Are gender quotas good for business?
economist.com
economist.com
I'll queue up the studies to read later, but I am skeptical. I've looked at studies that claimed quotas for women in boards = more profit before and without fail, they weren't controlling for confounding variables. Usually it was as simple as "companies in Norway do better than companies in Saudi Arabia, look at the gender differences!" which is of course totally invalid. Unfortunately the way governments have forced women into boards via legislative fiat means it's very hard to control for the pre-existing economic state of countries: you'd need to compare two economies that were basically the same except for gender differences, or compare the same country before and after and then try to control for all other changes in the world economy, which is very hard.
The article is quite balanced about the limits of these studies though. Which is good.
Why is the scope so narrow defined as to exclude any criticism on how state and government operate as the largest group of organizations with paid employees. Seems very convenient from the position of power that government and states enjoy.
I've met many many board members over the years and they are often very unimpressive. I'm sure we can find some equally unimpressive women to replace them! Better still anyone with even a modicum of talent would do!
If we suppose a meritocratic hiring process is the best way forward, and that girls are equal to boys (and only considering those genders (if we surmise that there are more)):
Then, if we take the stance that there has been historic bias against girls then it leads to them not having the experience to be in the same category as boys.
It's not about "all guys being good", it's that historically girls have not necessarily had the same opportunity to gain experience and learn. (Except for the most dedicated or those who went to shops that did not practice any kind of discrimination). This leads to a small pot of experienced girls but a large pot of experienced guys.
If you hire "the most qualified candidate" you'll end up with mostly guys because guys have had the opportunity to work unfettered, and if you have a quota to hire more women and want someone experienced, then you're competing against many in a small pool of experienced women.
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EDIT: I should add that I haven't read the article; but the above is a topic I think about often in the context of discrimination and its role in the future. I don't believe in hiring quotas, I believe the problem should be fixed at its root- But this is not the current topic- and I would kindly ask those who downvote me to argue their points if they wish me to be more understanding.
The question is are they an improvement over the current system or not?
However they should be at most a stop gap solution, a truly diverse system would make it impossible to know the race and gender of your workers, so implicit basis would be impossible. Or maybe we could train a neural net to have no implicit bias.
This is an extremely difficult thing to assess frankly.
There are so many reasons for board members.
Often they could be from a family fund. Maybe they are from an institutional investor who own a lot of share. They are not there to provide strategic guidance, rather just to sit there and keep an eye on things. They may be simply there as an 'extra head' for another party, like the CEO who wants to keep the power. And sometimes they're there because they have deep networks that you might not know about.
Instead of forcing women on boards, they should try to convince companies that having female board members is a good thing, maybe provide some data, and then create some networks for hiring.
So until your own project isn't blatantly gender biased, maybe you should refrain from waiving the 'sexism' card to broadly. Because I'll gather your probably not trying to 'oppress women' over there, rather, there are any number of other more nuanced and complex reasons for the absence of female contributors.
There are many reasons boards are mostly male, and most of it is systematic. They're no more trying to 'keep women off boards' than you're trying to stop women from making contributions to open source. Approaching boards with information, and especially access to women's business networks where boards can find qualified women has actually worked in other areas (Finland) and it's a considerably more responsible approach. (Although in Finland there is mandating as well).
FYI PouchDB is amazing, by the way.
We have gender (despite what a fringe group of academics might believe) and 99.9% of the world is fine that that.
This creates gendered outcomes in various fields which in some cases might be, or perceived to be exclusionary. The difference is more than nuanced to the pointe wherein I think it's wrong to merely point at any gendered situation and say 'sexism!'.
I'll bet $100 that OSS projects are not actually very exclusionary at all, and more actually representative of the fact that women for whatever reason, don't want to do that kind of stuff to the extent men do. At least today. Of course, one could argue than the ranks of female engineers are thin due to lack of role models, sexism in early years and that would be true, but even without this ... there would still be a mismatch.
Screaming sexism at OSS teams or boards is counterproductive.
Imagine if the government mandated that 25% of all OSS contributions of 'major projects' had to be made by women? I don't think that would make sense, nor would it be well received.
But - I'll bet that the managers of major open source initiatives might be open to some facts and figures, right? Or open to networks that have more women? If the 'women's coding club of London' indicated they had a bunch of young ladies who wanted to learn the ropes of OSS would you help out? Probably, right?
