carry a cost. By hiring person A you would be missing out on person B, by hiring person B you would be missing out on A. The point is that the net cost is 0. So if B brings more diversity then A you should hire B. You are not (net) missing anything.
"Progressive" doesn't mean "jump on any bandwagon that comes along". I think HN's readership is much more nuanced and analytical than your average AOC fan, and luckily it shows in these comments.
>"If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway."
That's not necessarily true. There are plenty of organizations all over the world that are not "diverse" but those institutions manage to succeed. Not every company needs to have a board room that looks like a university admissions pamphlet in order to operate and respond to competition.
> If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your [sic] doomed to fail anyway.
Then why do we need a law banning it? If these white-male-only-board-led companies are doomed to fail, they should be outcompeted by sufficiently-diverse-board-led companies.
I have a feeling the physical attributes of the board doesn't actually matter when it comes to a company's performance.
> "If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway."
If that were true, none of the tech giants in the US in the white male dominated '50s-'80s would have existed: IBM, AT&T + Bell Labs, Xerox + PARC, Digital Equipment Corporation, etc.
There's a lot of vocal conservatives, libertarian, "centrists", contrarians here. These kinds of topics bring out the worst. I only clicked because I misread board rooms.
It is shocking that one could be punished for hiring based on “wrong” color/gender. We spent decades getting past that, only to have it codified in law. “You’re great, but we’ll be punished if we hire you, because your skin is pale and you have testicles” is evil.
I have an impression that HN readers are more libertarian than progressive.
The ambiguous part of this law that this is employment (or something close enough to employment) contingent on race and gender. Imagine a single woman of color on the board resigns and the seat must be filled. If the best candidate is a white male, he will be rejected based on gender and race.
How non-white does someone have to be to qualify? Should it be based on self-identity? Should the race of corporate board members be determined by a state bureaucracy? While I agree with the goal, such a policy seems to raise questions like that immediately. And the more I wrangle with them the more intractable they seem.
> quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common
Not if you knew the distribution of wealth by race (and gender) in America. Black people in America are poor after being slaves unable to own property for generations. Until very recently (in living memory) widely denied due process, access to employment, social and labour organizations, etc. that would enable building wealth. To this day, still disproportionately denied. There is less intergenerational wealth to transfer. Less educational capital. And so on. A different but cousin tale for women.
This is one angle of systemic racism, I suppose. But to my eye the solution is mostly to address the poverty by the transfer of wealth, not legislate representation among the elites. Especially when you can do wealth transfer to poor people without legal racial classification systems, which is a notion that immediately evokes opposition from many.
I want to redistribute more wealth to poor people, and I don't give a damn what colour the rich people sitting on corporate boards are. Americans have a myopic obsession with the race and gender of their rulers, but are willing to let the crippling poverty and poor working conditions of their neighbours slide.
Progressivism sometimes takes time and energy that previously went to helping the working and middle classes, and redirects it off into the aether to help the very top of the pile.
While we are at it, just off the top of my head, lets make it required to include at least one bald person, at least one person with blood type AB, and at least one person with freckles. We shouldnt descriminate against them should we?
Is a non-American European counted as white in this?
Or are we pretending that the various different non-Anglo/WASPy "whites" in Europe have the exact same cultural & socio-economic headstart in the US as the US whites?
Even within a single country, I imagine the rural Alabama white is quite different from the rich, privately educated executive board member.
I was born and raised in a poor, rural town with a high crime rate. Neither of my parents had a trade nor a university education. It is very obvious to me that I am culturally different from a lot of other educated people in tech. Hell, the military even covered my education. I don't hold the same values or interests as my peers, but I'm a white male so I get lumped into a "homogenous" group.
I'm not sure why you think that. Hacker News is amazingly conservative, not in the "God and guns" sense, but in the "please don't change anything ever" sense. I'm not even going to pretend that doesn't apply to me, too. Hate crypto, short AI hype, can't stand Electron apps, refuse to touch anything written in JavaScript, wish code would get out of my damn browser and into compiled executables I can keep on my local filesystem. We're basically all old men yelling at clouds here.
