This seems like the right decision (and I'm saying this as an LGBT person). The problem is, it just doesn't seem like legislation is the right instrument for promoting diversity in boardrooms. But what is the right mechanism? I anecdotally recall studies that found organizations with greater diversity deliver better financial results, and that public companies have a responsibility to their shareholders. It's important to state this because businesses exist primarily to create profits, not promote social movements. There's a legitimate business justification to diversity policies.
I empathize with those in diversity roles that are tasked with finding the informal-but-not-legally-enforcable means by which to increase diversity. How are you reasonably going to achieve that? It's a hard problem to solve. It seems like something driven by society at large. I'm not sure if you can hire a person to solve this problem, honestly.
I believe those studies but correlation does not equal causation. I think the real reason that more diverse boards do better (if they do) is that the company hires people more based on talent and other metric which don’t discriminate, vs ones like patrimony. Forced diversity just sidesteps the problem because the company can still use bad metrics.
moreover, diversity of viewpoints borne of diversity of life experiences will better represent the search space in any decision-making. that's what makes diversity better, all other things being equal, which potentially then leads to better financial performance. it doesn't mean that any one decision will definitely be better, but that the totality of decision-making will be better on average than a less diverse decision-making group. this is a pretty reliable result in group dynamics/decision-making research.
There's a little bit of a systemic epistemic bias around this- diversity is socially desirable, so positive results are more likely to get published, get into the media, get shared, get remembered.
I wonder what would happen if we found out that people of similar backgrounds work better together? The reasoning of increasing shareholders value would still apply. Would we start implementing de facto segregated workplaces?
> It's important to state this because businesses exist primarily to create profits, not promote social movements.
Those at the top will often prioritize their feelings over profit potential. Corporations are not true profit maximizers, that's a total myth. It's one of the reasons why WFH wasn't more popular earlier, and why some companies are trying to force back-to-office to the point it causes some of their employees to quit.
Do people not go to work and see their managers in action? What makes them think that after just enough career steps a switch happens and people just magically become soulless profit driven AIs?
> I anecdotally recall studies that found organizations with greater diversity deliver better financial results
People also tout these studies for getting more women in business leadership. in reality that's a weird argument, women or lgbt or people of color don't need to be better in order to be accepted, they should be accepted by default. Maybe business culture with its rigid and often stupid conventions and demands has a lot to do with it. Things like, how business people socialize, what they 're expected to wear, what business gifts they send etc.
Pretty sure the idea is that diversity (of thought and other) itself can improve outcomes, not that anyone is necessarily better or worse at their jobs.
"The sum of its parts" is a very opaque phrase here. But even without defining it, anyone with work experience has some understanding of the effect of workplace dynamics, environmental factors, office morale, and other intangible influences on one's productivity and hence, the business's success. In other words, there are emergent properties in the calculus of success, and pursuing diversity is one way of trying to control that.
"Diverse" people do not have to be intrinsically better employees, for them to positively affect the business's success.
Sorry, you put a lot of buzzwords there, but buzzwords do not constitute any proof. It's certainly true in low-skill businesses like , i dunno, agriculture that production scales linearly. If nonlinear interactions occur it would be interesting to name them, instead of attributing it to some kind of magic ether. I dont like this completely vague explanation because it's exactly the rhetoric that people mock when they want to attack diversity
Well, to make it concrete then: I've seen teams get happier and more productive when some asshole is removed from the team; I've likewise seen teams get less productive because someone is added who drains morale, interest and productivity because they're continually negative and waste everyone's time with distracting concerns and a lot of "yes, but what about this?" type navel-gazing. I've found my own productivity fluctuating with different coworkers based on how well I communicate with them (where someone I struggle to interact with well gets along well with others).
So no, you can't view overall productivity as the sum of individual productivity because there are factors like this that are a function of group composition. And there's a lot of factors that are not functions of individual productivity.
Then let’s hear some hard logic. You’ve presented literally nothing.
If the best response you have is handwaving team dynamics as a buzzword, and pretending its not a real and tangible thing, go to work and start abusing all of your coworkers and see if their performance remains consistent.
Please explain your logic. Are you saying that someone’s contribution to the company is: A.) mathematically exact (lol) B.) not dependent on their team dynamics?
Well I’m not a woman but as for the rest of it it’s never been an issue.
The only time it’s even been mentioned is that when traveling by bus in Texas in 1999 that I should make sure I take my ID with me when leaving the bus just incase there’s ICE around.
My experience has been that people largely create their own problems, right now I’m in a very catholic country and looking for a cross necklace. It’s just to avoid people asking me if I believe in God which I don’t care to talk about.
Blend in and you’ll have 100x less problems. Your work likely doesn’t care who you’re banging but is going to care if you want to talk about your relationship all day instead of business.
>in reality that's a weird argument, women or lgbt or people of color don't need to be better in order to be accepted, they should be accepted by default.
In reality every non-majority demographic has to be better in order to be accepted. They often have to work harder just to reach the default that the majority takes for granted, because that system works with the majority, and against everyone else.
Ivy League US Ratio
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56
Meritocracy is bigoted or rational depending on which groups appear in a particular order. Pick one and be consistent with it. Swapping depending on what pecking order shows up is just more moral relativism to benefit one group while demonizing any others who ever try to do the same. Don't think it's not noticed and remembered for future reference.
Why does the concept of "working hard" have to be a categorized by race when it is largely based on individual circumstances such as family income, parental upbringing, and immigration history? Someone who individually works hard that is a member of a group that is not considered to be hard working (or vice versa) would still be treated unfairly by this proposed system, making it no better than the status quo.
You want to attribute different outcomes to differences in behavior by race? In this case, you're saying that Jewish students are 11x more hard-working than Hispanic ones, and Asian students are 6x more hard-working than Black ones?
Which other racial disparities do you attribute to differences in behavior?
>In this case, you're saying that Jewish students are 11x more hard-working than Hispanic ones, and Asian students are 6x more hard-working than Black ones?
Does Michael Phelps (23 Olympic gold medals) swim 23x faster than Mack Horton (1 Olympic gold medal)?
Internet arguments aside, the fact that certain cultural groups push their children to study hard (and also provide them with as many resources as possible to make sure their studies are fruitful) probably is a big contributor to the disparity illustrated in your table.
Anecdotally, it absolutely has. The people I knew growing up (regardless of race) whose parents encouraged educational excellence were far more likely to attain it.
(Looking at your link, it's important to note that it doesn't separate Jewish and non-Jewish Whites.)
But it looks at all students (not only those that make it into the Ivies), so Jewish whites, that are only ~4% of all whites, have a minuscule effect on white SAT scores. Yet, for non-Jewish whites, comparatively higher SAT scores have not translated into higher Ivy enrollment.
>Jewish whites, that are only ~4% of all whites, have a minuscule effect on white SAT scores
On average, yes. At the Ivy League level, though, they account for a solid third of the white admissions. I'm sure you'd find a similar overrepresentation in the top few percentiles of the SAT.
> I'm sure you'd find a similar overrepresentation in the top few percentiles of the SAT.
Even supposing this is true, it still doesn't answer the question: Since non-Jewish whites do better at the SAT than Blacks and Hispanics, why does this translate to lower, not higher, Ivy enrollment rates?
The data clearly shows: higher SAT scores help every group except non-Jewish whites.
