Germany to order large companies to include women on executive boards | Hacker News Reader

Germany to order large companies to include women on executive boards

thelocal.de

18 pointsvinni224 comments

Is it just me or is this a little bit ridiculous.

"Qualifications for being a member of the board?" "I'm a woman"

It’s just you - you’ve created a silly little straw man with no relation to reality.

I don't see how this is a straw man. This is the attribute that people care for. Sex.

What attribute do you think is relevant in reality to be a board member of a bigger company? Do you think it's skill related? No, its arbitrary and based on nepotism. So disrupting rigid structures inside existing balances of power via quotas is a good thing. Lets start with women and not end there.

True, I don't think any such position is skill related. It depends on connections and relations to a large degree.

But in some cases it is not, every company has an interest to find adequate replacements and young successors. And some of those will inevitably be women.

I don't think it is a good idea to discriminate for intrinsic characteristics.

Some people won't get a job because they are male. Those people are discriminated by the state. Especially Germany should treat lightly here in my opinion, even when the justification sounds better at first (It isn't much better if you think a bit about it).

Not being skill related is why Theranos happened.

Old boardroom makeup: 100% male elites.

New boardroom makeup: 49.5% male elites, 49.5% female elites, 1% non-binary elites.

This change does not benefit the average person, including the average woman, at all.

It sounds made up.

Which group will be next for the mandatory quotes? This won't be a one-time thing. Sooner or later it'll be like the Lebanese parliament and government, with each group having a fixed quotes and positions.

good!

Maybe the NBA should require a racial affirmative action as well. After all, 81% of NBA players are black, and only 13% of the US population is black. Whites are underrepresented in the NBA.

Everybody likes gender quotas, until they're being used to prevent members of your gender from joining. Suddenly it's no longer a good idea:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/15/paris-city-hal...

The irony of this is that the reverse scenario has been the norm for a long time.

I think the difference is that women were selected through something similar to affirmative action. I'm curious to know if these people are concsious of the fact that they were a "token" hire in scenarios like this or truly do believe they're qualified? In the same vain, if they do know, how it affects their decision making?

To clarify: I don't know much about the situation but I don't see any indication that the Paris councilwomen were selected purely because they are women. They may very well be qualified.

But there is a clear hypocrisy in what they were saying. Do gender quotas help equality or not? If so, then the fine is fair. If not, then the people involved are admitting they were first supporting it only to push their agenda. Do you believe a council full of men is biased towards men's needs? If so, then a council full of women shouldn't be much different.

I'm not even saying that gender quotas are good or bad, I'm saying by their own logic this doesn't make any sense.

> Do you believe a council full of men is biased towards men's needs? If so, then a council full of women shouldn't be much different.

Ah, but it is different, it's called feminism these days

We're way past the point of truly caring about a person's qualifications on the job or universal human rights everywhere in the case of Germany.

California passed a law required women on the board of public companies based in the state in 2018:

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/01/653318005/california-becomes-...

And in the fall of 2020 passed a similar law requiring minority representation:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-30/californ...

It’s motives are noble, but once you allow the government to dictate corporate structure and association, where does it end?

No, the motives aren't noble. This isn't different from people that tried to protect women from the alleged hordes invading the occident.

They spin stories of discrimination of thin air and have an ideological view on how an end result should look like and discrimination by race or sex isn't off the table, the ends justify the means.

Women are oppressed by computer nerds and need to be protected is just the latest instance, but the train of thought is as transparent as it is predictable and there certainly isn't anything noble to find.

What if they are not qualified?

I will be interested to see the results, on one hand i am not a fan of quotas, on another, I am sure a large listed company cam find at least one qualified woman

There was much resistance to quotas in South African rugby through the late 90s and noughts. But this was the team which won the 2019 rugby World Cup: https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/south-africa-win-rugby-wo....

I’m really not an expert here, but I think partly what happened is that quotas force a rethink on the part of the establishment: “what do we need to do to make sure we can meet these quotas with high quality players/managers?”. And then there is system change around that.

The parallel is when we set ourselves sales targets at work, we then put in place the structures to meet those targets.

At last, the plight of the female elites is over. Literally dozens of women will benefit from this law. It's great to live in a society that has no problems worse than the careers of a few managers.

Why Germany? Why?

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