Reflexively, this sounds like a stupid law to me, but unless the LA Times is just lying, it sounds like it's been successful and similar policies are now being pushed privately, apparently by Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is behind an effort to do something similar but without actual punishment.
It's probably illegal, though, and seems destined to eventually be struck down whenever it gets to the Supreme Court.
I also share your surprise that all white-male boards were even common before this. Mostly white-male boards I expected, but not 100%, at least for publicly traded large companies. Anybody trying to say that was meritocracy is fooling themselves. There is no way in hell there is that much of a skew in merit across gender and race boundaries.
At the same time, I very much agree with the other comments saying this is focusing on exactly the wrong kind of progressivism. It feels like George Bush putting together the most ethnically diverse cabinet of all-time, but they were still uniformly war hawks, liars, and authoritarians. Making the 0.00001% of the world allowed to have power more diverse doesn't change that power is still way too centralized. It's fine for the extreme upper echelon of women and ethnic minorities but does nothing for the vast masses of actually underprivileged people.
> There is no way in hell there is that much of a skew in merit across gender and race boundaries.
It’s the long pipeline. Bias from 30 or 40 years ago determined who got a chance to earn executive experience and build connections to become qualified to hold a board seat today.
We should expect effectiveness, not fairness, from meritocracy, because merit was often not fostered fairly and much potential went undeveloped.
I really don't like this pattern that's developing. The pattern that I see is, "Implement an obviously unconstitutional law. Let it affect people in some manner for N months until the courts get around to saying that it's illegal. Repeat indefinitely."
The speed of the courts depends on the political party of the offender, of course. See also: Executive Orders that can be removed and how swiftly they are removed.
This comment ten years ago would be agreed to by almost everyone in the United States. Not anymore; it is now fashionable to be racist against Whites. No more!
This comment has never been agreed upon by almost everyone in the US. The difference now is that we want to take action to try to even the playing field against the majority of those who didn't agree with the statement then or now.
What a shockingly sad interpretation from most (all at the time of writing) comments here.
When did you ever have a job that you didn't learn 90% of what's needed, while on the job itself?
Cries for meritocracy are woefully ignorant for this fact alone.
If you want meritocracy, focus your energy on improving education. Until then, your worth is determined mostly by whether someone gives you a chance, which depends on your skin color, location, and last name, aka luck.
If the state continues to allow a small subset of the population to discriminate based on race and sex, isn't that also the state defending discrimination?
I think discriminating based on race and sex (for hiring decisions) is already illegal. Therefore, the only new scenarios covered by this law are where a board ends up being single-sexed and -raced for reasons that one can't make a strong case were due to discrimination.
> When did you ever have a job that you didn't learn 90% of what's needed, while on the job itself?
The older and more specialized my roles get, the less I'm learning about how to do the job on the job, and the more I'm just learning the small differences at the current location.
I assume that's why CEO's are routinely hired away from other companies. I assume the stuff they'll learn at the new job is the specifics of that company, but not "how to be a CEO".
I would assume the same of some board members (as I understand it, they don't all bring the same things to the table).
> your worth is determined mostly by whether someone gives you a chance, which depends on your skin color, location, and
last name, aka luck.
Nonsense. If you can code, you can start next week. You can set up a website and start selling things. If you make good music, people will come. If you solve a problem that saves people time or money, they will buy it.
Apart from people like you, most people don't care all that much about race.
They've been playing a game of redefining terms for a few years now, at least since 2015.
People not paying attention (not wanting to be labeled with scary terms) basically fell for it and here we are.
I guess we’ve stopped hiring the best people for the job. Moves like this put the US at a competitive disadvantage.
We can solve our inequality problems without making us weak. The US army took equal opportunity seriously long ago, their model works and can be replicated.
If we were ever at the point where companies were hiring the best people for the job, this wouldn't be necessary as the companies would already have a diverse board.
Except that everywhere, including when admission is solely based on performance on a test you can study for, there end up being massive racial disparities.
The whole point is it’s not innate differences but it’s a bad solution. There are better ways of providing equal opportunity that don’t compromise the integrity of the system
But these are board positions. They are not chosen based on measurable skills, but rather almost always on some combination of connections and a specific mindset.