And shareholders are not some pasty group of old white men either. They'll listen and change will happen, though fairly slowly admittedly.
I'll bet $100 that OSS projects are not actually
very exclusionary at all, and more actually
representative of the fact that women for whatever
reason, don't want to do that kind of stuff
to the extent men do.
If you could donate that $100 to a relevant charity (maybe https://www.womenwhocode.com/)
And read up why the "negative externalities that result from a gendered world" is called "sexism" and why its not counterproductive to able to identify sexism in order to work towards solving it, it is actually pretty critical.
I suspect the reason is that building software that works for users is about asking the right questions, and more diverse groups ask more diverse questions. That doesn't mean an all-male or all-white team can't ask the right questions but in my limited experience it seems they don't.
You can hire developers of diverse gender, ethnicity and age, but those are most likely still very similar along other dimensions like income, location and ability to deal with complex systems.
Rather than trying to hire more diverse developers, you might be better off paying someone to find out what your actual users think about your product.
The main objective of the article it seems is to allay fears that more women in boardrooms would not be a bad thing. I honestly don't care for such studies. What I do care about is the fact that more and more businesses are going to be told _how_ to hire. This is a terrible idea.
Furthermore, the article goes on to say that there have been no changes in the profits reported and that the companies across Europe have seen no change whatsoever. This might say much more about boards and their lack of effect more than anything else.
What I see happening is that due to the increased regulation on how businesses operate, more of them will not go public and thus prevent a lot of the population will miss out on good investment opportunities.
Some years later situation is no different: ~100 people on the floor, 5 females here: 2 secretaries, 2 export specialists and senior researcher with PhD degree.
Where find suitable candidates for these quotes when women avoid technical stuff at university level?
The conclusion they had is that by drop rates and gender segregation get amplified in every step between first year student to long term employee.
Let's say there's a fitness function for each candidate in a candidate pool.
If you filter candidates by any criteria, the expectation of fitness function will be less or equal to expectation before filtering.
> If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company.
I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions.
Then you haven't looked very hard. There are even programs with financial incentives, e.g. http://www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/new-bursary-introduce...
The bursary in question is only £3,000 which is nothing. And the total fund is only £30,000 - so enough for 10 nurses.
This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeting.
Of course, because no such jobs exist from which men are mostly absent. You can't expect a response of the same size when the problem is nowhere near the same size.
You responded with an article about a sum of money so trivial it would cover 10 men for perhaps a couple of months depending on where they live.
If that's the best you can find, this doesn't really disprove his point.
If you're saying the efforts are not of the same absolute magnitude, then I would agree; my point is that they are similar relatively to the size of each problem.
If you insist that diversity efforts are only "real" if the same effort is applied to solving two problems which are of clearly different orders of magnitude, then I can only say that I find your definition of "real" perplexing.
What remains is that the word "diversity" doesn't mean diversity. It means focusing on getting women into positions of wealth and power - which you appear to be agreeing with me about, but for you it's an "ends justify the means" situation whereas for me and other posters here it isn't.
If diversity advocates cared about diversity they'd attack all gender disparities with equal vigour because it'd be the disparity itself they care about. But obviously they don't: they only go after the ones where there are big benefits of money and power to be had. Gender disparities that favour women or that don't yield large streams of money and power are ignored.
However they don't admit that. This is what rankles. Instead of talking about money and power they claim they merely want "gender diversity", which is false.
Yeah, to me this makes no sense. It's like saying that if you care about infant hungriness, you have to help with equal vigor both those starving in war-ridden areas and those in wealthy neighborhoods whose parents occasionally forget to give lunch money. Or that if you care about forest fires, you give the same number of fire engines to California and to Delaware.
In my opinion, if you care about a problem, you dedicate more resources to where its effects are more pronounced.
With hunger this is easy. Measure the number of children sick of malnutrition or that dies of hunger per population and square miles. With forest fires you measure the number of forest fire per square miles and affected people per square miles.
So what should we use in order to measure gender disparities. What about gender segregation, ie the professions with the highest rate of gender segregation get also the highest number of resources dedicated to it. We could measure by effectiveness, looking at the historical rate that gender segregation goes down per number of resources in gender equality. We could look at gender disparities in the form of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, addressing each layers gender disparities.
