Because any modification to criteria other than optimizing for competency in the specific role for which you were hiring will be necessarily, mathematically, suboptimal.
You’re assuming that humans can be perfectly, mathematically, optimal, and this is basically never the case. Humans will always have biases, such as preferring those similar to themselves.
The problem with reality is there is no mathematical metric function where you can plug as input a human and you get as output a number and then you can sort this humans out so you can hire the best. Even for small domains like programming with language X and framework Y is not possible to create a good such metric function, someone could be good at memorizing APIs, someone could be fast at creating good solution but others might be slow but their solutions are even better and others are good at debugging issues.
I think the term "mathematically" is used here broadly and metaphorically, and not literally meaning a symbolic formula. Perhaps "measurably" would have been a better term. No doubt you measure people on various skills during an engineering interview rather than the shape and color of their body, right? Board of Director positions also have measurable skills.
No, I'm going to claim that there is at least something better than judging on physical characteristics. In fact most companies agree. It's not a strange or unique opinion.
Most company want to meet and see you, why is that? why are so incompetent and not just give you a test and have someone check the results without meeting you and having a bias ?
Then don't fucking use math to prove a point if it involves only subjective shit like I think this dude has better social skills because I know it when I see it, or this dude has larger culture fit because he likes same movie I do.
If you can meassure skils then you should be capable of hiring people with this simple 2 steps
1 Person A administers the tests
2 Person B checks the results but he has no idea who the candidates are
No more problems with gender,race,culture,political affiliation
Someone explain me how you always have to meet the candidate because you have a skill to read they competence and cultural fit from their face and body proportions and you are special and this proven physical biases never affect you the special one. I mean "you" in a general term not the comment author.
You are just optimising for different things. One side is optimising for gender equality and statistical diversity. You are trying to optimise for competency.
But outside of a perfect mathematical universe competency is multi dimensional and difficult to measure. Bias does creep in. Treating it as a scientific process seems just as reductive as reducing a person to just their gender.
"The law voided Friday was on shaky ground from the get-go, with a legislative analysis saying it could be difficult to defend. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed it despite the potential for it to be overturned because he wanted to send a message during the #MeToo era."
The true purpose of this law was political career boosting, not actual change.
Pushing through a law that requires discrimination based on race/gender/etc in a state that constitutionally forbids discrimination based on race/gender/etc does not make any sense (at least not on the surface).
Brown is not stupid, nor is the legal team that worked for him.
Just because you're retired doesn't mean you're out of politics and no back scratchers are beholden to you or you can't act as kingmaker or whatnot. There's a lot more to politics than the office itself. California is famously corrupt in this regard.
Alternatively he thought it was a worthwhile policy and hoped the constitution would be amended by the time it took effect, if not, then he had multiple years of his preferred policy in place..
Are all of the unconstitutional ratchet laws that were passed during the Roe era political grandstanding? Or do you think their authors and legislators passed them hoping for changes in the judicial branch that would render them “good law”?
> Are all of the unconstitutional ratchet laws that were passed during the Roe era political grandstanding? Or do you think their authors and legislators passed them hoping for changes in the judicial branch that would render them “good law”?
If we're being real, it's obviously a mix of both. Political grandstanding with plainly dumb laws is definitely a thing that happens. And politicians passing dodgy laws hoping it will work is also something that happens.
> Alternatively he thought it was a worthwhile policy and hoped the constitution would be amended by the time it took effect, if not, then he had multiple years of his preferred policy in place..
> Alternatively he thought it was a worthwhile policy and hoped the constitution would be amended by the time it took effect, if not, then he had multiple years of his preferred policy in place.
So if I believe something I know to be blatantly illegal is "a worthwhile policy", doing it anyway is OK then, especially if I feel confident I can get away with it for a few years? Does this also apply to policies you personally don't feel to be worthwhile?
> Are all of the unconstitutional ratchet laws that were passed during the Roe era political grandstanding?
Trigger laws you mean? Of course it's political grandstanding, but there is still a night and day difference between having a law which explicitly says it won't come into effect until e.g. Roe vs Wade gets overturned such as here:
You are obfuscating. The distinction that matters is if there is an intent to threaten people into compliance with a policy position of yours by creating a piece of legislation you know to be unconstitutional or not. It seems pretty clear to me that this was indeed the attempt.
> The Women on Boards law, also known by its bill number, SB826, called for penalties ranging from $100,000 fines for failing to report board compositions to the California secretary of state’s office to $300,000 for multiple failures to have the required number of women board members.
> The Secretary of State’s office said 26% of publicly traded companies headquartered in California reported meeting the quota of women board members last year, according to a March report.
As you are probably aware, it is a common legal strategy to avoid setting a precedent for some dubious legal claim you know you would lose in court but that is an effective way to coerce others. This works for patent trolls for similar reasons why it likely worked for the state of California (because a lot of times a rational actor would rather comply rather than incur the often greater costs of fighting even if a win seems near certain). It's also quite different from passing some dubious law which plainly states that it does not currently apply and why, as a symbolic act to some constituency. For what it's worth, from memory I don't think all anti-abortion legislation has been mainly symbolic like this, I think there were also cases where legislators tried to coerce people with laws they full well knew would be ruled unconstitutional.
> a law that requires discrimination based on race/gender/etc
This is a semantic matter that largely depends on context, but more typically, it is not considered "discrimination" in the legal or usual common sense when it's in reality a form of "affirmative action".
I'm just pointing this out to distinguish the case where "discrimination" can have positive meaning with that where it has pejorative meaning. When making value judgments either way, overloaded word choices can cause more harm than good.
It's not a matter of "typically". A certain political side is pushing to define "discrimination" to apply only against certain groups.
That use is not typical especially when you consider history and the fact that it still differs from the view of the constitution. Moreover it strikes me as disingenuous (like the Soviets calling Western news disinformatzya).
Where does discrimination have a positive meaning?
I am pretty sure that the folks who are against this law will also be against it if you call it "affirmative action" or "positive discrimination" once you explain the meaning to them. From a meritocratic, humanistic, democratic perspective it is just morally wrong however you spin it.
This idea of a meritocratic system you have is very incomplete. I'd really recommend listening to what Michael Sandel has to say about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qewckuxa9hw
Even if you accept his caution about merit it is still morally wrong to make sweeping decisions on basis of sex if you hold to democracy, humanism, individualism... Actually an honest take of taking privilege into account will find that the most important factors are wealth and education, certainly not sex.
I'm not denying that wealth and education are major hallmarks of privilege, but you can't be honest and say that sex is not an important factor in privilege. That's a whataboutism.
> in a state that constitutionally forbids discrimination based on race/gender/etc does not make any sense
That's a pretty strong assertion you're making, that requiring equality is discrimination. I don't agree at all, and I'm not alone. Which means it's not on the face of it obvious if a law like that is actually unconstitutional - anymore than it's clear if the 2nd amendment applies to nukes.
You’re confusing equity with equality. You can’t have both because equity is an affront to equality. Fortunately, equality is the law of the land and racist or sexist equity laws are illegal.
Explain to me what's unequal about requiring boards to be 50/50 male-female? That’s not even how far the law goes, but let’s take it that far. There’s an equal number of men and women born in america. That gives every child born an equal shot at one of those seats. To allow unequal boards would be to allow people to discriminate based on gender when picking board members. To mandate that is to legally require a level playing field. That’s equality, not the equity you seem to have beef with.
How wonderfully optimistic. Unfortunately, such a belief is built on an assumption divorced from how decisions get made and structural advantages (and disadvantages) not equally shared by groups.
I'd argue most believe that men and women are generally equal in terms of skills and potential given similar circumstances, but recognize that society does not afford them equal opportunity regardless of merit. This operates for more than just gender, of course.
Giving some group an advantage through a law will worsen its position in other areas of life.
Mandating a ratio will deepen the divide not fix it. I think the society is on a good track to fix this divide in time. Any attempts by social engineers may undermine it.
Equality means everyone is judged on merit instead of this dystopian view that you’re espousing where people should be considered on immutable physical properties above all.
Sorry if I am missing something but... Why is this his problem?
If the legislature want to pass unconstitutional laws that will get struck down, at best he is saving the court sometime by vetoing it. But it is the legislature that is at fault for passing it, not him for failing to stop it, isn't it?
He put his signature on the bill after taking this oath:
> I (Governor) do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California…
A constitution is just a piece of paper. It only has meaning because people respect it. Passing a law you know violates a constitution is a direct attack on the rule of law itself, and should probably come with penalties attached. Certainly, the fact that politicians in the USA very regularly and blatantly pass laws they know will be struck down by the courts a few years later is one of the stronger arguments I've seen for why the UK shouldn't bother with setting up a written constitution. It's got no teeth. Governments can simply pass and enforce illegal laws, exploiting the lack of speed and capacity in the court system. Then when one gets struck down, just pass another in a similar way.
What you're suggesting for the UK sounds like a terrible argument. Without the constitution these terrible laws will never be struck down for being illegal because they wouldn't be illegal. Courts can, and do, issue injunctions to prevent laws from going into effect when they are likely to be struck down.
Well, I didn't say I agreed with it, just that it's one of the stronger arguments. Creating a constitution is a fraught project that requires referendums and the like, so people have to believe it works. If courts are willing to injunct unconstitutional laws then why didn't it happen here?
I'm not sure why it didn't happen here, but there are a lot of times where it does. Another article mentioned that no fines had been levied because of this law. That might be a reason it was allowed to stay in effect.
Presumably companies were simply complying rather than getting fined. Companies are generally way more law abiding than individuals, it's a rare legal department that would sign off on "let's ignore the law and hope it gets struck down before we get fined and dragged through the mud". Would that even be compatible with the rules around ensuring shareholder value?
Companies fail to comply with laws all the time. They suffer fines, recalls, and sometimes nothing for non-compliance. The Secretary of State at the time it was signed into law warned the Governor that it was unenforceable. The Secretary of states office testified during the trial that there was no intention of fining anyone over it.
> The true purpose of this law was political career boosting
That's kinda the whole point of our systems, an attempt to marry personal interest and community interests. Since when is, "Politician does something his constituents want," a headline?
European women generally sought help with carrying the burden of child bearing and child rearing and gains in terms of employment followed. American women generally took the very American position of "Don't tread on me!" and it hasn't been as effective.
In Germany and France, the women are fighting to get such laws going through.
My very personal take on the issue is that one needs such law to "change the habits" and then hope that the new normality later reduces the need for such laws.
My concern would be that it could lead to women getting positions for which they aren't really qualified and this undermining corporate health over time, among other things.
Having a smaller slice of a larger pie can be a better deal than a larger slice of a dying economy because people are being stupid in the name of ethics and equality.
That is more of a short-term concern: over the longer term, it is widely understood that establishing more equitable opportunities has the effect of redressing systematic inequities that are preventing full participation & competition of traditionally marginalized groups.
The classic illustration is that the increased prevalence of women/black/hispanic/indigenous role models in STEM, for example, encourages a higher degree of participation and competition from these traditionally marginalized groups in the field.
If there is no good reason to think these marginalized groups are inherently less suited for the role, then over time, they should be selected on the basis of merit in roughly demographic proportion.
> Historically, "men" were made, not born. You had to prove yourself a man.
I don't think women had the historical opportunity to be "made a man", so this very-rhetorical argument / play on words is not particularly persuasive.
You see such stories in media (and I would wager in practice, with any lady that enters a male-dominated group and ends up actually fitting in) frequently enough.
Do not worry. Women are totally qualified to get such positions. In fact, in Germany/France, they are usually more qualified than men. I don't know in the US, but on my side of the Atlantic women must be 10 times better than men to be considered for the same responsibility job.
For me as an external consultant for big companies, it means I really enjoy working with women. They are always extremely good in what they are doing as soon as they are one level up.
Boards of directors of public companies are normally elected by shareholders. I wouldn't say they're chosen based on their real qualifications, more so their reputation and popularity.
The number of seats is kind of arbitrary from what I understand, you could add more or have less seats.
Also what the board is responsible for is generally governed by government regulation in some jurisdiction.
The whole thing is about corporate oversight to some extent, supposed to be you have unbiased members that don't have skin in the game like execs and CEOs and other employees and who can represent shareholder's interests as well as government regulation.
I'm not sure how I personally feel about the law, but the idea that you'd need say a gender parity of board members isn't that insane as compared to say for hiring for a doctor, engineer, scientist, etc. If you think of the purpose of the board to be that unbiased oversight, you could argue diversity is a good way to optimize for reduced bias.
I see it as window dressing at best. Getting a job on a board is great for that one person (they get money, influence, status), but doesn't do anything for the others. I've asked this before: what's the goal, and how does putting women (in this case) on boards help towards that goal?
> I've asked this before: what's the goal, and how does putting women (in this case) on boards help towards that goal?