This has often been called the "old boys club", and the persistent pattern of boards being overwhelmingly white and male is great evidence that there has a (predominately unconscious) bias in the selections.
Since the makeup of these boards affects the decisions made by these companies, and those decisions have a large impact on society, society (California) has decided that they have to clean up their act and make those decision makers at least vaguely reflect the makeup of that society.
There are ways of preventing unconscious bias in which you don’t degrade the integrity of the position. As I pointed out in my original post the army has solved this well, because in the army of you put someone in a position that isn’t right for it you put lives at stake.
> What is not a white male? Will this be a self declared sort of thing?
Except for Native Americans, where active tribal affiliation is sometimes required, racial/ethnic identity in the US is generally purely self-identification, despite having legal significance for various purpose (e.g., government contracting and minority-owned business incentives/requirements.)
Quotas are good for increasing diversity, but lol @ thinking someone of a different gender or race will lead to a gentler kinder capitalism. This is a decision that will affect at most a few hundred or a few thousand people in a state of tens of millions. Those millions are suffering far more than bourgeois C-level aspirants one rung too low on the ladder for their taste.
Pure spectacle. We need workplace democracy and social services for everyone! Healthcare, housing, and integration on a local level. That's what it means to change society, not changing the paint on a machine that grinds people up and spits them out.
The country got worse thanks to Obama's presidency because he refused to even chip away at pure financial capitalism and let people get crushed in the financial crisis. His refusal to help people created the "liquidity trap" that strangles the economy because people have no money to spend in an economic system that requires a buyer and a seller.
Yeah. Some of the most cruel and exploitative slaver I had as bosses were women, even had one asking why I needed to take a day off to be with my son at the hospital if I was married,”couldn’t my wife spend one more day? “
Yup. It's frustrating neoliberal nonsense to be so concerned with increasing diversity in roles that shouldn't even exist while ignoring the widespread impacts of sexism and racism.
I think that gender identity for the purposes of pursuing a loophole would be happily denied. Woke progressives don't pursue their goals simply to say they do, but in order to provide relief to marginalized groups.
Unlike conservatives who use it as a shield to try to continue to oppress marginalized groups.
Sorry. I thought they were saying they used that gender only for submitting for compliance to this. If they took on being a woman for all legal purposes even if for this loophole then fine.
This is a very nuanced topic that treads on very dangerous grounds on this specific forum, though I am trying my best to remain respectful to all.
I think it's important to remember that there's a difference between legal definitions and what the modern, en vogue morality is. (and keep in mind that the modern morality is not defined, but can change over time as new situations emerge)
In terms of legal documents such as what sex appears on one's drivers license, I imagine that somebody wanting to change their official sex designation can be done, but would require filing some change request or affidavit with the state.
In terms of modern morality, gender identity (gender is considered to be different from biological sex) is considered fluid and may change from day to day. I believe that some people may even choose to identify as non-gender, or multiple genders at once.
Racial identification is another question mark, particularly for Americans and is very convoluted. Look at questions 8 and 9 on the Census form as an example of how officialdom tries to determine race.
In America particularly, laws based on race are really dumb. What the hell do you do with somebody who is a mix of white and black or is a white person with a hispanic background? Do we need government committees to try and determine if somebody is too white to qualify for some job?
As far as the modern morality goes, there are some number of people who self-identify as trans-racial and seem to identify with a different racial group. I don't know what will come of that.
> legal documents such as what sex appears on one's drivers license
So there is a formal place where someone's sex is "assigned" (at birth, I presume). In other words you cannot claim for cases with a legal consequence that you are a man when it says "woman" in your papers.
i understand that you can declare yourself as whatever, but it does not change your rights and onbligations.
> Racial identification is another question mark, particularly for Americans and is very convoluted
Is there a similar thing for races? Is this "objectively" assigned (though your ancestry, for instance), or is it purely declarative (I am white, but declare to be black and therefore get access to, say, minority advantages)?
