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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!
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.
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.
When will California adopt similar diversity quotas for State Senators?
Also, I'm curious how this legislation defines "women"?
Ken
Society is arbitrary, as evidenced by the fact we have so many of them each with their own artificial constructs...
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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.