Ten years on from Norway's quota for women on corporate boards

>Personally, I don't think striving for equality of outcome will do society any good.

Well, isn't it just convenient that if we don't strive for equality of outcome then life will just have to remain tilted in favor of white/asian men

The idea of diversity on corporate boards isn't to mandate equal outcomes, it's that a more diverse board may be more inclined to provide equality of opportunity to the next generation.

That's why it's not a requirement for diversity in CXO positions. The board is a rather hands-off institution in most companies. They hire the CEO, on mostly just hold them accountable afterwards.

> And that makes me wonder if and when this will turn into something akin the "Communism / Captialism / Whatever concept has never been tried/implemented _properly_"

I see this as the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy of ideologies

> The essayist Spengler compared distinguishing between "mature" democracies, which never start wars, and "emerging democracies", which may start them, with the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. Spengler alleges that "political scientists" have attempted to save the "US academic dogma" that democracies never start wars from counterexamples by declaring any democracy which does indeed start a war to be flawed, thus maintaining that no true democracy starts a war. [0]

0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

This is what bothers me the most. The thinking seems to be that by deliberately employing "positive" discrimination, someday we'll detect that bias has been eliminated, and then the government will instruct all institutions throughout the country to dismantle their discriminatory policies. Having deliberately practiced discrimination for 10, or 20, or 30, or however many years, someday we'll see it isn't needed anymore, and stop. To me, that's absurd.

For one, I doubt we'll ever detect that bias has been eliminated. Secondly, even if we did, we'll never dismantle the institutional policies of discrimination, because at that point, far too many people would be benefiting from them. We seem to be deliberately implementing institutional discrimination on the assumption that differences of outcome necessarily represent oppression.

> Do the company now need to fire 30% of this guys and is it a valid reason for firing (company can`t get sued)?

There was a five-year period for the changeover, so under most circumstances, natural fluctuation would have eliminated all need for firing. Some companies could have also had the possibility to increase the board's size.

But yes, ultimately some firings may have been required. But note that a seat on the board isn't much like a typical job. Board members almost always have a real job, are retired, or sit on multiple boards.

I don't know how boards work, but can't they just expand the number of seats on the board?

>What we, as a society need to do is to encourage men to be less sexist, for instance, a manger who can hire a male and a female who are both eligble should not hire a male because he 'doesn't want female', that needs to be fixed.

But there are no managers who will say that. They'll rationalize it a different way that people will buy into.

> I have seen the reservation system in India and it is horrible, to be honest, it only helps the top % people but the bottom of the food chain is exactly where they were since the start, the bottom of the food chain.

I have also, and this is the point of the reservation system, to create wealthy powerhouse families in a society which had very few from those castes. For everyone who complains about it, there are many more who appreciate it for the good it does and who understand that reservations are not meant to eliminate poverty (else they'd be based on financial status) but are meant to build power and concentrated wealth in communities which had no opportunities to have such.

In India, before reservations generational wealth had cemented a very strong hierarchy. Overturning that hierarchy cannot be done solely by providing education equally, there has to be a balance shift somewhere. People are not going to voluntarily give away their inherited wealth and status, so similar wealth and status needs to be built in other communities. The best way to do this is educate some select few in that community, then perhaps they gain wealth from it, now their children get the same education they did, they inherit wealth and build some more, repeat repeat and now you have powerful families in underprivileged communities which could rival the ones in the privileged ones.

"Gender quotas at board level in Europe have done little to boost corporate performance or to help women lower down"

Isn't the article saying that they didn't work?

Yeah but most of the outright wrong and sexist things our societies allow seem to disadvantage women. This doesn't make it even, but it's a good step.

It's sexist both ways too. Even if you are a woman that really deserved to lead some company, people will think that you just got there because of the quota. Every error you do would count tenfolds against you... That can't be good.

And those negative views don't entirely come from sexism. I assume similar things would happen if there was a quota for e.g. short people. People are just jealous and claim that others don't deserve things.

Edit: If you feel the urge to dislike could you at least state what you didn't like? Or are discussions frowned upon nowadays?