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California May Become First State To Require Companies To Have Women On Their Boards (techcrunch.com)
Two female state senators from California are spearheading a bill to require companies to have women on their boards. "SB 826, which won Senate approval with only Democratic votes and has until the end of August to clear the Assembly, would require publicly held companies headquartered in California to have at least one woman on their boards of directors by end of next year," reports TechCrunch. "By 2021, companies with boards of five directors must have at least two women, and companies with six-member boards must have at least three women. Firms failing to comply would face a fine." From the report: "Gender diversity brings a variety of perspectives to the table that can help foster new and innovative ideas," said Democratic Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson of Santa Barbara, who is sponsoring the bill with Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins of San Diego. "It's not only the right thing to do, it's good for a company's bottom line."
Yet critics of the bill say it violates the federal and state constitutions. Business associations say the rule would require companies to discriminate against men wanting to serve on boards, as well as conflict with corporate law that says the internal affairs of a corporation should be governed by the state law in which it is incorporated. This bill would apply to companies headquartered in California. [A] legislative analysis of the bill cautioned that it could get challenged on equal protection grounds, and that it would be difficult to defend, requiring the state to prove a compelling government interest in such a quota system for a private corporation.
Yet critics of the bill say it violates the federal and state constitutions. Business associations say the rule would require companies to discriminate against men wanting to serve on boards, as well as conflict with corporate law that says the internal affairs of a corporation should be governed by the state law in which it is incorporated. This bill would apply to companies headquartered in California. [A] legislative analysis of the bill cautioned that it could get challenged on equal protection grounds, and that it would be difficult to defend, requiring the state to prove a compelling government interest in such a quota system for a private corporation.
It is has a chance at passing and as a result a chance of being profoundly damaging.
It's not going to be profoundly damaging. At worst companies will "relocate" their headquarters to Delaware. At best it'll be immediately struck down for gender discrimination at the federal level.
The bill contains this little nugget in the footnotes:
" “Female” means an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth."
I was already hoping the bill would pass because of the silliness of it, but with the above it's gonna be comedy gold.
That solves it! Just have one of the board members identify as a woman!
this is a terrible idea. It'll energize the right wing in the State giving them plenty of legitimate talking points/grievances. It's obviously unconstitutional discrimination so it'll get shot down in court wasting a ton of money too.
On the plus side stuff like this is very popular with a certain kind of Democrat. To whit: right wing "corporate" Democrats who need something to throw to the base besides economic issues. This let's them run in left wing districts while opposing stuff like single payer healthcare, college for all, ending the 8 wars we're in, The New New Deal etc, etc. It's the Democrat equivalent to Dog Whistling and just as despicable.
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I'm only Mexican-American so I'm not allowed to have a culture
I'm American. This is why civic nationalism is dead in this country. Nearly every non-white person identifies as a hyphenated American.
James Damore got in trouble, because his memo said that women don't think the same way that men do.
That's only part of what he did, and not why he got fired. Damore wrote a memo with lots of logical gaps. The reader naturally had to fill in those gaps. Most readers didn't realize they were gaps and filled them in according to their own fears and preconceptions. That's why a lot of people filled in with their presumption that he was a nasty person making sexist arguments, and other people filled in with their presumption that he was a reasonable person making valid points. The different audiences were responding to literally different memos.
I'd hoped the reason for his firing was that his logical gaps showed a woolly mind that wasn't a natural fit for software development. But alas no. He was fired because the gappiness of his memo, in a contentious area, inevitably and needlessly created workplace hostility that also interrupted a Google high-up on his vacation.
Since there is absolutely no history of liberals coming up with ideas that they regret when conservatives do them twice as big (*cough Biden rule *cough senate justice nuclear option *cough) I wonder how long it will be until there are 'intrusive' rules requiring a certain number of conservatives on company boards and college professorships. You know, for the sake of diversity.
Absurd strawman of the academic left is blamed for a long-standing undercurrent of the political right --modded +5 insightful.
I just thought I would point that out
How is that a strawman? Both groups are screeching about non-existent oppression that they are subjected to.
The far right is indistinguishable from the far left.
and provide inside access to the resources that board member is associated: eg. inventment banker
In other words the notion of "most qualified" is laughable.
Didn't you just contradict yourself? That definitely seems like a qualification to me right there.