I get the general point about the affirmative action, but it's important to remember that it's not just Whites getting the short end of the stick. Asians are absolutely underrepresented too.
I'm the only one that presented any data at all - the original comment simply asserted something was true, without backing it up in any way.
It's reasonable to expect a refutation to contain at least some data, instead of dismissing what data we do have as not complete enough, and reverting back to the original fact-free assertion.
You can't just throw up a data table and go "ok I refuted it!" That's not an argument, it's just some contextless numbers. It is legitimately not clear to me in any way what you're trying to say or what it has to do with the thing you're replying to.
As a sibling reply said, I'm not making an argument. I'm asking for the relevance of your reply to the statement you replied to. I think there are a lot of confounding factors to the data you presented, so personally consider it to hold very little value on its own. You're the one who seems to draw meaning from it.
So, what meaning do you draw from it? What explanation do you have for these discrepancies? How do they relate to what you replied to?
Don't be deliberately obtuse. Of course you were making an argument. You were making it sarcastically, to be sure, but it was still an argument dismissing the data presented as irrelevant because it doesn't purport to show the level of effort from the groups involved. And it's a spurious argument in any case, because the data presented still shows a major issue in the initial claim, which was that non-white students need to expend significantly more effort than white students to be accepted into the Ivy League, unless you happen to believe that (non-Jewish) white students for whatever reason expend much, much less effort than other demographics to join. If you think other factors are the cause of that, state them; don't just off-handedly and rudely dismiss people presenting valid contrary data.
> initial claim, which was that non-white students need to expend significantly more effort than white students to be accepted into the Ivy League
You've added a whole bunch of words here that weren't in any claim of this thread. The person I was replying to is the one who brought students and school acceptance into it. I've double checked the whole thread to make sure, so if I missed it please point it out. The conversation above car_analogy's post was about business leadership.
At any rate, while of course I'm being a little obtuse, I really do not know what car_analogy is driving at. I can speculate, but I suspect I'd be accused of being uncharitable if I said my speculation out loud. It's not up to me to make their argument for them, and they didn't even bother to make one.
Anyways,
> If you think other factors are the cause of that
Fortunately, as I'm not the person who threw a snark bomb into the thread tied to a table of tenuously related data, it's not my job to interpret the data I don't think is significant to the argument at hand. If car_analogy wants to convince me of its relevance, they can say more than two words about it and then get defensive.
US immigration policy selects for high earners, the already wealthy and the highly skilled and educated. I think that can explain the demographics pretty well.
I’ve never really understood the diversity thing. Why should it be more desirable to hire me because I was born in this place or that?
Is the native part of me more deserving of a contract than the Latin part?
If I was with a guy the night before instead of a woman am I more beneficial to a company? Am I even more valuable on the odd night I’m with a trans person?
Am I more beneficial with my Paraguayan passport instead of a Canadian passport?
Diversity should just be called what it is, bigotry.
* in an organization filled with native (whatever that means) people, your Latin heritage would add value. In an organization filled with people with Latin heritage, the native part of you would add value.
* in a company filled with cis-straight men, then diversity being valuable implies that anyone with a different experience would add value.
* in Paraguay, your Canadian experience is more valuable in terms of whatever value diversity brings than it is in Canada. By contrast, in Canada, your Paraguayan experience would offer more value.
Of course, it is possible that it's not true that diverity is valuable. But there's solid anecdotal evidence that it is, and maybe even a bit of actual statistics.
Oh by native I mean indigenous, I’d just say Indian but I’m not allowed to call myself that anymore without issues from the PC people telling me how ashamed of myself I should feel. I always forget the acceptable term to refer to myself by.
I kind of get it but I just call that hiring people with experience.
Like I do get hired because I’ve done a whole bunch of different roles and have actual diversity I’m not just a Java programmer with 20 years of experience making login forms.
Also having done a lot of things I usually have an interesting non-work story to tell.
I find that kind of diversity hugely valuable. I find hiring people because they check a diversity box dumb and bigoted.
The worst-case scenario is a bunch of people with different ethnicity, religious affiliation/experience, gender identity, age, etc. etc. ... who all like the same entertainment, food, clothing and vacation options. "Diversity" ... yes. But actual diversity, no.
However, I'm not sure that this actually a real-world problem.
I'm not going to defend diversity but the idea is having a Paraguayan and Chinese would be better than two Paraguayans because you get insight from two cultures vs one.
For some roles this might be important (sales) for others like accounting it's foolish.
That's the other side. Having all Chinese allows for easier communication, shared cultural experiences, similiar worldview.
Location is a factor.. in China everyone is Chinese. In the US you have a variety of people with different cultural backgrounds. What works in China couldn't work in the US.
>I anecdotally recall studies that found organizations with greater diversity deliver better financial results
While that may be true, it isn't the case that more diversity necessarily makes a more profitable organisation. It's also a pretty dangerous game to play; diversity policies can be, and often are, implemented in a ham-fisted or corrupt way that destroys value.
Simply look at the havoc that BEE has wreaked on South Africa's economy and especially the public service.
Since it’s us mathematically minded people here, it’s worth pointing out that these studies don’t establish causation. You’d probably find a strong correlation between financial performance of firms and investment into other social initiatives, such as corporate philanthropy or environmental causes. It’s possible that wealthier and more successful firms are simply better able to afford such investments than less successful firms.
Exactly: Most studies that I've been referred to are shiny McKinsey pages that boil down to big companies having more diverse boards on average.
Besides what you said, that's not a surprising correlation because it's easy for Multinational MegaCorp Inc. to have a multi-ethnic board after a few international mergers.
And then there are very opinionated shareholders like Vanguard and BlackRock, which receive voting rights for every Euro that I save for old age, who can make this outcome a self-fulfilling prophecy by punishing companies for lack of diversity.
I don't think it's possible to control for all of this.
I’ve done some work adjacent to those shiny mckinsey pages. The mergers wouldn’t explain it. It’s not looking at size, it’s looking at growth and success relative to where they were some period of time ago.
It’s probably a bit tautological. The only effective way to make your company more diverse is to grow and hire diverse candidates. This is not the case for top level leadership though. Boards as well. Growing companies want to invest in their people and that tends to result in some more attention to diversity. Conversely dusty old companies that are having their lunch eaten by tech enabled competitors do tend to be very non diverse because that’s they way it is and it’s not an environment that diverse candidates want to join. Also self fulfilling.
Board diversity can also be an indirect metric indicating a board that stuffed with irrelevant rubber-stampers: if all you need is a rubber stamp wielder you can pick whatever flavor of human will complete your box of crayons, but if you actually need someone's judgement or experience the selection is more limited.
> White people were the most opposed to considering race and ethnicity in hiring and promotion: 78 percent said only qualifications should be considered. But a majority of black respondents (54 percent) and Hispanic respondents (69 percent) also said race and ethnicity shouldn’t be considered.
These are policies are being driven mostly by liberal whites oh behalf of racial minorities, but those minorities themselves mostly oppose such policies.
I agree upon the success of your parents. It only makes sense that say a 'rich' or 'successful' parent that knows how to budget, had a better education, a strong will to persevere, and/or is extremely kind will pass on those skills of success to their children. Does that kid deserve to have the advantage? I'd say yes because it was the parents who created the life of their kid and what the parents want to do with their money and time, if that's support and educate the life they created then should be able to do that. In U.S. with public education, financial aid, and grants it is about as equal as possible monetarily but if a good blacksmith makes the best swords their son has a teacher around 24/7 that can teach them and make their son the next best blacksmith - but that applies to every single profession, but in general just budgeting or the skills I mentioned above would be enough to succeed in almost any profession, and bonus points if they have multiple of those skills.
