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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

The comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not.

I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and sexism that is easy to observe in hard data, and so this law feels like a single step towards modern equity.

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"Progressive" doesn't mean "jump on any bandwagon that comes along". I think HN's readership is much more nuanced and analytical than your average AOC fan, and luckily it shows in these comments.

How non-white does someone have to be to qualify? Should it be based on self-identity? Should the race of corporate board members be determined by a state bureaucracy? While I agree with the goal, such a policy seems to raise questions like that immediately. And the more I wrangle with them the more intractable they seem.

> quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common

Not if you knew the distribution of wealth by race (and gender) in America. Black people in America are poor after being slaves unable to own property for generations. Until very recently (in living memory) widely denied due process, access to employment, social and labour organizations, etc. that would enable building wealth. To this day, still disproportionately denied. There is less intergenerational wealth to transfer. Less educational capital. And so on. A different but cousin tale for women.

This is one angle of systemic racism, I suppose. But to my eye the solution is mostly to address the poverty by the transfer of wealth, not legislate representation among the elites. Especially when you can do wealth transfer to poor people without legal racial classification systems, which is a notion that immediately evokes opposition from many.

If a board rejects a (very) competent person based on the person’s gender, race, sexuality, age, then… they lost a very competent person. That person will do great work outside of that board. Can we agree on this? Also, is that some sort of Nash equilibrium?

No, we can't agree on this. If most boards reject this person based on one of these things, they may never actually do this work or achieve anything near their potential.

We've seen already in the US that culture trumps almost everything else. I've had people tell me that they'd rather their daughter marry a poorer white guy than a richer black guy.

That said, all this really ends meaning is that the all-white board hires a couple of tokens they provide no power to and make their lives hell. It's standard process.

You're assuming board memberships are meritocratic. Don't assume.

I don’t think that this formulation reflects the actual situation. Realistically you have a broad pool of near-identical performers (in a sense that your error in judgement is similar to difference in performance) mixed with some bad performers. The goal of the company is not to hire good, but to avoid the bad. So if someone isn’t bad then it’s fine to give preference based on some diversity metric, because you are just choosing between equivalent candidates (to within your ability to objectively measure).

They still lose a (very) competent candidate, and that candidate will do great work elsewhere (and not for the board)

If you have a fixed headcount, then forgoing one candidate for equivalent another doesn’t carry a cost. By hiring person A you would be missing out on person B, by hiring person B you would be missing out on A. The point is that the net cost is 0. So if B brings more diversity then A you should hire B. You are not (net) missing anything.

You clearly don't understand how boards operate. They're mainly good-ol-boy networks of rich elites who can open doors for the company.

They don't care for competence, pre-se, but connection.

I want to redistribute more wealth to poor people, and I don't give a damn what colour the rich people sitting on corporate boards are. Americans have a myopic obsession with the race and gender of their rulers, but are willing to let the crippling poverty and poor working conditions of their neighbours slide.

Progressivism sometimes takes time and energy that previously went to helping the working and middle classes, and redirects it off into the aether to help the very top of the pile.

This is actually core liberalism. Nancy Pelosi is probably very much on board with this law.

Get left enough and universal healthcare, universal college and universal child care become a lot more important than equality of CEOs.

Sorry to disappoint you but there are plenty of smart people who are not "progressive", they just have learned to not make it obvious.

Is a non-American European counted as white in this?

Or are we pretending that the various different non-Anglo/WASPy "whites" in Europe have the exact same cultural & socio-economic headstart in the US as the US whites?

It's a stupid rule.

> are quite shocking

Sheesh, your hyperbole is showing.

Even within a single country, I imagine the rural Alabama white is quite different from the rich, privately educated executive board member.

I was born and raised in a poor, rural town with a high crime rate. Neither of my parents had a trade nor a university education. It is very obvious to me that I am culturally different from a lot of other educated people in tech. Hell, the military even covered my education. I don't hold the same values or interests as my peers, but I'm a white male so I get lumped into a "homogenous" group.

Racially discriminatory policies are anything but progressive.

what you are saying is that women and people of color are not capable of competing on merit? they have to be installed by decree? i am insulted.