In France we legally have a few things that are non-discutable and part of you papers (sex, nationality, marial status, ...). This an change, of course, but requires going through a procedure that changes what is in the papers. We do not have anything "declarative" that would have a legal meaning (and that would open the door to advantages for instance)
Regarding certain kinds of sex claims, there's probably a difference between what is technically illegal and what is actually prosecuted in a place like California. In one situation, a certain claim might be labeled as both brave and beautiful, and in another situation, the same kind of claim might be labeled as bigoted trolling.
Regarding US racial statistics, I don't know if there's any kind of official document that enforces what "race" you are and everything is essentially self-reported, as far as I am aware.
Genuinely curious how women would feel if they were given a job not based purely on merit and credentials, but their gender. Isn’t that a slap in the face? Like, “yea there were other much more qualified candidates, but we just have to fill this quota.” That’s what would be nagging me in the back of my mind if I was a women.
It completely undermines credibility. If there is a person in authority who may have been put there under affirmative action policies, the people under that authority will always wonder whether or not the person was put in that position because of their competence or because of the policy.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 383 ms ] threadThat said, there is hardly any company that would want to be the plaintiff in this case: "So, you're the company that led the lawsuit trying to keep corporate boards all white and male" is what the headlines will say, and no corporation would want to be branded as such.
As much as I support equality and diversity, I'm even more strongly opposed government over-reach. The state shouldn't have a say in who gets a job at a private (non owned by state) company.
As the article state, I hope this will get over-turned by the courts.
This would set a bad precedent. If the state can dictate the kind of person gets a highly coveted job, what else can state dictate?
Yes, exactly. Which is what has happened to women and minorities in this country forever.
What do stocks have to do with it?
I understand the difference between equity and equality, but I don’t know what exactly you mean to imply here, and don’t want to draw any hasty conclusions about this comment.
But as the critical race theory worldview defines it, "equity" involves unequal treatment of people and discrimination (decisions made about how to treat people) on the basis of race.
The idea is to retroactively create equal outcomes, not equal opportunities in the present.
The problem is: a society can't create either equal outcomes or equal opportunities by intentionally discriminating one way or another, since doing so (1) fails to solve problems at their source and (2) creates new problems.
In other words, love is the answer, not hate.
Society can't create equal outcomes, period. People don't want the same things in life. Some want to be of service to other people, some want to be rich so they can buy a yacht. You can't just give yachts to everyone and call that equality.
We do need safety net and equal opportunities
Personally I think the whole idea of equality is stupid because it just makes people compare their life to others instead of thinking about what they want in life. But again if we have to have equality then it's equal opportunities and more importantly, safety net.
They aren't saying, "you have to hire this person". They're saying you can't hire exclusively this type of person that currently dominates the top of society.
Given that these boardrooms don't diversify themselves, what is the actual problem with it?
No one was fired.
I understand the appeals to equity vs equality. I'm saying this is a subtle distinction hinging on who is making choices and how. I don't want the government deciding who is diverse enough or historically oppressed enough or underrepresented enough. It will get it wrong far too often.
Plus, by making this a factor, you're just kindling actual racism by pitting white males against everyone else. The resentment created by rejecting someone for their gender or color of skin does not subside just because the attributes happen to be white and male.
I get the intention, but fighting racism with racism just doesn't work.
You leave no room for the possibility that people in such positions are self aware, or even capable of understanding the broader context. I suspect this is what folks are reacting to.
How is "looking down on for any sort of privilege" a function of race? I thought it was a function of the asymmetrical nature of the privilege.
Do you think people who are black think "damn, I love chicken/watermelon/grape drink/stealing things/being violent! Do you think people of Asian descent are all good at math?
Like I don't even understand how you can be so blind to the self-referential inconsistency here.
Also, for the record? If you can talk the talk, and walk the walk, or at least demonstrate some aptitude at getting the job done so the person hiring you can be reasonably comfortable they aren't just bringing on an anchor; that is infinitely more likely to factor into getting you a position than skin color.
t. Have Hired and fired
When you disparage an entire group based on skin colour and gender, you're being a racist and sexist. You're being highly offensive to the majority of white men who weren't born with silver spoons. If you look at the most successful tech founders you'll see a pattern of them being born into wealthy families with educated parents. 50 years ago, most wealthy and educated families were white, which is why you see so many of these founders today. For example:
Mark Zuckerburg - parents were a psychiatrist and dentist. They literally hired software developers (in the 1990's) to tutor him.
Bill Gates - father was a prominant laywer, mother was on executive boards. Access to computers before they were even a thing.
Sergie Brin - Father was a professor, mother a NASA researcher. Private schools.
Larry Page - Father had a computing professor, mother was a computing instructor. Private schools.
Bezos - wealthy family (Grandfather was regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commision).
Any argument made that Larry or Sergey had exceptionally monetarily copious upbringings is merely false; they had fairly middle class upbringings by parents who idolized math and science. They both parleyed that through public colleges to positions at Stanford.
No, that's not what Federal anti-discrimination law says. It only says you can't refuse to hire certain people on the basis of a protected characteristic (of which race is one, but not the only one). It says nothing about refusing to hire certain people for other reasons that don't have to do with a protected characteristic.
(Btw, corporate boards of directors aren't even "hired"; they aren't employees. So it's not even clear what, if any, Federal anti-discrimination laws about hiring and employment would apply to them.)
> Given that these boardrooms don't diversify themselves, what is the actual problem with it?
There are two actual problems. One is that you can't have a government that only exercises its power wisely. For every mandate the government makes that happens to move things in the right direction, there will be many more that move things in the wrong direction. The people who are attracted to government jobs where they get to tell other people what to do aren't benevolent helpers; they're people who like power. All history shows that such people are precisely the people you don't want telling other people what to do.
The second problem is that dictating that people of certain races must belong to corporate boards is just as wrong as dictating that people of certain races can't belong to corporate boards. Both are looking at something that is irrelevant to the actual job, which means they aren't actually improving the corporations; the corporations can still do just as much damage as they did before, just now they'll be doing it with a "diverse" board.
The only real way to fix corporate governance is for people who would do better jobs than the board members of current corporations to form their own corporations and out-compete the current corporations.
I wasn't referring to Fed Discrimination Laws. I was referring to the California law. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
> The people who are attracted to government jobs where they get to tell other people what to do aren't benevolent helpers; they're people who like power. All history shows that such people are precisely the people you don't want telling other people what to do.
Why do you think that's not already the world we live in? Police officers are the epitome of this. I'm just not convinced things get much worse with this.
> The second problem is that dictating that people of certain races must belong to corporate boards is just as wrong as dictating that people of certain races can't belong to corporate boards.
I disagree with this. They are vastly different. One is completely excluding a group from the table. The other is ensuring that a group has a spot at the table. And boards, in particular, are the type of position where there are many qualified people. If we did a controlled study I'd be shocked if there was a negative difference in performance of companies with Black board members.
> The only real way to fix corporate governance is for people who would do better jobs than the board members of current corporations to form their own corporations and out-compete the current corporations.
In order to do that you have to fix a bunch of other stuff in society as well. Companies don't live in a meritocratic bubble.
Umm you can have an all white board with the new law.
In other words, you've just reinvented Plato's Republic. Historically, the closest things to this have been societies like the Puritans or Geneva under John Calvin, or in the 20th century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. How well did those experiments in "managed care" work out?
The closest thing to it in today's world is probably China or North Korea. If you think that's a good idea, you're welcome to go live in one of those countries.
> Unfortunately short of that we’re likely to never have real equality.
We won't have "real equality" even with such a draconian plan, because the inconvenient truth is that every human being is a unique individual. There is no such thing as "real equality" because human beings are all different. You can't pigeonhole human beings into boxes. You can't "manage" their care so they fit into whatever preconceived utopian fantasy you happen to have. Human beings are free individuals and we all have to figure out for ourselves how best to use whatever we have been given. And since we all get given different things, we are going to end up wanting different things, needing different things, and making different choices. No central planner can possibly comprehend all that. And every time it has been tried, it has ended up costing a lot of lives and a lot of misery even for those who managed not to be killed outright.