Parents provide more than just moral teaching. For example, when kids screw up, wealthy parents can buy them second chances and the appearance of moral rectitude — when in the same situation a poor kid would be ashcanned as a dissolute moral failure, whose parents didn't know how to budget, didn't pass on a strong will to persevere, etc.
Anybody up for an argument that the government should have custody of and raise all children? I know that’s a non-starter, but if you want to level the playing field for all kids, this is how you do it. Outside of that, you are leaving children to whatever shitty situation they didn’t ask to be born into.
I’m not saying I’m for this. I’m not and you would have to kill me to get to my kids. Just seems like the most logical solution to an otherwise impossible problem.
> Anybody up for an argument that the government should have custody of and raise all children?
That's either a bit strong or a bit already true, depending on how you look at it; the state sets boundaries and responsibilities on the relationships parents have with children, and if they violate those boundaries or fail to live up to those responsibilities, the legal relationship between parent and child can be terminated.
I'm for it is a more practical way. It is the state's responsibility to be good at raising children, because some children will have no family to take care of them. We (at least in the US) horribly fail at this, which is a clear signal that our society is selfish and irresponsible. This should be changed. People with shitty parents should be jealous of state wards. If we can't be successful when we have complete control, we shouldn't have much to say about how well parents are doing except in the cases of gross neglect and abuse.
We can't figure out what to do with constituencies that don't have lobbyists.
I think you could do a lot of stuff to provide support to all kids without going all the way to universal government custody. Things like (optional) government paid universal day care and after school care, government paid universal health care for minors, food/housing/etc stipends (like the child tax credit, but bigger), and arguably better pay for teachers and smaller class sizes. These things wouldn't end inequality, but might more kids up to good enough resources.
You could also pull a China and outlaw tutoring/test prep to reduce the advantages wealth can provide.
Violence in the home (most goes unreported),
Mocking education in the home,
Drug abuse in the home,
An example of single parent pregnancy everywhere,
General neglect - nobody to read to you
These are all cultural things. Culture is the software that gets installed on you and some people are getting a shitty software version that almost guarantees failure. If you don’t believe that, watch any documentary on rural Appalachia.
> Anybody up for an argument that the government should have custody of and raise all children?
Because that worked really well in Communist Romania. "Let's make sure things are equally terrible for everyone, then we can call that a level playing field" is not sensible policy.
some grim capitalist realist shit when it's easier to imagine taking everyone's kids away than it is to imagine not structuring society around the exploitation of artificial inequality.
We are obviously not talking about being born into wealth. Middle-class people still need to accumulate capital first, generally by working, something that's not always possible (for an extreme example, take e.g. ~90% unemployment rate for autistic college grads).
Even if we were talking about wealthy families, that doesn't count out being disowned, etc. for being gay or transgender.
Transgender people are a tiny percentage of LGBT people, so using them to characterize all LGBT is intentionally misleading.
Also, this law was actually about requiring that any non-white or LGBT person be on the board; the LGBT part being highlighted is part of Newsweek's anti-gay agenda.
The US has a recent history of racial discrimination that prevented a lot of people from building wealth in their communities or generational wealth. Not that there aren't a shit ton of white people living in trailer parks, but no one was denying them home loans because of the color of their skin.
So, if owning your own home is a big part of your wealth over a life time, and your parents and their parents were discriminated against and prevented from accessing those mechanisms, it makes it much less likely that you will today be born in a wealthy or a poor family.
Look up redlining on wikipedia if you want specifics.
You're reading it wrong. They weren't saying that there's an equal chance for anyone to be born poor as to be born wealthy, they were saying the chances are the same for a straight person to be born either poor or wealthy as for a LGBT person to be born either poor or wealthy.
This is not always true for other minorities. A random black American isn't as likely to have been born into wealth as a random white American.
What a horrible place you immediately jumped to. Historically and systemically disadvantaged does not mean or imply intrinsically disadvantaged. Jesus.
> I anecdotally recall studies that found organizations with greater diversity deliver better financial results, and that public companies have a responsibility to their shareholders.
If diverse boards do better it's because you have to be doing very well already to do something as stupid as picking board members for their sexual orientation.
> There's a legitimate business justification to diversity policies.
Based on personal observations, innate aptitude and interest doesn't seem to be aligned. Eg, one of the more amazing minds I've ever met was contained in a woman who just didn't have the competitive glint in her eye to make herself successful. Sad story in many ways.
But - if that observation is true - then diversity policy quotas will break the correlation. At the moment, about half the aptitude is in women, some percent in various minority groups in rough proportion to their prevalence, etc. Companies better at surfacing talent will naturally be more diverse. Companies that forcibly make themselves more diverse through a quota will ironically probably regress to the mean level of competence and perform worse.
>This seems like the right decision (and I'm saying this as an LGBT person). The problem is, it just doesn't seem like legislation is the right instrument for promoting diversity in boardrooms.
Oh for sure it's the right decision. If even the legislation's intention was successful, forcing this matter will only go to create more radicalization and make the situation worse.
>I anecdotally recall studies that found organizations with greater diversity deliver better financial results, and that public companies have a responsibility to their shareholders.
Regardless of the issue you wish to prop up. There is always a study that says it will work.
>It's important to state this because businesses exist primarily to create profits, not promote social movements. There's a legitimate business justification to diversity policies.
Businesses should not even consider diversity. There is a problem in some businesses in that they do discriminate. They discriminate against and that's the ideal goal of what should be fixed. Or should it? If we are in a free market and Business 1 refuses to hire LGBT. Business 2 hires those and will eventually pick up good people that give them a competitive advantage.
Government coming in and using force to make Business 1 take LGBT on the board... That's not going to work out.
I' m left-handed but I would never think of identifying myself as being part of some diffuse group of people 'united' by handedness. In the same vein I do not see why gays, lesbians and bisexuals are to be seen as part of a single group given that as far as I gather there is often not that much love [no pun intended] between the former two - it is not as if gays and lesbians have much in common.
Do you truly identify as 'an LGBT person' - implying that those who claim to be spokespeople for 'this group' also speak for you - or do you just see yourself as a gay, lesbian or bisexual man or woman? Or, to put it even more bluntly, would you not rather see yourself as a person who happens to be gay or lesbian or bisexual, just like I see myself as a person who happens to be left-handed? I may sometimes grumble about some object which could have easily be made to fit left- and right-handed people alike [1] but I would never join a left-handed political action committee, nor would I trust anyone to 'speak for me' in such a context because I don't want to be used as a pawn in some ideological/political struggle.
[1] If you ever start a cheese packing facility make sure to put a peel corner on the left and right hand side of the package, the latter is far more useable for left-handed people...
There's a difference between what one wishes the world was like, and what one should do given the world as it actually is.
Given the past rampant anti-LGBT feelings and actions around the world, it totally made sense for LGBT people to band together, to enact change on their own behalf.
Much of the world is better for LGBT people today, but a) it's still not quite as good as most would want it, and b) in many parts of the world, it's still quite bad.