The parent comments implies that money and positional power is the metric being exclusively used here to measure anything.
Look at it this way. I make the charge that so-called "diversity advocates" don't care about diversity, that it's not a matter of prioritisation - gender is just a smokescreen. I posit they could achieve 100% female boards but then they'd stop. They wouldn't go on to try and tackle the dominance of women in teaching because they never cared about diversity to begin with: just money and power.
What evidence or arguments do you have that could convince bystanders I'm wrong? There are none. The behaviour we observe can be explained in both a complex way (yours) and a simple way (mine), so Occam's Razor applies.
Why shouldn't the right person be hired just because they have both sets of genitalia? How does that fit in to the quota system?
Obviously this is considerably more likely to actually be the case in some businesses and industries than others.
Individual fitness is not independent, let alone group fitness. And without independence you are just plain wrong.
Sociology dressed up as a priori mathematics is rarely credible. Even worse if the math simply isn't correct.
Who said that fitness in my description cannot include group fitness? The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce?
I did. Because doing so contradicts your conclusion. Though I also said it is not necessary. Lack of independence alone makes you wrong.
> The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce?
Which same argument? The argument you made was about filtering lowering fitness.
Going for the conclusion instead of the argument. You can't demonstrate where my reasoning is wrong, but saying that the conclusion is wrong. Congratulations, you're an ideologue.
I specifically said why your argument was wrong. Without independence it is simply untrue.
> Congratulations, you're an ideologue.
I am. Mathematical flummery triggers me.
If it were true then it would apply to selection by any attribute e.g. experience or qualification. The only way you'd get around that would be to include the attribute in the fitness function. You're then back to deciding what effect gender has on the fitness function i.e is gender selection good for the business?
My opinion is that affirmative action is naive and that society is better off to strengthen meritocratic hiring. Removing names from CVs may help women slightly but there's no reason to believe that men and women would achieve the same outcomes given equal opportunity.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep...
Adding another programmer to my company would be less valuable then adding a salesperson. Similarly, adding people with diverse perspectives is more valuable then hiring only people that grew up in the same city, at our income level, with same gender, ethnicity, age, etc.
An assumption I suspect you’re making is that we already have THE correct fitness function.
They aren’t just trying to filter the fitness function, they’re trying to improve it.
Humans aren't gender either. Doing gender quotas reduces candidates to their gender.
> An assumption I suspect you’re making is that we already have THE correct fitness function.
> They aren’t just trying to filter the fitness function, they’re trying to improve it.
Ohh, no. My assumption is that current hiring is not perfect, but gender quotas are waaay worse. Gender-blind hiring would be better than both.
Board members might be the least likely of all people related to the company to have the right credentials. It's networks, power, relationships. Not usually talent.
Though I'm totally against board quotas, it's very easy to see how women are locked out of this game. Far, far more so than for normal roles within an organization.
It's the friends of low level managers who get hired who sometimes have the least credentials.
So we have a company, following the however implemented rules and has, let's say has 60% of group A and 40% of B on their board.
But maybe the ideal quota is 70% / 30%. Or 10% / 90%. Or the standard deviation is so high that there is a high probability that everything from 20 % / 80% to 70% / 30% was achieved without any bias but just because of differntly distributed skillsets. Point is, by setting a quota like that without any research, you're gonna end up with one group having it statistically harder to get their well deserved board place as the other, which is the problem that we're trying to fight in the first place, right? And now it is locked in stone, because abandoning the quota would have big political implications.
I understand that it is an attractive short term fix and that we might not have good other solutions, but where are we going with it?
Interesting times ahead. The market will have fun sorting out the profitability of these changes in due time.
I don’t think anything measurable will happen.
Men and women are different in many qualities, but doing business in modern relatively civilized society is not one of them. Both genders do just fine.
Employee should be of a neutral color, creed or gender.
Some have tried blind interviews but these are very hard to do properly and effectively. A 40% quota is another way to push business into looking beyond gender.
On the contrary, all the evidence I've seen points to discrimination being a very small part of the gender pay gap.
The problem is that men and women are different.[1] So it becomes very difficult to even measure if women are being discriminated against much or are just different to men.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep...
There's a limit on articles per month, at least in some regions, and maybe other restrictions in different regions.
Side-note: WSJ is the only news source I feel is worthy of purchasing, as a student subscription is only $4/mo