I hope you’ll never be in any position of power to realize this “solution”.
It wasn't since you explicitly said "Federal government" in your previous post. I agree that state laws can say different things.
> Why do you think that's not already the world we live in?
I didn't say it wasn't. If you already agree that what I said is the case, then you should be all the more opposed to more of the same.
> I'm just not convinced things get much worse with this.
Any extension of government power makes things worse. If the increment of "worse" seems small with some particular change, well, the phrase "frog-boiling" wasn't coined for nothing.
> One is completely excluding a group from the table. The other is ensuring that a group has a spot at the table.
You are misunderstanding my point. The current state, where many corporate boards are all of one race and one gender, is not a product of government fiat; it's a product of private decisions. But there have been cases in the past where similar states were products of government fiat. Those past government fiats are now pretty much universally agreed to have been very bad things. My point is simply that this is the same kind of thing, and should be considered bad for the same reasons. The issue is not "spots at the table". The issue is government fiat.
> In order to do that you have to fix a bunch of other stuff in society as well.
Like what? If you mean, like certain corporations having huge advantages because they have privileged access to things like loans with government printed money, lobbyists with the ear of government officials, and so on, yes, I agree all those things need to be fixed--and they're all just more examples of government power being misused. As the saying goes, the root problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell. That is what needs to be fixed.
> Companies don't live in a meritocratic bubble.
In a free market, where the government did not play favorites at all, they would--they would either have to make and sell something people want to buy, or go out of business. That's the only kind of "merit" that matters to us as consumers. But we can't exercise that ultimate control if the government keeps getting in the way.
I sometimes watch professional sports, in particular basketball. There is very, very little diversity.
My son is in his first year of teaching elementary school. He tells me he is almost alone in the school, gender-wise.
I think this is a very complex topic, with lots of nuances.
Demographics are funny because they're really easy to satisfy. People come from many backgrounds.
This is just one of many restrictions on individual choice we make for the sake of social cohesion. All of us might choose to work for below minimum wage, but there are real risks there, so we ban it. All of understand how one might end up with a board of all white men, but there are risks there as well, so now it's banned. It does not seem like a meaningful restriction for any serious enterprise.
e.g. https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/06/barry-goldwater-decla...
"The two portion so this bill to which I have constantly and consistently voiced objections, and which are of such overriding significance that they are determinative of my vote on the entire measure, are those which would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action in the area of so-called "public accommodations" and in the area of employment--to be precise, Titles II and VII of the bill. I find no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority in either of these areas; and I believe the attempted usurpation of such power to be a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government..."
This law is saying that you must take into account race and gender in your hiring decisions.
> The state shouldn't have a say in who gets a job at a private (non owned by state) company.
that's exactly what the Civil Rights Act does. The state has been telling you how you are allowed to make hiring decisions for a while now.
edit:
And here's Strom Thurmond on the Civil Rights Act:
"This bill would take away the rights of individuals and give to government the power to decide who is to be hired, fired and promoted in private businesses."
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/debate-on-the-c...
https://listingcenter.nasdaq.com/assets/Board%20Diversity%20...
You have to argue that the state shouldn't be able to impose requirements on the situations where it relaxes individual liability, not complain about about the natural rights of corporations (they don't have any).
I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and sexism that is easy to observe in hard data, and so this law feels like a single step towards modern equity.
Example?
We've seen already in the US that culture trumps almost everything else. I've had people tell me that they'd rather their daughter marry a poorer white guy than a richer black guy.
That said, all this really ends meaning is that the all-white board hires a couple of tokens they provide no power to and make their lives hell. It's standard process.
They don't care for competence, pre-se, but connection.
good chunk of morons around here are old chuds who get upset over the silliest thing and have no self awareness. it's a give and take.
dang sure has too much work.
Board room implies scale. If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway.
So many knee jerk reactions are a sad reflection of this community, though.
That's not necessarily true. There are plenty of organizations all over the world that are not "diverse" but those institutions manage to succeed. Not every company needs to have a board room that looks like a university admissions pamphlet in order to operate and respond to competition.
The market would have slaughtered tech firms if this were true.
Then why do we need a law banning it? If these white-male-only-board-led companies are doomed to fail, they should be outcompeted by sufficiently-diverse-board-led companies.
I have a feeling the physical attributes of the board doesn't actually matter when it comes to a company's performance.
If that were true, none of the tech giants in the US in the white male dominated '50s-'80s would have existed: IBM, AT&T + Bell Labs, Xerox + PARC, Digital Equipment Corporation, etc.
The ambiguous part of this law that this is employment (or something close enough to employment) contingent on race and gender. Imagine a single woman of color on the board resigns and the seat must be filled. If the best candidate is a white male, he will be rejected based on gender and race.
> quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common
Not if you knew the distribution of wealth by race (and gender) in America. Black people in America are poor after being slaves unable to own property for generations. Until very recently (in living memory) widely denied due process, access to employment, social and labour organizations, etc. that would enable building wealth. To this day, still disproportionately denied. There is less intergenerational wealth to transfer. Less educational capital. And so on. A different but cousin tale for women.
This is one angle of systemic racism, I suppose. But to my eye the solution is mostly to address the poverty by the transfer of wealth, not legislate representation among the elites. Especially when you can do wealth transfer to poor people without legal racial classification systems, which is a notion that immediately evokes opposition from many.
Progressivism sometimes takes time and energy that previously went to helping the working and middle classes, and redirects it off into the aether to help the very top of the pile.
Get left enough and universal healthcare, universal college and universal child care become a lot more important than equality of CEOs.
Or are we pretending that the various different non-Anglo/WASPy "whites" in Europe have the exact same cultural & socio-economic headstart in the US as the US whites?
It's a stupid rule.
> are quite shocking
Sheesh, your hyperbole is showing.
I was born and raised in a poor, rural town with a high crime rate. Neither of my parents had a trade nor a university education. It is very obvious to me that I am culturally different from a lot of other educated people in tech. Hell, the military even covered my education. I don't hold the same values or interests as my peers, but I'm a white male so I get lumped into a "homogenous" group.
Reflexively, this sounds like a stupid law to me, but unless the LA Times is just lying, it sounds like it's been successful and similar policies are now being pushed privately, apparently by Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is behind an effort to do something similar but without actual punishment.
It's probably illegal, though, and seems destined to eventually be struck down whenever it gets to the Supreme Court.
I also share your surprise that all white-male boards were even common before this. Mostly white-male boards I expected, but not 100%, at least for publicly traded large companies. Anybody trying to say that was meritocracy is fooling themselves. There is no way in hell there is that much of a skew in merit across gender and race boundaries.
At the same time, I very much agree with the other comments saying this is focusing on exactly the wrong kind of progressivism. It feels like George Bush putting together the most ethnically diverse cabinet of all-time, but they were still uniformly war hawks, liars, and authoritarians. Making the 0.00001% of the world allowed to have power more diverse doesn't change that power is still way too centralized. It's fine for the extreme upper echelon of women and ethnic minorities but does nothing for the vast masses of actually underprivileged people.
It’s the long pipeline. Bias from 30 or 40 years ago determined who got a chance to earn executive experience and build connections to become qualified to hold a board seat today.
We should expect effectiveness, not fairness, from meritocracy, because merit was often not fostered fairly and much potential went undeveloped.
The speed of the courts depends on the political party of the offender, of course. See also: Executive Orders that can be removed and how swiftly they are removed.
When did you ever have a job that you didn't learn 90% of what's needed, while on the job itself?
Cries for meritocracy are woefully ignorant for this fact alone.
If you want meritocracy, focus your energy on improving education. Until then, your worth is determined mostly by whether someone gives you a chance, which depends on your skin color, location, and last name, aka luck.
It's shockingly sad to see people defending state discrimination based on race and sex.
If the state continues to allow a small subset of the population to discriminate based on race and sex, isn't that also the state defending discrimination?
Example?
The older and more specialized my roles get, the less I'm learning about how to do the job on the job, and the more I'm just learning the small differences at the current location.
I assume that's why CEO's are routinely hired away from other companies. I assume the stuff they'll learn at the new job is the specifics of that company, but not "how to be a CEO".