So given that everyone else treats LGBT as a group, and that everyone else treats them badly, then of course it makes sense for them to act as a group. (Though of course I don't literally mean that everyone treats them badly, just the general trend)
> So given that everyone else treats LGBT as a group, and that everyone else treats them badly
Simply put: Nonsense
A bit more elaborate: some people have something against people who differ in some way, whether that be in their sexual orientation or handedness or skin colour or the language they speak or the food they eat or the god(s) they worship or the parties they vote for or the places they live or the clothes they wear. This has always been that way and will always be so. Most people harbour some preconceived ideas about those 'others' - yes, you do as well. In most liberal western societies these preconceived ideas are frowned upon by official institutions, especially when it concerns such ideas related to 'protected' identity categories like sexual orientation, race and religion. your statement regarding the supposed mistreatment of that group does not hold any water. It is a lie, an untruth, a distortion of the facts - unless you can prove your claim.
Can you prove it? Show us how your statement is true, in what way everyone treats gays, lesbians and bisexuals badly. Just saying this does not make it true, not even repeating it ad nauseam, not even when it is claimed to be true by academics from the grievance studies departments - especially not when claimed by those academics from those grievance studies departments since they are on an ideological mission.
> Can you prove it? Show us how your statement is true, in what way everyone treats gays, lesbians and bisexuals badly. Just saying this does not make it true, not even repeating it ad nauseam,
As I said in the original comment, not literally everyone treats LGBT people badly. But are you seriously suggesting there is zero bad treatment of LGBT people? Do you think historically there was, but now there isn't? Based on the language in your comment, it seems you have a certain point of view about this topic which makes you think there isn't any bias against LGBT people, and you're not just randomly asking for proof.
So as proof, I can easily show historical mistreatment of LGBT groups. Example: having homosexual sex, at least for men, was illegal in some places (including some states in the US). Until fairly recently, getting married to a same-sex partner was illegal in the US. Those are two easy examples, the latter change happening what, less than a decade ago?
For existing mistreatment, homosexuality is still illegal in many countries. There are new laws being passed in the US which some LGBT groups consider to be against their interest. In my own country, it's only within the last year that gay couples could have a baby through surrogacy within the country. Etc.
If you think that none of this counts as mistreatment, I'd urge you to say what * would* count in your opinion.
You first state that 'everyone treats gays, lesbians and bisexuals badly', only to walk it back a few words later. Why did you say it in the first place?
Also, I asked for proof of your statement in the here and now, not for historical proof. Not 'was' but 'is'. Furthermore, the fact that some things are illegal in some countries does not mean anything for how those things are treated in liberal western democracies which is what I was asking about.
The fact that 'new laws being passed in the US which some LGBT groups consider to be against their interest' is totally irrelevant unless you can show which laws those are and in what way they actually discriminate against gays, lesbians and bisexual people.
You have not shown proof of your claim that everyone treats gays, lesbians and bisexuals badly. It is not up to me to provide you with examples of what would be mistreatment since I did not make any claims about people being mistreated. You made a claim but you can not prove it, it is up to you to either provide proof or walk back your claim.
> If you ever start a cheese packing facility make sure to put a peel corner on the left and right hand side of the package, the latter is far more useable for left-handed people...
I think there are a LOT of products that would benefit from company leadership having someone left handed (or colorblind, for that matter) due to the fact that more than a few products work sub-optimally ... probably more than from having someone who's gay.
Diversity in company leadership would better be spent on factors relevant to the product or workforce. Outside of some specialist industries, board members sexuality has absolutely no place in the workplace.
> I anecdotally recall studies that found organizations with greater diversity deliver better financial results
If Hollywood movies start getting a lot better with the new diversity requirements for Oscar eligibility, presumably this will serve as an example for every other industry.
Maybe introduce new grounds for suing - if the stock underperforms, and leadership is showing a bias in its demographics, then the share holders can sue for presumptive discrimination reducing the quality of decision making.
yeah it's almost like the single axis of race isn't quite enough to make full sense of these problems. maybe we could mix in some other forms of identity and access people might have. could call it "union theory" or something idk.
Not to get into the social or mental aspects, but biologically there is some very non standard stuff that can happen. Chimera for example can be a mix between male and female cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)#Humans
That isn’t to say non standard biology is always involved, just that it can be.
Look, I agree that it's biological - I'm not claiming, for example, that people who claim to have 'gender dysphoria' are lying. No doubt there are both men and women who don't feel right in their own bodies. But I draw the line there. I think surgeries and hormone treatments, particularly in children, are abhorrent and that we as a societal are enabling mental illness and self-mutilation. One interesting thing I never see anybody talk about is that perhaps (and I'd suggest this is the case) the reason suicide rates amongst trannies is so high is literally that they are mentally ill/fucked up to begin with. The data show that having the treatments don't actually help the outcomes - ie., if you're miserable as a natural born male, you're likely to be miserable after you undergo genital mutilation and hormone therapy.
Point is - no doubt there's something biologically and cognitively going on with these people (I'd frame it as there being something wrong with them, in the same sense that eating disorders are maladaptive and harmful).
So after reading that I went to check the literature and it seems to on average be a net benefit. Complications and regret are both possible, but various objective and subjective measurements do improve on average.
Just because their subjective well-being improves doesn't mean the problem is solved, and you'll see that even after 'treatment' they are still much more likely to commit suicide or suffer from depression compared to the general population. My personal hunch is that, again, these people have a mental illness, but we as a society have framed it in the way that if they just get surgery we can fix their dysphoria - when they get the treatments and then they are just as unhappy, or only slightly happier than they were before, this is sort of the end as they see it. This would also explain why so many of them kill themselves after they have treatment.
Also, though I'm trained as a lawyer, I also have a BsC with an interest in endocrinology and I'd suggest that nothing in the human body besides the brain is more complicated than one's hormones and their interactions inter se. I'm a big believer in modern medicine, but I do think we have too high an opinion of ourselves as a species when it comes to our ability to control outcomes vis-a-vis a person's hormones.
These treatments clearly don’t solve the underlying issue. The question is simply are they the best current alternative for a subset of the population. That is supported by hard data, even if the surgery is rather barbaric we simply don’t have the technology to do a better job while either keeping someone their old gender or swapping to another.
As to having a mental illness, that’s often how we describe issues we don’t understand or have the ability to treat. Stress ulcers are a great example of such classifications. I am not disagreeing that many of these people have significant mental issues, but calling something a mental illness isn’t specific enough to do anything with and tends to be used dismissively. Further once the underlying cause is discovered we stop thinking of say mercury poisoning as a mental health issue.
You'll get flagged into oblivion here for pointing this out and holding sensible, do-no-harm type opinions on this topic. Seems that HN has a sizeable contingent of 'trans rights' activists who want to hide such blasphemy from public view.
I've actually been surprised at how constructive the various responses have been. Not sure what other sites you visit regularly, but this is the least draconian site I can think of outside the dark web.
I should also add: the trans-rights thing is actually something that in my experience most people, even those who are otherwise socially 'liberal', generally find disagreeable. I've got gay friends and feminist friends who both get just as outraged as I do at the idea that men should be able to waltz into female bathrooms, or compete in women's sports, etc. My own view is that this is actually something that the large majority of the population thinks a certain way about, but as usual in this day and age a very small minority of people dedicate their existence to 'activism' and cause the movement to seem larger than it is.
