Female fund manager opposes gender quotas for startup boards

However Quotas I don't think are the answer.

1) because they reinforce negative stereotypes (you are only here because you are x, rather than being qualified)

2) They make the candidate feel like they don't belong/less valued

3) they don't fix the underlying issues

Now, this is from a UK perspective, so the next points are less universal.

In the UK we have a training issue. It is hard as a startup to source mid/senior "diversity" candidates because they are rare.

Therefore we as an industry need to get into schools and provide mentorship to allow children of all types to come into IT. UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.

since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships. From a business perspective its a brilliant way to source cheap, loyal and effective workers. For companies like the financial times, its worked out pretty well. They have something like 70 apprentice/apprentice grade employees in a tech team of 400.

I imagine this as part of the political purpose of the assault on the concept of merit. If merit is just a cover for miscellaneous class, race and gender supremacisms, and people are largely the same in capability underneath achievement-skewing social conventions, then the above quote makes no sense. Of course there are plenty of women for these posts. Just pick some random suitably intersectional people and the overall competence of the board won't likely change much, but fairness will increase.

I guess I don't understand the argument:

1. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates. (The argument implied by the very first paragraph of the article.)

2. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates who the same age as the typical male board member. (The argument implied in this quote.)

3. I'm going to say there are too few qualified female candidates to generate a title suitable for much clicking. Then in the interview I'll switch to talking about how I've met a lot of perfectly capable female candidates of the younger generations and speculate about how they'll probably eventually fill board positions in the future. (The argument implied by the "smell" I get from clicking on stories like these and leaving with no more knowledge than I had before I clicked.)

4. Something completely different.

Which is it? I can't tell because it appears a stenographer wrote down utterances from an ostensibly well-known person in their field, and didn't press for clarification or supporting evidence.

Edit: clarification

This argument always appears when discussing improving diversity: e.g. fewer women engineers so it makes sense to hire fewer women, women not as a good football players as men so it makes sense to pay them less, etc.

My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow. If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards (even though they might not be as good now as men) then the pool of such women will always be smaller than men. Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually. Women are second class people for literally thousands of years and now we want to make it right but we're not willing to pay even a small price?

> In this case, especially for smaller companies already battling bigger companies for the best candidates, it’s not easy to find good non-execs

This sounds like a separate problem requiring its own solution - any extra regulation benefits big companies.

EDIT:

multiple replies are questioning "inspiring the next generation". I'm talking about inspiring small girls to choose IT in school, so that there is a big pool of women in tech. That's where the problem is fundamentally but you can't just fix it by spreading flyers in schools. Girls get motivated by seeing successful women.

Sure, this is a crude and ugly way to force the matter, but private industry f*ked this up bigtime. If you don't want government regulation, you have to step up.

Success example: Google and the other cloud hosting providers got ahead of environmental regulation by many years for the "green"ness of their data centers - yeah yeah greenwashing whatever, the point is that they're making a much more serious attempt than anybody else, and unsurprisingly, nobody's talking about mandating green data centers, because they're demonstrated leadership.