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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.
What about companies with all female board of directors? Will they be forced to have males on board or does equality only matter when you have a vagina?
I'm confused. I thought California had officially settled on 1,000's of genders. Is this not discriminatory to Neutois demi-boys? Or woodsprite pansexuals? I mean, I understand there is a need to keep out Apache Attack Helicopters but we need balance here!
Wait a minute. I'm Hispanic. Where is the law that requires companies to have at least one Hispanic on their board? Why does the California legislature hate me?
It's about the intersectional thing now. A woman? Why not a black muslim woman? Or better yet someone who is transgender or gender fluid? That law is so behind the times. You have to be a member of a grievance group to get attention.
Sadly - this identity politics thing is fueling the rise of white nationalism. Which is another identity ground centered around grievance as well. Strangely - many far left and far right groups are in solidarity on socialism. Weird.
I thought we were working to make everyone treated the same?
Now, women need preference quotas to fill chairs.
Got it. I'm SURE that will give them the respect they precisely deserve.
-Styopa
James Damore got in trouble, because his memo said that women don't think the same way that men do.
But Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson says, "Gender diversity brings a variety of perspectives to the table that can help foster new and innovative ideas."
So do women think differently from men, only when this difference should make you want to hire women?
There's a lot of intentionally provocative/trollish bills california congress - which actually have weak effects, and are mostly pushing for industries to self-regulate, and are NOT actually expected to pass, but reach compromise.
If it isn't expected to pass, then why was the largest committee tally of "noes" only 2 votes and why did it pass the floor vote with 66% "yeas" of those who voted and 56% "yeas" if include the non-votes? Don't believe me? Then see for yourself.
That doesn't seem like something that has no chance of passing. It is has a chance at passing and as a result a chance of being profoundly damaging.
I'd like men to live as long as women, and to have a suicide rate that's equally low. Can we get more funding for research (and subsidized medical care) to level the playing field? And how about criminal justice interventions which stop our prisons from being full of men?
Equality is great, unless it's applied unevenly. And frankly, I will worry about boards of directors after I worry about healthcare and unequal application of justice.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
My exposure to board-level people is that the positions are sinecures meant to demonstrate the bonafides of the company and provide inside access to the resources that board member is associated: eg. inventment banker, or someone from a VC firm, or the President's son. In other words the notion of "most qualified" is laughable.
California is attempting to address the chicken-and-egg problem of increasing the number of women in a position to be influential enough to ask to join the board in the first place.
This bill is a pretty blunt-force approach, but corporations are creatures of the state and this isn't an instance where a quota would have an impact on anything that could pretend to be a meritocracy.
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.
I'm all for states regulating companies that do business within them. I mean, I get that all of Silicon Valley decided to incorporate in Delaware, but they live in California. Let California regulate them.
You do realize that they can chose to not live in California, no? California already drove out a handful of aerospace companies because of their stupid laws. They wanted to regulate "rocket fuel" as a toxic substance. I don't know if they realized this or not but "rocket fuel" is no different than jet fuel, fuel oil, gasoline, or any other hydrocarbon fuel. There are already rules on this on the state and federal level. But it's "rocket fuel" now and so the state wanted all kinds of paperwork to burn "rocket fuel" in their state. Well, that just meant they lost a lot of future business in the space launch industry to Texas, Colorado, Florida, Arizona, etc.
I don't much care what the restriction is on a business, so long as a company can free themselves from a state restriction by moving out of the state then California will lose businesses. I believe that if California did not have such great weather that they'd have gone bankrupt a long time ago by now. There's only so much that beaches and sunshine can buy.
Maybe someone could argue that this rule serves some "greater good" but it won't. Here's why, can you define a "woman" for me? Seems simple enough, right? Well, there was a story going around the internet a week or a month ago on how a Canadian man got himself a discount on his car insurance by declaring himself a woman. He didn't take any hormones, he didn't undergo any surgery, he didn't change his name or his "pronouns". He simply wanted the lower insurance rates that women get and so found a physician willing to sign a form and got his sex changed on paper. So, legally speaking, he's a "woman".
I don't know if it's the same people that are trying to hold these two conflicting ideas at once, or two different sides of this debate trying to make conflicting points, but whatever this is it will end up eating itself in the nonsense. If gender is just a social construct then there is no man and there is no woman. Men cannot oppress women if this is a social construct because then women can gain the same "male privileges" by declaring themselves men. If gender is not just a social construct then they will have to admit that men and women are different, not that men are better, only different.
If men are different than women then there are things that men will excel in that women will not. Also, there will be things that women excel at that men will not. If men and women are different then this will be exposed in things like men being more prominent in being on corporate boards.
If this nonsense continues then we'll see board members leave as "Bruce" one day and only return the next in a dress and lipstick as "Cait". And who will dare to say this person is not a woman?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
WTH. No NSFW tag. At least you should give a little warning.
Off to wash my eyes out at the eye station.
Like the old adage goes - Democrat Ideas: So great that they have to be enforced.
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.
don't forget Ellen Pao.
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There are fewer women on boards not becuse women are less intelligent but because there are fewer of them at the top of corporations , fewer of them with the depth of experience which would actually br beneficial to a company. The reason for that is not discrimination, it's that women overwhelmingly make different life choices than the men who fight their way to the top of these companies. It's perfectly clear ftom the internationsl data thst this is their vhoice. That is their right.