From experience, I've also found the discussion here to often be constructive, but tends to be cut short by being flagged to death. For example, I see that your top comment already has been - which also stops the discussion below it from being visible to anyone who has 'showdead' set to the default.
> My own view is that this is actually something that the large majority of the population thinks a certain way about, but as usual in this day and age a very small minority of people dedicate their existence to 'activism' and cause the movement to seem larger than it is.
Agreed, but also that most people up until recently haven't really thought much about it at all. That the activism of this small minority is drawing more attention and scrutiny of late is probably a good thing in the long run, given all the harmful downstream effects of gender identity ideology, particularly on women and children.
I think this shows how being "US liberal" is pretty much the same as "anywhere else right."
Like straight out the gate with "I support marginalized people but only the way I think is best for them, disregarding their own experiences and preferences." Then immediate followup with the 2011-era reddit style pseudo-evo-psych about how our current social order is fully justified because of science or whatever.
Hm why do men not want to go into some of these fields could it be the decades of ensuring they have low prestige, low wages, or both? No, it must be evolution.
These may pass for liberal positions in the US but they are moderate-to-hard right compared to things like "medical care is between an individual and their doctors" and "there are still barriers to equality in society and the workplace, and it takes generations for all the effects of social change to be realized so of course we'll be seeing the effects of past exclusions for decades."
Actually, gender behaviour differences are noted in non-human primate infants also. For example (and I can find the study if you're interested), male baby monkeys prefer toy firetrucks to dolls, and they don't display motherly (viz., feeding, caressing, etc) behaviour towards the toys, whereas female infant monkeys prefer dolls (even human dolls) to toy firetrucks, and they do display these behaviours. At least when I was taught this in uni (2017) this finding/conclusion was sound enough to be in textbooks, and had been replicated and was considered paradigmatic of innate biological gender differences.
There is also plenty of evidence that testosterone has effects on male aggression, caring instincts, bonding, etc. Pretending that gender hormonal differences don't exert massive effects on interests and social behaviours is not tenable, IMO. No doubt more men than currently do would would go into childcare if the wages suddenly became $200/hour, but that doesn't mean they'd be as good as it as women are on average, nor would it reflect a change in their natural desires/motivations.
I'm not pretending these differences don't exist or don't affect individual behavior. I'm saying using them to justify inequality in our society as innate or inevitable is fucked up. A lot of behaviors can be accurately described as "innate" and "biological" but nonetheless the entire project of "having a society" depends on us not acting on them regularly.
But there is a very big leap between identifying inclinations in primate infants and determining that the unjust structures of our society are caused purely by that. Especially when there are so many other easily observable factors in that inequality right now.
That aside, why even focus on it when there are more powerful incentives already at play? Let's get the wages evened out then see what people do, rather than decide in advance what we think they will do.
I guess where we don't see eye to eye is in the existence of 'unjust structures' in society. My own view is that all advanced cultures today, not just the West, are the result of organic developments that have occurred over millennia and have basically been subjected to social natural selection. That includes their legal systems. I'm an American living in Australia and I've worked within both legal systems. While neither is perfect, and there are sometimes glaring problems (Djockovic v The Minister for Immigration comes to mind), I wouldn't consider either to be pillars of inequality. I think any inequalities that do exist are there for a reason, and trying to exert top-down control over them isn't necessarily wise or even possible.
Take blacks and the black crime rate, for example. It's known that blacks are busted for, and convicted of, marijuana possession at rates exponentially higher than other races. Instead of concluding that perhaps blacks have some genetic predisposition for weed, or that they have cognitive differences that affect their judgment and self-control - either of which isn't an obviously unreasonable conclusion IMO - in many US states it's now been determined that, apparently, the laws themselves (viz., the laws the criminalise marijuana possession) are racist. Or take college admissions - because blacks are, on average, 1 standard deviation less intelligent than literally every other race, and hence do substantially worse on standardised tests, SURPRISE, they don't get into Ivy League universities, become lawyers and doctors and engineers, etc. But instead of considering that maybe, just possibly, there's a genetic difference - or a difference caused by them having been enslaved for a few generations - society has now apparently concluded that in fact it's the standardised tests that are racist, or the admissions process itself. Frankly I find all this laughably asinine, and if that's what you mean by the 'unjust structures of our society' then I'll have to disagree with you. Even if you want to blame their current problems on slavery, don't you think it's reasonable to call the slavery itself racist, and not today's current laws?
Regarding the gender pay gap, my understanding is that men literally work more hours than women per capita, therefore, logically, they do on average get paid more in lifetime earnings. Adding to that point, let's look at 'women's sports'. I've seen it said that WNBA players, for example, should as a matter of 'equality' be paid the same as men's NBA players. But men's players are compensated according to the market, and the market is based almost exclusively on the public's desire and willingness to pay to see men's NBA players play. People, apparently, do not want to see physically inferior females who are weaker, slower, less coordinated, etc., play basketball, and apparently people refuse to value the experience as highly as they do men's basketball. And if you find that objectionable, just look at how many females and female Olympians were outraged at the idea of having men who'd had surgery/hormone therapy compete against them in the Olympics. They know, just as I do, that there is a massive physical gap between the genders. As an aside, query whether those differences carry over into the cognitive domain (I think they do - as a start, men have 10% larger brains, and completely different proportions of important regions like Broca's area, the anterior cingulate, area 10, etc). What if they did, and men happened to be better at things that people find more valuable. Is that unjust?
Curious to know your thoughts on this, specifically whether you think 'sexism' is to blame for that market situation.
I bring that example up because, quite literally, it is one of those intractable problems (women being physically inferior to men) that we can do nothing about except accept and move on. Not every apparent inequality is a problem, IMO, nor can we fix them all.
Wait I can't find the comment now but didn't you start this thread by claiming you're a liberal? And then three comments in you're busting out the calipers and white hood? I'm not interested sorry.
Definitely not busting out 'the white hood', but if you want to caricature me in that way I can't stop you, obviously. What I claimed was that I hold a number of views that are socially 'liberal' in the American sense, noting that liberal means something different in the rest of the world, including Australia (where I live).
Not sure how old you are, but at some age you'll realise that in real life the political beliefs people hold often don't conform precisely with those of any particular political party. Such is life, regardless of their political bent.
In the case that carrying a fetus to term would kill the mother: abort. One life does not merit the safety of another.
In the case that a fetus was conceived in rape: abort. Would you remind yourself, and even be beholden to, evil?
In the case that a fetus would be born unwanted: abort. It is better to be born into a loving family than raised in orphanages or worse: raised in a family who do not love you.
Why do you need those reasons? It doesn't like pro-abortion, it's anti-abortion by limiting its use cases. If you are pro-abortion, you would happily suggest any pregnant women to abort their babies.
I don't. You asked why would anyone. I just presented some reasons that I know my lady friends have stated.
I do, in fact, think that you don't "need" any reason whatsoever. I think a woman has every right to choose whether or not to have a baby including to abort a baby for any reason or even for no reason.
Why would everybody be anti-abortion? Why are some people rooting for war, while others denounce military acts? Why does my grandma love eating fish heads but I think it's odd?
I think it's normal that different people think differently. I think this is a very flame-inviting question as it stands.
I think what they are getting it is that someone called it "pro-abortion". It is usually called "pro-choice", because it is abortion rights that most pro-choice people are in favor of rather than abortion itself.
