EU to set 40% board quota for women by 2026 | Hacker News Reader

EU to set 40% board quota for women by 2026

reuters.com

14 pointssereja16 comments

So bad such laws. It is good to promote equality and woman in boards and all, but here it is a prime to mediocrity. You will not get a board seat because you are the more competent but because you are a: - woman - hispanic - a pinguin - ...

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_...

official EU press release

> While there is no penalty for missing the target, companies that do achieve it will win public praise.

What kind of law is that? Ruling by the sanction of the victim [1]?

Also, you can be gender-fluid [2], right? You can be a woman while serving on the board, and a man otherwise.

[1]: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sanction_of_the_victim.htm...

[2]: https://gender.fandom.com/wiki/Genderfluid

Interesting - a similar California law was recently struck down, under what authority does the EU meddle in business like this?

> Interesting - a similar California law was recently struck down

Notably, it was struck down by a California court as violating the California constitution.

> under what authority does the EU meddle in business like this?

According to https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_... the policy represents an agreement among the European Commission, European Council, and European Parliament, with the latter two still requiring a formal vote. And the EU mandate will actually be on member countries to pass enacting legislation within their jurisdiction.

Prudent policy or not, I don't think there's any way to spin this as an EU end-run around the democratic process or member state sovereignty.

And I don't think this policy applies to foreign corporations, only to companies incorporated in a member jurisdiction. (But I haven't read anything specifically mentioning the scope.)

It would be an EU directive, which means that member states will have to write new laws that accomplish this.

However don't get the wrong idea that this was just decided by someone in Brussels and it's a directive now. This is just a draft for a potential directive. This has not been approved by the European Parliament or the European Council. [1] Long way to go still.

[1] "Once Parliament and Council have formally approved the agreement" https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/et/press-room/20220603IP...

> While there is no penalty for missing the target, companies that do achieve it will win public praise.

So no authority needed. But it's an interesting legal question whether the EU could impose such a requirement (backed by fines, for example) on unwilling member states.

Under the authority of the EU parliament (assuming that this draft legislation eventually gets a majority there), given to it by the member states through the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

By the way, the directive's wording is actually gender-neutral, talking about an "under-represented sex". If a company has a board dominated by women, it becomes a quota for men.

Can they explicitly define what they mean by “a woman” ?

If a 40% of a board’s males identify as women, does that solve this quota?

>Can they explicitly define what they mean by “a woman” ?

Nope.

And I'm not trying to be glib here either, this segment of society literally claims that a woman is whatever anybody wants it to be while at the same time demanding special treatment for anybody who claims to be a woman. It doesn't follow any rules of logic at all.

Hopefully they'll define this quota in terms of sex rather than gender identity. Otherwise this is a pointless endeavour.

Their press release seems to imply this will be the case but, well, you never know these days. There's a lot of confusion and contention around this issue.

Here's an interesting article about a similar consultation in the UK and its outcome, in terms of collecting statistics on the female to male ratio in boardrooms: https://sex-matters.org/posts/the-workplace/fca-women-on-cor...

There is a paywall so I couldn't read the article. I'm curious if some male board members are going to start identifying as women. Does this directive have any rules regarding that?

this is actually a really interesting point.

Gender identity vs Gender equality.

I guess the authorities might find themselves in the position of having to judge the authenticity of a gender identity claim, something which they would not want to do, so I suspect they would wave any claims through

Unfortunately this is already happening in the UK, for example: https://archive.ph/dM4D0

It really does make a mockery of the struggle women continue to have to achieve equality in this still largely male-dominated area.

I suspect no one anticipated the identity could come into tension with equality in this way, but in hindsight it seems obvious and inevitable that it would. We probably will end up abandoning gender categories altogether, it seems the only possible step forward

I need to leave this shithole.

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