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Comment by nyxxie | Hacker News Reader

Call me cynical, but I'm not sure this was about achieving anything other than political points. I doubt anyone cared about who they galvanize into disliking this genre of legislation.

Out of all classes who experience unequal representation on corporate boards, why were women chosen as the exclusive beneficiaries of this legislation? My guess is because a lot of the hot button social issues being discussed right now focus on women, thus there's a lot of political capital to be gained if one takes a radical position in favor of women.

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Or maybe because women are the most extreme example? Women are not a minority - they are ~51% of the population. When most of your population is treated like a second-class minority, well, that's kind of a big crisis.

And yes, it helps that women's issues are du jour. A lot of credit goes to a lot of women for their diligence in this matter.

> most of your population is treated like a second-class minority

... as evidenced by not being on corporate boards?

The only relevant statistic is what percentage of board-eligible people are women vs their actual representation on boards.

Unless you believe corporate boards should reflect the composition of the population at large?

Of course, there's no evidence that women are "treated like a second-class minority". There are individual instances where women fare worse than men (e.g., sexual assault victimization), but there are also individual instances where men fare worse than women (e.g., literally every other kind of assault victimization).

You hurt your cause by using active discrimination to attempt to remediate systemic issues.

There have been plenty of European countries where similar (or much stricter) rules were introduced and arguments similar to yours were used.

And in the end, there are hardly any negative consequences.

This hand waves away the complexity involved. Witness the immigrant backlash and rise of populism in Europe, Britain, and the United States.

Progress is needed, of course. But these are pipeline issues that take decades to nudge in the right direction. Push the lever too far, too fast, and it is going to snap back in your face (See: Brexit, Trump, Poland, etc). There are consequences for disregarding the climate you operate in. Voters and companies can respond faster than you can; recognize the leverage points in your feedback loop and the appropriate amount of pressure to apply to each (and what each point can tolerate).

This has nothing to do with immigrants, brexit, Trump, etc.

And in many countries, these policies have been done for over a decade with no obvious voter backlash.

Are you arguing that these countries are the same as the United States?

Are you arguing that Brexit and Poland happened in the US?

I'm arguing we had a similar result with Trump being elected, yes.

You don't need to guess, Jerry Brown says it directly.

White women are far and away the primary benefitiary of affirmative action. The simple reason is that they are the wives, girlfriends, and daughters of white men and thus are closest to them and it's not a lose-lose for white men.

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