I've certainly met vastly more people who want to preserve Roe v. Wade because they want to preserve a woman's right to choose than people who want to preserve Roe v. Wade because they think that we need more abortions. I can't recall ever meeting someone who was actually pro-abortion.
Even those who think we should significantly lower the population almost always want to do that through better contraception, not through more abortions.
It's not word games. It is quite possible to believe that something is wrong and people should not do it while at the same time believing that whether or not people do that wrong thing should be their decision.
- that is semantics (if you want the choice to exist, you're pro-abortion, existentially speaking)
- everyone knew what the poster meant
- this is the least interesting conversation derailment folks could choose. Maybe instead go to bat against the raging anti-trans statement included for some reason?
I think most people are anti-abortion. People usually celebrate a birth, not celebrate an abortion. "I heard you abort the baby. Congratulations!" still seems weird. No? It's kind of strange to me. But what do I know?
In most cases it takes a man and a woman to conceive a fetus. But if the fetus is finally born into a baby, the consequence of that is rarely divided evenly between the man and the woman. In extreme but not really uncommon cases, the division can be 100%-0%: that the man bears no consequences at all and the woman bears all the consequences. Abortion makes the consequence close to 0, so that it's more even between 100% and 0%.
Personally I also do use the term pro-abortion because it is clear about the actual issue and what the disagreement is. Pretty much every single person anywhere is in favor of both life and choice, it's a uselessly euphemistic set of terms that obscures the real conflict.
I'm not necessarily in favor of any specific case of abortion, or wanting more of them in the world, or anything like that. "Pro abortion access" would probably be more technically correct but that opens the argument up to getting derailed by "well how much access" and shit. Plus the mild transgressiveness of the term is helpful sometimes, if it makes people stop for a second and ask like this.
The difficulty here is the collision between explicit discrimination by the state (prohibited in this case by the CA constitution) and de facto discrimination by private actors (see the significant under-representation of many different demographic groups in positions of power and wealth).
CA sought to use the power of the state to legislate some private behavior to reduce the negative impact of de facto discrimination by private actors. The judge has said "no, the CA constitution prevents you from doing this, since that would be explicit discrimination by the state".
If you accept for a moment that there is de facto discrimination arising from the actions of private actors, and you believe that this is a net negative for society, how would you go about reducing or elimination it?
Of course, you may not accept that there is de facto discrimination by private actors, but then you need to explain the underrepresenation of different demographics, and likely in order to appear reasonably sane, your argument needs to be something other than "that's just the way it is". What argument is there to explain the underrepresentation that doesn't ultimately confirm that it is actually discrimination?
Assuming discrimination exists in order to justify discriminatory policies in response is a doozy of a begging the question fallacy.
> What argument is there to explain the underrepresentation that doesn't ultimately confirm that it is actually discrimination?
There are myriad reasons applicable to different groups. Age and immigration status are big ones. Almost all of the so-called “bamboo ceiling” (the theory that Asians are underrepresented in management and board positions) can be explained by the fact that the older cohorts from which board members are drawn typically have a lot fewer Asians than the 6-7% average for the overall population, and the fact that most Asians are first generation immigrants and many don’t speak English fluently or lack US citizenship.
Similarly for Hispanics, a lot of disparities are simply due to recency of immigration. Lots of Hispanics are recent immigrants from very poor countries who come here for economic reasons. Within a couple of generations, however, Hispanics more or catch up to native born whites: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.
A lot of these “lack of proportionality proves discrimination” arguments are just lazy and don’t compare like with like.
Those arguments don't really work for gender discrimination or discrimination against African-Americans. It's not as if women or black people only just got here.
The law that was struck down lumps everyone who isn’t a straight white male into the same category. At least as to race, the majority of non-whites are immigrants or children of immigrants, so immigration recency is an important factor that laws like this fail to consider.
Moreover, the category of “white” is deceptive. I suspect that corporate boards have few people of Appalachian descent, and many people of New England Puritan descent. Understanding what causes that disparity would probably reveal structural mechanisms that affect other groups as well.
At bottom, this law suffers from the same defect identified by Judge Thapar in striking down racial preferences for SBA loans: https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/21a0120p-06.pd.... Maybe there is a kernel to this law that passes Constitutional muster because it addresses concrete harms to specific groups that can’t be remediated in a less discriminatory way. But the intersectionality approach of lumping everyone from ADOS to immigrants to LGBT people into one category for favorable treatment isn’t going to fly under civil rights laws.
The difficulty is that as a society we have already gone some way towards identifying protected group status, even though there is some disagreement near the edges. The definition does not cover the distinction between people of Scots-Irish descent living in Appalachia and those from Northern English Puritan descent with a history in New England. Perhaps it should, but it currently does not, and so until we shift the broad definition of protected group status, that sort of distinction is casually tossed into the "don't care" bin by current social and legal norms.
I personally am in the "class matters more in terms of discriminiation than race", but I acknowledge serious and well-intentioned and well-informed objections to this understanding. I would prefer to see us focus on class-based discrimination (with class defined primarily in economic terms), because I think this more equitable and ultimately gives us greater (social) bang for each (legal) buck. That said, the category of "underrepresented" in the CA law is broadly (though not precisely) in line with current legal understanding, and I'm not sure it's based on a different concept that current civil rights laws or jurisprudence. The real issue is whether the state can pro-actively discriminate in an attempt to remediate the discrimination it has stated as its target.
There’s no such thing as a “protected group” in the law. There are “suspect categories” such as race, religion, etc. But it’s not any more legal to discriminate against whites or men than to discriminate against Hispanics or women.
Moreover, the California law improperly conflates discrimination with structural disadvantage. It’s definition of “underrepresented” reflects people who might face discrimination. But that’s a different thing than facing structural disadvantages—persistent disparities that can’t be remediated simply by addressing prejudices conduct—which is the linchpin of affirmative action programs.
Hispanics and Asians are just modern day Italians or Irish. They may face discrimination, but the data shows that they don’t really face structural barriers to closing gaps with “white” Americans. Appalachians, by contrast, likely don’t face much discrimination, but face large and persistent structural gaps. These are two quite different categories and it’s nonsensical to conflate them.
> There’s no such thing as a “protected group” in the law.
No such thing as a protected group ... sure, but there are characteristics that is legal to discriminate on the basis of (e.g. you like King Crimson too much) and ones that are illegal (e.g. you have a Y chromosome)
CA's definition of "underrepresented" does not reflect who might face discrimination; it reflects people who are underrepresented in certain kinds of positions in society and are prima facie concluded to therefore be discriminated against.
For what it's worth, I've been reading your writing here for a long time, and to see you make a comment which allows for the possible existence of either structural barriers or discrimination in the contemporary United States made me feel as though today's discussion was less than 100% hopeless. That the structural barriers you cite apply to Appalachians doesn't bother me, they're a good example.
> Of course, you may not accept that there is de facto discrimination by private actors, but then you need to explain the underrepresenation of different demographics, and likely in order to appear reasonably sane, your argument needs to be something other than "that's just the way it is". What argument is there to explain the underrepresentation that doesn't ultimately confirm that it is actually discrimination?
Why do you believe that all positions in all domains should be perfectly proportional with the underlying population across the six dimensions you've decided to care about? Is that reasonable?