It's all about overcoming inertia by pushing against it. There's a cultural bias in corporate boards to only or primarily hire men. Putting women on them can show that they are equally capable, and gives these women the opportunity to create the contacts needed so that other women in the future will also have access to them. All this is more difficult as long as the cultural tendency to discriminate in favor of men remains unchanged.
I suspect these laws bear out their effects in considerably more numerous (and more subtle) ways than many critics realise. I suspect most will understand (i) the law immediately addresses a numerical imbalance, and (ii) also creates visible models/ examples to inspire future women to go for board seats. But also (iii) it builds the CVs of the current crop of women benefiting from the law to get onto boards, meaning they'll be less at a disadvantage next time they apply for another board (people are often on multiple boards at once), boosting 'organic'/'natural' (non-discriminatory) gender balance in the competition for seats; and (iv) when it comes to replacing the female board member, the company/organisation can more naturally contemplate another woman also doing a great job in that seat (whether or not they hire one into that seat would be a question of available candidates, but at least the headhunters and board would be able to - at least - imagine a woman in the role). Those are all quite significant levers.
> Putting women on them can show that they are equally capable
How is that a goal? Putting someone on a board isn't visible, at all. Almost nobody sees board members, and certainly nobody sees their achievements (which is needed to demonstrate capability). And visibility/perception of capability hasn't been needed in the past. Women have stormed institutions that were male bastions once.
> so that other women in the future will also have access to them
That's circular reasoning.
Note that I'm not at all arguing against anyone in a board position. It's just that this seems to be a "feel-good" measure without any reason and effect.
> Almost nobody sees board members, and certainly nobody sees their achievements (which is needed to demonstrate capability). And visibility/perception of capability hasn't been needed in the past. Women have stormed institutions that were male bastions once.
Won't other board members see their achievements, and aren't board members responsible for choosing new members? Having women there should work to make their peers realize that being a woman is not by itself a handicap for the position (contrarily to the tradition of irrational beliefs that it does).
> That's circular reasoning.
No, it's compound interest. Getting the ball rolling is important so that the process will increase speed by building on the previous efforts, until reaching the point where the artificial pressure is no longer needed.
Ok. But I don't think that's going to be done by putting them there. Nothing suggests it would. Instead, it's a slow process of endless education. And I'm afraid the people at the very top are (on average) the more conservative, so it's a long, uphill battle. Giving a bunch of women a cushy job isn't going to achieve that goal. Chances of it backfiring are real, too: one foobar and the mindset is back again, rooted firmly in evidence this time.
For comparison: look what a black president has done against racism in the USA. OTOH, I don't believe putting women on a board of directors is going to make companies perform worse. So many seats are taken by mediocre bootlickers. But I still think it's not going to help women in general.
The idea is that membership of boards is often chosen by existing members of said boards, and that people (not always, but on average) have a tendency to choose people who are like themselves. And boards are typically male-dominated due to historical sexism, so the goal is to disrupt that inertia with an external push towards a more diverse group, with the hope that it will then be self-sustaining going forwards. And this is considered desirable because it means that opportunity and power is more evenly distributed across different sections of society.
If such law is effective and useful then we should use it in a gender neutral way in all places where gender segregation exist. A good verification that a law is good is when the usefulness of the law remain the same regardless of whom it is targeted against or whom favors by it.
Few laws got removed faster then when one such law was tried in Sweden, and the argument was the exact same thing as in California. No one likes discrimination, and when the "wrong" demographic benefited the political support goes into negative. Sweden has a worse gender segregation than US, and at the extreme end you got profession and educational programs that are practically single-sex. Gender quotas would force a change of habits, but you won't find much political support for it. Would even you be a supporter if it was used as a general tool against gender segregation?
It’s frustrating how the courts can take 4 years to decide such an apparently straightforward question. During which time people had to make important decisions under uncertainty.
It may seem so from our perspective, but the people who were in charge of rebuttal probably wanted to make sure their case is bulletproof.
I'd rather it take a little bit longer if it assures that procedure is followed and laws like these are legitimately struck down and set a strong precedent for the future.
This "natural selection" argument presupposes that women are sufficiently prevalent on boards that the competitive advantage they provide is apparent and obvious to all other companies. This assumption is problematic in a context of low prevalence.
The way State Senate leader Toni Atkins stated it - direct reference by the OP - "better decisions and businesses outperform the competition" means she believes that this is a 100% fact, and the competitive advantage is apparent to everyone but the foolish judges (quote: "legalities don’t match our realities"). She doesn't seem fazed by this assumption being problematic in a context of low prevalence.
When you do research, you select your sample judiciously, and you never really sample the whole population. Depending on the research question, you sometimes want to select a sampling technique that is not representative of the population.
Winds are finally blowing the other way? The other completely unconstitutional but widely practiced things in US are "the employer has to prove its innocence" when it comes to hiring discriminations - which is not only blatantly unjust, but eats up enormous resources and potential. And affirmative action in education.
I found these points of the court's judgement noteworthy:
-- If a California government action contains discriminatory classifications with the intent to reverse or compensate for discrimination, that original discrimination must be concrete, tangible, and a product of that government's other action.
-- The defendant (California government) could not / did not produce any case of an identifiable woman who was discriminated against in board seat selection (according to the definitions of illegal discrimination) which would have been justification for creating legislative discrimination to reverse the harm.
-- The history and debate about the Senate bill showed that the goal was not to reverse specific cases of discrimination, but to achieve the broad goal of gender parity on boards -- which is not a compelling state interest enough to justify creating discrimination.
-- The state was not able to (or did not) present compelling evidence either that lack of women representation on boards is a result of discrimination, or that having women on boards is a causal factor in improved corporate performance or positive benefit to the state, which would have been necessary to claim that the legislation is constitutional. During the bill's debate and passage, none of the expert testimony or contribution to its passage was able to cite compelling research linking female board members causally to such.
----
Let me just say I am all for all for women to have more representation on boards of companies -- by each individual's interest and merit (and equally, connections) to do so. I am not in favor of legislators passing such shoddy discriminatory legislation to force it to happen because they want to see a symbol of something achieved regardless of how it happens, and glossing over what it contorts others to have to do to make it so.
I suspect if they had worded the law as boards must have a minimum number of both sexes then it would have been less likely to run into legal trouble. Such a law would have had a similar effect so it puzzles me as to why they chose the explicit discrimination option.
> “More women on corporate boards means better decisions and businesses that outperform the competition,” Atkins said in a statement. “We believe this law remains important, despite the disheartening ruling.”
I don't understand this. Something being a competitive advantage is not a reason for a law.
Inequality is a reason for a law. The fact that it's a competitive advantage just means it's not a law that has to harm anyone in order to decrease inequality.
Hmm, should we just take everyone's wealth every few years and split it evenly? After all wealth is opportunity. Hmm, or maybe set inheritance tax and gift tax to 100%. After all that is also equal opportunity.
You just described the situation of millions of parents in the US today.
Why does your kid need a financial advantage? If society provided an equal footing for every child, the advantages you could provide to them would be love, advice inspiration, and bettering society so that there was more for them.
You say “that’ll never fly”, but I say if we’re going to imagine a better world why not imagine it radically better not just incrementally better.
It's not radically better. Giving people who at the age of 50 have enough money to live on no way of passing anything on will disincentivise a giant number of things you take for granted.
Like what? I'm interested in disincentivizing the accumulation of more wealth than you can spend in a lifetime, and the continued sequestering of that wealth into family lines. We abolished the monarchy for a reason - we don't want to be ruled by people who were born into their position.
They literally shape the world around us. Money = speech, so they speak louder than us. It may not be quite so restrictive as a lord-surf relationship, but “giving you a job” is a power dynamic that edges towards feudal when the choice is homelessness and starvation or work.
an unjust world where some nosy stranger decides "intergenerational wealth is bad" and "everyone is fed, housed and educated" takes precedence over you working towards your children or your children's children's future because they feel justified in using political oppression to take what you've earned for your family.
Not sure what kind of dystopia you're setting up where politicians will always use the greater good of everyone else to justify any actions against individuals.
You can't just pass a law against inter-generational wealth. It's too easy to work around, too many ways of passing money without directly inheriting it. The only way it could possibly work is if had cultural buy in. If everybody thought it was a good idea and believed in it, at that point the laws just codify and re-enforce the existing beliefs.
So I'm not setting up a dystopia where politicians swoop in and rob the elderly. I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.
>The only way it could possibly work is if had cultural buy in.
disagree. there are lots of unpopular laws that get passed as part of other bills, under the urging of activists or lobbyists against popular opinion, etc.
>I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.
The details matter. Big sweeping statements like the above don't mean anything until you get to details - they sound like moral soundbites but they ignore the details of the actions required to get to that point. That way you never have to deal with negatives arising from your ideas, because you never discuss the details enough to get to the negatives, just the platitudes.
> disagree. there are lots of unpopular laws that get passed as part of other bills, under the urging of activists or lobbyists against popular opinion, etc.
Not saying it couldn't be made a law without cultural buy-in, I'm saying the law wouldn't be effective. There are too many workaround. You can give your child your stuff while you're still alive. You can put it all into a trust. You can create a scholarship where the criteria is being this one person. You can put it all in gold bars and bury it in the backyard. Etc. etc. etc. but if there is a cultural consensus that doing that is WRONG, people will by-and-large not do it.
> The details matter.
Indeed they do. But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details. It seems that there are a lot of people on here who don't think we should be seeking to create a society that actually provides equal opportunities - in that context, debating how to achieve that goal is pretty useless. If we all agree that it would be good, then we can discuss specific plans and proposals to get closer to that goal.
>Not saying it couldn't be made a law without cultural buy-in, I'm saying the law wouldn't be effective.
The bureaucracy would expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, and enforcement mechanisms would be created like every other tax rule, enforced at the end of a gun like every other tax rule.
>But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details.
On the opposite - without the details the goal is just a meaningless sound bite, used as a weapon to justify things many won't agree to by saying 'but didn't you agree goal x is important?'.
The answer is 'depends on the cost'. If the cost is empowering equality of outcome proponents, or creating communist style political commissar enforcement mechanisms, then no, not worth it.
That's why I say details of plan first, not last. it's easy to say "what if we had equal opportunity" and get head nods but ultimately meaningless. The details are what matter, and if you can't present what you think is a good plan, you don't have one - you just have a platitude to justify wide future actions that I probably wouldn't support.
> enforced at the end of a gun like every other tax rule.
Ahh, like every other tax rule - so not really at all for rich people and quite heavily for poor and middle class people? Sounds about right.
> That's why I say details of plan first, not last
I hope that's not the approach you take with everything in life. "Do you want to go out to eat?" ... "What restaurant? I'll only say if I want to go when the venue has been selected." That's not measured caution, or the ideal - a collaborative approach to solving problems - that response is a trap where every suggestion is met with disdain. Saying "Yes I would like to go out to eat, what restaurant did you have in mind?" doesn't mean you have to go if the selected venue turns out to be chuck-e-cheese.
>I hope that's not the approach you take with everything in life.
It is from blatant political rejiggering that use these platitudes to gain artificial buy in from the uninformed.
I mean, if you just ask hitler his goal was to restore germany to greatness. Why can't you just agree with his goal before you know his plan? I hoped that's not the approach you take to political platitudes.
If you have reason to suspect someone is using these platitudes to gain buy in their plans would never gain, its important to ask for the details. If they don't have details, they're just a useful idiot. If they do have details, they're the thing that separate good and bad.
So lets not pretend "lets agree to my incredibly vague goal without any mention of how we get there" is a reasonable thing to try and thrust on strangers EXCEPT for the express purpose of manipulation and echo chamber buy ins.
In this context there really isn't any difference between the two. Different opportunities lead to different outcomes and vice versa. So if you want same opportunities for everyone you'd have to accept, that to achieve that, same outcomes are also needed.
You need to do a lot more reading if you think equality of opportunity and equality of output are the same. Saying that everyone should have equal rights and treatment under the law is a far cry from saying that everyone deserves the same outcomes in life.
I assume that you're conflating equal opportunity( via rights and treatment under the law) with equal starting points, but they are far from the same things. Equal starting points are going to be impossible, literally a pipe dream without creating some form of dystopian nightmare that prevents people from having children, and instead farms genetically equal embryos who are then raised by the state. Which will also necessitate monoculture and risk humanity due to the lack in individual variation.
Public schooling, a non-rights based government program that provides everyone with education regardless of the economic circumstances they were born into, does not create equal starting points - but it is an improvement in the equality of everyone's starting point. Hardly a dystopian nightmare. Seems to me that there is a lot more we could do while still avoiding your dystopian nightmare scenario
What set of rules did you use to draw the line between an opportunity and an outcome there? Why does it stop at highschool, and not continue on to university, jobs, or board seats?
Because you might just as well frame public school as the government stepping in to mandate that there are seats in elementary and high school for everyone.
Everyone has access to public school (hopefully of decent quality). Not everyone learns the same amount. Not everyone gets A's. Even more, not everyone is valedictorian.
Equal opportunity is a lot different than equal outcome. The first does not guarantee equal outcomes, as individuals vary in all sorts of ways, including skill and ambition. Achieving equal outcome almost certainly means a serious reduction of liberty, because you can't allow people to be free to do better than others.
Not a lie, but it was a simplification of a nuanced fact that I used for the sake of brevity and quippyness.
So, for actual factual nuanced details, it depends on where you are and what you're specifically talking about. E.g. in canada it was 1964 when women became legally entitled to open a bank account without their husband’s signature.
I can't find a specific date that women were able to access basic non-credit banking services without a cosigner everywhere in the US. It happened in California in the 1800s, but there seem to have been significant obstacles for women accessing banking tools up until some time in the 1960s - without a legal requirement, it's up to the individual banks, some would have been easier than others.
The 1970s bit was a reference to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, passed in 1974 - “Prior to the law, for car loans or financial transactions, a woman was expected to have someone — a father or husband, typically a male — co-sign for that transaction,”
So yes, what I said was only true about access to credit-baring accounts, not all accounts. But before you dismiss how that would have impacted the presence of women on corporate boards - it was 1988 when the Women's Business Ownership Act of 1988 passed and put an end to state laws that required women to have male relatives sign business loans.
So yeah, the reality is both better than what I said, and worse than what I said.
1. Communism with central planning / with internal price signals cannot work, because the computation for efficient goods distribution scales as the fourth power of the number of differentiated goods in the economy (where in addition to physical goods, every individual appointment time with every individual service provider is its own differentiated good.)
2. Even in a world where essential resources are plentiful, many people compete for status, which is a zero-sum game.
3. Perhaps as a result, communism when attempted historically results in famine and/or shortages and/or genocides.
All of these famines are exeprienced in communist countries, but not caused by communism. IIRC those were mostly direct or indirect consequences of wars and economic sanctions that capitalist countries lead against communist countries.
Compare that with the following famines that were both experienced and caused by capitalism:
The communist famines were primarily caused by forced collectivization which disrupted the agriculture industry, incompetent centralized administration, and poor economic planning. They were literally caused by communist policies. The Great Potato famine was caused by potato blight and and the Indian Famine was caused by drought.
Conveniently, you're ignoring both the periodic environmental famine conditions experienced in both Eastern Europe and China for centuries and the British profit-making policies that caused famine in both Ireland and India.
However, please keep in mind that not everyone who is not a priori against communism can be classified as hard core Stalinist. One should be able to criticize both systems, and wish a better one, without being labelled from one side as “tankie” and from the other side as “imperialistic capitalistic pig”, or another insult of the day.
I'm not uncritical of capitalism, especially as we practice it with high amounts of monopolization over sectors and regulatory capture by conglomerates. But communism as historically demonstrated will not solve our problems, and will likely make them worse.
Which historical communist country would you like to live in?
> Which historical communist country would you like to live in?
None of the historically available communist countries would be my choice of living. In the same way, I would not be eager to live in any of the historical early pure capitalist countries, unless I am sure I would belong to the top 1-5% percent.
Good capitalism implementation borrowed quite a bit from communism/socialism, to make those systems bearable for an average citizen.
Given that capitalism exists at least a hundred-year longer, I suppose there's still possibility for a nice implementation of communism to come. It took capitalism at least 150 years to get to the somewhat liveable level.
I'd still rather live in a Star Trek like communist utopia/dystopia than in an Elysium like capitalist utopia/dystopia.
That's kind of sad, considering our parents all survived the 2nd half of the 20th century, and they probably weren't in the top 1-5%. I would be quite happy living in Western Europe or the US during the 2nd half of the 20th century. I think one's chances of living a brutishly short life would have been less than 5%.
Let's do the similar exercise about the main competitor, capitalism:
1. Capitalism cannot work since it inevitably leads to concentration of capital and monopolies, which hinders competition and causes extreme income and wealth inequality.
2. The same zero sum game applies to capitalism, since people still compete for wealth and status.
3. Historically looking, capitalism and its ever expanding nature lead to colonialism, endless imperial wars and conflicts, resource grab wars and conflicts, debt slavery, people dying of famine although there was no global food shortage, climate destruction, ...
So yeah, both capitalism and communism can fail and prosper, depending on the implementation, but none of the systems is inherently better.
> So yeah, both capitalism and communism can fail and prosper, depending on the implementation, but none of the systems is inherently better.
The problem is that we actually have evidence against this tested theory. Whenever communism has been implemented on a large scale it has failed. Countries like the USSR and Mao’s China implemented communism and it resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Whereas today we have a variety of capitalist economies ranging from today’s prosperous China which has a mix of capitalism and a dictatorship, to places like Sweden or the United Kingdom.
Capitalism is a better system based on the experimental evidence that we have, at a minimum. And that does not even include arguments appealing to human nature and the inability of a government to manage prices or human desires.
> 3. Historically looking, capitalism and its ever expanding nature lead to colonialism, endless imperial wars and conflicts, resource grab wars and conflicts, debt slavery, people dying of famine although there was no global food shortage, climate destruction, ...
Communism never stopped these things either. The reason is that these issues are government failures.
First, the countries you mention included Germany and Japan, which, during World War 2 were both fascist states.
Second, the USSR in conjunction with Nazi Germany invaded Poland and together kicked off World War 2 - the USSR was a reluctant ally only to defeat a greater evil. Both regimes were outright evil.
Third, colonial expansion was primarily done under monarchist governments.
Fourth, if you want to (incorrectly) say that the US, UK, Germany, etc. and capitalist economic systems have the same feature of 'deaths of tens of millions of people" then you also would have to take into account that capitalist economies have also prevented the deaths of millions, provided the world with vaccines and breakthrough medical treatments, helped get us to the moon, and improved living standards for many billions of people. Communism did none of that over the long-term. Even Communist China has come around to support capitalism.
Finally, the debate among anyone serious, and I do mean exactly that, isn't capitalism + free markets versus something else, but instead it's to what degree should a government be involved in the market. Capitalism is so obviously superior that it's difficult for anyone to bring about an improved economic system based on the human condition up to this point. Frankly, communism is a failed ideology at the nation-state level and it has been outcompeted by capitalist economies, which is why it doesn't exist except by violent force, and in those limited cases it is dwarfed in wealth, effectiveness, and benefit by all but the worst capitalist economies.
Capitalism requires minor tweaks to work, such as anti- monopolistic laws, but the tweaks required to make communism work, such as removing central planning, make it not communism anymore.
One can argue that those "minor tweaks" required to make capitalism work make it actually more communist / socialist.
On the other hand, if removing central planing makes communism not communism anymore, then adding those "minor tweaks" make capitalism not capitalism anymore.
Btw, central planing is not a requirement for a communism, it's just that one of the largest communist experiments was implemented that way. There was also a king of distributed self-planning, that worked much better as an implementation of communism.
>if removing central planing makes communism not communism anymore, then adding those "minor tweaks" make capitalism not capitalism anymore.
The minor tweaks to make capitalism work still allow private ownership, free exchange of goods, and a system based on the movement of capital.
The changes to make communism work, make it not communism by definition. If you don't have central planning then how are goods and services created and allocated? By a free market? That's capitalism!
Apparently there is what we are doing now, and there’s communism? No other possible things we could do. No other changes we could make that could increase the equality of outcomes, because if we even think about that idea we’ve got full blown north korea on our hands.
Nobody is arguing there are no biases or suboptimal behaviours in the global economy, only that so far capitalism is the best system known for optimizing out those suboptimal behaviours. And that in particular, having governments try to short-circuit the process often make things worse rather than better.
"Tax brackets, medicaid, and public schools, to name a few. None of those are communism"
Tax brackets and medicaid are indeed not communism, though in a communist system Medicaid would be the only option. Those are safety nets, not forced equalization of outcomes (state schools aren't really a safety net, and in my view shouldn't exist; governments have a poor track record with education and ensuring everyone has access to it could be done in other ways like voucher schemes).
"A mandate for diversity on corporate boards wouldn't be communism either - it'd be an attempt to undo historical biases that give people unequal opportunities based on their race or gender."
These laws aren't safety nets designed to ensure a minimum quality of life for all. They are communism because they are direct attempts to enforce equality of outcome for only special demographic groups who are favoured by the ideology.
If I’m being honest, I don’t think this law is particularly import, because it’s a top down approach. All that seems to do is elevate the people who are already successful in the existing framework. Women who work like men will get those seats. A bottom-up approach seems more valuable. Mandating equality in schools, hiring, etc.
But we can’t have the discussion of what the best way to undo historical inequality, if we don’t agree that historical inequality happened, that it’s effects are still being felt today, and that the rate at which it’s being equalized is not enough - if the world is biased against you for your entire lifetime then it’s not useful to say “well it improved!”
If life is a board game, you’re arguing for the rules of the game: that these rules are enough to ensure that it’s fair. What I’m saying is that if life is a board game, it’s one where the game doesn’t start from scratch when you’re born - the people who were playing before you arrived have a far bigger influence on how the game unfolds for you than the theoretical fairness of the rules. Which means if you’re born into the right identity, the rules protect you. If you’re born into the wrong identity, the rules keep the game stacked against you.
And if you call that communism, well then I guess I’m a commie, but i really do think communism has a lot more to do with collective ownership of the means of production than mandating equal representation in positions of power
You're wrong for objective reasons. People try to immigrate to the capitalist democracies at very high rates. The same is not true of communist states, which historically had to build actual walls to keep people in.
You can try to blow off actual, concrete performance in metrics everyone agrees on like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality, but you will still be wrong by the mass collective judgement of many billions of people over a period of a century or more. Claiming otherwise is like claiming 2 + 2 = 0. There are no such things as walls around capitalist democracies to stop citizens from fleeing.
What you're missing is that the alternative to capitalism isn't necessarily communism. It can be wrong to argue for capitalism and wrong to argue for communism.
I would for example argue that, while still imperfect, European-style "social democracies" that combine a market economy with a strong social state are a lot better a system than either Soviet-style communism or US-style capitalism. They certainly tend to do much better than both on the metrics you mention like like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality.
And when considering "oughts" we need not limit ourselves to extant systems either. We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based. I'd argue that such a system would be different enough that it would no longer count as capitalism.
This works well when there are no alternatives. If the best country in the world to do business stops bring the US due to these changes, then capital will gradually move elsewhere and the massive amounts of wealth needed to enable us to even contemplate UBI may no longer exist.
European countries are capitalist democracies though (modulo the EU institutions themselves, which aren't, but let's put that to one side). The differences between Europe and the USA are tiny compared to the differences between capitalism and communism. They aren't profoundly different third ways or anything like that. I live in Europe and the place I live has mandatory health insurance, rule of law, relatively free speech, a strong finance sector, good ease of doing business and high inwards migration. From the perspective of an average person life here isn't much different to life in the USA.
W.R.T. Europe doing better on those statistics, can you cite that? It's not really true I think. The USA and western European countries are comparable in terms of percentage of migrants:
USA is ~15%, similar to the UK, Spain, France, Germany. Of course they would all be much higher if controls were relaxed. Many people would like to migrate to the USA but cannot, even from western Europe. Notably pale on the map: eastern Europe, China, Russia, Latin America etc. Migration stats are as I said - communist countries have very low numbers of immigrants and capitalist countries, which certainly includes western Europe, have much higher rates.
For life expectancy it's the same story. USA and Europe are very similar. The USA is a bit lower, probably due to higher rates of obesity, but there's not much in it. China, Russia and especially North Korea are both quite a bit lower.
"We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based"
Theoretical non-capitalist, non-communist systems are usually communist on close inspection. UBI is communism in its purist form, renaming it doesn't change that. If you want to know how well paying people regardless of work goes, take a look at the current rates of inflation, backlogs in government services and economic chaos that lockdowns and furloughs led to. That's peanuts compared to what a meaningfully sized UBI would entail.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're tedious, extremely repetitive, and usually turn nasty. That's why the HN guidelines specifically ask people to avoid them.
Laws are created all the time to create a competitive advantage for companies. Disney’s special tax district in Florida, industry cities like Emeryville and Vernon in California, tax credits for films, lax usury laws in South Dakota and Delaware for credit card banks, and the list goes on and on. It’s a reason, a common one, even if you don’t like it.
I'm not saying I don't like it :-) This isn't describing the same sort of thing as that.
To give an example, it would be like legislating that companies switch to email from postal mail because it's a competitive advantage to do so. I'm saying that that isn't a valid (or necessary) use of legislation. Companies will use email anyway to give themselves a competitive advantage.