Ezekiel 23:20
If they were better qualified than the available men, then they would already be appointed to the boards without needing any legislation. Companies are not going to appoint less qualified people unless they're forced to (eg by legislation like this)...
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When will California adopt similar diversity quotas for State Senators?
Also, I'm curious how this legislation defines "women"?
Ken
There are fewer women on boards not becuse women are less intelligent but because there are fewer of them at the top of corporations
If that is the reason then it is an obvious case where positive discrimination could temporarily be applied to break the vicious cycle. Corporations should, for a decade or two, be forced to employ more women at
The reason for that is not discrimination, it's that women overwhelmingly make different life choices
Yup, for instance in Japan women make the life choice not to become medical doctors.. And when we do experiments sending in identical CVs, but for a male/female first name, to job advertisements, and the male named applications overwhelmingly get offered interviews ... that the life choices women make too, yeah? Sorry mate, that's not only bullshit, it's obvious bullshit. You are fooling yourself (perhaps successfully).
What gets me is when women encounter the real level of competetive [sic] viciousness inside companies, they think they're being targeted because they're women. Wrong.
No, because no woman has ever been attacked in a highly highly gendered fashion, called "bitches" when aggressive (though less than their "go-get-it" male counterparts), accused of sleeping around, or of being pre-menstrual, etc, etc, etc. You're livin in fucken dreamland matey.
Women are smarter in a certain way. They see how bad it is and decide it's not worth it earlier than men do....
Oh FFS, get your hand off it man!
Society is arbitrary, as evidenced by the fact we have so many of them each with their own artificial constructs...
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Thinking that a cradle of cronyism and nepotism magically becomes a place of genuine meritocracy, by just including women, is just a baseless delusion.
That's why I don't think that. It's a bizarre assumption on your part.
It's really just the start of a long process, the thin end of the wedge. It has worked fairly well in some areas, such as in British comedy where some initially all-female shows like Smack the Pony and later on a concerted effort to include more women on comedy panel shows has helped a new generation of funny women to come through.
Another example would be UK politics. Efforts were derided at first, such as the infamous "Blair babes", but now we have better representation in Parliament and are starting to deal with issues like harassment and bullying in that house. This is over a period of decades of course, in fact going back a century to the very first efforts. Things are speeding up now as we learn what works.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A key point is that people's cognition, their worldview, grows and develops, just as a small child can't form certain concepts, as adults grow, they can develop wider, more sophisticated ways of viewing the world. And this is key, because it applies to everyone. And we don't really know why it happens differently in different people, but it is something about the individual and their experiences.
So as you say, diversity of thought, or rather, people whose thinking is more sophisticated, yeah, it helps to have those people running things.
Where things seem to go wrong is when we take what is a cognitive stage, which could appear in anyone, and start mandating that we should mix a certain proportion of labels (woman, black, chinese, tarns, indian, whatever), and that by mixing those labels, you will generate that higher level of cognition and worldviews. It is not so simple. You cannot force people to grow. What difference if the woman on the board has the same male traits of obsession with ruthless cuts as any other male? (Usually, men have greater focus, and narrower outlook.)
The pomo current adds yet another problem in that, it want this better world, but it disavows making value judgements about people, yet it makes value judgements about people. So, if women are no different to men, and the very notion of gender is a social construct, and yet women are supposed to have all these wonderful qualities which men don't. If men and women were no different, then there is no reason why we should include women more. If men and women were no different then there is no reason why men would be oppressing women any more than women would oppress women. Basically in pomo world, nothing makes sense.
But if they allowed clear value judgements, like saying that certain traits are being more highly valued and so we need to look at why women don't seem to value those traits, and why those traits are valued in business, and whether those traits make sense for the goals of the work, then you can start to have a debate about, what is it about corporate culture which is needlessly making it incompatible with other traits, and making itself unattractive to women? Is it just the long hours? Is it too much travel? Is it just too f***ing depressing that most women don't want to do it?
Pomo always wants to label victims and perpetrators. It is never women themselves making choices. Like how nurses are mostly women, and engineers are so often men. Nobody says women are oppressing men out of nursing. The question should be, why is a particular kind of work done in a way which promotes certain traits and not others? COULD that work be done in more effective way, if some of those other traits were valued more?