That is not to say that discrimination is imaginary. It is not to say we should ignore it. It is to say that disproportionate outcomes are not evidence of discrimination. In other words, the fact that 20% of Nobel prize winners are Jews is not evidence of a global Jewish cabal. Nor should you stay up at night wondering where all the white rappers are.
If you actually want to help disadvantaged groups, focus on existing programs that don't effectively serve those groups. Like public schools. How can we make public schools work better?
The truly inane thing about mandating one black/gay/woman/whatever on every board is that those people won't be disadvantaged. They aren't going to invite people off the street to sit on their boards. It's just cosmetic bullshit.
> the fact that 20% of Nobel prize winners are Jews is not evidence of a global Jewish cabal
Two points:
1. when there are relatively small numbers of X, I agree that we should not expect the set of all X to proportionally represent the whole population. This leads to the question of what a "relatively small number" is, and while there is a mathematical/statistical way to answer this (sampling/set theory etc.), I think there's room for there to be a political/social dimension to it as well.
2. it is true that the Nobel situation does not indicate a Jewish cabal. However, it is interesting enough to raise questions about the specific histories of those winners, and whether there was anything about their being Jewish that helps to explain their success (I have no idea of the answer). Likewise, I think it is absolutely worth wondering where all the white rappers are, even though their absence doesn't indicate discrimination or a cabal.
Representation matters. It matters when all white juries try black defendants. It matters when all-male boards decide that sexual harassment isn't a big deal.
Yes, they are now. (As far as I know.) But such was not always the case, for example in the Jim Crow south — where all-white juries routinely convicted innocent black defendants and routinely exonerated guilty white defendants. Proper Jury representation had to be foisted on Southern states, who resisted it mightily.
Representation matters when it's the result of discrimination. You're assuming that any deviation from proportional representation is due to discrimination. I see no reason to assume that.
There are a number of mechanisms by which differential results can be arrived to by mechanisms that can reasonably be described as non-discriminatory. The easier to describe one is a winner take all election system (like most U.S. elections.) If an identity group minority has a strong and cohesive set of preferences that are in opposition to the majority, then the results of fair elections can look discriminatory and non representative. If 65% of group A that represent 80% of the population prefer option X and 90% of group B that represents 20% of the population prefer option Y, then a huge portion of group B is going to be disappointed that they don’t win free and fair elections. What’s more, if candidates are randomly selected from the pool of people that support X or Y, the victors will come from group A close to 96% of the time, despite group A only representing 80% of the population.
All that’s to say that if shareholders (who theoretically appoint and are represented by the board) as a group have legitimate and real preference differences from the average person from the these other minority groups, you can get easily get boards that are unrepresentative of the minority groups.
Now, as to why those shareholders might have preferences that differ from those minority groups so much, you can start making class based or structural inequality/racism arguments. But I’ve written enough :)
> All that’s to say that if shareholders (who theoretically appoint and are represented by the board) as a group have legitimate and real preference differences from the average person from the these other minority groups, you can get easily get boards that are unrepresentative of the minority groups.
Sure. But the point of the CA law was to say, "nuh-uh, you can't do that. Society has its own interest in board composition, and that trumps (on the grand scale) the shareholder preference." I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that, but I think it's not a ridiculous or even obviously unconstitutional law.
> If you accept for a moment that there is de facto discrimination arising from the actions of private actors, and you believe that this is a net negative for society, how would you go about reducing or elimination it?
Laws can’t make people love each other. We have to make that choice on our own. We learn to accept and include others through our life experiences and the examples set by leaders in our society. If you want people to change their behavior, set a good example for others to follow and encourage others to follow suit.
The board of directors of a company does not exist to shower love among the members. It's there to provide oversight and steerage to a corporation. The members could all hate each other and (at least theoretically) still perform that role with skill and committment.
Let me tell you that growing up off the rez I have a pretty good idea of why indigenous kids growing up on the rez aren’t building wealth and it has largely to do with two things:
1) intergenerational trauma needs to be called what it is which is neglect and child abuse.
2) PC victimhood culture and the politicians who take advantage of it to convince people they just need more handouts instead of to stop abusing their children and take responsibility for their lives.
There is real discrimination in society things like Japanese internment but you don’t see any issue with Japanese people lifting themselves out of poverty.
I have a neighbor couple who lived on- and off-rez (Hopi) over the years. They would agree with your point #1, and would not agree with your point #2. Because #2 seems to be a matter of debate, I'd propose that we (as a society) should probably focus on #1.
> If you accept for a moment that there is de facto discrimination arising from the actions of private actors, and you believe that this is a net negative for society, how would you go about reducing or elimination it?
Reduce the difficulty of proving discrimination, so there's less plausible deniability
That's not the way reality works. Lowering the evidentiary standard also lowers the credibility of the claims therefore increasing plausible deniability.
This is what the California constitutional says (excerpt),
> A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens. Privileges or immunities granted by the Legislature may be altered or revoked.
The is what the bill says (excerpt):
> a publicly held domestic or foreign corporation whose principal executive offices, according to the corporation’s SEC 10-K form, are located in California shall have a minimum of one director from an underrepresented community on its board
> “Director from an underrepresented community” means an individual who self-identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self-identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.
So as someone who is mixed (Cape Verdean father, Irish/Jewish mother), identifies as mixed, but is white passing (Latino passing in the summer if I get sun... which is rare these days. Spoken to in Spanish quite a bit), how would that work?
I ask in a meaningful way, not to spark an argument. It's just that this is so confusing.
Like I did not grow up with the hassle or hate (with exception of a few racist remarks made to me growing up after being asked my background) that my brown family members and friends encountered and still encounter today, but I could still benefit from legislation like this? It just seems off.
Also, couldn't people just game this and say they're xyz or how is this proven? If it weren't by self identification, birth certificates seem like they'd be an issue. For example, because my father was black but light skinned my grandmother got away with putting caucasian down on his birth certificate thinking it'd benefit him somehow in life, but if you saw him you'd say he's black. So what is he and his offspring considered officially when his whole life he has identified as black and my siblings and I as mixed?
Idk this just sounds weird to me
Edit: Sorry to OP. Not directly speaking to your pointing out of this being unconstitutional in California. Just that it's the first post I saw summarizing the legislation and was commenting on that
I have an honest question.. regardless of your gender, sexuality, or race; if you are a competitive person and want to work your way up the corporate ladder to lead, how would you feel if this law (and others like it) existed and "othered"[1] you? If you know the amount of work it takes to get that position, yet instead you're brought in to fulfill some quota, would you be satisfied with that?
I'm asking the people who want to lead based from their hard work and experience. Personally, I'm not sure such a disingenuous existence would sit right with me. I also could not imagine walking into work every day mutually sharing the knowledge my presence in the room is to fill a quota. That seems incredibly dehumanizing. I'm sure some people will disagree, and some people take advantage of what they can. But I'm talking about the day to day existence.
I dont need to read reality counter-arguments, I know they exist. I know how unfair the world is. This is a question for the individual.
[1] Meaning legislatively labeled you apart everyone else.
You should survey people who got legacy admits to business schools about the pain of having success made easier, and then survey some members of underrepresented groups about discrimination they have experienced in the current day and the current society.
The issue here is that people from over represented groups have historically and presently received an unearned lift to their prospects of success, and everyone else has the complementary push against them. Trace this back to the families of one taking wealth in the past from the families of the other one or not, your question is very discordant from the reality of our society.