There are women who are accomplished and sit on boards , run companies etc., just a lot fewer.
What gets me is when women encounter the real level of competetive viciousness inside companies, they think they're being targeted because they're women. Wrong. They do the exact same thing to men, it's just that men eat it.
Women are smarter in a certain way. They see how bad it is and decide it's not worth it earlier than men do. They preserve more of their vital years for thing that matter than men do. This has to be counted as a form of intelligence.
Ihave a friend who works at a hospital. She watches high powered men die all the time. They almost all regret how they dpent their lives.
I would not want to have accomplished what Steve Jobs accomplished if it came with the price tag of being the person we now know Steve Jobs to have been.
You buy things with the hours of your life. Some peopel, men mostly, buy command psoitions in corporations and all that goes with that. That is their due. You can't just hand it out to people who didn't earn it.
Gesetze sind wie Würste, man sollte besser nicht dabei sein, wenn sie gemacht werden
--Bismarck
If they were better qualified than the available men, then they would already be appointed to the boards without needing any legislation.
Riiiiiiiight!
Companies are not going to appoint less qualified people unless they're forced to ...
What are you talking about? They clearly do!
Nor is this just a male/female thing either, among others, it's famously a "what school did you go to" thing as well. Maybe for the crucial technical jobs qualification win, but companies are full of humans making decision on a very human basis: first and foremost they decide in favour of "people-like-us". You cannot seriously believe that the better qualified guy has never lost out on a job to the better connected guy. (It's not what you know ...)
Plus we are talking company boards here. How do you spell sinecure?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Gender diversity brings a variety of perspectives to the table that can help foster new and innovative ideas
... is bollocks. In my experience at least, fresh perspectives and innovative ideas are fostered by - surprise, surprise - intellectual and cultural diversity. You get that in a multicultural environment (which you don't necessarily get by hiring the Officially Sanctioned number of each color of person), but cultural diversity between men and women from a similar cultural background is minimal. And the higher up you get, the smaller the difference seems to get.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
I can't really see how you can conclude that, given what you just said:
Look at the average board and it's full of cronyism and nepotism.
Thinking that a cradle of cronyism and nepotism magically becomes a place of genuine meritocracy, by just including women, is just a baseless delusion.
It is either a meritocratic place or it is not: throwing women into the equation, you get either a meritocratic place with a few women more (possibly less meritocratic then) or a meeting of cronies (now both male and female cronies).
In the end it does nothing for "women", it is good only for a few, already privileged, women, namely the president's daughter, the CEO's lover and the venture capitalist's sister.
If you do not believe what I just said, look at how well "coloured quotas" worked in South Africa for coloured people (and South Africa at large).
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.
He's pointing out that "qualifed" just means a member in good standing of the financial nobility. Skill, intelligence, etc usually associated with "merit" have nothing to do with it.
And nurses? Firefighters? Garbage collectors? Strippers? Elementary school teachers?
And...***insert long list of jobs where gender (sex?) discrimination is obvious because one sex or the other dominates***?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
He's pointing out that "qualifed" just means a member in good standing of the financial nobility. Skill, intelligence, etc usually associated with "merit" have nothing to do with it.
In this instance, the qualification is distinctly called out. It is based upon the genitals of the qualified person.
We'll overlook that those who are born as a male are specifically denied x number of positions based upon their sex.
Regardless, this is an incredibly sexist and bigoted bill.
I guess I just don't understand how sexism is eliminated by sexism.
It isn't even affirmative action.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
I know - my wife was the highest paid person in her company - Higher indeed than the owner. It was a company involved in flooring and construction, so lots of "traditional men" worked there.
All those things happened.
She was called a bitch - by women.
She was accused all the time of sleeping with the boss - by women.
All of that stuff that people try to attribute to men. Man, there were some nasty sexist bigot women there.
One thing both she and I learned was that there is a interesting relationship between loud people and what they say, and what they do.
These women were very loud about how they were oppressed because of their sex, but if a woman did well, they made excuses for that success based soley on..... sex. Projection 101. They were sexist bigots, and the only positive thing they got out of their bigotry was a cheap easy excuse for their own lack of success.
Their projection was not unlike the Social Conservative gay hating folks who rail on about the unholy sinful acts of sodomy, but then are caught having sex with another of the same sex.
This is no accident, it is projection. Accuse others of what you are.
there are sexists of both sexes, obviously. I merely point out that if we use sexism to cure sexism, it will never work.
And since Animojo will chime in here, telling me I am doing the same - no, I'm not.
If I wrote something stupid like "All women are sexist", that would be a pretty good indicator that I was projecting, and probably am guilty of what I am accusing others of.
No, I just react, noting that a system that determines qualification for a position based on the equipment between a person's legs, is the very definition of sexist. These sexist women are trying to pass an overtly sex based law. To deny that is to be sexist.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You're not even close to being right. But the narrative must survive!
There are plenty of studies that clearly show that women are generally not oppressed in the workplace, but rather make different value judgements with regard to careers. There are plenty of studies that show these differences, and how they are not societal constructs, but rather rooted in biological differences.
Men tend to like things. Women tend to like people. It is why boys play with Trucks n balls, and girls play with dolls and social games (tea party). This explains why more women go into nursing and more men engineering.
This isn't to say that ALL women are one way, or ALL men are another, as with most things in life, it all falls along a sliding scale.
But the SJW/Womyn Studies narrative against the patriarchy must go on!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.