Then you are woefully oblivious to the state of the world.

It's not that they're incapable of competing on merit; it's that the established institutions are unwilling to recognize based on merit, and a coercive outside force is required to counterbalance the entrenched racism & sexism until we're at a point where society can function on a truly meritocratic basis on its own.

> it's that the established institutions are unwilling to recognize based on merit

Example?

Show me a rule that actually enshrines this.

So create a company full of passed over women and minorities and clobber the existing ones.

While we are at it, just off the top of my head, lets make it required to include at least one bald person, at least one person with blood type AB, and at least one person with freckles. We shouldnt descriminate against them should we?

Are these groups of people under represented in company leadership?

Institutional racism, as this proposed, is not the answer.

This is not progressive, it's regressive.

I have an impression that HN readers are more libertarian than progressive.

The ambiguous part of this law that this is employment (or something close enough to employment) contingent on race and gender. Imagine a single woman of color on the board resigns and the seat must be filled. If the best candidate is a white male, he will be rejected based on gender and race.

Why?

There's a lot of vocal conservatives, libertarian, "centrists", contrarians here. These kinds of topics bring out the worst. I only clicked because I misread board rooms.

It is shocking that one could be punished for hiring based on “wrong” color/gender. We spent decades getting past that, only to have it codified in law. “You’re great, but we’ll be punished if we hire you, because your skin is pale and you have testicles” is evil.

I agree with you, about HN's audience, which is I guess what "bro culture" devolves into, and that the idea isn't crazy.

Board room implies scale. If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway.

So many knee jerk reactions are a sad reflection of this community, though.

>"If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway."

That's not necessarily true. There are plenty of organizations all over the world that are not "diverse" but those institutions manage to succeed. Not every company needs to have a board room that looks like a university admissions pamphlet in order to operate and respond to competition.

> If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway.

The market would have slaughtered tech firms if this were true.

> If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your [sic] doomed to fail anyway.

Then why do we need a law banning it? If these white-male-only-board-led companies are doomed to fail, they should be outcompeted by sufficiently-diverse-board-led companies.

I have a feeling the physical attributes of the board doesn't actually matter when it comes to a company's performance.

> "If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway."

If that were true, none of the tech giants in the US in the white male dominated '50s-'80s would have existed: IBM, AT&T + Bell Labs, Xerox + PARC, Digital Equipment Corporation, etc.

I'm not sure why you think that. Hacker News is amazingly conservative, not in the "God and guns" sense, but in the "please don't change anything ever" sense. I'm not even going to pretend that doesn't apply to me, too. Hate crypto, short AI hype, can't stand Electron apps, refuse to touch anything written in JavaScript, wish code would get out of my damn browser and into compiled executables I can keep on my local filesystem. We're basically all old men yelling at clouds here.

Reflexively, this sounds like a stupid law to me, but unless the LA Times is just lying, it sounds like it's been successful and similar policies are now being pushed privately, apparently by Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is behind an effort to do something similar but without actual punishment.

It's probably illegal, though, and seems destined to eventually be struck down whenever it gets to the Supreme Court.

I also share your surprise that all white-male boards were even common before this. Mostly white-male boards I expected, but not 100%, at least for publicly traded large companies. Anybody trying to say that was meritocracy is fooling themselves. There is no way in hell there is that much of a skew in merit across gender and race boundaries.

At the same time, I very much agree with the other comments saying this is focusing on exactly the wrong kind of progressivism. It feels like George Bush putting together the most ethnically diverse cabinet of all-time, but they were still uniformly war hawks, liars, and authoritarians. Making the 0.00001% of the world allowed to have power more diverse doesn't change that power is still way too centralized. It's fine for the extreme upper echelon of women and ethnic minorities but does nothing for the vast masses of actually underprivileged people.

> There is no way in hell there is that much of a skew in merit across gender and race boundaries.

It’s the long pipeline. Bias from 30 or 40 years ago determined who got a chance to earn executive experience and build connections to become qualified to hold a board seat today.

We should expect effectiveness, not fairness, from meritocracy, because merit was often not fostered fairly and much potential went undeveloped.

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