I too have trouble imagining a world where middle management and executives ever stopped to wonder if they were actually any good at their jobs. How terrible for their egos!
This currently does happen, the quota has thus far been in the opposite direction. So how would that underrepresented person feel? The best person to ask may be the people that have been at the receiving end of the existing unwritten quota.
An aspect of affirmative actions policies in practice is that the individual beneficiaries are not explicitly labeled as such, so there is a layer of plausible deniability.
Why are these push backs always associated with Republicans? Only 40% of CA democrats voted for Prop 16, for example, which would have reinstated affirmative action in CA public schools (it's currently prohibited in California, as decided by vote). That's a large percentage of Democrats against non-merit-based college admissions.
I think nullc is subtly pointing out that if Democrats are afraid to publicly oppose these policies, it will of course seem like all the push back is coming from Republicans.
Good, sort of a ridiculous law. I'm ignorant so excuse me if this sounds ridiculous, but shouldn't the politicians and law makers be working with communities to create improved outcomes directly instead of signing in laws at random?
Sending teams to white, heteronormative neighborhoods to encourage people to really see the people around them as fully human with differing life experiences?
While I think this is probably the right decision (I’m no constitutional scholar or lawyer though, to be fair), it does bring up the question of why boards and C-suites are still pretty homogeneous, when most research supports the idea that diverse boards and executive teams perform better in the market. And that’s not even considering the fact that I believe our society (including our companies) has a moral imperative to fix the pretty stark inequities many minority populations in the US have and are still facing.
Is it because groups of white men are more comfortable hiring other white men? Or is it because the pipeline for producing executive-level managers is only producing similar individuals because of those societal inequities? I’d guess a mixture of both.
There are generally three levels of people involved in a business:
1) The lowest level are the rank-and-file employees. These are individual contributors and middle management. These are the youngest employees given their lack of experience. Because they're the youngest, they've grown up with the most opportunities for traditionally unrepresented groups and thus are the most diverse group.
2) The second level is upper management. These people are older than the low-level employees and are slightly less diverse.
3) The last level, the board level, is largely made up of corporate retirees and are thus the oldest group. Given the lack of opportunity this generation experienced if you weren't part of a specific demographic, it's no surprise the board level is not diverse. The duties of a board member require experience in running a corporation and corporate governance. There just isn't a diverse set of people to draw from due to the average age of qualified people looking to be board members.
You don't need to look far for an explanation, it's right here in this discussion. Others do not see diversity of representation as an imperative. What you or I might consider massive iniquity in perpetuity isn't considered something that needs a remedy, or even something that should be acknowledged as meaningful.
IMO, one factor is that women are still the ones to bear children, and legislation, diversity guidelines, and complete elimination of prejudice aren't going to change that. Several women I know have said that after having children, their priorities changed instantly. Some tried to go back to work for a while, but in the end could not handle being separated from their baby. My sister is an example: she's a CPA, tried to go back to work, but ended up starting her own practice and working from home. She did this through both of her kids' childhoods, so a good 24 years.
I'm not saying there is no prejudice against women or other minorities. Only that it's not easy to look at statistics and conjure up always-correct reasons behind the statistics.
These laws based on what goes on in the bedroom are not enforceable anyway. Everyone is going to self-identify as "bi" or "queer" if that becomes a requirement of entry in high profile jobs and it will be a impossible to verify.
I agree. And it's common sense that you can't force a corporate entity as to who its business leaders. The signing of that law makes no sense.
If boards are composed of people chosen based on their colour and ethnicity, that's not just odd, it's racist. Affirmative action should extend only so far.
Don't be surprised if this just gets moved to stock exchanges where because the cult of "it's a private business, go start your own stock exchange if you don't like it" will give this policy a home where it can be imposed nationwide. NYSE and NASDAQ have already voiced this possibility.
Basically the argument that there is no such thing as systemic discrimination and the only things that matter are micro-decisions, which are essentially impossible to prove discrimination.
After AB979 there was a strong move towards preferring only persons matching multiple of the AB979 criteria for 'outsider' seats on boards so as to not have to lose even more seats to people without the greatest relevant experience, much to the detriment of women who didn't match the bills sexuality or racial minority criteria. It's good to see this patently unlawful discriminatory policy struck down.
If companies were employee owned and operated you wouldn't need half the regulations and laws on the books that we do now. They would have been better served by creating more rights for all workers instead of this odd-ball stuff that ends up getting struck down and handing more power to corporate shadow characters.
So let me get this straight, you want me to give you money so that you can build and run a business, and you also want me to have no control over how that money is used, and for me to get no benefit from the whole thing?
Democracy means representing the will of the people. Do democratic processes produce better outcomes? Because the last 10 years of America would seem to indicate polling for the collective will is no promise of good outcomes.
"The measures came into force last year and gave firms with a main executive office in California until December 31, 2021 to have a member on their boards from groups including LGBT, Black, Latino, Asian, Native American or Pacific Islander."
The headline focusing on LGBT is a reflection of the concerns of Newsweek's owners, not the law. The law is dictating a quota of a single non-white, non-straght person on all California corporate boards. Current Newsweek has no relationship to the old Newsweek (which was also terrible) other than branding. This is a spinoff of the International Business Times (also crap.)
It looks like they may be controlled by another creepy religious right-wing Asian prosperity cult, so basically The Epoch Times, UPI, The Washington Times, or whatever Happy Science is doing on Youtube.
"Note From the Editors: As we were reporting this story, Newsweek Media Group fired Newsweek Editor Bob Roe, Executive Editor Ken Li and Senior Politics Reporter Celeste Katz for doing their jobs. Reporters Josh Keefe and Josh Saul were targeted for firing before an editor persuaded the company to reverse its decision. As we continued working on the story, we were asked to take part in a review process, which, we ultimately learned, involved egregious breaches of confidentiality and journalism ethics. We believe that subjects of the story were shown parts of the draft, if not the entire piece, prior to publication by a company executive who should not have been involved in the process. At an on-the-record interview with the subjects of this story, a company official asked editors to identify confidential sources. On-the-record sources were contacted and questioned about their discussions with Newsweek Media Group reporters. We resisted their efforts to influence the story and, after learning of the review's ethical failings, the reporters and editors involved in this story felt they would be forced to resign. At that point, a senior Newsweek Media Group executive said the company's owners would ensure independent review and newsroom autonomy going forward. This story was written and edited Tuesday, free of interference from company executives."
That was a terrible way to word it, yes. But Newsweek probably is controlled by an actual, according-to-Hoyle cult. It's a whole thing.
At the very least, nobody should be citing it anymore; it hasn't existed in the form people think it has for many years, and is essentially just a content mill now.
> The Hon. Terry A. Green is a judge for the Los Angeles County Superior Court in California. He was appointed to the Superior Court in 1995 by former Governor Pete Wilson. He filled the vacancy created by the retirement of the Hon. Eric Younger (Ret.). Before his elevation to the Superior Court, Judge Green was a presiding judge for the Pasadena Municipal Court.
I empathize with those in diversity roles that are tasked with finding the informal-but-not-legally-enforcable means by which to increase diversity. How are you reasonably going to achieve that? It's a hard problem to solve. It seems like something driven by society at large. I'm not sure if you can hire a person to solve this problem, honestly.