I would assume the same of some board members (as I understand it, they don't all bring the same things to the table).
Nonsense. If you can code, you can start next week. You can set up a website and start selling things. If you make good music, people will come. If you solve a problem that saves people time or money, they will buy it.
Apart from people like you, most people don't care all that much about race.
We can solve our inequality problems without making us weak. The US army took equal opportunity seriously long ago, their model works and can be replicated.
Except that everywhere, including when admission is solely based on performance on a test you can study for, there end up being massive racial disparities.
Other races need to be shoehorned in.
This has often been called the "old boys club", and the persistent pattern of boards being overwhelmingly white and male is great evidence that there has a (predominately unconscious) bias in the selections.
Since the makeup of these boards affects the decisions made by these companies, and those decisions have a large impact on society, society (California) has decided that they have to clean up their act and make those decision makers at least vaguely reflect the makeup of that society.
My understanding was there is a smaller pool of qualified women to pick from due to career/family balance choices.
Except for Native Americans, where active tribal affiliation is sometimes required, racial/ethnic identity in the US is generally purely self-identification, despite having legal significance for various purpose (e.g., government contracting and minority-owned business incentives/requirements.)
Pure spectacle. We need workplace democracy and social services for everyone! Healthcare, housing, and integration on a local level. That's what it means to change society, not changing the paint on a machine that grinds people up and spits them out.
The country got worse thanks to Obama's presidency because he refused to even chip away at pure financial capitalism and let people get crushed in the financial crisis. His refusal to help people created the "liquidity trap" that strangles the economy because people have no money to spend in an economic system that requires a buyer and a seller.
Nothing will really change here in practice.
"Johnson, as the youngest member, the board has decided that you must identify as a woman for regulatory compliance."
What are woke progressives going to do, deny that a man can identify as whatever gender she wants?
Unlike conservatives who use it as a shield to try to continue to oppress marginalized groups.
Do you have to declare that with a legal document? Will there be blind tests to make sure you're conforming to your declared identity?
Can you just identify as a man on Monday, than a woman on Tuesday?
In other words, is sex a flag in your documents, or just something you say to be?
I am asking because I read that the racial identification is purely declarative.
I think it's important to remember that there's a difference between legal definitions and what the modern, en vogue morality is. (and keep in mind that the modern morality is not defined, but can change over time as new situations emerge)
In terms of legal documents such as what sex appears on one's drivers license, I imagine that somebody wanting to change their official sex designation can be done, but would require filing some change request or affidavit with the state.
In terms of modern morality, gender identity (gender is considered to be different from biological sex) is considered fluid and may change from day to day. I believe that some people may even choose to identify as non-gender, or multiple genders at once.
Racial identification is another question mark, particularly for Americans and is very convoluted. Look at questions 8 and 9 on the Census form as an example of how officialdom tries to determine race.
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2020/tech...
In America particularly, laws based on race are really dumb. What the hell do you do with somebody who is a mix of white and black or is a white person with a hispanic background? Do we need government committees to try and determine if somebody is too white to qualify for some job?
As far as the modern morality goes, there are some number of people who self-identify as trans-racial and seem to identify with a different racial group. I don't know what will come of that.
So there is a formal place where someone's sex is "assigned" (at birth, I presume). In other words you cannot claim for cases with a legal consequence that you are a man when it says "woman" in your papers.
i understand that you can declare yourself as whatever, but it does not change your rights and onbligations.
> Racial identification is another question mark, particularly for Americans and is very convoluted
Is there a similar thing for races? Is this "objectively" assigned (though your ancestry, for instance), or is it purely declarative (I am white, but declare to be black and therefore get access to, say, minority advantages)?
In France we legally have a few things that are non-discutable and part of you papers (sex, nationality, marial status, ...). This an change, of course, but requires going through a procedure that changes what is in the papers. We do not have anything "declarative" that would have a legal meaning (and that would open the door to advantages for instance)
Regarding US racial statistics, I don't know if there's any kind of official document that enforces what "race" you are and everything is essentially self-reported, as far as I am aware.