> “More women on corporate boards means better decisions and businesses that outperform the competition,” Atkins said in a statement. “We believe this law remains important, despite the disheartening ruling.”
If they really believe that they would let the market make it happen. It is because they don’t really believe it that they are trying to enforce it by law.
Perhaps they also believe markets are imperfect, especially over the short to medium term timescales that the current and incoming generation of women (and other people who care about these things) actually care about?
Just because someone says that they believe in something, does that mean that they're right, and that they get to force others to do anything they want based on that belief? Including discriminating against yet others?
If you arrived at the snack table early and grabbed 10 juice boxes, and the teacher comes and takes five of them away from you and gives them to the other kids, you're not being discriminated against.
I know you really want it to be top down patronizing politicians doing this kind of thing all on their own, but there are actually millions of Californians who agree this is a good idea. In my metaphor, those are the adults in the room.
I'm sure that's true - I don't disagree with you. Though I would maintain politicians have a distinctly high-handed approach to dealing with such matters, and are often highly dismissive of collateral damage from their grand schemes.
So these "adults in the room" are high and mighty about makeup of boardrooms but they refuse to build more housing? If hoarding is the metaphor, seems like that's the more apt interpretation. The average woman in California is much more affected by rent than access to board positions.
I never said it’s a perfect system. There’s lots of
times when the government isn’t doing what ANYBODY wants, but that wasn’t what we were talking about. I definitely care more about housing than boardrooms, but that wasn’t what we were talking about either.
Your analogy is poor. A better one, if we’re going to stick with childish analogies:
You achieve straight A’s for a promised juice box reward, but the teacher refuses to give it to you because you’re a boy, and too many other boys got A’s in the past.
I understand your frustration because there really is the sentiment among some people today that “privileged” [1] people should be punished for the crimes of their ancestors.
However a law that says that the board of a large enough company can’t be all male (and then also not all female) is actually not the stupidest idea.
It should absolutely be considered a temporary stop-gap and automatically revoked as soon as some threshold of women on boards is achieved, but it actually is sometimes necessary to give people a little kick in the butt to get things going.
I don’t live in California so I don’t know the specifics of this law, just saying that the idea in general is not as terrible as some of the bad woke stuff.
[1] I say privileged in quotes because usually it’s enough that people look similar to people that are or have been privileged.
The explicit harm done to individuals by such a law is not a distant hypothetical; some non-zero number of people were discriminated against on the basis of their gender, by the government, in order to fill a mandatory quota.
It doesn’t do those individuals any good if you roll the laws back in a few years.
> some non-zero number of people were discriminated against on the basis of their gender, by the government, in order to fill a mandatory quota.
Your assumption is that board seats are being allocated to their rightful owners today, and this law would be a corruption of that. That’s a pretty big assumption. What rooms are you in where the ten most qualified people are _ever_ all male? Even in tech that’s not that common.
No, the reality — not my assumption — is that there are a limited number of opportunities and the government mandated that men should be discriminated against when being considered for them.
But it is also the reality that these seats aren’t really filled based on pure merit. It’s mostly (or at least a real prerequisite) a question if you belong to the right “club”. These laws expand the club a bit which I think is a good thing.
I agree that the idea that decision making will be better simply because there are women is suspect.
Looking at gender segregation here in Sweden, there are many class rooms where all the ten most qualified people are of the same gender. There are simply just many class rooms that have higher gender segregation than 90%, and many are practically single sex from the simple fact that all the students are of the same gender (teacher included).
Many profession are also above the 90% segregation line, and most of them are women dominated professions. Most of those work places will have rooms where ten most qualified people are of the same gender. Most of those work places also have women dominating from the top.
Tech is actually pretty much in the average in terms of gender segregation, at around 70%.
When it comes to rights guaranteed in the Constitution, millions of Californians, especially if they want to trample on those rights, are not the adults in the room. Those questions have been removed from the democratic process (by the people, through the Constitution and our fundamental rights) and are not up for grabs just because enough people think that they should.
You may want to think hard about when millions of people have been wrong and trampled on rights you would wish for courts to protect. It may not always go your way based on your approach above.
Actually they don't think that, they don't care one way or another. They just want women on boards, and they assume the market will make it work somehow.
More likely it just isn't true. Markets respond quite aggressively to even a small change in the bottom line. Often companies are quite happy to ignore the law, common sense or basic decency to achieve a bit more profit.
If they aren't lining up women for the boards voluntarily, it is because nobody with money thinks there is a benefit from doing so. The effect is probably just the so-called Berkson's paradox [0] and will likely disappear if hiring teams start seeking out female candidates.
How would that happen? I'm curious because I've never seen markets as being specially good at enforcing policies that (some or most) parts of society see as morally good (as vague as these terms are). For example, markets never managed to prevent child labour (they still don't!), we had to pass laws to enforce them in Western countries.
What are your specific thoughts on how would this process unfold?
Edit: On a second read of the article and parent comment, I understand it now as an ironic take on a flawed justification for the law that tries to satisfy everyone ("We're doing this for the markets!").
The part he quoted was about running a more efficient business (i.e. outcompeting the competition), not being morally better. Markets are generally pretty good at promoting that.
Get it, then I think disagreement runs deeper than I thought. As a sibling comment mentioned, I believe that markets are meant to serve humans, not the other way around.
The question is: is it more desirable for society to have the most competent people running a business or to have a balanced representation of gender, sexual orientation, skin color or <insert other arbitrary way to classify people here> running it? Free market proponents would argue the former is more desirable.
If you're excluding a significant proportion of your population from leadership roles - which is what happens predictably, almost as if by magic, when "markets" make decisions about leadership - your markets are anything but free.
I believe you are using a non standard definition of "free market" here? Also I am not sure I understand what you mean by "excluding a significant proportion of your population from leadership roles". Of course, competency/qualification requirements excludes a large proportion of the population.
This question might be a binary over-simplification. We currently do not have the tools to measure who is "the most competent people running a business". Markets are never pure so I do not think that the current situation (predominantly white men in boards) is the outcome of rational optimisation over the years. If anything, free market proponents should welcome these laws as a way to experiment with different variables to empirically determine what's the best way to run a business.
I also do not think that (most) proponents of a balanced representation favour diversity over competency. Speaking for myself, I do believe (from experience) that having diversity in a team results in more resilient, efficient, and "optimal" decision-making. Again, we do not have sufficient tools to prove that empirically, so we better A/B test the hell out of it :)
If it’s widely accepted that placing more women on corporate boards delivers better results for companies, then investors will push companies to do just that.
Those that fail to do so will see their share price lag behind their competitors.
Social policies are not mine and I personally do not have a goal to promote them among the privileged class to which I myself belong, so it should not matter what terms I use in this conversation. It’s just the matter of fact that certain class of people of certain ancestry and gender is often ignorant to the social progress and lives by the book of Ayn Rand, rather than by the book of Acemoglu and Robinson.
I understand now. However, I think it unfairly assumes that markets are run (or executed?) by rational actors that always make optimal decisions without getting bogged down by biases or passed down wisdom.
Sure, but then you’re replacing that with assuming the government is making the optimal decision and not being bogged down by biases or politically expedient self-serving moves.
Given that the feedback loop for government actions is slow and often time indirect, I’m not sure the government is making the best decision either.
I don't think I ever said that passing this law was correct or that governments were free from bias. I just questioned whether it was a good idea to let markets make decisions and expect them to be optimal, or whether optimising for competitive advantage is inherently good.
I think it's similarly fair to question whether it is a good idea to let governments make decisions and expect them to be optimal, or whether optimizing for equity in outcome is inherently good.
Why do you think corporations aren't part of the government?
They certainly have huge influence over policy. IMO it's extremely superficial to believe that just because they're not part of the official party political process they're somehow not in a senior leadership role.
My guess is that GP means that it's not actually a competitive advantage, otherwise the markets would already be including women on their boards in equal proportions to men?
Markets don't tend to experiment that much when they have something that works unless further competition shows up, see electric cars for example.
Markets are meant to serve humans, not the other way around.
How would that not happen? Businesses are always looking for an edge over the competition. If it was clear that women bosses outperformed men, any smart investor would insist on having them run the joint. The only counter argument would be that investors hate women more than they love money, which is just patently absurd on the face of it, since they obviously love nothing more than money.
It's possible there is two competing market forces:
1. women on corporate boards are a competitive advantage for reasons stated above.
2. women on corporate boards are a competitive dis-advantage because of social factors based around the cultural idea that women are not normally on boards.
If that's the case, then the market won't unlock the advantages of the first factor unless something happens to disrupt the second factor.
I honestly don't know how anyone can believe the market will find the optimal outcome. At best it finds an optimal outcome within constraints put on it by the confused, reactionary, panicky, racist, sexist, bigoted people who are the things actually acting out "the market".
Wouldn't it be pretty easy to confirm or falsify the theory then? See how companies perform with more diverse boards as compared to those with less diverse boards? That information is public. This study [1] seems to have inconclusive results:
> We found evidence for a positive effect of women on corporate boards on both measures of company performance—ROA and PER—apart from the percentage of female executives in the case of ROA when estimated through pooled OLS. However, the outcomes of panel data fixed-effects and random-effects revealed the lack of connection between board gender diversity and ROA but a positive impact of the number and percentage of women on board on PER.
Those studies didn’t happen in a vacuum. Imagine your company loses out on some big contract because when the some-women board shows up the all-men board at the other company’s unexamined prejudices kick in and they “just have a bad feeling about that company”. Or maybe it’s that the male faction of the board undervalues the female board members input and it’s functionally like having a smaller board. Those are kinda cartoonish examples of what I’m talking about when I say “cultural forces” - there may be all kinds of hard to quantify hard to control for effects at work. But if those effects would go away if the cultural stereotypes and biases went away, then maybe a law like that would push a skewed system towards one that provides equal opportunity for everyone
To be fair, that sounds a bit like a fallacy ... if a diverse board leads to comparatively better outcomes, it's the fact that they were diverse, but if it doesn't, it's the fault of everyone not trusting the female-identifying board members enough?
If you're bringing up a claim or a hypothesis in a discussion, you need to allow for the claim to be falsifiable.
I'm not making a claim. I'm describing a potential mechanism. The start of this thread was a question like "if women make boards better, why doesn't the market put them in those seats", so I was describing the type of system that could be at play - i.e. cultural inertia counteracting the benefits.
There is, I believe, plenty of evidence in the literature of cultural factors like stereotypes, preconceptions, and prejudices having a very real impact on group performance. But that's not a specific claim about WHICH factors are at play in this circumstance.
You posted a study that seems to show no impact when adding women to boards, so I was pointing out how a study that doesn't control for those kinds of cultural inertia factors can't say anything about the existence or non-existence of those factors.
As for the specific example "if a diverse board leads to comparatively better outcomes, it's the fact that they were diverse, but if it doesn't, it's the fault of everyone not trusting the female-identifying board members enough" which you describe as an un-falsifiable claim, but it's not. Something as simple as an analysis of meeting calendars or emails on diverse and non-diverse boards might be able to determine if the communication patterns are a negative or positive influence on performance.
In the end, from a corporate investor level, it's all about the bottom line. Overperformance and underperformance are well-defined terms. If there is a (positive or negative) correlation between ratio of male and female board members and performance, investors won't look twice at more obscure facets like 'meeting patterns' or 'cultural inertia'.
If the original claim ("Companies perform better with more women on boards") is not provable in a comparatively simple metric like growth, and if there are indications that in fact, 'other factors' like cultural inertia currently is diametral to female success in boards, then making a law that shoehorns more women in boards is not designed to make companies perform better, but to change the assumed cultural inertia at the expense of short- to medium-term economic growth. It becomes an experiment - with the countries that do not have that kind of laws and are unlikely to implement them as a control group (looking at you, China).
It only would be fair to tell that - instead of painting an unproven (and to some extend: disproven) claim a fact.
Well based on the study you cited, there was no significant impact of women on boards detected - so the worst case is performance stays the same but equality is increased. The best case is that gender-diverse boards perform better in the absence of cultural factors, and this law changes the culture and performance increases. Sounds like we win either way - more equality and stable performance, or more equality and increased performance. Where's the downside?
I should have been more clear: I was also refering to the index comparison shared by thematrixturtle [1].
Differently from you, I don't assume the idea that co-ed teams will eventually outperform more homogenous teams is a foregone conclusion. Which means that there are scenarios in which we don't all win.
What are we supposed to get from that chart? It looks like a subset of the data performs differently from the set? That's not useful information. Via regression to the mean the larger data set will always be more "normal" either lower or higher than the smaller data set.