But if you merely mandate quotas out of some notion of justice, you just don't even touch that problem. It is like your code crashing all over the place but always returning "ok!" You have simply erased the warning light, not handled the underlying problem.
Anyway, that's just a couple of examples of how these issues need to be seen with value judgements and with discernment about making distinctions about things. It ain't just labels. The tricky part is to do it without introducing bias, but pomo is already so magtastically biased that you could only improve things at this point.
1) There are very few females in the top ranks of genius
2) It may well be that at the tail end of the bell-curve, there are fewer women than men.
2 does not necessarily follow from 1. My daughter lives towards the top end of the curve. Getting her TESTED only happened because we noticed issues she was having, and had the resources to privately test her (it costed about 4k$ by the time it was all said and done). The school didn't notice because she was a B student, they don't pay much attention to quiet, geeky, autistic girls who are scoring OK in school.
So I submit that the reality may not be a discrepancy in the number of females in the 99.99+ percentile range, but rather the number of females in the 99.99+ percentile range that are tested.
Our school district has since instituted 100% screening for gifted children, recognizing this and other statistical dependencies, and it'll be interesting to see how the statistics change over time.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
> In situations like this forcing in a small wedge can be what is needed to start a move towards a genuine meritocracy and a system that doesn't exclude women.
Here's the problem. These are **private** companies. They should be allowed to "exclude women" if they want. They should be able to choose their board however they damn well please. Women are not prevented from being directors of companies, they can start their own whenever they like, but forcing certain numbers of board members of private companies to be a certain sex is sexist, and wrong.
Why not black women? They are far more underrepresented than white women, or oriental for that matter.
I still remember when I was in the Forest Service in the 90's and this "Gender Diversity" first started. A law suit on the Forest Service in California stated they needed to have more women in higher positions and especially in traditionally male positions like the well known, "Forest Ranger", position. Now there was no doubt such positions were dominated by men (not totally but mostly). Typical picture most people had at the time of a forest ranger was a man in his mid 30's with a Collie (aka Lassie) for a pet.
Most National Forests and such went out of their way to accommodate the new ruling. But they had a hard time. Many women were asked but did not want these positions. One who was qualified (and did have the desire and ability) was hired in two different regions for the same type job. It was so both regions could put on paper they had a female in these positions. She must have had a great paycheck. She also only had to show up a few days a month at one of those jobs. Is that fair?
There was one female ranger who spoke up. She sent out an email to all users in the service describing what she had seen. Had she been a man, she would have been shouted down and probably fired. But she said she found it pitiful to see women, who did secretarial or part time support work hired into jobs they were not trained for. The men who had been working hard to qualify for these positions were not only passed over, but ended out doing the work for these women so it would get done. Some still spent time doing their nails as they did in their previous position.
GO AHEAD AND HATE for putting it down, but I did not write her description. I simply read it. Every one of us guys in our office were so thankful there was a woman who had the guts to speak up. THE INSANITY of DIVERSITY (as proscribed by many judges) IS ONE REASON I GOT OUT of there. I hated the prospect of putting years into a position and then having a wall put in front of me just before I reached my goal. I FULLY EXPECT SLASHDOT TO DELETE MY INPUT. SLASHDOT does not support input if it does not support the opinions it wishes to purvey. But so what. Not everyone has to be a robot. But take me to your OVERLORDS.
The fact that 20 people turned up to Unite the Right this year is because they badly misjudged the reaction of the nation last year. They convinced themselves that many ordinary people agreed with them but just needed permission to come out and say it by seeing the nationalists march openly and proudly.
What actually happened is that they lost their jobs, someone got murdered and the expected widespread support never materialised. The bubble they had been living in burst.
They are called nationalists because the alt-right wants to create an ethnostate. They think America is a "white country" and want to make it more racially pure. These ideas and the term "nationalist" dates back to the Nazis, or "National Socialists".
The reason they are associated with the more mainstream right of US politics (which is actually far right by most standards, with the Democrats being a somewhat right of centre too) is that some members of the GOP have been saying the same stuff and the alt-right has been trying to take control of that party. Don't forget that Steve Bannon was Trump's close adviser and campaign manager, a lot of the populist language Trump uses comes from him. The alt-right really thought that with Trump in power they were about to become the mainstream of US politics, but fortunately it didn't happen.
I hope that American conservatives do push back hard against this a reclaim the Republican party with more moderate views.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC