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[Antioch]

[...]

No I am saying women make different career choices than men. I find every position that is not selected because of qualification but because of gender despicable.

High school graduates are close to 50/50 men/woman. Is the fact that only 3% of mechanical engineering students are women due to discrimination?

does it make sense to introduce a quota of 30% women if a study mechanical engineering were to introduce an application procedure?

The main problem with that quota would be that it would fail because the lack of applicants. This is also the difference between your example and the other situation.

well ARE there an equal amount of qualified male/female applicants for those positions?

[RedKing]

@Caz: Yeah, no required paid leave. A fair number of employers (including most of the large corporations and government agencies) do offer some kind of paid leave. But small businesses often don't, especially retail and low-pay service jobs. The closer you get to minimum-wage, the more "expendable" people are, and the less inclined employers are to offer anything resembling a benefit.

I think my ex-wife got 6 weeks maternity leave with each of our kids, because she works for a state university. I got maybe 2 weeks paternity leave with our son, because I was working for HP. I was unemployed when our daughter was born, so there wasn't an issue there (other than financial strain).



I'd say the bulk of the argument against seems to boil down to "women are going to get their babymaker on, so we can't have them in boardrooms". It's not like they're going to randomly have a baby during a board meeting. And the ones that are driven and ambitious enough to want to be on a corporate board probably are thinking career first, family second.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Obviously, as a man, I am not going to support a measure to deny me a job. I don't care if the status quo is unfair for women or not. No amount of ideals or philosophy matter in the face of getting paid, and in that regard there is only one person who's success it is sane to care about.

[Frumple]

Gender quotas seemed to work pretty well for... India, I want to say it was? Governmental (local, at that, if I'm not misremembering) instead of business positions, iirc, but still. If the practice is best (or at least good) at bringing the desired goals (and generally, about the only way to find that out is to just try it -- and given how few positions the noted change effects, what they're proposing/implementing sounds like a fairly good wide-scale/low-job-number change), might as well give it a go.

... also that's a heaping pile of bullshit, MSH. If the practice actually improves the general situation, you'll be getting paid regardless of whether you have that particular job or not, and probably in a better position anyway. There's plenty of peoples' successes for which it's sane to care about beyond your own, because their success influences yours as well. Y'can question whether the practice actually does that, but "Fuck them, got mine" isn't actually a terribly sane position at all, especially when it's causing notable negative effect.

[Reelya]

Well, the status quo is that young women without kids out-earn men without kids by a full 8%.

Here's another source making the same point, but with data calculated for the entire population based on the year 2000 census data.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11240.pdf?new_window=1

Table 9 (last column) further highlights the relative importance of family responsibilities versus labor market discrimination by examining the gender gap among men and women in apparently similar lifetime family situations—namely men and women who were never married and never had a child. In this case, he unadjusted gender gap is actually positive—women earn about 8% more than their male counterparts. This observation is an important one because it suggests that the factors underlying the gender gap in pay primarily reflect choices made by men and women given their different societal roles, rather than labor market discrimination against women due to their sex.

8% is large statistically, especially when it's taken from the entire national Census. If you factor out level of education however, the 8% swing to women disappears: the bias disappears as it was due to the women in the group having a higher level of education. So, it's accounted for, but would we say that it is "fair"? I seriously doubt that if we gender-flipped this exact situation anyone would call it "fair": if men got more degrees and earned more on that basis.

[Antioch]

Gender quotas seemed to work pretty well for... India, I want to say it was? Governmental (local, at that, if I'm not misremembering) instead of business positions, iirc, but still. If the practice is best (or at least good) at bringing the desired goals (and generally, about the only way to find that out is to just try it -- and given how few positions the noted change effects, what they're proposing/implementing sounds like a fairly good wide-scale/low-job-number change), might as well give it a go.

...

The goal of forcing unqualified women into boards over qualified men? That WILL happen, it is inevitable with this policy, the random distribution of candidates will assure that.

Lets have a hypothetical company. Their board currently has 70% men and 30% women. One of the women leaves the company so they are looking for a replacement.

The 2 best candidates are Bob and Stacy

Bob scores an 8 on merit.
Stacy scores a 5 on merit.

Stacy gets hired because Bob has a penis.

Desirable?

[Reelya]

Y'can question whether the practice actually does that, but "Fuck them, got mine" isn't actually a terribly sane position at all, especially when it's causing notable negative effect.

Ease up on MSH, I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic there. But I disagree because I think llnking scepticism about quotas to being greedy and uncaring is a strawman / ad hominem.

In general, if a company is hiring on merit and you impose a quota, the people they need to hire will by definition be worse at the job that their current worst people.

Not only, that, but the group you shrink will naturally rise in average performance (because you naturally sack the lowest-performers first), while the group you grow via quota will drop in average performance (because the people you hire will be people who were previously seen as not-good-enough to hire). So, if two groups had equal performance, they won't after you fiddle with things via a quota system. This could actually reinforce ideas that one group is "naturally better" than the other, even when that's not the case.

Applying a quota to boards of directors is treating things at completely the wrong end of the talent pipeline, it needs to start in education. And it also ignores the points brought up by people like Sheryl Sandberg.

[RedKing]

First off, I'm against quotas on principle. In a gender-blind, race-blind, age-blind, religion-blind, orientation-blind world I would support a 100% pure meritocracy. And when we get to that world, me and the Magical Sparkle Ponies will be right there with you. Until then, however, there needs to be some impetus to smooth out the imbalances. We're not that far removed in time from a period when a black man in a boardroom would have been unthinkable.

Secondly, do you people even realize what corporate board members do?? This isn't a skill position. Hell, half the time board members don't even show up for board meetings. Sitting on a corporate board of directors is the epitome of a "got the job through networking and winning a popularity contest" situation. Usually the only qualification is that you're a somewhat high-level executive at another company (typically one that the CEO you'll be supervising sits on the board of). The only negative effect for the CEOs is that it might force them to pick someone outside their circle of golfing buddies to vote them their annual pay raise.


EDIT: And that Forbes article is a puff piece opinion article. No sourcing of statistics, just some "here have these numbers and assume they're accurate".

EDIT #2: Counterpoint article, pointing out how bad the US is in this regard compared to Europe.

From that article:

A huge number of studies have found that those with more women on their boards outperform companies without any women.

[Reelya]

There are very few companies that have no women at all in the USA however. One link on the same site you quoted says that of the S&P 500, only 18 companies lack any women on the board. There could be something similar about those few companies, such as they're older companies without strong growth potential in their markets, thus they have a slower turnover of board members compared to those who are expanding. That point colors all the links - comparing companies with 1+ women board members to the few with no women board members is comparing 95% of the companies to the remaining 5%. It's not necessarily comparing apples to apples. It's hard to separate out causation from purely correlation-based data, as your first link points out.

[RedKing]

Yeah, would have been nice to know which 18 companies. But that's kind of beside the point. I doubt there are many in Europe that don't have at least one as well. But if you have 1 woman on an 11-member board, that's still considerable underrepresentation.

HP (pre-split) had four woman (including our female CEO) and eight men, so they were better than average.

[Reelya]

Another key point, going back to the quotas idea, is the question: because something can be shown to be better than an alternative, does that give the government the right to mandate it as a law?

If it's correct that companies with more women outperform others, then their rise is pretty much guaranteed. They will crowd out the less-profitable ones on their own, without needing quotas.

[RedKing]

There may something to that, given that the first analogy that came to mind was the "No Irish Need Apply" days of the mid-1800s. This disappeared without Irish hiring quotas, but just because something will eventually "go away on its own" (and there's quite a debate to be had there) doesn't mean that people shouldn't seek progress. That's like saying "Well, eventually racism will be a thing of the past so we don't need any laws against racism." You don't get rid of discriminatory behavior by allowing it to go unchallenged.

[Antioch]

There may something to that, given that the first analogy that came to mind was the "No Irish Need Apply" days of the mid-1800s. This disappeared without Irish hiring quotas, but just because something will eventually "go away on its own" (and there's quite a debate to be had there) doesn't mean that people shouldn't seek progress. That's like saying "Well, eventually racism will be a thing of the past so we don't need any laws against racism." You don't get rid of discriminatory behavior by allowing it to go unchallenged.

But there ARE laws against discriminatory behaviour during job interviews and women participation has been rising for years. This quota is an entirely different matter, it is making discriminatory behaviour mandatory.

[mainiac]

If your jump shot is always going two feet to the right, you should aim two feet left of your target.  If your hiring process is always missing women, you should aim to hire more.  You do both to be more accurate.  Sure you want to correct what is making you aim to the right or miss qualified women but until you do, you counteract the bias.

It aint rocket surgery...

[BlackHeartKabal]

If there's a shortage of women on a work force, consider the fact that maybe they aren't interested in such a field or something on your end is causing this. Gender quotas are stupid, extremely, yes, but it won't have that ill of an effect on any field of businesses.