If you wanted a good comparison you'd have to be comparing an equal sized subset of the DJI that only included boards with low diversity. Junk conclusions from junk data. When it was actually studied with rigor, e.g. the study you linked to (https://jfin-swufe.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40854-...) "We found evidence for a positive effect of women on corporate boards on both measures of company performance—ROA and PER"
There's no actual evidence that women on boards yields better outcomes, it's just another false belief propagated by junk studies.
But even if there was, would that be a good reason to act on it? This "logic" never seems to be deployed in men's favour. It's obvious that strong male firefighters will have better outcomes than female firefighters, that's why New York had to make the qualification tests easier in order to hire more women. Yet the rules were changed anyway.
"I honestly don't know how anyone can believe the market will find the optimal outcome."
Because of enormous amounts of history, theory and practice showing that it will? BTW the "confused, reactionary, panicky, racist, sexist, bigoted people" would appear to describe the people breaking the law in order to ban men from powerful positions on the basis of their gender, wouldn't it.
"It's obvious that strong male firefighters will have better outcomes than female firefighters, that's why New York had to make the qualification tests easier in order to hire more women."
Is it obvious, though? Sure, perhaps for a few specific things, but outside of a very limited set of things... probably not. You don't need to be a strong manly man to drive a fire truck nor to use hoses. The test probably didn't actually measure what was necessary before and likely disqualified women not because it was difficult, but because it didn't actually measure how fit for the job women were (example: Measuring upper body strength alone instead of measuring how well they could carry someone out of the fire or hooking up hoses). I mean, somehow women are strong enough to be lifting patients in a nursing home but not helping folks out in a fire? I doubt this.
> You don't need to be a strong manly man to drive a fire truck …
It helps if you’re going to be doing literally anything other than just driving the apparatus.
Also, why should men be relegated to the most dangerous jobs, just so that we can fill a female hiring quota by giving women the safer, less demanding jobs?
> … nor to use hoses.
You absolutely need to be built to man a firehose.
It takes your full weight and strength to keep control of a hose with the diameters and pressures used in firefighting.
With a 2.5”+ hose, it can take two full-grown men to keep control of the line with the nozzle open, especially when advancing.
Nevermind hauling a charged line into a building, up stairs, etc. The weight alone is tremendous.
> I mean, somehow women are strong enough to be lifting patients in a nursing home
Male staffers are generally asked to do the lifting, and sometimes medical services literally call in the fire department for a lift assist.
> … but not helping folks out in a fire?
The structure gear alone weighs about 70 pounds. By the time you find someone in a building, you’ve been using a heavy tools, in the heat, to sound floors and search rooms rapidly in the most exhausting way possible.
It’s so much more difficult than just lifting someone without all the gear on.
There’s also forced entry into doors, etc, which benefits substantially from weight, leverage, and upper body strength.
The same is true for military standards, and potentially some police forces (SWAT).
Of course this should have nothing to do with a board position. Perhaps women would actually excel in board positions as those mostly have to do with building/having social networks, something women certainly seem to be better at than men on average.
Most of it is going to be speculation until we see larger numbers and can compare boards with women to boards without (and even boards with only women). It's tough to say, as the 'old boys club' seems to be dying out regardless.
As far as I can tell, your argument is:
1. There is no evidence that women on boards yield better outcomes
2. Even if they led to better outcomes, it's wrong to act on it.
3. Markets are efficient and therefore don't allow for discrimination
Re: 1, I don't know
Re: 2, I believe that there is a place for affirmative action, especially in places like the boardroom where physical aspects of gender differences have no meaning.
Re: 3, There's plenty of evidence showing places where markets are discriminatory in preference to being efficient: https://danluu.com/bad-decisions/
Gathering data to investigate this is tricky, you cannot really run a randomized controlled trial, so everything is always observational.
This meta analysis study suggests that the suggests that the effect size of having a woman in the board is negligible, but the average number of women in the boards of the considered companies was low:
> If they really believe that they would let the market make it happen
"The market" is not an entity. It's a collective of people, those people have prejudices and friends. Those primarily factor into what happens - thus, more of the same in-group ends up at the top. This is frankly such a base explanation it's bordering on bad-faith reasoning, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Forgive the eye-roll, but this is classic HN reductionism.
How many things can you think of - right now - for which there is clear evidence of benefit yet society has not adopted action? Systemic change is slow, sometimes laws help advance systemic change. The gender disparity gap in leadership is closing, but network effects will continue to operate to create inequitible opportunity for quite some time.
In term of things that are more profitable, companies tend to be very good at optimising for that, that’s the nature of a free market, economic darwinism through competition. If your objective is equity, not economic performance, then it’s a different objective but that’s not the one quoted by the senator.
Companies exist within systems that are more than just "pure capitalism", and whose individual-level actors (who often hold decision-making authority) are motivated by more than just "maximizing company returns". The free market is not some independent force of physics, it's operating in a highly complex, multi-factorial society with individual actors and competing forces. For instance: I have seen people lobby for hires - yes, including two instances of appointing board members - based on personal associations vs. a sober-eyed review of qualifications (guess which gender typically benefits?).
The idea that "if it was better the market will make it so" may be right in the fullness of time, but we live in what is effectively a zero-sum society when viewing the present. Patience for the long-tail of change advantages the already advantaged.
>How many things can you think of - right now - for which there is clear evidence of benefit yet society has not adopted action
Which ones can you think of? Keep in mind the article is talking about markets and fiscal health of the company itself, not society as a whole. It's pretty easy to make the case "society would be better if we did the beneficial things", the question at hand is whether it's the governments place to push these on private actors.
That's unfortunate, we've had a similar law on the books here in Norway since 2006. There where some noise about it at the beginning. But the consensus now seem to be that it is a positive.
By "the consensus" you mean the press stopped reporting on objections and now tell you there's consensus?
There's obviously no consensus that it's positive. It's clearly, very obviously and very badly negative. It's blatantly sexist discrimination against men who have done nothing wrong, which is deeply immoral. It also many other subtle negative effects. It degrades the language and confidence in the rule of law because these laws that make people unequal are invariably presented as "equality" laws. It also makes it impossible to respect women on boards! Everyone knows they might be there only to satisfy a legal quota, not because anyone actually respected their abilities. I've actually heard quite a few women opine that they start out suspicious of women in powerful positions these days, because they know directly how easy it is to get there on the back of feminism, but they need competent services in that moment and not a job. If you want to create anti-female sexism where none should exist, forcibly replacing men for sexist reasons is a great way to do it across the board.
This sounds like you don't actually live here. I'm not a native in Norway, and what you describe isn't what I see at all.
Is there a small part of the population that is against it? Sure, and there probably always will be. There is also a small population of xenophobes and racists, but they definitely aren't the majority.
I've actually heard quite a few women opine that they start out suspicious of women in powerful positions these days, because they know directly how easy it is to get there on the back of feminism, but they need competent services in that moment and not a job.
Just to fill you in, people are suspicious of people in powerful positions. Right now, folks that agree with you blame feminism. Previously, they'd say it was obvious that she sexed her way to the top. I'd not take any of this seriously.
Instead of discussing imputed attitudes or motives, since the Norway law is already 16 years old, why not look at actual studies of quantitative results on company performance? (by company size, sector, age etc.)
Which are the most authoritative? What were their findings? (on actual company performance metrics, not just on the effect on gender representation on boards or executive search committees, or pay gaps)?
For what it's worth, even though I don't agree with you, your post really should not have been flagged to death. I don't see what rules it's breaking so I vouched for you to bring it back.
How many years after the Norway legislation did it take to measure the outcome? Can you cite any definitive studies on that? (other than https://www.economist.com/business/2018/02/17/ten-years-on-f..."Ten years on from Norway’s quota for women on corporate boards: Gender quotas at board level in Europe have done little to boost corporate performance or to help women lower down")
As to the California state law 2018/SB826 ('Women on Boards'), IIRC part of the reason the state acted was out of frustration that federal legislation on this topic had not happened despite years of discussion.
You are right that on the economically side the reporting and research, indicates that there is no measurable difference on economical performance between before and after law. But before the law was introduced there was worry that an influx of unexperienced women would undermine profitability, which did not happened.
The positive, (as seen from most Norwegians view), is that there are now more powerful women in Norwegian industry and private sector. This is obviously an ideological view, and if you view more women in powerful position as of no or negative value. Then it isn't a positive for you.
Wouldn't that disproportionately help mostly already wealthy upper class Norwegians who have the ability to qualify as CEOs? I think that matters, as often these types of measures don't take into account lower classes
The law is to force companies to let women onto boards. That's the aim. Claiming that some study says it's better for business is just something to fire back at the "leave it to the free market" people, in case of opposition.
How about we get parity quotas for enforcing the ratio of men attending university, which is crushing?
The fascinating thing about those "protections" is that they mandate a ratio for women without mandating a symmetric ratio for men, which means a world where men become very underepresented would be perfectly fine according to the law. And given that neither masculinism nor egalitarianism have a sufficient number of vocal proponents, those situations will happen as they are already happening in Education.
Males issues such as suicide rate, egodepletion and loneliness are skyrocketing and it will only lead to more suffering and conflict in our society.
Don't be a retard, be an egalitarianist.
The thing to realize is that all the "fairness logic" is made up after the fact, to rationalize the whole endeavour, and sell it to the population at large. Women want to do what men are doing, they want to be there in every vaguely high-status space, always on the scene. That's it. If a load of men get driven out of some place as a result, that's of comparatively little import.
Can someone help me understand why a law that mandates women on company boards (arguably the best position in the market) would be more beneficial than women being mandated into all jobs, including lower level men dominated jobs (like brick laying, plumbing, construction, metal working, etc)?
Because more female plumbers isn't something that middle-class college-educated women in the media and industry care about—and those are the women in a position to be heard and to influence policy.
Serious answer? Because boards of companies have control over many parts of those companies. Ensuring companies have a variety of people on their boards ensure a variety of viewpoints, and make sure female issues are represented. Are there are a wide range of other viewpoints still not represented? Yes, but let's try to make progress where we can.
Can men represent female issues? Of course in principle, but in my experience they often don't do well at it.
There are plenty of policies, including ones where governments spend chunks of money, to get women into (as you call them) "lower level men dominated jobs", these often involve advertising, and helping people get qualified to do the job. As there are no qualifications for company boards, that type of thing wouldn't help there.
Interesting insight. I see your point and I agree that more points of view can definitely be an asset to a company. But my concern in about mandating these jobs.
I tend to disagree with you that company boards have no qualifications. I think you need a pretty impressive resume to even be considered in a company board. So programs for less prestigious jobs that can help women gain the experience and build an resume where they get the job in a non mandated way could be more viable (IMHO).
I think if you start mandating these kind of jobs in the name of equality and diversity you:
1. Should mandate blue collar jobs in the name of equality and diversity as well
2. Should really make sure you have qualified and competent people to fill the jobs. Otherwise you risk filling those positions with unqualified people who, despite their best intentions, will not help the cause by under performing.
This is an area where there are (I think) no perfect answers.
One deeper problem is how boards tend to work in general -- often the people already on the board are involved in choosing new members, so things don't "fix themselves" over time. The best option (I think) would be to make sure as the most qualified and competent people take the jobs, I personally believe in that case you would end up with more women on company boards. One way to do that would be to have boards appointed by a completely independant group, but I suspect most company owners would hate that suggestion.
Mandating many blue collar jobs wouldn't work, as there simply aren't enough women with the necessary qualifications, so you would simply shrink the sector by (making up a number I admit) 80%.
I also tend to think that if we hire the most competent and qualified people the numbers would naturally tend to 50% or whatever the men/women preference ratio for that job is. What we should strive to do, IMHO, is make sure that everyone has the same opportunities and there is no discrimination preventing different people to get a job.
I agree that mandating many blue collar jobs would not work because of the low number of qualified women, but why would that not be the case mandating company board jobs? If we're saying we have very very few women in company boards, doesn't that mean we have very very few women that have experience for positions like those and consequently way more men that have experience and are more qualified? Since board members are such high end positions and paid very well you can't just double the number of such positions which means you'll end up picking women with less experience over men with more experience cause it's mandated. Hence you're picking the less qualified person for the job which will create friction.
I think a way better solution would be creating incentives for companies to hire women in the boards or funding companies created by women. That way women can get the same degree of experience as men and then can compete for these positions with similar qualifications which I think will increase their numbers.
But in my opinion mandating something like this creates a lot of friction. Government mandated people to wear masks and we all know how that went. So many people did everything in their power to resist that. I think it's human nature to try to resist when something is forced on you.
If the spirit of the law of corporations is to serve the publics interest, and profit-motivation serves the public interest by increasing the capital savings in private society, then why do a variety of view points matter in achieving the objective? How does a board member with more feminine care knowledge increase the available capital for lending into, say, nail salons, by being more proactive about such internal capital expenditures toward more femininity?
Can it be true that the companies that have women directors do better only because they promoted the qualified ones organically and due to permit? Those that would be forced to due to quotas may not do better
After many years of living in San Francisco I came to the couclusion that for most CA lawmakers US constitution is a pesky nuisance. Thus both CA and the rest of the country would greatly benefit in the long term, if CA secedes.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadWithout legal consequences? Probably (if the decision is not reversed on appeal).
Without horribly negative PR consequences? No way.
The problem with reality is there is no mathematical metric function where you can plug as input a human and you get as output a number and then you can sort this humans out so you can hire the best. Even for small domains like programming with language X and framework Y is not possible to create a good such metric function, someone could be good at memorizing APIs, someone could be fast at creating good solution but others might be slow but their solutions are even better and others are good at debugging issues.
If you can meassure skils then you should be capable of hiring people with this simple 2 steps
1 Person A administers the tests 2 Person B checks the results but he has no idea who the candidates are
No more problems with gender,race,culture,political affiliation
Someone explain me how you always have to meet the candidate because you have a skill to read they competence and cultural fit from their face and body proportions and you are special and this proven physical biases never affect you the special one. I mean "you" in a general term not the comment author.
But outside of a perfect mathematical universe competency is multi dimensional and difficult to measure. Bias does creep in. Treating it as a scientific process seems just as reductive as reducing a person to just their gender.
"The law voided Friday was on shaky ground from the get-go, with a legislative analysis saying it could be difficult to defend. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed it despite the potential for it to be overturned because he wanted to send a message during the #MeToo era."
The true purpose of this law was political career boosting, not actual change.
Brown is not stupid, nor is the legal team that worked for him.
Just because you're retired doesn't mean you're out of politics and no back scratchers are beholden to you or you can't act as kingmaker or whatnot. There's a lot more to politics than the office itself. California is famously corrupt in this regard.
Are all of the unconstitutional ratchet laws that were passed during the Roe era political grandstanding? Or do you think their authors and legislators passed them hoping for changes in the judicial branch that would render them “good law”?
If we're being real, it's obviously a mix of both. Political grandstanding with plainly dumb laws is definitely a thing that happens. And politicians passing dodgy laws hoping it will work is also something that happens.
That is possible. They did try in 2020, at least for government and public institutions not companies: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
So if I believe something I know to be blatantly illegal is "a worthwhile policy", doing it anyway is OK then, especially if I feel confident I can get away with it for a few years? Does this also apply to policies you personally don't feel to be worthwhile?
> Are all of the unconstitutional ratchet laws that were passed during the Roe era political grandstanding?
Trigger laws you mean? Of course it's political grandstanding, but there is still a night and day difference between having a law which explicitly says it won't come into effect until e.g. Roe vs Wade gets overturned such as here:
https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=188.017#....
and just passing some law you well know is unconstitutional but trying to enforce it anyway, till the courts actually stop you a few years later.
> The Women on Boards law, also known by its bill number, SB826, called for penalties ranging from $100,000 fines for failing to report board compositions to the California secretary of state’s office to $300,000 for multiple failures to have the required number of women board members.
> The Secretary of State’s office said 26% of publicly traded companies headquartered in California reported meeting the quota of women board members last year, according to a March report.
As you are probably aware, it is a common legal strategy to avoid setting a precedent for some dubious legal claim you know you would lose in court but that is an effective way to coerce others. This works for patent trolls for similar reasons why it likely worked for the state of California (because a lot of times a rational actor would rather comply rather than incur the often greater costs of fighting even if a win seems near certain). It's also quite different from passing some dubious law which plainly states that it does not currently apply and why, as a symbolic act to some constituency. For what it's worth, from memory I don't think all anti-abortion legislation has been mainly symbolic like this, I think there were also cases where legislators tried to coerce people with laws they full well knew would be ruled unconstitutional.
This is a semantic matter that largely depends on context, but more typically, it is not considered "discrimination" in the legal or usual common sense when it's in reality a form of "affirmative action".
I'm just pointing this out to distinguish the case where "discrimination" can have positive meaning with that where it has pejorative meaning. When making value judgments either way, overloaded word choices can cause more harm than good.
Edit: for those who are taking issue with my comment, please see #7 before you downvote: https://www.usf.edu/compliance-ethics/equal-opportunity/ten-...
That use is not typical especially when you consider history and the fact that it still differs from the view of the constitution. Moreover it strikes me as disingenuous (like the Soviets calling Western news disinformatzya).
Where does discrimination have a positive meaning?
I am pretty sure that the folks who are against this law will also be against it if you call it "affirmative action" or "positive discrimination" once you explain the meaning to them. From a meritocratic, humanistic, democratic perspective it is just morally wrong however you spin it.
That's a pretty strong assertion you're making, that requiring equality is discrimination. I don't agree at all, and I'm not alone. Which means it's not on the face of it obvious if a law like that is actually unconstitutional - anymore than it's clear if the 2nd amendment applies to nukes.
If you absolutely need proportionate representation somewhere it suggests that each group is unequal.
I'd argue most believe that men and women are generally equal in terms of skills and potential given similar circumstances, but recognize that society does not afford them equal opportunity regardless of merit. This operates for more than just gender, of course.
Mandating a ratio will deepen the divide not fix it. I think the society is on a good track to fix this divide in time. Any attempts by social engineers may undermine it.
If the legislature want to pass unconstitutional laws that will get struck down, at best he is saving the court sometime by vetoing it. But it is the legislature that is at fault for passing it, not him for failing to stop it, isn't it?
> I (Governor) do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_of_California
Edit:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-says-california-...
That's kinda the whole point of our systems, an attempt to marry personal interest and community interests. Since when is, "Politician does something his constituents want," a headline?
European women generally sought help with carrying the burden of child bearing and child rearing and gains in terms of employment followed. American women generally took the very American position of "Don't tread on me!" and it hasn't been as effective.
There are better ways to address such issues.
My very personal take on the issue is that one needs such law to "change the habits" and then hope that the new normality later reduces the need for such laws.
Having a smaller slice of a larger pie can be a better deal than a larger slice of a dying economy because people are being stupid in the name of ethics and equality.
The classic illustration is that the increased prevalence of women/black/hispanic/indigenous role models in STEM, for example, encourages a higher degree of participation and competition from these traditionally marginalized groups in the field.
If there is no good reason to think these marginalized groups are inherently less suited for the role, then over time, they should be selected on the basis of merit in roughly demographic proportion.
Women who join male dominated groups tend to feel the men are just being mean to them because male and female culture differs.
It's probably a waste of my time to try to discuss it here.
So I think I shall bow out without completing my thought in this comment.
I don't think women had the historical opportunity to be "made a man", so this very-rhetorical argument / play on words is not particularly persuasive.
For me as an external consultant for big companies, it means I really enjoy working with women. They are always extremely good in what they are doing as soon as they are one level up.
The number of seats is kind of arbitrary from what I understand, you could add more or have less seats.
Also what the board is responsible for is generally governed by government regulation in some jurisdiction.
The whole thing is about corporate oversight to some extent, supposed to be you have unbiased members that don't have skin in the game like execs and CEOs and other employees and who can represent shareholder's interests as well as government regulation.
I'm not sure how I personally feel about the law, but the idea that you'd need say a gender parity of board members isn't that insane as compared to say for hiring for a doctor, engineer, scientist, etc. If you think of the purpose of the board to be that unbiased oversight, you could argue diversity is a good way to optimize for reduced bias.
I'd like to shoot for a higher standard than "less nutty than some other proposal" personally.
But I'm weird that way.
It's all about overcoming inertia by pushing against it. There's a cultural bias in corporate boards to only or primarily hire men. Putting women on them can show that they are equally capable, and gives these women the opportunity to create the contacts needed so that other women in the future will also have access to them. All this is more difficult as long as the cultural tendency to discriminate in favor of men remains unchanged.
How is that a goal? Putting someone on a board isn't visible, at all. Almost nobody sees board members, and certainly nobody sees their achievements (which is needed to demonstrate capability). And visibility/perception of capability hasn't been needed in the past. Women have stormed institutions that were male bastions once.
> so that other women in the future will also have access to them
That's circular reasoning.
Note that I'm not at all arguing against anyone in a board position. It's just that this seems to be a "feel-good" measure without any reason and effect.
Won't other board members see their achievements, and aren't board members responsible for choosing new members? Having women there should work to make their peers realize that being a woman is not by itself a handicap for the position (contrarily to the tradition of irrational beliefs that it does).
> That's circular reasoning.
No, it's compound interest. Getting the ball rolling is important so that the process will increase speed by building on the previous efforts, until reaching the point where the artificial pressure is no longer needed.
For comparison: look what a black president has done against racism in the USA. OTOH, I don't believe putting women on a board of directors is going to make companies perform worse. So many seats are taken by mediocre bootlickers. But I still think it's not going to help women in general.
Few laws got removed faster then when one such law was tried in Sweden, and the argument was the exact same thing as in California. No one likes discrimination, and when the "wrong" demographic benefited the political support goes into negative. Sweden has a worse gender segregation than US, and at the extreme end you got profession and educational programs that are practically single-sex. Gender quotas would force a change of habits, but you won't find much political support for it. Would even you be a supporter if it was used as a general tool against gender segregation?
I'd rather it take a little bit longer if it assures that procedure is followed and laws like these are legitimately struck down and set a strong precedent for the future.
This is an odd way to defend a law. If he actually believed this were true, why would he need to mandate it? Just let the better companies outcompete.
-- If a California government action contains discriminatory classifications with the intent to reverse or compensate for discrimination, that original discrimination must be concrete, tangible, and a product of that government's other action.
-- The defendant (California government) could not / did not produce any case of an identifiable woman who was discriminated against in board seat selection (according to the definitions of illegal discrimination) which would have been justification for creating legislative discrimination to reverse the harm.
-- The history and debate about the Senate bill showed that the goal was not to reverse specific cases of discrimination, but to achieve the broad goal of gender parity on boards -- which is not a compelling state interest enough to justify creating discrimination.
-- The state was not able to (or did not) present compelling evidence either that lack of women representation on boards is a result of discrimination, or that having women on boards is a causal factor in improved corporate performance or positive benefit to the state, which would have been necessary to claim that the legislation is constitutional. During the bill's debate and passage, none of the expert testimony or contribution to its passage was able to cite compelling research linking female board members causally to such.
----
Let me just say I am all for all for women to have more representation on boards of companies -- by each individual's interest and merit (and equally, connections) to do so. I am not in favor of legislators passing such shoddy discriminatory legislation to force it to happen because they want to see a symbol of something achieved regardless of how it happens, and glossing over what it contorts others to have to do to make it so.
I don't understand this. Something being a competitive advantage is not a reason for a law.
Why does your kid need a financial advantage? If society provided an equal footing for every child, the advantages you could provide to them would be love, advice inspiration, and bettering society so that there was more for them.
You say “that’ll never fly”, but I say if we’re going to imagine a better world why not imagine it radically better not just incrementally better.
Not sure what kind of dystopia you're setting up where politicians will always use the greater good of everyone else to justify any actions against individuals.
So I'm not setting up a dystopia where politicians swoop in and rob the elderly. I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.
disagree. there are lots of unpopular laws that get passed as part of other bills, under the urging of activists or lobbyists against popular opinion, etc.
>I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.
The details matter. Big sweeping statements like the above don't mean anything until you get to details - they sound like moral soundbites but they ignore the details of the actions required to get to that point. That way you never have to deal with negatives arising from your ideas, because you never discuss the details enough to get to the negatives, just the platitudes.
Not saying it couldn't be made a law without cultural buy-in, I'm saying the law wouldn't be effective. There are too many workaround. You can give your child your stuff while you're still alive. You can put it all into a trust. You can create a scholarship where the criteria is being this one person. You can put it all in gold bars and bury it in the backyard. Etc. etc. etc. but if there is a cultural consensus that doing that is WRONG, people will by-and-large not do it.
> The details matter.
Indeed they do. But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details. It seems that there are a lot of people on here who don't think we should be seeking to create a society that actually provides equal opportunities - in that context, debating how to achieve that goal is pretty useless. If we all agree that it would be good, then we can discuss specific plans and proposals to get closer to that goal.
The bureaucracy would expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, and enforcement mechanisms would be created like every other tax rule, enforced at the end of a gun like every other tax rule.
>But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details.
On the opposite - without the details the goal is just a meaningless sound bite, used as a weapon to justify things many won't agree to by saying 'but didn't you agree goal x is important?'.
The answer is 'depends on the cost'. If the cost is empowering equality of outcome proponents, or creating communist style political commissar enforcement mechanisms, then no, not worth it.
That's why I say details of plan first, not last. it's easy to say "what if we had equal opportunity" and get head nods but ultimately meaningless. The details are what matter, and if you can't present what you think is a good plan, you don't have one - you just have a platitude to justify wide future actions that I probably wouldn't support.
Ahh, like every other tax rule - so not really at all for rich people and quite heavily for poor and middle class people? Sounds about right.
> That's why I say details of plan first, not last
I hope that's not the approach you take with everything in life. "Do you want to go out to eat?" ... "What restaurant? I'll only say if I want to go when the venue has been selected." That's not measured caution, or the ideal - a collaborative approach to solving problems - that response is a trap where every suggestion is met with disdain. Saying "Yes I would like to go out to eat, what restaurant did you have in mind?" doesn't mean you have to go if the selected venue turns out to be chuck-e-cheese.
It is from blatant political rejiggering that use these platitudes to gain artificial buy in from the uninformed.
I mean, if you just ask hitler his goal was to restore germany to greatness. Why can't you just agree with his goal before you know his plan? I hoped that's not the approach you take to political platitudes.
If you have reason to suspect someone is using these platitudes to gain buy in their plans would never gain, its important to ask for the details. If they don't have details, they're just a useful idiot. If they do have details, they're the thing that separate good and bad.
So lets not pretend "lets agree to my incredibly vague goal without any mention of how we get there" is a reasonable thing to try and thrust on strangers EXCEPT for the express purpose of manipulation and echo chamber buy ins.
Would anyone leave inheritances or give gifts after that? People would just spend everything they have, targeting a $0 or negative net worth at death.
I assume that you're conflating equal opportunity( via rights and treatment under the law) with equal starting points, but they are far from the same things. Equal starting points are going to be impossible, literally a pipe dream without creating some form of dystopian nightmare that prevents people from having children, and instead farms genetically equal embryos who are then raised by the state. Which will also necessitate monoculture and risk humanity due to the lack in individual variation.
Because you might just as well frame public school as the government stepping in to mandate that there are seats in elementary and high school for everyone.
I am surprised to learn this!
So, for actual factual nuanced details, it depends on where you are and what you're specifically talking about. E.g. in canada it was 1964 when women became legally entitled to open a bank account without their husband’s signature.
I can't find a specific date that women were able to access basic non-credit banking services without a cosigner everywhere in the US. It happened in California in the 1800s, but there seem to have been significant obstacles for women accessing banking tools up until some time in the 1960s - without a legal requirement, it's up to the individual banks, some would have been easier than others.
The 1970s bit was a reference to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, passed in 1974 - “Prior to the law, for car loans or financial transactions, a woman was expected to have someone — a father or husband, typically a male — co-sign for that transaction,”
So yes, what I said was only true about access to credit-baring accounts, not all accounts. But before you dismiss how that would have impacted the presence of women on corporate boards - it was 1988 when the Women's Business Ownership Act of 1988 passed and put an end to state laws that required women to have male relatives sign business loans.
So yeah, the reality is both better than what I said, and worse than what I said.
You have to qualify it with married.
A single woman could open a bank account without anyone's permission! A married women was considered a part of a partnership with her husband.
2. Even in a world where essential resources are plentiful, many people compete for status, which is a zero-sum game.
3. Perhaps as a result, communism when attempted historically results in famine and/or shortages and/or genocides.
Capitalist societies experience famine, but that's not the same as causing famine, something which has happened numerous times in communist societies:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–1922
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Compare that with the following famines that were both experienced and caused by capitalism:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India
If you look at the full list of famines, you'll find the difference between capitalism and communism astonishing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine
I had to search for “tankie”. Thanks for introducing a new word for me. For people who don't know what “tankie” is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
However, please keep in mind that not everyone who is not a priori against communism can be classified as hard core Stalinist. One should be able to criticize both systems, and wish a better one, without being labelled from one side as “tankie” and from the other side as “imperialistic capitalistic pig”, or another insult of the day.
In both cases, government actions were what drove crop failures to become widespread famines.
Which historical communist country would you like to live in?
None of the historically available communist countries would be my choice of living. In the same way, I would not be eager to live in any of the historical early pure capitalist countries, unless I am sure I would belong to the top 1-5% percent.
Good capitalism implementation borrowed quite a bit from communism/socialism, to make those systems bearable for an average citizen.
Given that capitalism exists at least a hundred-year longer, I suppose there's still possibility for a nice implementation of communism to come. It took capitalism at least 150 years to get to the somewhat liveable level.
I'd still rather live in a Star Trek like communist utopia/dystopia than in an Elysium like capitalist utopia/dystopia.
1. Capitalism cannot work since it inevitably leads to concentration of capital and monopolies, which hinders competition and causes extreme income and wealth inequality.
2. The same zero sum game applies to capitalism, since people still compete for wealth and status.
3. Historically looking, capitalism and its ever expanding nature lead to colonialism, endless imperial wars and conflicts, resource grab wars and conflicts, debt slavery, people dying of famine although there was no global food shortage, climate destruction, ...
So yeah, both capitalism and communism can fail and prosper, depending on the implementation, but none of the systems is inherently better.
The problem is that we actually have evidence against this tested theory. Whenever communism has been implemented on a large scale it has failed. Countries like the USSR and Mao’s China implemented communism and it resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Whereas today we have a variety of capitalist economies ranging from today’s prosperous China which has a mix of capitalism and a dictatorship, to places like Sweden or the United Kingdom.
Capitalism is a better system based on the experimental evidence that we have, at a minimum. And that does not even include arguments appealing to human nature and the inability of a government to manage prices or human desires.
> 3. Historically looking, capitalism and its ever expanding nature lead to colonialism, endless imperial wars and conflicts, resource grab wars and conflicts, debt slavery, people dying of famine although there was no global food shortage, climate destruction, ...
Communism never stopped these things either. The reason is that these issues are government failures.
First, the countries you mention included Germany and Japan, which, during World War 2 were both fascist states.
Second, the USSR in conjunction with Nazi Germany invaded Poland and together kicked off World War 2 - the USSR was a reluctant ally only to defeat a greater evil. Both regimes were outright evil.
Third, colonial expansion was primarily done under monarchist governments.
Fourth, if you want to (incorrectly) say that the US, UK, Germany, etc. and capitalist economic systems have the same feature of 'deaths of tens of millions of people" then you also would have to take into account that capitalist economies have also prevented the deaths of millions, provided the world with vaccines and breakthrough medical treatments, helped get us to the moon, and improved living standards for many billions of people. Communism did none of that over the long-term. Even Communist China has come around to support capitalism.
Finally, the debate among anyone serious, and I do mean exactly that, isn't capitalism + free markets versus something else, but instead it's to what degree should a government be involved in the market. Capitalism is so obviously superior that it's difficult for anyone to bring about an improved economic system based on the human condition up to this point. Frankly, communism is a failed ideology at the nation-state level and it has been outcompeted by capitalist economies, which is why it doesn't exist except by violent force, and in those limited cases it is dwarfed in wealth, effectiveness, and benefit by all but the worst capitalist economies.
On the other hand, if removing central planing makes communism not communism anymore, then adding those "minor tweaks" make capitalism not capitalism anymore.
Btw, central planing is not a requirement for a communism, it's just that one of the largest communist experiments was implemented that way. There was also a king of distributed self-planning, that worked much better as an implementation of communism.
>if removing central planing makes communism not communism anymore, then adding those "minor tweaks" make capitalism not capitalism anymore.
The minor tweaks to make capitalism work still allow private ownership, free exchange of goods, and a system based on the movement of capital.
The changes to make communism work, make it not communism by definition. If you don't have central planning then how are goods and services created and allocated? By a free market? That's capitalism!
1. Enforcing outcome equality directly by force of government, which is what we're discussing here, is pretty much the raison d'etre of communism
and
2. It starts from the premise that if an outcome isn't equal then there's automatically a problem created by people, which isn't true.
"Tax brackets, medicaid, and public schools, to name a few. None of those are communism"
Tax brackets and medicaid are indeed not communism, though in a communist system Medicaid would be the only option. Those are safety nets, not forced equalization of outcomes (state schools aren't really a safety net, and in my view shouldn't exist; governments have a poor track record with education and ensuring everyone has access to it could be done in other ways like voucher schemes).
"A mandate for diversity on corporate boards wouldn't be communism either - it'd be an attempt to undo historical biases that give people unequal opportunities based on their race or gender."
These laws aren't safety nets designed to ensure a minimum quality of life for all. They are communism because they are direct attempts to enforce equality of outcome for only special demographic groups who are favoured by the ideology.
But we can’t have the discussion of what the best way to undo historical inequality, if we don’t agree that historical inequality happened, that it’s effects are still being felt today, and that the rate at which it’s being equalized is not enough - if the world is biased against you for your entire lifetime then it’s not useful to say “well it improved!”
If life is a board game, you’re arguing for the rules of the game: that these rules are enough to ensure that it’s fair. What I’m saying is that if life is a board game, it’s one where the game doesn’t start from scratch when you’re born - the people who were playing before you arrived have a far bigger influence on how the game unfolds for you than the theoretical fairness of the rules. Which means if you’re born into the right identity, the rules protect you. If you’re born into the wrong identity, the rules keep the game stacked against you.
And if you call that communism, well then I guess I’m a commie, but i really do think communism has a lot more to do with collective ownership of the means of production than mandating equal representation in positions of power
You can try to blow off actual, concrete performance in metrics everyone agrees on like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality, but you will still be wrong by the mass collective judgement of many billions of people over a period of a century or more. Claiming otherwise is like claiming 2 + 2 = 0. There are no such things as walls around capitalist democracies to stop citizens from fleeing.
I would for example argue that, while still imperfect, European-style "social democracies" that combine a market economy with a strong social state are a lot better a system than either Soviet-style communism or US-style capitalism. They certainly tend to do much better than both on the metrics you mention like like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality.
And when considering "oughts" we need not limit ourselves to extant systems either. We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based. I'd argue that such a system would be different enough that it would no longer count as capitalism.
W.R.T. Europe doing better on those statistics, can you cite that? It's not really true I think. The USA and western European countries are comparable in terms of percentage of migrants:
https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/wmr-2020-interactive/
USA is ~15%, similar to the UK, Spain, France, Germany. Of course they would all be much higher if controls were relaxed. Many people would like to migrate to the USA but cannot, even from western Europe. Notably pale on the map: eastern Europe, China, Russia, Latin America etc. Migration stats are as I said - communist countries have very low numbers of immigrants and capitalist countries, which certainly includes western Europe, have much higher rates.
For life expectancy it's the same story. USA and Europe are very similar. The USA is a bit lower, probably due to higher rates of obesity, but there's not much in it. China, Russia and especially North Korea are both quite a bit lower.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
"We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based"
Theoretical non-capitalist, non-communist systems are usually communist on close inspection. UBI is communism in its purist form, renaming it doesn't change that. If you want to know how well paying people regardless of work goes, take a look at the current rates of inflation, backlogs in government services and economic chaos that lockdowns and furloughs led to. That's peanuts compared to what a meaningfully sized UBI would entail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If anyone would like further explanation, you can find 7 years' worth here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
To give an example, it would be like legislating that companies switch to email from postal mail because it's a competitive advantage to do so. I'm saying that that isn't a valid (or necessary) use of legislation. Companies will use email anyway to give themselves a competitive advantage.
If they really believe that they would let the market make it happen. It is because they don’t really believe it that they are trying to enforce it by law.
You achieve straight A’s for a promised juice box reward, but the teacher refuses to give it to you because you’re a boy, and too many other boys got A’s in the past.
However a law that says that the board of a large enough company can’t be all male (and then also not all female) is actually not the stupidest idea.
It should absolutely be considered a temporary stop-gap and automatically revoked as soon as some threshold of women on boards is achieved, but it actually is sometimes necessary to give people a little kick in the butt to get things going.
I don’t live in California so I don’t know the specifics of this law, just saying that the idea in general is not as terrible as some of the bad woke stuff.
[1] I say privileged in quotes because usually it’s enough that people look similar to people that are or have been privileged.
It doesn’t do those individuals any good if you roll the laws back in a few years.
Your assumption is that board seats are being allocated to their rightful owners today, and this law would be a corruption of that. That’s a pretty big assumption. What rooms are you in where the ten most qualified people are _ever_ all male? Even in tech that’s not that common.
But it is also the reality that these seats aren’t really filled based on pure merit. It’s mostly (or at least a real prerequisite) a question if you belong to the right “club”. These laws expand the club a bit which I think is a good thing.
I agree that the idea that decision making will be better simply because there are women is suspect.
Many profession are also above the 90% segregation line, and most of them are women dominated professions. Most of those work places will have rooms where ten most qualified people are of the same gender. Most of those work places also have women dominating from the top.
Tech is actually pretty much in the average in terms of gender segregation, at around 70%.
Wow, I really hope you're not in any position of authority.
You may want to think hard about when millions of people have been wrong and trampled on rights you would wish for courts to protect. It may not always go your way based on your approach above.
If they aren't lining up women for the boards voluntarily, it is because nobody with money thinks there is a benefit from doing so. The effect is probably just the so-called Berkson's paradox [0] and will likely disappear if hiring teams start seeking out female candidates.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
What are your specific thoughts on how would this process unfold?
Edit: On a second read of the article and parent comment, I understand it now as an ironic take on a flawed justification for the law that tries to satisfy everyone ("We're doing this for the markets!").
Edit: typo
If you're excluding a significant proportion of your population from leadership roles - which is what happens predictably, almost as if by magic, when "markets" make decisions about leadership - your markets are anything but free.
I believe you are using a non standard definition of "free market" here? Also I am not sure I understand what you mean by "excluding a significant proportion of your population from leadership roles". Of course, competency/qualification requirements excludes a large proportion of the population.
I also do not think that (most) proponents of a balanced representation favour diversity over competency. Speaking for myself, I do believe (from experience) that having diversity in a team results in more resilient, efficient, and "optimal" decision-making. Again, we do not have sufficient tools to prove that empirically, so we better A/B test the hell out of it :)
Mandated experiments are not experiments.
Those that fail to do so will see their share price lag behind their competitors.
Given that the feedback loop for government actions is slow and often time indirect, I’m not sure the government is making the best decision either.
They certainly have huge influence over policy. IMO it's extremely superficial to believe that just because they're not part of the official party political process they're somehow not in a senior leadership role.
Markets don't tend to experiment that much when they have something that works unless further competition shows up, see electric cars for example.
Markets are meant to serve humans, not the other way around.
How would that not happen? Businesses are always looking for an edge over the competition. If it was clear that women bosses outperformed men, any smart investor would insist on having them run the joint. The only counter argument would be that investors hate women more than they love money, which is just patently absurd on the face of it, since they obviously love nothing more than money.
1. women on corporate boards are a competitive advantage for reasons stated above. 2. women on corporate boards are a competitive dis-advantage because of social factors based around the cultural idea that women are not normally on boards.
If that's the case, then the market won't unlock the advantages of the first factor unless something happens to disrupt the second factor.
I honestly don't know how anyone can believe the market will find the optimal outcome. At best it finds an optimal outcome within constraints put on it by the confused, reactionary, panicky, racist, sexist, bigoted people who are the things actually acting out "the market".
> We found evidence for a positive effect of women on corporate boards on both measures of company performance—ROA and PER—apart from the percentage of female executives in the case of ROA when estimated through pooled OLS. However, the outcomes of panel data fixed-effects and random-effects revealed the lack of connection between board gender diversity and ROA but a positive impact of the number and percentage of women on board on PER.
[1] https://jfin-swufe.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40854-...
If you're bringing up a claim or a hypothesis in a discussion, you need to allow for the claim to be falsifiable.
There is, I believe, plenty of evidence in the literature of cultural factors like stereotypes, preconceptions, and prejudices having a very real impact on group performance. But that's not a specific claim about WHICH factors are at play in this circumstance.
You posted a study that seems to show no impact when adding women to boards, so I was pointing out how a study that doesn't control for those kinds of cultural inertia factors can't say anything about the existence or non-existence of those factors.
As for the specific example "if a diverse board leads to comparatively better outcomes, it's the fact that they were diverse, but if it doesn't, it's the fault of everyone not trusting the female-identifying board members enough" which you describe as an un-falsifiable claim, but it's not. Something as simple as an analysis of meeting calendars or emails on diverse and non-diverse boards might be able to determine if the communication patterns are a negative or positive influence on performance.
If the original claim ("Companies perform better with more women on boards") is not provable in a comparatively simple metric like growth, and if there are indications that in fact, 'other factors' like cultural inertia currently is diametral to female success in boards, then making a law that shoehorns more women in boards is not designed to make companies perform better, but to change the assumed cultural inertia at the expense of short- to medium-term economic growth. It becomes an experiment - with the countries that do not have that kind of laws and are unlikely to implement them as a control group (looking at you, China).
It only would be fair to tell that - instead of painting an unproven (and to some extend: disproven) claim a fact.
Differently from you, I don't assume the idea that co-ed teams will eventually outperform more homogenous teams is a foregone conclusion. Which means that there are scenarios in which we don't all win.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/SHE#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsi...
If you wanted a good comparison you'd have to be comparing an equal sized subset of the DJI that only included boards with low diversity. Junk conclusions from junk data. When it was actually studied with rigor, e.g. the study you linked to (https://jfin-swufe.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40854-...) "We found evidence for a positive effect of women on corporate boards on both measures of company performance—ROA and PER"
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/SHE#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsi...
But even if there was, would that be a good reason to act on it? This "logic" never seems to be deployed in men's favour. It's obvious that strong male firefighters will have better outcomes than female firefighters, that's why New York had to make the qualification tests easier in order to hire more women. Yet the rules were changed anyway.
"I honestly don't know how anyone can believe the market will find the optimal outcome."
Because of enormous amounts of history, theory and practice showing that it will? BTW the "confused, reactionary, panicky, racist, sexist, bigoted people" would appear to describe the people breaking the law in order to ban men from powerful positions on the basis of their gender, wouldn't it.
Is it obvious, though? Sure, perhaps for a few specific things, but outside of a very limited set of things... probably not. You don't need to be a strong manly man to drive a fire truck nor to use hoses. The test probably didn't actually measure what was necessary before and likely disqualified women not because it was difficult, but because it didn't actually measure how fit for the job women were (example: Measuring upper body strength alone instead of measuring how well they could carry someone out of the fire or hooking up hoses). I mean, somehow women are strong enough to be lifting patients in a nursing home but not helping folks out in a fire? I doubt this.
It helps if you’re going to be doing literally anything other than just driving the apparatus.
Also, why should men be relegated to the most dangerous jobs, just so that we can fill a female hiring quota by giving women the safer, less demanding jobs?
> … nor to use hoses.
You absolutely need to be built to man a firehose.
It takes your full weight and strength to keep control of a hose with the diameters and pressures used in firefighting.
With a 2.5”+ hose, it can take two full-grown men to keep control of the line with the nozzle open, especially when advancing.
Nevermind hauling a charged line into a building, up stairs, etc. The weight alone is tremendous.
> I mean, somehow women are strong enough to be lifting patients in a nursing home
Male staffers are generally asked to do the lifting, and sometimes medical services literally call in the fire department for a lift assist.
> … but not helping folks out in a fire?
The structure gear alone weighs about 70 pounds. By the time you find someone in a building, you’ve been using a heavy tools, in the heat, to sound floors and search rooms rapidly in the most exhausting way possible.
It’s so much more difficult than just lifting someone without all the gear on.
There’s also forced entry into doors, etc, which benefits substantially from weight, leverage, and upper body strength.
> I doubt this.
Only because you know nothing about firefighting.
Of course this should have nothing to do with a board position. Perhaps women would actually excel in board positions as those mostly have to do with building/having social networks, something women certainly seem to be better at than men on average.
Most of it is going to be speculation until we see larger numbers and can compare boards with women to boards without (and even boards with only women). It's tough to say, as the 'old boys club' seems to be dying out regardless.
Re: 1, I don't know Re: 2, I believe that there is a place for affirmative action, especially in places like the boardroom where physical aspects of gender differences have no meaning. Re: 3, There's plenty of evidence showing places where markets are discriminatory in preference to being efficient: https://danluu.com/bad-decisions/
This meta analysis study suggests that the suggests that the effect size of having a woman in the board is negligible, but the average number of women in the boards of the considered companies was low:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276057102_Does_Gend...
However more recent research finds a positive effect if the number of woman is higher ( they do not report an effect size though):
https://jfin-swufe.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40854-...
This invites a "Laffer curve" like argument: surly we just do not have enough female board members jet.
"The market" is not an entity. It's a collective of people, those people have prejudices and friends. Those primarily factor into what happens - thus, more of the same in-group ends up at the top. This is frankly such a base explanation it's bordering on bad-faith reasoning, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
How many things can you think of - right now - for which there is clear evidence of benefit yet society has not adopted action? Systemic change is slow, sometimes laws help advance systemic change. The gender disparity gap in leadership is closing, but network effects will continue to operate to create inequitible opportunity for quite some time.
The idea that "if it was better the market will make it so" may be right in the fullness of time, but we live in what is effectively a zero-sum society when viewing the present. Patience for the long-tail of change advantages the already advantaged.
Which ones can you think of? Keep in mind the article is talking about markets and fiscal health of the company itself, not society as a whole. It's pretty easy to make the case "society would be better if we did the beneficial things", the question at hand is whether it's the governments place to push these on private actors.
There's obviously no consensus that it's positive. It's clearly, very obviously and very badly negative. It's blatantly sexist discrimination against men who have done nothing wrong, which is deeply immoral. It also many other subtle negative effects. It degrades the language and confidence in the rule of law because these laws that make people unequal are invariably presented as "equality" laws. It also makes it impossible to respect women on boards! Everyone knows they might be there only to satisfy a legal quota, not because anyone actually respected their abilities. I've actually heard quite a few women opine that they start out suspicious of women in powerful positions these days, because they know directly how easy it is to get there on the back of feminism, but they need competent services in that moment and not a job. If you want to create anti-female sexism where none should exist, forcibly replacing men for sexist reasons is a great way to do it across the board.
Is there a small part of the population that is against it? Sure, and there probably always will be. There is also a small population of xenophobes and racists, but they definitely aren't the majority.
I've actually heard quite a few women opine that they start out suspicious of women in powerful positions these days, because they know directly how easy it is to get there on the back of feminism, but they need competent services in that moment and not a job.
Just to fill you in, people are suspicious of people in powerful positions. Right now, folks that agree with you blame feminism. Previously, they'd say it was obvious that she sexed her way to the top. I'd not take any of this seriously.
I found 21.7K publications on Norway’s quota for women on corporate boards https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Norw...
Which are the most authoritative? What were their findings? (on actual company performance metrics, not just on the effect on gender representation on boards or executive search committees, or pay gaps)?
As to the California state law 2018/SB826 ('Women on Boards'), IIRC part of the reason the state acted was out of frustration that federal legislation on this topic had not happened despite years of discussion.
The positive, (as seen from most Norwegians view), is that there are now more powerful women in Norwegian industry and private sector. This is obviously an ideological view, and if you view more women in powerful position as of no or negative value. Then it isn't a positive for you.
Good thing we have a court system and a constitution.
Can men represent female issues? Of course in principle, but in my experience they often don't do well at it.
There are plenty of policies, including ones where governments spend chunks of money, to get women into (as you call them) "lower level men dominated jobs", these often involve advertising, and helping people get qualified to do the job. As there are no qualifications for company boards, that type of thing wouldn't help there.
I tend to disagree with you that company boards have no qualifications. I think you need a pretty impressive resume to even be considered in a company board. So programs for less prestigious jobs that can help women gain the experience and build an resume where they get the job in a non mandated way could be more viable (IMHO).
I think if you start mandating these kind of jobs in the name of equality and diversity you: 1. Should mandate blue collar jobs in the name of equality and diversity as well 2. Should really make sure you have qualified and competent people to fill the jobs. Otherwise you risk filling those positions with unqualified people who, despite their best intentions, will not help the cause by under performing.
One deeper problem is how boards tend to work in general -- often the people already on the board are involved in choosing new members, so things don't "fix themselves" over time. The best option (I think) would be to make sure as the most qualified and competent people take the jobs, I personally believe in that case you would end up with more women on company boards. One way to do that would be to have boards appointed by a completely independant group, but I suspect most company owners would hate that suggestion.
Mandating many blue collar jobs wouldn't work, as there simply aren't enough women with the necessary qualifications, so you would simply shrink the sector by (making up a number I admit) 80%.
I also tend to think that if we hire the most competent and qualified people the numbers would naturally tend to 50% or whatever the men/women preference ratio for that job is. What we should strive to do, IMHO, is make sure that everyone has the same opportunities and there is no discrimination preventing different people to get a job.
I agree that mandating many blue collar jobs would not work because of the low number of qualified women, but why would that not be the case mandating company board jobs? If we're saying we have very very few women in company boards, doesn't that mean we have very very few women that have experience for positions like those and consequently way more men that have experience and are more qualified? Since board members are such high end positions and paid very well you can't just double the number of such positions which means you'll end up picking women with less experience over men with more experience cause it's mandated. Hence you're picking the less qualified person for the job which will create friction.
I think a way better solution would be creating incentives for companies to hire women in the boards or funding companies created by women. That way women can get the same degree of experience as men and then can compete for these positions with similar qualifications which I think will increase their numbers.
But in my opinion mandating something like this creates a lot of friction. Government mandated people to wear masks and we all know how that went. So many people did everything in their power to resist that. I think it's human nature to try to resist when something is forced on you.