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Comment by bobbytherobot | Hacker News Reader

There are studies that found that companies earn more when their boards and management are 50/50 men and women.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-08/more-women-means-more...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/02/why-companies-with-female-ma...

This might be a bias due to the fact that most companies are started by men (probably more inclined to take larger risks), and that companies need to reach a relatively successful state before the initial members of board and management have been circulated.

This is backwards thinking. Companies who have 50/50 male/female management are likely smarter companies, picking up smart women who are looked over for other roles and because they are smart enough to do that they likely do other smart things. It is the effect of a well run company not the cause of it. If your company is working working the other way they are dumb.

I completely agree that you can't better a body of people by forcing it to modify its constituents into a defined range of racial/gender ratios (and it may even be the case that you will worsen it on average). However, there is another goal: To help the individuals who would not have been hired. Of course, there's an argument to be made that any harm you might do to the body would then ultimately harm the individuals you helped to be placed in it, but I tend to believe that these opposing forces balance out on the net good side for the individuals.

There are studies for everything.

I love when people want to force something for “their own benefit”. I’m so glad you’re so concerned about my profits.

“Companies” covers a lot of territory. Market sizes, markets, local laws, etc.

The implication is that there is some innate quality in women that men lack and cannot acquire. Funny, the feminist movement spent decades fighting that myth.

But do we trust these studies? We shouldn't! I've read some of them before and they usually make basic errors of logic or statistics. For instance sometimes they take the gender makeup of boards across the world, and then look at how much (absolute) money the companies make. They end up including countries like Saudi Arabia in that, and in the inverse, countries with laws that force women onto boards. So they end up concluding "companies with women on the boards make more money" but all they're really measuring is "companies in richer countries make more money than poorer countries".

It's a sexist conclusion anyway. These studies are basically arguing women are better decision makers than men. Would people so passively accept studies concluding that companies do better when women are kept out of certain roles? I bet not.

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